zztong

But you cannot regenerate water infinitely with a campfire. Boiling an empty container, or cooking an empty plate, accomplishes nothing. You need a water source. But I take your point. This game... being set on Earth... water full of bacteria and harmful minerals is really common, effectively infinite. I completely understand how making water scarce makes it more of a survival game. That approach seems apropos if maps were entirely desert wilderness or the game were set on Mars. Cities, however, are built near water sources. And I'm curious to see how it turns out. Roland's reports from playtest suggest early game scarcity was achieved. I might misunderstand his characterizations of late game, but it sounds like the Rainwater Collector / Solar Still thingy is common enough (over time) that a player can be mass producing water. Maybe the constant drain on Dukes to buy more filters (to expand capacity) significantly draws out mid-level play. If so, hurrah! My only criticism is that I think the real-world provides a buffet of water-related complications that I personally would find more inspiring and I think would achieve the same effect. If that's left to mods to toy with then that's probably okay.

I'm not sure about the day number, but I have transferred a character between maps before, specially when I want a game that wanders from map to map. It has been a while since I did it, but here are my notes... Moving to a New Map On Windows, the character files are store here... <USER>/AppData/Roaming/7DaysToDie/Saves/<MAP>/<GAME>/Player/<STEAMID>.ttp ... and you will find other files there *.map and *.bak that you do not want. Copy this file to the new map's game's save and the rest of 7D2D will recover. You will land at the same X, Y coordinates that you were at in the old game. The altitude/elevation seems to recover, placing your feet on the ground. You will retain your inventory, but obviously not anything you had placed in the old world.

That XSLT, so it would go in a modlet if you wanted to use it verbatim. (1) If you wanted to apply the change by hand, rather than make a modlet then you would... Edit the game's rwgmixer.xml file. Find the township with a name of "city". Change the township's "outskirt_district" to be "residential" instead of "rural." (2) Another option would be that you install my modlet (ZZTong-Prefabs) but you will get a lot more than just that change.

I saw it. Basically, make the runway look like it dissolved into ruin or overgrown land. Position it in the Wilderness, or perhaps the edge of town, hoping that RWG won't place a landmark or a POI where the runway would have continued. It's an interesting idea with merit. I'd go Wilderness with this approach. As a Tile, I worry RWG will rotate it such that the runway ploughs into an Industrial zone or puts it next to Downtown. I've also thought about the military. An Air Force Base would be too big. (The one I was stationed at would be a 10k map all by itself.) Also, aircraft have very long ranges, so why rush around during a pandemic to build a dirt airfield near Navezgane? I mean, somebody is _still_ airdropping crates on the area. What I could see is somebody clearing a patch of dirt for helicopter transports to use.

You're ultimately banging into a need for a great many more POIs, which would let districts be thicker and then allow for a more gradual transition. As an alternative, I like the looks of this a little better. It wraps cities in Residential instead of Rural. It still leaves Country Towns wrapped in Rural. <rwgmixer> <!-- Wrap Cities in Residential Tiles instead of Rural Tiles --> <set xpath="/rwgmixer/township[@name='city']/property[@name='outskirt_district']/@value">residential</set> </rwgmixer> We could maybe get closer if maps involved one city, but that might seem weird with the Traders as they are today.

Would it be skyscraper_04? It doesn't have a cellar, so I'm guessing not.

I think you're going for a "taste of phoenix", which I think TFP does too with their skyscrapers.

I have no inside information. An interesting compromise might be if they could be enabled via XML (off by default) and only were in random spawns, not in POIs. Or, maybe POIs with placed Bandits in them, treat them as a standing zombie sleeper, instead. I can see how that might be true. Of course TFP should go with whatever schedule is best for them. For me, an EXP release between Thanksgiving and the Christmas holiday (and vacation) is much, much more convenient for converting a large pile of POIs from one major version to another. Once you get out into January work and classes ramp back up and my schedule gets tight. Otherwise, it might be May before I can free up a bunch of time.

Since we're sharing pictures, here's my regional airport. Of all the buildings pictured, the one on the far left is the gate/terminal/operations building. There is no tower. The two larger hangers contain some maintenance facilities. There's a flight school in one of the buildings, some research, etc. Parking is hidden by the hangers or the gate/terminal building. A taxiway is only partially shown. I'd probably try to make the buildings depicted fit on 1 Tile. Then a runway could be maybe 3 Tiles, though 5 Tiles would probably look better. If we had some flexibility in what we could do with Gateway Tiles, then maybe I'd put the airport buildings there and just have a runway for the settlement.

I largely agree. The local regional airport where I live is 1707 meters, which I rounded off for the sake of discussion. Nobody is going to make an 11 Tile (1700/150) runway in the game, but how many tiles is enough to convey the theme? 3? 5? You're showing a 6 gate terminal with larger aircraft, so you're going to be looking for a long runway to go with that, I'm guessing 5-7 Tiles in length so that the runway is longer than the terminal. I was thinking of my regional airport with 1 gate and no passenger boarding bridges. I was also thinking of the airport in Nome AK that I once visited: 2 gates, no bridges. But either vision would be supportable with the base idea of declaring a grid. Anything more about integration with cities, stand alone settlements, etc. we would just roll with whatever support TFP could extend via RWG. An airport off on its own in the wilderness works well enough. Other non-airport projects that might want to use a grid might prefer to be more tightly integrated into a settlement.

I think I'm mixing in Attack volumes when I don't mean to. Attack are the default volumes, right? I think I just mean Trigger volumes when we talk of an ambush that I thought ignored stealth. I thought entry into a trigger volume alone, no other factors, triggered the encounter and that Z's would become immediately active and targeting the Player that triggered it. The Combat Encounter comes to mind within a Gun Store. If you enter the combat encounter and proceed to the obvious loot, you trigger a bunch of other volumes and have to deal wth the Zs. But, if you ignore the loot and sneak the perimeter, you can stealth most/all of the place. I've never tried to stealth to the loot. I guess I'll have to do that.

I wasn't aware there was a perk specific to attack volume sleepers. I've got to go do some reading. I hate to have overlooked that. I wouldn't say I expect players to "game the mechanic." I expect they will adapt to their environment to avoid being ambushed -- that's playing the game. The mechanic provides a language to describe zombie behavior. Example: Why do invisible zombies appear all around me when I reach the top of a ladder? You entered the Zombie Volume vertically; they appeared at the last moment when your feet hit the floor. How do I stop that? Arrange some other vertical ascension and enter that space horizontally... perhaps a ladder on the outside of the building, knock a hole, see zombies, shoot zombies. Edit: As a POI designer, I admit there is a bit of a thrill seeing a player experience planned surprises. As a professor, there's also a thrill in seeing people detect a complication or challenge and then plan, organize, execute and ultimately overcome it. Go team humanity!

I'm watching a stream right now and I'd love to turn on friendly fire for a few minutes. Opening and Closing the Trader might be fun, specially when the players turn the Trader into an impenetrable horde fortress.

1 byte for color? Isn't RGB 3 bytes? Or do you just mean 1 byte to brighten/darken a texture? Also, blocks have multiple faces that can be textured individually. Potentially you'd have to multiply by 6 for a cube if each face were textured differently than the default. Am I missing something?

Tired of the same old loading screen messages? Here's a modlet that will lower the collective intelligence of players down to zombie levels. It adds thirty stupid zombie jokes to the loading screen. Download it and join in the chorus of groans. https://github.com/brucezztong/Loading-Jokes/archive/refs/tags/Jokes-001.zip Yeh, I'm not going to all the trouble to put this waste of bytes on Nexus Mods. Not that it represents a lot of maintenance, but if somebody is somehow inspired by this, you're welcome to take this modlet off my hands. Just let me know. It won't be a high priority to me, otherwise.

Release A20.6-ZZ011 is now available. 5 New POIs: house_04, house_05, slabhouse_01, store_s_01, store_s_02 Slabhouse is based on a building discussed in a 7D2D Reddit Conversation 16 New Biome Decorations Includes 3 "Mystery" Decorations - Strange things, but real-life things. Various bug fixes and improvements to existing POIs.

This is an overstatement. A low percentage are attack volumes. I've been tempted to write a script to be able to give an accurate percentage since the volume type in the XML files should tell us that. (We are talking vanilla POIs, right?) To me, this reads as an unreasonable expectation. A POI with all of a room's zombies visible from the doorway is a gift; free experience for very little work. By making you move, you're forced to pick a path and get closer. The path might tempt you across a noise-maker, or into light, or to a proximity that is close to a zombie. All of those work in the zombie's favor. The counter is to practice good stealth techniques and work to avoid those issues. That's playing the game. That's a good thing. I suggest you try to stealth the A20 version of the Crack-A-Book POI, AKA skyscraper_02. This POI is 100% stealthable. I do it all the time. You might wake up a zombie or two, but that's different than waking up an entire room or floor. You need to be rigged for stealth, so light armor, lights out, able to keep your stealth number very low when needed. You'll be crouched the entire time (no running) and no normal movement. Don't step on trash. Destroy if it is in your way. Stay out of the light. Use a wrench and dismantle illuminated lights if you're going to walk past one. Abandon the "suckers path" when it makes no sense. (Climbing and jumping to start? Nope.) Night time does the best because there's no sunlight. Finally, use a bow or silent weapon to keep your distance when possible. Work to get those shots. Destroy furniture or whatever to give you the angle. Figure out how far your reach is with those tools. You can take stuff apart from a decent distance. Attack volumes are special. Once you enter the attack volume it will trigger the ambush. If you don't enter the volume, it won't trigger. The idea is to get to the same height as the zombies to get them to spawn in and then quietly kill them with a bow from outside the attack volume. You won't know where the attack volume starts and stops, but there's little reason for the attack volume to include blocks in a neighboring room. Poke holes in the wall, or roof, to get a good shot.

I've not felt that objection was very strong. I've got many perks that are "useless during horde night." I mean, I won't be harvesting crops, bartering with traders, or salvaging cars either. Stealth's value would increase with the addition of some horde night function, but stealth isn't worthless.

I'm puzzled too. I wouldn't extend the feature to all doors. Those big 7,000 point steel hatches, for instance, I wouldn't make pickable. There may be a few POIs that get some adjustments, but I doubt it would be a big deal. Other than that, external doors to POIs make sense to me to be pickable. As a designer of POIs, I fully expect somebody will knock down a 300 point exterior door. I do when I play. Heck, I routinely pound through gun safes with a stone axe. (It gives me a chance to get up and walk around while the computer works.) I say let folks pick them.

While I was working I had a random idea that a kind of "hide and seek" with viewers might be kind of cool. The game places some kind of figurine with a viewer name on it and then the streamer tries to find them, perhaps with a timer. So, just spit-balling here, when a POI quest starts, the game takes 10 viewers and randomly places a figurine somewhere within the POI. That is, it replaces an Air block that is not exposed to the sky and puts a figurine there. Maybe it isn't a figurine, but some kind of lesser loot container? Maybe it is a cowering survivor waiting to be rescued? Find all of them before the timer expires and then some reward? Maybe the Trader pays a reward for rescued survivors? During the course of play, the streamer gets to see a viewer's name on the figuring/survivor and maybe that leads to conversation. (Great to see you, George.) Darn idea keeps running in my head... Maybe after the timer expires, a zombie spawns that knows where all the survivors are and it begins to hunt them down. If the hunting zombie finds the survivor it turns them into another hunting zombie. Once all of the survivors have been picked up, any hunting zombies hunt for the player.

I can see how Twitch Integration changes the stream, specially when the viewers are out to kill you. Not being a streamer, I've never messed with the settings, but I've seen streams where the menu was active but there was no voting. We could probably brainstorm some other ways for viewers to get involved: Maybe let the viewers vote to pick the mission at the Trader. Maybe let the viewers put "bounties" on objectives for the player: Find the MacGuffin (some plot object) in a POI where the player has started a quest. Slay some amp'd-up zombie in a POI where the player has started a quest. Make the drone say goofy things. Come to think of it, #scare could add another sound being the player's drone saying "I've got a bad feeling about this" or any of the "detected zombie" sounds.

That's cool. I'm probably a 60/40 (harmful/supportive) person, but it really depends on what's going on. I think unexpected challenges are fun. Piling on a massive barrage of spawns isn't really all that interesting unless the Player is into it, otherwise you just get to watch a player's morale and spirit get crushed. I think spawning a crawler is just funny.

I agree. I use Stealth all the time and have no complaints. It comes with its share of challenges, which is what I think makes it fun, early game through late game. You have to be into careful movement, lighting, proximity, and then some creativity to make alternative paths. To the OP's point, I can empathize with the feeling that ambushes are being built into POIs a bit more now than before. To me, this elevated the challenge, but didn't make stealth useless. Now I'm a bit more thoughtful about how I proceed through a POI. I'm quicker to abandon the "sucker's path" through a POI and get those zombie volumes to reveal themselves or to come at the zombies from angles that defeat their concealment. Stealth is never 100% perfect, partly because of the unknown locations of zombies and partly because POIs can create lighting situations that you sometimes have little choice but to enter. Proper planning for a place to retreat always helps, and then there's the trusty AK on the toolbelt to fallback to.

This is an innovative idea for Tiles and I'm a fan. I've been playing with it some today and think it has great potential. The Tiles pull from some of the established TFP districts and sometimes end up with some weird results, specially when a POI lands on an island. For instance, an island house with a driveway. An island restaurant with cars in the parking lot. I thought this POI of mine could be kind of swampy, so I tagged it appropriately, and ... This one I didn't tag, so the Tiles grabbed it from another district. I guess swamp folks like their computer games... I got a hearty laugh out of this when I found it... And then this last one left me more with the impression it wasn't so much a swamp as lands that had been flooded, either intentionally or via some disaster...

#no_safe, I think. Its kind of expensive, but is effective in driving them out of a base. It comes up in voting sometimes too. The economics and motivations really get in here and mess with things. If you're on a channel with lots of viewers all earning points then things can be very active, even overly punishing for the player. I often visit channels with few viewers, where I might be 1 of 2 people watching. Points can come in very slowly, and if you're mixing in supplies and buffs along with debuffs and spawning the occasional complication but not trying to make it a player kill fest, then you can be perpetually out of points. Well, really the problem is tapping into a stream that isn't being very entertaining. If there's no commentary and you're watching somebody sort their base's inventory for 20 minutes, then... well I guess I know why I fell asleep.