Darklegend222

I have one question about the color variants for zombies. When Marlene spawns, does it pick between 5 different models to spawn each with their own colored clothing? I would assume when she goes to spawn her clothes call a function which randomly picks which hexadecimal her clothing uses.

The majority of this seems to be art with some POIs, and I'm all here for it. I'm very happy to see an updated model for the piggy, hopefully it decides to get added back in. The armor rework is something I'm skeptical on, I'd like the standard armor to remain in the game, while the sets are something that you slowly obtain over time. It would be a shame to have 1 piece of this set, another piece from a different set, then 2 pieces from a completely different set, it adds up overtime and just becomes a clutter and a mess. Overall, very happy with what I'm seeing so far!

The difficulty isn't the issue, it's the annoyance that is. Vultures spawn in the wasteland and the desert. If I needed rotten flesh THAT badly, I'd go to the wasteland and take on a few zombie bears and never run out again. It's all about that oil shale and tier 4-5 POIs that don't spawn near where my base is. Makes the trek that much more annoying.

I don't mind the implementation of vultures being faster than vehicles during a horde night, but that was ONLY implemented to avoid cheesing them. I would like to see their speed adjusted back to normal during non-horde hours, regardless of day or night. Vultures seem to overspawn as it is, getting 3 vultures roughly every 100 blocks. It's extremely obsessive given that exiting a vehicle forces your camera into a seemingly random direction. I am all for vultures aggroing onto the player if they're on a vehicle as it is now, but that speed is atrocious.

I can only craft a tier 3 iron sledgehammer, but I got a tier 4 steel sledgehammer from trader Jen as a reward. There's very little reason to collect magazines for your weapon except early game if you're getting boned on RNG. Not to mention, the fact you can't event make Q6 items, only up to Q5. So your going to loot the best items anyway which makes crafting tools/armor/weapons entirely obsolete. The cooking, electrical, trap, and wiring books make sense to continue gathering as they're always going to be needed. You do NOT want to have to rely on a trader selling you the blade traps you need for your horde base, or for selling you the high quality food when your hungry. Well... Maybe you could get away with not cooking since tier 1 buried supplies are guaranteed to offer you the higher quality foods anyway.

Latest screenshot of a tier 3 buried supplies

Summary: Buried supplies generate less and worse loot as the tiers progress in quest difficulty. Game Version: A21 b324 OS/Version: Windows 10 CPU Model: Intel i9 10850k System Memory: 32GB GPU Model and VRAM: Radeon RX 6700XT 12GB, not relevant Screen Resolution: 2560x1440, not relevant Video Settings: High-ultra, not relevant Game mode: Singleplayer Did you wipe old saves? Yes Did you start a new game? Yes Did you validate your files? Yes Are you using any mods? No EAC on or off? Off Status: NEW Bug Description: https://pastebin.com/8aNchr3T Doing a tier 1 buried supply gives BETTER loot than a tier 2 buried supply, and a tier 2 buried supply gives better loot than a tier 3. Detailed steps to reproduce the bug: 1) Do a tier 1 buried supply and complete it 2) Do a tier 2 buried supply and complete it 3) Do a tier 3 buried supply and complete it 4) Compare the loot from each one. Actual result: Completing a tier 1 buried supply, ALWAYS gives food of high quality with an item such as: blueberry pie, meat stew, hobo stew, or gumbo stew, along with a stone or pipe weapon). Meanwhile a tier 2, DOESN'T give food, stone weapons, or stone tools. Instead a tier 2 may give a crafting book, and storage pocket modifications. Then comes the tier 3, where you don't get food, or schematics, or modifications, just pipe weapons. My latest tier 1 gave me a can of peas, blueberry pie, can of pasta, sledgehammer crafting book, and a Q2 pipe rifle, The tier 2 gave me a crafting book for sledges, double storage pocket mod, and a Q2 stone axe. Finally, the tier 3 gave me a Q2 stone sledgehammer and a Q2 pipe rifle. So I can only assume a tier 4 would only give 1 or 2 pipe and stone weapons. Expected result: Tier 1 buried supplies to contain less and worse loot than tier 2 buried supplies, tier 2 buried supplies containing what tier 1s do, with extras, and tier 3 buried supplies containing what tier 1s and 2s would contain with extras, etc. As it progresses in tiers.

I've always used 2 weapons in the game. The first is a melee weapon which is usually a sledgehammer (maybe a club if I'm on a lower difficulty). Followed by a gun, preferably a machine gun or a shotgun. A machine gun is better for lower - mid range difficulties, and a shotgun is a MUST for harder difficulties since it does massive damage to enemies with that sweet AP. With that said, I use throwables like pipe bombs and grenades during EARLY horde nights. Building a bottlenecked door with hatches out front makes for easy killing with explosives. Though the catch is that I NEVER perk into throwables, I rely on them only early game. That slowly changes as I progress till I have blade traps. They get used to build a dedicated kill box which I can grab loot bags from. Now, with the addition of A21 allowing you to get MORE drops for a weapon specced into, I will ONLY choose 2 weapons so I don't get overloaded with many varying types of parts like I did with A20. For instance, in A20 I would constantly get steel spear parts when I really wanted AK-47 parts, but that's so much less likely and it's FANTASTIC. I can have a higher chance to get what I'm looking for and remove the RNG to a point where I'm more in control. As for the second part. Weapons not perked into, are just not worth it to use. You can't kill a demolisher efficiently with a rifle that isn't perked into unless you have books, but at that point, just put points into the rifle, it'll take LESS ammo, do MORE damage, degrade LESS, and just be a joy overall. I'm not saying weapons that aren't specced into can't be utilized, but it's just not beneficial by any means to do so. You might get away with doing it in early difficulties like scavenger, but I reiterate what I said above.

So is: "The Forest". A game where you have to skin your prey, and cook it directly on a fire. It's also a game where you take your cooking pot and dunk it into the water (literally), and then boil it over a fire. Taking pills to drink water isn't a bad solution in all honesty as water purification tablets exist. This game had decent water mechanics as it was, but allowing the user to drink lake water, but not being able to boil it is absolutely stupid. Literally anyone in the real world would boil it first for about 6-8 minutes. Or they would do 10-12 minutes of boiling depending on the location. I'm not against increasing the loot abundance in a sandbox game, I'm against ridiculous changes that ruin a survival aspect. The game doesn't have to be "hyper-realisitc", but this is not the way.

The water system honestly sucks a lot. Everything else in this update was great. Wonderful optimizations, solid 120fps at ultra settings. Shooting through doors, being able to see how much you got when harvesting and total count, being able to see the POI and biome tier, and finally the better RWG changes. But water, it's so stupid. I've only ever gotten water from the trader quests and vending machines. Everywhere else it's all murky water. You can't even put the water in a jar either, but you EAT the jar you just drank water out of? Someone said something a while back: "Technically you always have jars on you 24/7 when you drink from lakes and store it there", but if that were true, then surely I could just pick the water up with my hands and carry it to my campfires cooking pot. OR BETTER YET, I could just retrieve lake water WITH the cooking pot, now that's an idea!! The changes to water are not only terribly unbalanced, they also ruin multiplayer badly. If I buy the water from a trader, neither can my friends, it makes multiplayer so much more tedious for no reason. Sure you can get that chance to receive 10 water from a trader quest, but is that REALLY reliable? Especially with the chance of spawning 1-2km from a trader at the beginning. Water is my 2nd problem with the latest update, the other being that this alpha was rushed to stable because of the "summer sale". Other than those TWO things, the game has been really well polished and well designed overall!

POIs reset so that you can gather a quest there. Imagine you travel 4km to a skyscraper you can't quest at because someone decided to destroy it. What fun would that be? Not getting to quest where you want, and not being able to use your daring adventurer perk. I would that y'all stop the "exploiting" and double-looting, then coming here and saying it breaks immersion. I haven't double looted since A19.4 and I'm loving it. I've even gone as far as to turn loot abundance to 75%. It really makes you appreciate the loot when you need it. Not having a wrench until day 5-6 really puts a damper on my pipe bomb crafting, but it doesn't hurt enough to make my 5 stacks un-craftable before day 7. I definitely agree with the buried supplies though, I put frames around every hole that I dig so I don't drive into them. Pulling a buried supplies twice a day really adds up, especially if you get them right in the middle of a road. I don't know how I feel about the zombie parts for completion as horde nights will take care of them. There's not really a good way to balance quest progression out that I can think of. I really dislike the change to make traders have their own individual questline because spending 10 nights at a new rooftop while questing at a new trader and ferrying materials around from base to base is just boring. So I've never gotten a second trader npc to tier 2. Why would they send me to a new trader, then that trader rewards me with exp, but the new trader doesn't give me higher tier quests. Surely they need me to help right? Guess not if they won't pay better.

Horde night magic has been lost since A17. It feels a lot less tower defense, and more tower pathing issues. You either get a design that kills for you, or a design where you do the killing. Either way, it's only worthwhile to have for the exp. In A16.4 or A15, the crafting was so versatile for horde night. Now? You just have to build the exact same designs that are proven to work or risk the AI not doing what you need. I feel no threat if I don't prepare in time as there's so much easy ways to dispatch of the hordes. Sure back in A15 or 16 you could easily dispatch of hordes with spikes, but it made sense since it didn't have a basic crafting system and things were ACTUALLY difficult to come across. Now it's just a trader grind and letting the trader give you the ammo you need, or going mining for pipe bombs. Other than that, it's easier than ever and it's no longer a threat. What you don't want is hordes that ALWAYS step on you, but you also don't want hordes that take forever to finish (looking at you A17.4). So this is the best we can get from a simple comparison scale. I'm gonna be looking into mods such as yourself for larger wandering hordes and the disabling of horde nights. I want there to be threats in the wild, not just during sky scrapers or blood moons.

Lorna Shore is good, so is Whitechapel

Did you not read the fact that higher resolutions struggle more? It also doesn't help that there is ALWAYS something in the top right so it's easy to tune out and get ahead of yourself in a POI. Also, why would I look at my compass 24/7? I'm here to kill zombies. Didn't realize a see-through barrier you can walk through at all times is handholding, next you'll tell me that you prefer Morrowind over Oblivion because having a quest marker is too easy. It would be there to remind the player my guy, there's literally no harm.

Plus it's lot of more manual labor to do it. You can build better defenses than any spike and fight later hordes with ease. I'm about to the point of going back to A15 because of how much better the hordes and the skill system feels. A20 is just A19 with better RWG and more glitchy zombies.

I agree with all that, but the chances of a phone making it 3 years for the average person are pretty low. Especially when new phones release and they do the good ole planned obsolescence to slow down older phones to a point of needing a new one. Getting a good PC is one thing, but not everyone is tech savvy or wants to get a new build for thousands of dollars. Even my i9-10850k isn't running the wasteland well, it won't just come down to hardware in the case that me and the OP are in the wasteland biome as more optimizations and a better engine are needed for the game. Never had an issue with the Wasteland until the A20 update so something is up.

If the wasteland is able to cause that much damage to FPS, then that doesn't change a thing about the game being near unplayable for the end-game. All my worlds I've generated have only had tier Vs in the Wasteland, and the wasteland is the best biome for loot. If you're going to drop well over half your FPS because of how the optimizations and engine are, that's not the fault of a skyscraper or bad RWG.

I have the same issues with skyscrapers, disabling the dynamic mesh seems to give 10 extra fps, but it stutters so much. As for the zeds, we just let them absolutely annihilate the bottom areas. I rely on melee more than anything so by the time I'm 2+ floors up they stop pathing and just wander around. I'll take the oh @%$#z drop candy and jump off the side which has my vehicle for an easy escape. It's the most managable I can do, but with the stuttering i more than likely pull out the AK about 6-7 floors up. I have occlusion enabled so I have no idea why it would be stuttering so insanely bad as the objects shouldn't be drawing.

My greatest moment was Dishong tower. Insane difficulty, night time, day 5, just a mere level 2 AK. Got to the roof and thought I was doing very well, easily and quickly got surrounded. Tried jumping over the rail as it had a yellow tint below it making me think there was a stub I could jump up on, there wasn't. Now I'm surrounded, jumping ON TOP of zombies with a broken arm, an infection, bleeding, and a deep laceration I continue to run and prepare to die. After about 5 seconds of running I turn around to 20ish zombies ready to nibble so I jump, then proceed to get a broken leg and I'm at 13 health dropping rapidly. Managed to click use on my medkit fast enough that I could heal my wounds and QUICKLY get behind a doorway of which I threw a block down and used my AK to dispose of zombies at the doorway. Now i have every single ailment, but the tower was finished. I got the main loot, hopped on my bicycle and rode back to base. I decided I had conquered what I wanted to and ate glass till I died at base. May Long D*** McGee rest as a god. And Yes, this was a legitimate thing I had done.

@RolandThis is your chance to request bandit camps, and to have bandits riding ziplines to get to you

The walls are doubled in the red area, I have them on top of the dart traps, and I have another layer behind them placed above the fence posts. They were all made of steel, but seeing how it didn't affect their pathing I decided to go back to cobblestone for a more legitimate test. I've attempted to redo the door ways and get rid of them, but it did nothing to fix the issue. I will say that there are no flaws in the pathing if I'm on the roof, but I'd prefer if there were no issues to begin with as I will need to be repairing my traps. Id argue that the box of which you surrounded in traps is considered tower defense, hence the reason why "combination of" is dropped. You could be in a random POI during bloodmoon and it'll be a tower of which you're defending, your meant to use structures to stay alive. You are correct in that they aren't forcing us to play a certain way. I'm simply requesting that they allow us to have more freedom. The base does exactly what it should if I'm on the roof, but if I'm in the red area where I do repairs, then they no longer path and just start breaking everything. As the previous person said that the max blocks is 15, I'm not sure if that's true but if it is then I would think it needs to be a lot further. Otherwise i might have to keep going back to my little 10x17 box that is littered with blade traps and fence traps. I just like the idea of building much more elaborate bases (albeit way more resource intensive and infinitely less efficient) as it would add to the fun. Surviving blood moons is not challenging on any difficulty, so it would be nice to have more freedom and leniency towards the pathing.

That's correct, however this is a "tower defense" game and the developers want us players to develop our own horde bases that use that pathing to our advantage. In earlier alphas you were to build a base surrounded by spikes and barbed wire traps. Nowadays you build a gauntlet for them to path through and dispose of. I am perfectly fine with the zombies making a path to the player in the most efficient manner IF they do not have a path to follow. If you read through everything I said, if i stand in the yellow circled area, then they will follow the path. And that path to the yellow circled area is even more blocks away from the wall they break down if I'm in the red circled area. Which is why I believe the AI pathing needs to better optimized.

I don't believe it's intended behavior either that zombies get stuck on blocks, hence all the fixes the devs do in order for zombies to path around in POIs.

I'm still working on designing this horde base, but if I stand in the red circle then they will bash down the walls to get to me. If I stand in the green circled room, they will happily trot along the path. I'm in the process of making the 1 block narrow bridge connect to the red circled room to see the results. I tried using steel blocks for the walls in the red circled room, but it does not work in making them walk along the path. The weirdest part is, that if I stand on the iron bars which is the ceiling, they will go as far as to walk inside the red circled room and climbing the ladder in the corner to get onto the ceiling. Even though I have a ladder to the roof in the room below the green circled room, in which neither have a door. Horde pathing is currently better than any previous alpha, but I feel as if it could use a few minor tweaks to improve the performance of a tower defense play style. I will continue to revise this base until I find the "ideal" form, even though the current one should be working with no blocks needing to be damaged by zombies. Edit: I've changed the horde base so the one block pathway connects to the red room. I have the issue now where the zombies WON'T path into the red circled room and begin breaking walls, unless I'm on the bridge indicated by the YELLOW circle. There are no doors placed either, its a fully flat base on stilts with only straight paths from one place to another, unless you count ladders to the roof.

When you accept a quest, it would be beyond helpful to know the radius to be within. There is 0 indication of how far you can go before the quest fails. Having a see through barrier around the POI (which you can walk through) would be the area of which the player has to remain. Its very easy to tune out that there is dialogue there on high resolutions when you can hardly see it. It's also easy to forget you need to grab the supplies which are doing an even better job at hiding (looking at you office_3 and forcing me to pillar my way up). It's also a necessity when a horde shows up and you get pushed out the building so you have to fight outside. How far away is too far away before I fail!?