EggsAisle

I always thought it'd be a legendary prank if TFP announced that the new way to unlock schematics was by accessing gacha machines in which you feed premium currency (purchased with real-world money, naturally) for a chance at obtaining a common, uncommon, rare, or very rare blueprint that you may or may not already possess. Watch the debate over LBD versus LBL immediately vanish as though it never was! Entirely too on-the-nose, though. We just had someone in here freaking out about microtransactions based on breathless conjecture and literally nothing else. More fuel for that kind of fire would just be a massive headache for everyone. Ah, well.

That, and the stat screen is tucked behind an inconspicuous little icon that neither the UI nor the tutorial do a good job of pointing out. It's pretty easy for new players to miss. I agree with the battle axe criticisms and the above reasoning. I've never liked the model besides, it's way too huge and bulky compared to... uh... every other wieldable item, essentially. But I can't stand the comically-oversized weapon aesthetic in general, so I'm not really neutral in that respect. As for actual weapons, I think they've done a pretty good job of making all the melee weapons viable. In A21 I've run with knives, spears, and fists at the higher difficulty levels and they all put in good work. I don't miss the spear throw at all; I applaud the attempt, but it felt very janky and I never had much fun with it. I haven't tried clubs since A19 but nothing leads me to believe they're any weaker. And stun batons have always been reliable, if sometimes slow; I don't use them because the visual blowout and sound effect from the stun proc are so over-the-top that it's viscerally unpleasant. Drove me completely nuts last time I tried an Int build. No one else seems to comment on it, though, so I'll either figure out how to mod it out or just not play Int.

This is all extremely silly and I love it. Thank you for sparking joy in my life. My favorite is blowdarts. Completely out of left field lmao.

Getting potable water in The Long Dark isn't difficult, but it takes valuable time, consumes fire-building material, and is quite heavy. It's really more about opportunity cost than anything else; it's not difficult to do, but you have to do it, and that will impose a limit on other things you can accomplish. You could boil up a month's worth of potable water and stash it someplace, but it quickly becomes inefficient, in a game where using your time/resources wisely is basically the entire point. Plus, traversal is a different beast in TLD; it is entirely possible to spend weeks or months far away from your main base. Really great game, I highly recommend it. Very different approach than 7DTD, though. Incidentally, you can also get drinkable water by looting toilet tanks! But those are finite, and I've never found a pistol there...

There was a time when Madmole would post on here almost every day. Answering questions, posting screenshots, occasionally arguing with someone who didn't like what they were hearing... it was awesome. And he kept at it for *years*, which you have to consider on top of everything else he was doing (the team was a good bit smaller then.) Say whatever else you will about him, the man is passionate about the game. I kinda miss those days, it hasn't been quite the same since A18ish. But it's completely understandable, he's got to be busier than ever with the company growing, future projects, life outside of games, etc.

Burnt Forest used to be its own biome, and further back there was a Plains biome too. Those are the only two I know of, though there might be other older biomes from even earlier.

I choose to believe that prior to game start, a mischievous trickster god makes a deal with the player character wherein they will be given extradimensional pockets with which to carry enough construction materials to build a city block from scratch, or enough weapons and outfit a small army. In short, you are the ultimate portable container. In exchange, any and all portable empty vessels such as bottles, jars, cans, etc.- "lesser" containers- are forbidden and must be sacrificed immediately. About the un-craftable water filter that must be found/awarded/bought: for those who have tried it, is this component a common bottleneck? I dislike the idea of gating basic things like this behind RNG. I wouldn't mind as much if it was a reasonably common (and reasonably expensive) item at traders, but I'm not sure what to expect.

Maybe. But if you're playing at those settings, being forced to change and adapt sounds like a good thing, since the default game is probably too easy. I doubt hydration will be the big killer in that kind of game, even with the proposed changes. If you're doing Tier 5, you're in the late game and water is no longer an issue (at least, that's the impression I'm getting from Roland and schwanz). More generally, creating opportunity costs is, like, one of the central pillars of a survival game. Why do longer Tier 5s instead of shorter Tier 4s? Better quest rewards, better loot. Challenge. Fun? I dunno man, you tell me. Hopefully the devs do a good job at making it worth our while.

Probably for the best. It does mean we'll never see posts bitterly complaining that they can't craft a level 5 spear because Sharp Sticks vol 69 just won't spawn, though. Alas...

I dunno, I think the devs have been pretty open about their approach to realism/plausibility, which I would sum up as "nice to have, but will always be behind gameplay/tech/fun considerations". This system doesn't seem particularly more or less realistic than the other system to me, but it does seem like a tighter and better-integrated design. 7DTD has been moving in a more looting-focused direction in recent years (dungeon POIs, skill books, un-mineable resources like brass & plastic) so something like this isn't too surprising. I do concede that if I hated looting or was just more into mining/crafting, I'd probably feel differently about this.

Hmm. My first impression is that this sounds like the best thought-out crafting system so far. Truthfully, I've never been a huge fan of how 7DTD handled crafting progression- the stone axe factory of LBD was rightfully ditched, but the perk system was clunky and veered wildly between mandatory and useless. This sounds more up my alley.

I agreed with you about wanting more polish, and then you started talking about adding dozens or hundreds of things, which is... not polish. It's the opposite of polish. It's adding lots and lots of new rough content. So maybe I agree with you. Or maybe not. Hard to tell. Perks in this game are weird. TFP have tried a bunch of different systems, each of them janky in its own special way. Last time I heard about any plans MM was talking about separating crafting into its own skill system, which sounds like a good idea to me, but who knows where they'll go with it.

IMO the issue isn't that TFP can't figure out how to make death more punishing. It's more of a Goldilocks problem. Too lenient isn't ideal, but you can still enjoy the game. Too hard and it wrecks the whole experience. Agreed that the death system does need more work, but I won't be surprised if they hold off pending a few rounds of polish and all major features introduced (bandits, special infected, legendary weapons if those are still coming, etc.)

I know it's your gimmick and all, but please. Not like this.

INT stands apart from the other perk trees, no doubt about it. I wouldn't call it a weak tree overall, but I would call it extremely uneven. The trader/quest perks in particular are absurdly strong. The earlier poster talking about having motorcycles and auto-shotguns and chainsaws in 10 days? Yeah, that's INT. It lets you break the normal progression over your knee. It was gloriously fun for a playthrough or two, but after a little experience/optimizing, it started to feel like cheating to me. At the same time, a lot of the crafting perks (Physician, Grease Monkey, etc.) wound up in INT. In the pre-blueprint days, these were obligatory if you wanted to advance the crafting game. Blueprints made them into shortcut perks, which are extremely useful in the short term and extremely useless in the medium to long term. The devs know this and have been adding functions to them ever since in an effort to make them worthwhile, and I've actually been pretty impressed at their progress so far. They still feel pretty rough and prone to "essential or useless" design, but as the rest of the game takes shape and is refined, they're slowly getting pushed away from both extremes into more situational ground. Which is a much healthier space, IMO. The INT weapons are interesting. On their own, in a straight fight, they're pretty mediocre. That's not really controversial. The disagreement is over whether this disadvantage is outweighed by its other advantages, namely being able to deploy them to fight independently (turrets) or crowd control (baton). Personally, I think the junk sledge is great, the turret is finicky but adequate, and the baton is the same except with a hideously overdone electrocution visual and sound effect. I really, really can't stand it. I don't care if they give batons better than sledgehammer DPS, I'm never using one again until/unless they tone down the obnoxiousness by like 75%. So we wind up with a tree that consists of wildly overpowered perks (trade and quests), half-cooked leftover perks (crafting), and whatever INT weapons are to you. I don't think the solution is just beefing up some numbers or percentages; fixing INT really involves refining traders, questing, crafting, and other larger systems. Once those are smoothed out, I think INT will start to feel less clunky.