dcsobral

I was just replying how it only affects block damage when I went to copy the XML and saw it does affect entity damage as well. So I wondered when that changed and it turns out it changed on alpha 18. Damn, I'm usually better at picking up this sort of change. Gah. And Salvage Operations also affects the wrenching tools, which is great since they have a pretty good DPS and they don't have the stop-stamina-recovery effect on power attacks. Also, though this may have changed on alpha 19 (it was true for alpha 18), the wrench does not have grazing hits which makes it the ideal melee weapon against demolishers.

He did! Alas, he was using clubs. He showed the pipe baton towards the end, after they had all but stopped playing. I don't think he died once he started using the pipe baton.

You realize Miner 69r does not change the amount of damage you inflict to zombies, don't you? Besides, the stun baton is perfectly capable of handling target rich environments: (I was going to to use a 53:35 timestamp for the fun of it, but...)

Not town type, district. Of course, you can set district by town type, so yes, that as well. Actually, no, by prefab tag wasn't it? So I could make a Harley Davidson POI, add a special tag to it, and fill the surroundings with bikers? Did I get that right, @faatal?

See the previous paragraph regarding difficulty level.

I don't know, man... Maybe so, but I'm a hell of a mini-maxer and Strength will only get the odd point for quite a while. Combat skills are unnecessary, unless you are playing at higher difficulty levels -- in which case the argument should be "strength is optimal at higher difficulty levels", which is not, of course, the default. Until you put a lot of points into it the combat skills pale in comparison to the actual gun, and Intellect means better guns faster. And experience??? Upgrade. I usually do one point in Sex T and one in Miner 69er and then wait until get the cigar. One point in Sex T so I don't get tired all the time, one in Miner to unlock iron tools, dig buried supplies and break crates faster. Do you think a 5% increase in combat effectiveness translates into faster zombie killing? How many hits does it take to kill a zombie? Two, three? How likely it is that 5% will push it to one or two? Not very.

Uh, what? That is not how it is right now.

That's just the repulsor mod, and it's not more difficult than, say, crafting 7.62mm AP when you go Perception and Penetrator skill. The AoE depends only on nerd tats, which are readily available from vending machines.

This argument is a good example of the Great Intellect Divide. Here are the two sides of this divide: Jawoodle perks up early in weapons, and has level 5 in his weapons of choice as his ultimate goal. He hates Intellect. I never perk up in weapons until I'm pretty much done with every other skill I might possible want. I love Intellect. As much as it might be an anathema to many, it is perfectly possible to play 7 Days to Die without perking up on weapon skills. If you do so then your skill trees and your weapons have no connection whatsoever and, therefore, it is irrelevant what the Intellect "weapons" are. On the other hand, getting BB3 or 4 quickly and buying an auto shotgun for a thousand dukes enhances your fighting capability far better than what any other attribute can accomplish. You might not have cardio, but you have a motorcycle by day 7. You might not be good at looting, but you are good at buying stuff from the trader. You suck at using a pickaxe or fireaxe, but you don't need to because you bough a chainsaw and an auger. You don't need fast clear every POI desperately searching for crucial loot items because you can craft them. And you don't need to be super efficient at killing zombies during horde night because your base will help you out. So Intellect is a very good tree for people who don't want to spec into weapons, and bad tree for those who do.

This is a decent analysis, though it treats players being dumb as being a stun baton problem -- just remove the repulsor mod in that case, though. The stun baton with nerd tats is one of two AoE melee weapons, the other one being a sledgehammer when perked up (I think level 3 and above?). Combine with the repulsor mod it makes a great weapon to clear zombies from a place during horde night. The stun baton is faster than people expect so I see a lot of people using it like a club -- with the RoF of a club -- and effectively capping their DPS. That said, here are some weapons that have a higher DPS than the stun baton: the wrench, the claw hammel, the wood club, the candy cane knife and club, the iron fireaxe, the steel shovel. And, of course, all other T2 and T3 melee weapons except the iron spear. And a20 will introduce the pipe baton... I hope we get to see it during the dev streams, but here's the irony about it: did anyone ever thought that what the Intellect tree was missing was a worse stun baton? A problem with both the robotic turret and the robotic sledge is that they activate demolishers. There are things you can do with the robotic sledge to make it less likely but the robotic sledge seems almost drawn to that green light. You can have it shooting zombies in the back, but sometimes zombies decide they want to go the other way and, then... boom. I never use robotic turrets on my horde base because of that: early game the ammo is too expensive and the turret is not needed, late game it will activate demolishers. And, on top of that, you cannot use sledge and turret at the same time. I use robotic sledges to kill screamers while I mine, and that's all. And that makes all those magazines benefiting robotic turrets useless. It is fun as a novelty but if you stop and think about its effectiveness instead of just using them because they exist, you'll end up not using them.

My favorite part were the comments about drying concrete and clothing slots at the end.

Nope. The nitrogen gas (as opposed to element) is not toxic and, in fact, comprises 78% of Earth's atmosphere. Do you realize you don't need to use KingGen to add CompoPack?

Here's one question that came up as I talked to friends in the aftermath of the stream: Is there anything different in the output folder of a world? I'm wondering if tools that handle alpha 19 worlds will remain unaffected or if some changes may be required.

I think it was shown, if briefly, on the dev's dev stream, wasn't it?

Here's my summary for yesterday's stream on RWG. Let me preface this by saying that nothing below makes up for actually watching the stream and seeing these cities. Think of the most detailed POI in alpha 19, then extrapolate it to cover a whole city. That's what it felt like. Anyway, and sorry for repeating stuff that has been said already, here are the highlights: Cities are made out of tiles. Tiles are like POIs for the streets, and POIs go into reserved spaces in these tiles. Their size is fixed. Tiles can also have "parts" which are pre-defined mini-POIs with a chance of spawning. Parts can also be mutually exclusive, so a tile can have one of two parts, but not the two at the same time.. POIs can also have parts. For example, some farms have crop parts so the same farm will get different crop combinations. Some tiles have underground parts like sewers, and at least one tile we saw had an overpass. Tiles are organized by districts, so business tiles go together, downtown tiles go together, etc. Cities have "edge" tiles that are more sparse so you get the feeling of things getting crowded as you move from the outskirts to the center. Tiles have different types like cap, straight, corner, cross and T. That's how they connect to each other forming the city streets. Modders can add their own tiles and they'll be automatically used. Modders can also change the mixer to add their own districts, and add tiles of these new districts. Cities can also be thematic. There's an old west city in a20, with old west tiles that have old west building in it. Modders can also add their own thematic cities to the mixer. For example, they could make an "air force base" city. POIs now come in standard sizes, like extra small, small, medium, etc. I don't recall exactly what the sizes where, and they didn't give dimensions either. Gravel roads now always stay within biome. If you take a gravel road on a forest, it will never cross over to desert or snow, for example. Gravel roads have different sizes. Wilderness POIs can specify what their gravel road size is (or them minimum?), so if you take a small gravel road you won't end up in a POI with a big entryway. Traders now live in "gateway" tiles. Gateway tiles are the points where roads connect to the cities. So that means every city has a trader on its outskirts. There's also "stamps" which are the equivalent of POIs for terrains. For example, there's a canyon stamp that can add canyons (duh) to your map. RWG generation now has options. Currently: Towns, Wilderness POIs, Rivers, Craters, Cracks and Lakes with values like "Default", "None" or "Many", and Plains, Hills, Mountains and Random with numeric values. Plains are not completely flat, they are just flatter than hills and mountains. Cities are completely flat, though tiles may have elevation changes inside themselves. They still need to connect at the same elevation, though. Dedi doesn't have options. Server owners would have to mod the mixer to change the defaults to what they want. If I understood correctly, dedi still won't generate the same map as SP for the same seed. I might be mistaken on this regard, though. Lathan generated a 6k world in under 6 minutes while at the same time streaming. Speaking of which, world sizes are 6144, 8192 and 10240. Having said all that I'll repeat: go watch it. This list is meaningless compared to just seeing what alpha 20 cities will look like. Alpha 19 cities look absolutely primitive and barren in comparison.

The grass shown yesterday was amazing. That sounds silly on the face of it, but there you go. Big kudos to Shawn and to the artists involved in it! But then you add the weather effects and it went to a whole other level! Awesome!

I think they did something to increase the chance of dismemberment during the stream just for the purpose of showing it off, but I might be wrong. If I'm right then all that is changing is that you get some animation and art instead of the limb just disappearing. If I'm wrong then dismemberment might getting more common.

Confirmed! Botox bears coming to alpha 20! 😂

It was replaced with a model including the texture. Blocks can be created with arbitrary textures (within reason, I suppose), but paintable textures are limited. Or, at least, that's what I gathered.

It seems there is one new texture, replacing the old beer sign texture. This isn't going to change -- AFAIK it is just not possible to increase the number of paint textures within the current architecture and that is not changing.

😢 I liked awning as a superior alternative to hay bales. I'm going to miss them.

I forgot the generated world. Here it is: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lw13dntg9phquv1/New Cekida County.zip?dl=0

The cellar doors are player craftable, they said.

This is available in-game.

The two biggest things for me from this week's dev stream were doors: Cellar doors! I've wanted that for so long that I asked JaxTeller to add it to Ravenhearst back in alpha 16. You can shoot through holes in the door as they get damaged! Yes! The grass looked good too.