madmole

That's coming in A21 yet lol. There will be an option to disable it though

I'm not sure but I like seeing what equipment you have at level 57 instead of end game stuff at level 30 in previous alphas.

Once full they no longer generate heat.

Thank you for the kind words, we can't please everyone with every change, but we do feel the game improving over the years and have some crazy good stuff to share over the last 2 alphas and think that this would be most peoples stranded on a desert island game they would pick.

This. It's just not that great of a mod. Coffee esp blackstrap coffee is my go to drink, not only does it give me stamina I need to combat zombies, ride my bike for weeks at a time, it increases ore harvest so it's 10000x better than the water purifier mod IMO, but takes constant effort to keep a supply of it.

If anything we had it backwards all those years using murky water for anything other than brewing a poison just seems wrong. Now, you use your clean water to craft with, it makes more sense and it's impossible to boil too much and be screwed. Like wtf can't I make glue with this perfectly good drinking water? Yeah but you won't get any bug fixes that RNG might get in between versions. Didn't think we needed to? Every game with a shrinking crosshair over the years does it this way, I thought it was common shooter knowledge. Did you never notice the crosshair shrink as you aimed? You didn't think anything of it? You can aim at a wall and see impacts and tell the rays do not hit dead center but somewhere inside the crosshair. It's a dew collector not a rain collector. Still though, we didn't want to rely on weather since it's so random. Also we don't really track chunks that are unloaded and doing that would be really expensive and we knew people would have 50 dew collectors so we didn't want the whole server slowing down over a minor bit of realism that would also make it harder to balance.

Sounds like you should just turn down the difficulty until you are adjusted to the new networking. We are tuning it so you don't get hit from a crawler 10 feet away, but it won't get significantly easier. Tougher zeds are stronger now, maybe you need to look at the poi and biome difficulty. If you see a lot of skulls you aren't ready for it, go to the forest biome and level up and do the tier 1s and 2s until you get better gear or a higher level. There seems to be some bugs with getting multiple crits from one hit or bleed has no cooldown we are looking into.

This is beyond epic!

Ideally we could have a black border around text so it reads over any background.

Vocal minority like usual. Some people hate changes, but will come back later and say it was a good change and they were knee jerking. Water is supposed to be a rare commodity in an apocalypse, not all you can drink buffet on day 1.

There were several reasons to change it. 1.) Water was never a survival issue before. It was something you did once, go craft 500 jars, fill them up and your done for your entire play through. 2.) With unlimited duct tape people could craft OP quantities of things early game. Now its a choice, do use my water to craft duct tape, or do I drink it. 3.) Water jars is some leftover minecraft mechanic the engine had when we started and never a design we wanted. One less wasted slot in inventory.

It was always a placeholder.

I usually build near a mine and mine all night after I sort all my loot from the day in my containers or work on my base.

There are no wolves in the forest now. This is part of a larger progression goal that is ongoing.

I build different bases for different builds. I got rekt on day 7 relying on my walls to keep them out until morning, I couldn't believe how fast they got in without me killing them non stop like usual. But to me getting rekt gives me motivation to try harder so I added a melee room up front this time and a few doors they will have to get through this time (in theory). We will support dyes on the new outfit. All POIs including REKT got updated because there is now full art support to decorate them as envisioned in the concepts.

Probably already have well over 50... there are 3 variants of each one already, standard, feral and radiated.

I'd be ok with tint variations. It's not that we also wouldn't want to see more zombies, it's a matter of it would delay gold even further and we're focusing on going gold. It's one of those things that would not move the needle on sales even .01% too. New customers don't care if we add more zombies. I'm not that interested in more zombies without new behaviors. I wrote up a bunch of great zombie designs with behaviors but coders don't have time so more zombies or variations is just meh, and doesn't get us closer to gold or more sales so selling the idea is impossible, as well as we have to make room in the memory footprint for all these new bandits yet. At best we could add a few and put them into specific biomes so that memory can handle it, and it would still be the same problem, repetitive in each biome. Maybe we can leverage the character system to add a new zombie head to a player outfit and make some survivor zombies easily using the already in memory character outfits for some tougher armored zombies. These are more draw calls than the current zombies though and bigger textures etc and wouldn't be the best use of resources. Ideally we could start the next game from scratch using the system. I think the skeleton is different too though so animations become a problem. It's complex and like I said, it isn't moving the needle at all on sales, it just makes you veterans happy. Maybe we can use it for the next game if planned from the beginning.

After how many hours has the clone army put you and your friends off? Hundreds or even thousands? Our job isn't to infinitely entertain old customers, it's to make a great game. By the time the zombies get old you would have to have a ton of hours. Minecraft has one zombie, a skeleton and a creeper, spider a blob and a few dozen other rare spawn enemies and made billions, it hasn't hurt their sales to have just one zombie skin. I don't think there are any plans for any new zombies, but I have designs for them. There's tons of bandits coming, that will freshen up the encounters plenty. I have been asking for mud covered rotting skeleton type zombies like the later seasons of the walking dead for a while now, but again, we have enough to go gold with. We can always add more post gold or for DLCs and stuff. We made a conscious decision 10 years ago not to do this because A, it would have been hard to look good with Voxels, and B, the game is set in Arizona and moss/overgrowth like that just doesn't grow like that in the desert. We love the look too but would better work in a DLC or sequel set in a new location.

We can ALWAYS add more zombies. Adding more zombies doesn't put a check mark on the many empty checkboxes we have on the gold list. Most of the new outfits look the same on each sex.

We can consider it. Now that it requires great effort to reach the top skill level crafting Q6 doesn't feel so bad.

Right now there seems to be some unity between the three, so I can't tell which is the best. Like it's random enough you never know the best way to get the best weapon, just keep playing, looting and looking at traders, and craft when you can craft something better than what you found. The harder biomes have better loot so go to the wasteland for the best possible loot, if you dare. Oh and I forgot to mention, but you can find the type of magazines you are after also by looting an appropriate type of crate. For example gun crates have gun magazines, pop n pills crates have medical magazines, mo power has tech mags, etc.

Learn by looting not LBD.

Yes. Sharp sticks magazine improves your spear skill. Forge Ahead is back in the game too, with new art

I don't know what that is. Yes you move through the pipe shotgun skill pretty quickly. Each tier takes more magazines to move through. We're removing any overlap. There is still the concept that a purple stone axe has 4 mod slots so it would arguably be better in that regard.

Hi all! We're very busy on Alpha 21 but I thought I would share the new crafting system and looting changes with you. There are now tons of new skills that govern unlocking and the quality of items in the game. A few examples of crafting skills are shotguns, pistols, cooking, armorer, medical, etc. Perks no longer unlock recipes or govern crafting skills. Many perks are being reworked to add value where before the main value was a recipe unlock. Books no longer unlock recipes. The ones that did unlock items are being reworked to do something else. Crafting skill is improved by finding magazines in the game. Mailboxes, file cabinets, book shelves etc can all contain various magazines that improve your skill. Perking into shotguns for example, increases the odds of finding shotgun magazines, shotgun parts, and shotguns in loot. This makes early specialization work, and you are no longer at the will of the random numbers to find what you are looking for. There is still a chance to find other stuff, but you won't be level 100 and still using a brown double barrel because of random drops. Everything is weighted that you perk into. Once you find all 100 shotgun magazines, you will stop finding shotgun magazines so stuff that is still valuable to you will be found instead. Skill ranges represent their unlocks. Some skills go to 100, others stop at 50, so they require less magazines read to max out. All crafting ranges now do not overlap. For example with shotguns, skill 0 to 20 allows you to craft a brown to a blue pipe shotgun. Skill level 21-40 unlocks brown to blue double barrels. Skill level 41-75 unlocks brown to blue pump shotguns. 76-100 unlocks brown to blue auto shotguns. These numbers are just examples, I don't know the actual ranges, but now you don't just craft blue everything. There is a new skill menu that has a few pages of skills that tracks what skill level you are at and shows what the skill unlocks. How does it play? Everyone on the team loves it. The search for technology is fun and you are always finding magazines and unlocking stuff every day. The magazines are useful for a very long time too, where before once you read a single schematic finding another was a disappointment. Now you always find useful magazines. I found myself crafting nearly every range of pipe shotgun, stone axes etc. Even iron I would craft through most of the range. I would find some stuff and skip crafting for a bit, then when my skill superseded my item, I'd be crafting again. I've never crafted so much stuff in years and it felt really great. You can no longer just sit around in your cave mining and level up and be crafting the best mining tools. You'll need to get out of the cave and search. However teams can still cooperate and share magazines with a dedicated crafter. Traders sell magazines and offer magazines as rewards. I find myself taking those rewards quite often because it feels very rewarding to unlock things and level up your crafting skills. Personally I love the new system. I've never seen a crafting system quite like this before, nor an intelligent loot system with deterministic random. It is playing very nice, and I'm really enjoying a long game. I like it because it feels realistic to read something and learn from it and the player can move through all the ranges of crafting and be making that choice... should I use my parts and craft a new gun, or wait another level? Personally I've always had enough parts to craft what I want because I find the parts for what I'm looking for instead of spear parts or whatever. So the new system weights the loot to what the player needs and it feels very rewarding and enjoyable to me and the testers.