meganoth

Short answer: pipe machine gun. Long answer: There are people who can survive in 7D2D with a bone knife. Doesn't mean that the average case can or will optimize his game that far. Given a choice of drinking murky water and craft a simple mod for my stone axe or craft a pipe machine gun or a wooden bow or just drink some clean water I probably would do one of the former. And even if someone loots 3 murky water on average means that he can be unlucky and find only 2 per day on the first three days. The question is how much he then would dislike drinking murky water. A strategy someone with cooking pot and the golden rod tea recipe might take would be to produce a stack of golden rod tea, drink from sewers and heal any dysentery with golden rod tea. Will people do that? Will I do that? I don't know, that is a question we can only answer once experimental drops and we have played one or two worlds already. The point is that there is no limitation at all. Normally you might not need to make that trip, but then you might get some meat and want to make boiled meat out of it, build a mod, make some coffee or red tea for some early mining or other stamina-heavy activities (i.e. where you don't drink it for hydration but for the buff), ... And there is practically no limit. My problem here is that I know pretty well the changes in A21. But I don't know exactly the changes you are proposing. Not only is that knowledge distributed over multiple pages but I also forget details. Did you ever say whether empty jars can still be crafted in the forge with your scheme? I don't remember. What else is changed? Which makes for a lot of guessing how your mod plays out. The changes you initially suggested (as far as I remember) definitely were not enough to make water scarce. Maybe you just forgot mentioning them because the scheme is clearly worked out in your head. Or worse you are adapting the scheme whenever someone brings up a problem. Simply said: First define your mod completely in one post (with all changes you are proposing). Then we have a basis to argue about. What does rare drop mean? Acid is called a rare drop as far as I know, a tier3 weapon schematic is a rare drop. You'll likely have found say 5 or 10 acid at the end of week 2 but probably not a single tier3 weapon schematic. And I won't even try to guess what the number of filters you find will be in A21.0 experimental, the important thing will be what the number will be in A21.5 stable. We know that TFP often "errs" on the difficult side in their first balance attempts and adapts to make it more newbie-friendly after some balancing steps. I'm talking about making filters being less rare to find than you expect. You bring up far off suggestions I never mentioned and dismiss them. ?? Possibly. All of these methods create somewhat different results. At the moment none of these were mentioned and since we don't know what loopholes their scheme will have we can't really predict which correction they'll use. Whatever you do, if you put part of your money into water you have less to spend for books, magazines, weapons, armor, mods ... There are players who carefully have analyzed the game on how to get a lot of money out of selling specific stuff to the trader. And they easily have 10 times the money a newbie has at any day or more. The average player has not minmaxed the game to this degree and won't have money to throw out of the window, at least not in the first 2 to 5 weeks. Which isn't as it should be. But generalized accusations into the room where anybody could feel addressed/blamed if he so much as posted a reply to those modders do not help as well. Next time either report it or maybe try to calm the waters. A new scheme? I'm not gonna discuss another one, but notice that the developers probably have no design rule that states: "Make no new assets if possible" or "Don't remove anything". Nobody can say that TFP is averse of changes. Maybe they didn't think of your scheme exactly or maybe their scheme solved another problem they were having. Or there is a problem with your scheme that they did not want to have. Sometimes a problem can be solved many ways and the decision between the best is nearly arbitrary. Even with Rolands detailed description we don't know what alternatives were discussed and why they were rejected. So I don't see any sense into speculating what they were thinking. We can compare schemes theoretically, but will never know if TFP had other criteria we don't know of. And we can only be sure about the results when we actually have played it.

The changes in A21 will not necessarily solve your hydration problems the moment you get a cooking pot. Because you want to use some water you loot for production of food and glue you will have a motive for drinking from sewers and the like. The difference is that the only way to scale up the water production are dew collectors and those are not mass producable. In your scheme the only limit is how much inventory management grind the player is prepared to do. Find or craft 3 jars and you have enough water for yourself for a day. Find or craft another 3 jars and you immediately doubled your production capacity per run to the water source. What I specifically dislike about your solution is that the limiting factor is how much grind the user accepts. That is similar to the problem the LBD-stone axe-crafting had in A15. You don't know that yet. You are talking about 2 dew collectors but it is totally unknown how many dew collectors a player can build say on day 20 on average. I get the impression you are arguing here again that telemetry data alone can't tell TFP how many dew collectors are needed. But why are you still arguing about this? Nobody was disagreeing with you on this. When I was talking about feedback, naturally written feedback from players here in the forum should be taken into account. But that must come from a position of knowledge, for example how many dew collectors a player normally can build in a game. The math you do with 2 collectors is unavoidable BUT probably useless. Not having played it I can only guess. But I assume dew collectors will be scarce in the beginning, so if we talk about possesing 1 dew collector on day 3 and 4 people on the server I would say we still have a lot of water to buy at premium from a trader. And my group actually buys other stuff from the trader, including books, mods and yes, even a weapon sometimes. A jar of red tea according to xml costs 48*3 = 146 dukes at the trader or vending machine. That is nearly half of what one tier1 quest gives you as monetary reward. Do 2 quests and with the reward money alone you can't even afford food and drink for the day. Let alone save money for that Urban Combat book the trader has on display. Which is why I was asking if anybody was really dismissing them out of hand without bringing arguments. Do you have some examples? In your words it sounded like a witch hunt and many people were involved (you used the plural after all). I can only remember one person got somewhat into a heated discussion with them with a back and forth about who said what and what it meant, but even that person was bringing arguments (I just checked). Something between them as long as they don't violate forum rules. I prefer better commentary to accusations of "making changes without any reason" or wild speculations on what the reasons were (not refering to you here, but a few posters have done this)

Would you call a decision to include a satirical nerd-armor a bad idea? 😎 In reality: Then (A15): "I will not check this cabin and that town house, there is nothing interesting I can find there." . I remember very well that ALL normal town houses very simply ignored as soon as you left early game. There never was anything valuable in there anymore. Now: "Okay, I won't find a much better weapon, but I still need a better leg armor. And where is that damn silencer mod?" Strangely my group blasts through forged iron and forged steel as fast as we can produce them, and surely not because we can or can not build steel tools. I suspect that you play this game just as a shooter and do only minimal building. Naturally you don't need much raw materials in this case.

A friend of mine is heavily critizising the direction of 7D2D because he feels that (random) looting is just too central to the game now. The disadvantage being that the player ultimately has no meaningful decisions anymore. He has to take what he finds. That you can find fitting magazines and parts in specific POIs is one important step to give the player some control back. I hope the same happens with the dew collector, i.e. there should be specific but maybe hard to find places where you can find filters (or just a lot of water) much more frequently. This would give anyone wanting a lot of water a strategy to follow.

You fail again 😉. The developer only explained that it can't be easily **simulated in realistic detail** (i.e. only filling up when it actually rains there). So that rain has to be approximated unless they want to shove a lot of developer resources into a relatively unimportant feature. Observe that almost nothing in the game is really simulated in realistic detail. Does growing of crops check weather conditions or rain? No, all crops grow identical whether in desert, forest or winter biome. Are zombie and wildlife movements simulated? Would you be able to see the same deer if you came back to a specific area or project where a horde of wandering zombies would be after a day if you looked at their movement? No. Not simulated, still wildlife and wandering zombies are very much possible.

So lets be clear, the ones with the obvious bias have brought no arguments and just dismissed the modders? Should the modders opinion get no scrutiny? Is their opinion better than the one of other players? Do we have to adress them as "Your Majesty" ?😉 Should anyone here really accept Guppycur's silly argument that this was done because of console just because he is an excellent modder? He made that argument just to provoke a reaction, by the way. Interestingly the modders are in the same place as the developers when it comes to their own mod. Have you tried to argue with one of them that his newest change isn't a good idea and proposed your own solution? I don't think he would throw away his work immediately and use a different method without any discussion about merits of the solutions. He might actually recommend to first play the mod with the new changes and then provide feedback? Yes. It would have been much better in my opinion if some dev or Roland had immediately posted a summary of how such a change was decided and especially what the reasons were for it. (And for bonus points even some other solutions discussed and why they were not taken) Imagine Roland had posted that at the time the change was revealed:

Oh yes. Undoubtedly they also make mistakes and there even have been developers who objectively destroyed a game completely with wrong decisions. But normally a developer will at least do 2 things: Discuss changes in a group, more eyes spot more problems. And let it get tested, either by internal testers or in EA additionally by thousands of players. What we do now is no testing. What we do is theorizing (the same that is done in the internal group meeting). It has some value, but the real testing can only start once A21 has gone experimental. And at this time the developer is not looking for alternative ways to solve what he wants to be solved, as he has already implemented one solution he thinks can handle it and wants this tried out before dropping it.

Ok, but then I really don't see how your proposed system can have a similar result of water being scarce at the beginning of the game than the A21 changes. As Roland said a long time ago, find a few jars and thirst in the first few days is already a non-problem. You may have to walk to a water source a bit more often than you want but with say 3 drinks per day and say 6 jars one walk to the water source keeps you hydrated for 2 days. But this game has a lot of mechanisms without guarantees, that is part of almost any survival game. If you want to be safe that anything you plan will work then you have to play a deterministic game. The task of a game developer is not to solve your problems but to put you in front of interesting problems, like "Where can I find another filter, I need one more" or "I don't have enough expl. bolts for horde night, what weapon do I use for the rest of the night or do I invest in more traps?" So it isn't guaranteed that you can produce 75 expl. crossbows a week? Well, adapt. From past experiences I would guess that the game will be balanced so that new players will get hardly enough of those collectors and experienced players will complain about finding too many in the game too early, making it trivial. Sure, it is possible that they botch the balance, even with a handful of testers already providing feedback, but that is where the EA players come into play and give additional feedback. Sure, but the first few days WILL be an emergency situation (if Roland account of his play is to be believed). In the later game you might have a water purifier mod and maybe found too few filters so you want to keep most of the dew water for glue and exploding crossbows. In the paragraph above you fear you get too few dew collectors for your setup, here you promise me water value will be nil after the first week. That can't be both true. Is that fear of the unexpected? 😉

And I talked about limiting stack sizes having at least one serious drawback that should be taken into account. Obvious and simple solutions often don't cut it when you inspect them further. I can already see possible problems with those further solutions you are proposing. Doesn't mean they might not be solutions in the end, maybe after some adjustments. But it happens that the creator of an idea is often too "close" to it to see the drawbacks.

So stack limit of empty jars=1, stack limit of murky water jars= 250 or whatever it is now? Ok, yes, that would remove a lot of the inventory management grind. Still there would be a lot left: Not when you make glue as the jar is not returned, but every jar you drink from has to be refilled by a rather cumbersome procedure at the moment (i.e. moving to tool belt, exiting inv, filling at water, removing from tool belt...). What would be the stack size of boiled water and teas then? 1 or 10 like A20? 2 effects: Either you find out some problems or you can release that mod and point anyone who doubts that it would be fun and working like advertised (like me) to play it. Experiment tops theory. No, I said I doubt it. Doubting is not knowing. The only clues I have is that I never to my knowledge have heard a developer say that they build POIs as base models as you claimed. Also that I didn't notice anything in POIs that looked like they had bases in mind. Evidence, not proof at all. Right, just not useless. Water sources like sewers are able to keep you hydrated (which I would say would be my first concern at all times as it regulates stamina regen). But for teas and glue and other stuff one needs to loot or buy water. Only playtesting will show whether you can get enough of that from loot, trader and dew collectors. I have to quote myself from before: "They didn't want to remove nerd poling, but they wanted to limit its use case to building if possible and remove the capability to get easily out of danger or reach treasure chests with it.". A20. I don't have access to A21. And it isn't a mood point as I was talking about the preferences of my co-players and that they would not simply drink murky water unless that were by far the best option. Not that I know of. Naturally, once people start discussing sentence by sentence it looks like a sparring match from outside. I like the urine idea. Carry on 😁 Interesting. @Neminsis Seems you were right with your conjecture, POIs get modifications to make them more appealing as horde bases.

But this simply assumes that the dew collector came first and then they thought about how could it be made useful. What if the water jars change came first and then they thought about how the player could get a reliable and growing supply of water for later game stages ?

Yes, accepted, Iron Gut will not be a bit better for you. Did I claim it would force you to change your playstyle? I don't think so. Making 50 glue in late game would be a pain-in-the-ass inventory management hell if you limited stack size of empty and filled jars like you seem to be promoting. Starting with producing 50 empty jars in the forge where you had to remove 6 jars every minute so the next 6 jars can be produced. Then going to a sewer and filling each jar one after the other by moving them into the toolbelt, going out of the inventory, filling that single jar, then going back into inventory, moving another empty jar into the toolbelt, ... ad nauseum. I can't imagine anyone, even you, doing this. Simple: Make a mod of your design and play it with a few people. Tell us how it went. Maybe you'll find problems with your design that you haven't thought about yet. I must confess I don't look at ramps specifically when I select POIs for horde base. Are you sure anyone else apart from you is doing that? The ramps I use tend to be only 1 block wide and often made out of steps instead of ramp blocks to slow down the zombies. So I always have to build them myself. Also could you point me to POIs where the ramp seems out of place? Because a ramp is quite a normal thing in a parking garage or a store with sub-base storage rooms. Some ramps like in the house with the collapsed garage roof make the POI even unusable as horde base unless the ramp is removed. But sure, I can also ask @Laz Man: Were ramps build into POIs to help with base building? Were POIs designed to be good bases at all? By the way, you could have asked him or the TFP staff in general yourself instead of simply stating your conjecture as a truth. Don't think so. Even in the desert biome you will find water places in almost every town. You may have to rely more on urban areas and their sewers and swimming pools instead of the pure desert but you can make sure you are always not too far from a place with access to unlimited amounts of murky water. Now surely it will take some effort to get the water now, but isn't that why that hypothetical player selected a desert map? I mean what else is a desert biome associated with? ???? Naturally they are still available, I specifically said that TFP didn't do anything about it, because they didn't find a solution. Which isn't entirely correct because lately they moved a lot of loot rooms behind doors that can only be easily opened from one side with a key or button. So eventually they came up with a solution that at least makes some loot rooms harder to get to but still easy to escape out of. This is why I asked why the intent was dumb, not why some solution is dumb. At the time they didn't find a good solution and I don't know what dumb solution you are even refering to above. Note you can't know if there are solutions to a problem if you don't take a little time searching for them first. This is why I don't see how anyone can judge their looking for a solution dumb. I can only speak for my little group of co-op players that I know very well. And I know they greatly prefer tea and boiled water over murky water because they don't ever drink murky water and we usually have a good supply of teas by day 2. In your scenario they surely would cook enough tea over night so everyone could take 5 with them. And they would simply drink them and drop the empty jars whenever they would need space for the loot they find, especially if empty jars had a stack limit of 1. You speak of "people", but are you sure you know how they play? Asking any readers of this: What are you drinking on say day 2 of a game? Murky water or boiled water and tea?

I'm talking about the difference between no Iron Gut and perking into Iron Gut. A20: You perk into iron gut and you get some advantages out of it, but I would suspect that nobody notices that the chance for dysentery is reduced by 1%. Because nobody ever has the need to drink murky water. When was the last time you drank murky water (without a purifier mod) and risked dysentery? A21: You perk into iron gut. According to people who already played it they sometimes had to drink murky water in the first days. Here the chance for dysentery is actually a realistic chance and while the decrease from 5% to 4% isn't big, it is another small reason to get Iron Gut now. I don't know how many drinks are left to buy at the trader, it is possible they reduced it. Even if not, I heard that the cost of stuff in the vending machines is now equal to the trader food and water prices. If you buy food and water from there you will have no money to buy anything else. If you are talking about the dew collectors, they will produce infinite water only after you find enough filters, a rare loot drop. Like food, ammo and any other resource in the game it is only limited in the beginning. Yes, I don't think that is well balanced. But TFP has said that they have reduced wild animals. A good first step, but don't expect that it will ever be balanced for experienced players, vanilla is intentionally balanced for new players. Any source for this? Do you remember who said this? I am reading this forum since A15 and I don't remember anyone from TFP ever saying that pois were designed as bases. I forget a lot of things, but if it was mentioned many times I should have noticed it by now. How does it limit replayability? They didn't want to remove nerd poling, but they wanted to limit its use case to building if possible and remove the capability to get easily out of danger or reach treasure chests with it. What is so dumb (in the context of A15 where nerdpoling out of danger was done by almost everyone and nerdpoling for treasure by probably half of all players) about that intent ? At level 1 you easily have 5 free unencumbered inventory slots when you go out looting. And 5 bottles of water give you 100 water which should last a whole day, right? Getting 5 glass jars with murky water and cooking them is trivial. Then, whenever you are in danger of reaching encumbrance you can just drink one of the bottles. At a minimum you also would need to restrict water cooking to need a pot and restrict the availability of a pot in early game. Then there would at least be a chance that people without a forge would have only murky water in their bags. There are a few potential reasons for this change and I don't know which one was the initial or most important one. While I'm curious about it I don't think it is really important.

I don't see ingame logic violated here: You can carry all bottles/jars that are in the game. A lot of stuff is not in the game that we would expect to be everywhere: empty gas cans, sugar, apples and oranges, metal containers, cleaning chemicals, scissors, AA batteries, toilet paper, ..., that list is nearly endless. The game concentrates on the "important" stuff and leaves out anything else that it can get away with. This game is not a simulation, if you can't use AA batteries meaningfully then they are not in the game. The important part of water bottles for the survivor is the water not the container. The same is with gasoline. Did you notice that there are no empty gas cans in the game? I'm sure you have filled up the tank of your minibike dozens of times, but did that ever leave an empty can behind? It didn't, because the can is not important, the game leaves the details in what container you have transported the gasoline to your imagination. Fully agree on Fallout 76.

I think Red Eagle is not talking about radioactive water, but non-radioactive water contaminated with radioactive particles.

I heard that restarting the game every hour prevents the crashes. More info here: https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/4343-possible-work-around-solution-to-md5-error/

I was talking about you who invests in "iron gut" and who should be glad he gets more out of it now. Also "they" do not all decide the same. In that mass there are surely players who are on the fence right now whether to invest in "Iron Gut". Strengthening the appeal of IG is certainly a step in the right direction and will win some over from always choosing BB. In that way it is similar to farming now. Either farm or buy lots of food from the trader or hunt. If you farm in A20, you likely will farm and collect dew in A21. If you get your food from other means in A20, you probably should be able to do that with water as well. Sewers will be for water what chickens are for food. The water purify will be for water what the snow biome is for food. So I think the choice is still there. You'll have to explain that. Note that in A20 cities were upgraded so it follows that sturdy city buildings were added. And before A20 there were already hundreds of great POIs to make a base out of. My opinion is that TFP is simply accepting that changes that would invalidate POIs as bases would also remove fun and replayability and is not worth the trouble. Exactly. It is not worth going against the feature if eradicating it makes the game worse. The same happened with nerd poling by the way. There was discussion about ways to prevent nerd poling to safety or for end loot, but TFP said there was no good solution and too many ways to do the same, for example with ladders. So nerd poling stayed. I disagree that limiting the stack size would have the same effect, not even if you limit it to 1. You would still have all the water in the world, but you would fill your inventory with water (or tea) in the morning and always drink some before looting. You won't be forced to drink muck at all, you won't be looking for water. You just would have some additional (and I'd say annoying) inventory grind to do. There may be better or lets say less invasive solutions to the problem of water. This one though has definitely some drawbacks. I don't doubt that there are some players who might like it, I have my doubts that I would.

Sure. My point was that on the one hand this change removes some logic and adds it somewhere else, though naturally there is a difference in importance between realism and ingame logic But lets go a bit deeper here, you were saying it doesn't fit ingame logic. How?

You are probably aware that your sample of two games has no statistical significance. I don't think my group ever had problems finding either the turret recipe or turrets themselves. And I agree, turrets are, correctly used, quite powerful.

Which turrets are scrap turrets and what is "hardlocked" in this context?

Well, then consider any two perks in Fortitude besides the gun and melee perks and tell me if you get as much from them as you get from the two stealth perks? Naturally this his very subjective, but I would pick those two stealth perks every time. So AGI has guns that are in power somewhere between INT and FOR and on par with PER. But then only AGI allows you to increase the damage potential of all AGI weapons in specific circumstances (i.e. shooting from stealth) massively, just not on horde nights. Neither PER nor FOR have that capability, only INT is also able to sort of boost its own weapons through using other weapons at the same time (having its hands free)

My comment was for people who were complaining about not having the space on their POIs-converted-to-bases. You don't sound like you have a space problem at all. If you have, consider building a fourth floor.

It was mentioned by devs that the old method didn't scale very well. So the other reasons could have been either valve who wasn't happy about the server load (if they used some steam service for this) or TFP themselves if they had operated a server for this. Or as you say the reason was game pass if TFP needed to change the browser to handle steam and gamepass and EOS players at the same time and that wasn't working with the old setup

When I played as the farmer in our group in an A19 game last year I put the farm plots in a corner just ~10 meters away from the base. We used that base as a horde base for the first 5 hordes at least and I lost at most 2 plots if any at all. We often put a farm near our crafting base and compared to the effort some others seem to make into securing their farm our losses are definitely negligible. And if we dug holes and dropped the plots into those holes there would be even less chance of a loss, you would need to shoot policemen while they are standing on your plots to make that happen.

As if this game were full of trap rooms. Actually the trap room in higashi or dishong is big enough to run around and kill them with pistol/magnum/vulture/mp5. You just should avoid getting cornered, that can get you killed even with a shotgun I think. PS: I always have a few ladders on my belt, in case I have to get out of reach of zombies. A strategie that works for most trap rooms, place a ladder high on the wall, then jump on it. If I have to drop down into a room I usually place the ladder first, then drop down (whatever build I'm playing) Yes. Playing agility I always do that (pistols, magnum, mp5 and vulture depending on the progress) I didn't say the game is completely balanced. PER, INT and AGI are more difficult to play as they are not straightforward shooter builds. But I have no problem playing the game as AGI player and I might even die less playing AGI than STR. Because even though most fights with a STR character are very easy, but then occassionally I forget to reload or miss some shots, magazine is empty and I get cornered. Also AGI almost always gives you the option to run away from anything, but with all other builds, even if you notice that it gets hairy, you have to fight it out, retreating often isn't an option. A distinction I don't see in this case. A p&p RPG game has much of the same constraints and goals as a computer RPG game. Right, the autofail/autohit is only in attack rolls. I think this is even the second time I made this mistake. Anyway, a less apparent example are the normal skill checks as well. A character below maybe level 12 does not have even one skill high enough (i.e. with +20) to always succeed any skill check, including diplomacy. It is in the nature of an RPG to have skill checks with the chance to fail, otherwise why roll the dice at all? So even with "ideal play" your level-7 character will always have a very good chance to fail his diplomacy (or any other skill) roll, all the time. And this is true for most RPGs, whether p&p or computer. What then are "Baldur's Gate" and "Planescape Torment" ? Not PC games? Is Baldur's Gate a game ABOUT randomness? And is 7D2D a deterministic game? Weeell, you may not have noticed, but there is an awful lot of randomness in 7D2D 😉