zztong

That's a good point, and if that's the only issue then changing the graphic might be enough. Though at the beginning of the game, if you were to find an iron axe early I could see why you might conclude (based on the icon and name) that it was better than a Q1 club.

You have no control over biome. You will find some POIs still tag a biome, but that's the designer hoping support for that feature will return in the future. The only district where size doesn't matter is "wilderness". If you don't know your district/tile options, tag for wilderness if you just want to test the POI. However, without a "RoadExit" part on that POI, I don't think you'll get a road to that POI.

Some districts only support some sizes. If you chose a combination that isn't supported there will be no place for the POI to land. That sounds like a YOffset problem. In the Prefab Editor you would have to set the Ground Level. If you want just an XML change, you would modify a line in the XML file that looked kind of like this: <property name="YOffset" value="-2"/> The value depends on the POI.

I'll give it a try, though I've got home-grown mods installed. Results - It fails for me too. Here's the relevant part from my log file... It failed in Highway Plannin trying to get something from a list. I'm going to guess it was a list of settlements that was empty because we set Cities/Towns to "none."

I've seen a number of newbs on Twitch use an axe as a weapon. I doesn't seem clear to many people that in the game an axe is supposed to be just a tool. I wouldn't say the game needs to cater to axe as a melee weapon with a full line of skills, but I can see why a player would feel like it was a reasonable choice compared to a wooden club or a pipe baton. By the same measure, a pick would seem to be a good melee weapon, but as far as the game is concerned: axe, pick, shovel and torch are all improvised weapons. Even more confusing, the sledge is a weapon. Hmm, maybe that's the answer... maybe axe, pick, and shovel should all be considered part of the "sledge" family.

Oh, I didn't see Towns set to "None." I still see it as the same issue though. If that value isn't supposed to be valid then the UI shouldn't let you pick it, so if you can pick it and it crashes, then it must be a bug. Are there any mods involved?

Sure, though that's a really broad statement leaving lots of possibilities. For instance, I'm not sure if you mean RWG won't place them, or they won't load into the World Editor, or they won't load into the Prefab Editor. I can't tell what version of the game the Prefabs were made for, and more. I'd be happy to look over the POIs and tell you all about them if you could arrange for me to get a copy of the files. I'm on Discord as ZZTong if that helps.

I'm not sure I can read it, but I think it says "ArgumentOutOfRangeException." If I had to guess, I'd guess it relates to Pine Forest, Desert, and Wasteland all being set to 0%. Personally, I'd think if the UI let you set it to those values that it should run without exception, so I'd call this a bug. As such, what you want to report in addition to that screen shot is the exception found in your log file that goes with that error. And, you'd want to do that in the Alpha 21 Bug part of the forums. (Look for the red bar near the top of the page for a link.)

It goes in the XML file for the Prefab. You can use your favorite text editor (like Notepad++) to add it or as of A21 the Prefab Editor has a feature to allow the Tags to be set.

As Stallion says, there's no guarantee. POI placement by RWG is basically a competition between POIs. Various factors determine how many opportunities there are to place a POI. A POI's "Tags" and the POI's size have the greatest effect. If the POI isn't Tagged, or isn't tagged something meaningful, then the POI won't get placed. If the POI's size does not match up with the size of POI makers on Tiles for which the POI is tagged, the POI won't get placed. If the POI is appropriately tagged and is of a size that is supported for those tags, then the POI has an excellent chance of getting placed unless there is some other constraint. Obviously, larger maps have more potential POI locations. You can make cities more/less common. You can make wilderness POIs more/less common. If you look in the XML file for that POI and tell us the "Tags" property and the "PrefabSize" property, we could provide better insight. For instance, I downloaded the Central Station above to take a look. There is no "Tags" property, which will keep the POI from getting placed by RWG. The POI size is 100,28,100 ... so it needs a 100x100 footprint. To get it to spawn, you will have to add a "Tags" property. The only three vanilla districts that support that size are: Commercial, Industrial, and Rural. I suggest tagging it for Rural and/or Commercial, depending on where you envision it: <property name="Tags" value="commercial"/> If you tag it for Rural, then it may need some "driveway" parts added. You could also make this POI spawn in the Wilderness if you tagged it that way.

I tend to drive without holding SHIFT and it does help a lot. I've always done that, mostly to save fuel. I could make a go of it with the default. I have no problem with how plowing into a building or a light pole does big damage. What tends to upset me is when something silly, like a collision between a 4x4 and a traffic cone takes away 7%.

I did some recent experimentation and came away thinking the damage was pretty inconsistent. Things like hitting a traffic cone did damage when I didn't think it should. Major things, like driving a 4x4 off of a skyscraper, did not total the vehicle. You have to drive the 4x4 off a skyscraper 2-3 times to total it. I can feel for the Devs in trying to find a good system and supporting configurations. There's probably a lot to juggle. There's a modlet out there that makes all vehicles have 10x max damage. I think that's too much, but the modlet is easily edited. I think a better value is somewhere between x2.5 and x5 max damage. Even with that, there will still be nonsensical things doing damage to a vehicle.

It occurred to me, I could make alternative versions of the trader POIs that had no trader, but zombies instead. I'd append an "x" onto the name of the POI and rig them not to get placed by RWG. Then you could edit a map RWG created and append the "x" onto the POI name and you'd swap a working trader for a dead trader that was overrun with zombies. For instance, you edit your world's prefab.xml file, find this: <decoration type="model" name="trader_bob" position="1605,34,-1306" rotation="1"/> And change it to this: <decoration type="model" name="trader_bobx" position="1605,34,-1306" rotation="1"/> And you'd be done, so long as you had the alternative versions of those trader POIs. I'll try it, and if it pans out, I could (likely) get the alternative traders into the next release of my modlet. UDPATE: The concept works. I just need to work on the POIs.

I don't know if it is correct, or not, but as somebody sitting in the cheap seats and who hasn't really been able to figure out what was happening, I appreciate the effort.

I just watched it too. I had been thinking I was late to the game on using Triggers and many of the special Zombie Volumes. They've been around for all of A20. A21 just added more types blocks that could initiate them. But this gives me pause. On one hand, I see designers looking to create challenges and trying to be creative about it. The designer doesn't have anything like a patrolling zombie, so perhaps having zombies appear "off screen" behind you offers a way to simulate that. Alas, the open-world aspect of the game means the designer isn't truly able to "set a scene." A stack of standing zombies in a passive volume with pipe bombs at their feet isn't compelling play. And, as much as a designer can tell themselves there's a story to a POI such as "and then the zombie emerge from the air ducts" any visual clues placed in the area to prop up that story are moot if the player (1) doesn't see them, (2) can't possibly check the air ducts to discover the zombies, and (3) is going to feel "cheesed" when having taken suitable precautions they still had no chance to avoid the ambush. In short, if a wandering horde stumbled into the POI, I'd freak and enjoy it, all thanks to random chance. If I cleared a room from top to bottom, leaving no stone unturned, and then open a door (or push a button) only to have the room I'm in, or the room before it that I just cleared, suddenly be filled with zombies, then I'm likely to feel ripped off. I had been thinking that I might use Triggers to place zombies outside, and surrounding, a POI after a player got to the final loot. My thoughts were that those zombies might be far enough away from the player that the player wouldn't feel "cheesed" and that maybe a stealth player would be able to sneak long enough for the zombies to lose track of the player. But I had a lingering question... what if another player were passing by? Yes. I'm happy to see you qualified the declaration. Triggers don't make Stealth useless, but when used in great numbers it devalues stealth. I'd like to think this is still an early experimentation phase with regard to POI design. That we got some new toys and we're anxious to use them, but that the best use of them in terms of quantity and technique remains to be discovered.

Assuming you're talking about a POI's 6 files... %AppData%/Roaming/7DaysToDie/LocalPrefabs But if you're talking about a modlet that contains one or more POIs, then the modlet goes here... %AppData%/Roaming/7DaysToDie/Mods Then the game should be able to find those POIs and RWG should include them. (That assumes the POI is properly rigged for A21's RWG.)

Interesting ideas. Some feedback... I don't think this is the correct perspective. I think the goal of heat generation is to encourage encounters with zombies, which is kind of the "reason to be" for the game, and an appealing aspect to some players. I don't think heat discourages farming (water or otherwise) as it is trivial to eliminate the effects of heat by either dispersing those assets or not spending any significant time near them. The latter is especially easy with dew collectors as you only need seconds to harvest them and then move on. But I do like that filters would wear out and need to be replaced. In fact, that's a pattern I'd like to see extended to all of the workstations. I'd keep the heat generation, but go with your recipe/replace approach to filters. In fact, I've got a private mod I whipped up a day ago for an upcoming solo game that adds a recipe for a filter. It also includes both a filtered Dew Collector (make potable water) and an unfiltered Dew Collector that makes murky water. I did decide to reduce the heat on an Unfiltered Dew Collector since I would have to use a campfire (which produces heat) to purify it. Thus, my unfiltered dew collector has the approximate heat value of a torch, rather than that of a workstation.

More information: The district that is being used to wrap around a settlement has to have a district_spawn_weight of 0 for the tiles gaps to disappear. In my case, setting the residential district to a district_spawn_weight of 0 worked. For @cammel, who is wrapping the countrytown with countryresidential, he had to change countryresidential. For everyone, rural is working as a wrapping district because it already has a district_spawn_weight of 0. Not knowing what district_spawn_weight is ultimately doing, I hesitate to call this a fix. It seems like a work-around to set it to 0 and hoping this info helps the developer.

Ah, thank you. That was the critical bit of info. When I set residential's district_spawn_weight to 0 my dead spots go away. It certainly looks like whatever district is used to wrap around a settlement has to have a district_spawn_weight of 0 to avoid the Tile gaps.

@cammel reported... And while it didn't seem to affect towns and cities, it may have helped with countrytown. I'm noting it here in case "district_spawn_weight" might be a clue.

Oh, I love the idea of turning the Ghillie suit into armor mods. Very cool.

Thanks for the info. I'll give that try soon. Setting it to zero makes it the same as the default for rural, which kind of makes sense. I don't want to change the others, but maybe it points out that RWG needs to treat all outskirt_districts as if they had a district_spawn_weight of 0. It might break the bug report loose on that issue. Update: Oh whoops, I was thinking of the wrong district. How odd. I'm building a world now and wondering how changing a countrytown value helps the cities and towns. Update 2: The change did not seem to have any effect on Cities and Towns, though it may have helped Country Towns.

I'd be happy to look at the POI if you found a way to send it to me or let me download it. I'm on Discord as ZZTong if that helps. If you gen'd a world with RWG, it should have gotten placed... unless you haven't tagged it and sized it. Well, like I said, I'd be happy to take a look. I'm not spotting any obvious issue from your descriptions, but there are a lot of potential details that could matter.

Are you using RWG to make a world with your POI in it, or are you placing the POI into the world using the World Editor?

I can't think of a reason why zombies and volumes would Playtest fine but not work in a game world. If you edit the XML, can you see the zombie volume definitions? If not, maybe they didn't get saved after you playtested, or something like that? (I think you have to save in order to playtest, though, so I'm still confused.)