Kazgrel

The road thing's absolutely on their radar. I inquired about it in chat during one of the A21 previews because seeing the roads in a town pairing up with the big blank slabs of asphalt that comprise the main roads between towns very jarring.

Would be nice to have an official word on how this whole shindig will affect 7 Days going forward, but I suspect TFP and other devs have likely lawyered up at this point if Unity shows no sign of walking their decision back. I would hope this whole thing doesn't end up putting 7 Days going gold into jeopardy. One things for sure; I'm keeping my install in place and may make a backup copy in event the game is removed from Steam (even temporarily). Sorry if this is fear monger-ish, especially since it's mostly baseless speculation on my end. Simply want to see this game through to the finish and not have it cut short by a monumentally stupid decision by Unity. TFP has had enough fun with the whole Telltale/console debacle. Wouldn't have wished this @%$# on them or any other dev.

@hiemfire shells break down into buckshot iirc, so a source of lead, but I'd rather feed our shotgun user(s). Sorry for late reply; I don't check in every day here. I almost wonder if TFP saw something akin to what I did in my last A20 playthrough where I used nothing but my 2 junk turrets with AP ammo and cleared blood moon hordes with ease, even being on insane difficulty. It was costly, though; around 5k rounds of ammo used by those things which was around 30k iron. I suppose that's cheap by late game standards but that's still a LOT of iron. Now it has lead attached to it as a cost...at that point we just make AP ammo for our own guns and some explosives.

Requiring lead for the ammo pretty much gutted it for our crew. Couple that with the mountains of 9mm, 7.62, magnum and shotgun shells we had from clearing infestation quests, there wasn't much of a point in a junk turret. Course I won't be surprised if the "fix" is they nerf the ammo from those quests...

Loosely related, I'd like to see HP ammo drop or be sold more at the vendor. Generally we (my group of friends that play together) hold off on ammo crafting until we can bulk craft AP ammo, so HP ammo basically never gets made/used. Maybe we're doing it wrong but we figure the mats are better spent on rounds that can hit multiple targets potentially.

The saving grace for Navezgane Corrections is there's plenty of room to move around/kite/etc., but it is very frustrating when you do everything you can to be as stealth as possible and the game's set up to just "Nah fam" you in some of the nastiest spots there are. Aside from that, the difficulty of that POI is spot on; I've cleared it multiple times (mostly with 1-2 friends along with me) as a T6 infestation and still managed to come out of it with more ammo than I spent, heh. As for the OP's question, I'd say any T1s having a guaranteed dog spawn are pretty much a death sentence for many players within the first 7 days.

Our group just fed people whatever books they needed to craft stuff...in my case, being I went Fortitude, I got all the knuckle weapon + machine gun books, and crafted g5 of each weapon type I used before ever looting one of the same grade or g6. That was a playthrough that started with first experimental build and continued up through stable, though, but even after the crafting magazine drop rate nerf, we were still getting plenty of them for everyone to max out their "main crafts" fairly easily.

Went with mostly for question 1 and yes for question 2, but figure some context is worth posting: I almost always play with a group of 3-5 others, sometimes upwards of 8 total. Early game we decide on who wants to spec into what, and we start doling out weapons/ammo based on that. Usually we have that decided before we load up a new game. While this sounds like it'd be an "always" answer for question 1, one outlier would be explosives; generally speaking, whoever's on perception usually levels up rifles, salvage op and (as of A21) spear before bringing demo expert up, so unless we've gotten our hands on some Atom Junkies early, we just have everyone hold onto whatever pipe bombs/molotovs they've obtained from quests/loot for the first couple of blood moons. While I don't think perks are 100% mandatory, in a group setting like ours, where we have someone specced into everything, there's no reason for, say, me the strength guy using a pistol, outside of some extremely weird scenario where we have no shotgun shells and a surplus of 9mm ammo. Another factor is that we play on Insane difficulty, so we want people to be using the weapons they're going to do the most damage with. Couple that with said people also being fed whichever book set they need for their weapons (Pistol Pete, Shotgun Messiah, etc.), they're going to do even more damage with their perked weapon. Solo/group and difficulty will definitely factor in for these questions.

Oh no, not the zombie graboids!

Playing the save my group started experimental with. We've 32 collectors at our base. If I clear them all of water, we've a screamer looking for us every 5 real mins (default 60 min days). Nuisance? Yes. Silly change to the collectors? Yes, IMO. But late game it's easily mitigated by setting up turrets or just have someone on hand to deal with them. As annoyed as I was reading this change in the patch notes, it's not as obnoxious as I initially expected. Still don't 100% agree with the change, but it's nothing to uninstall the game over. Figure the change impacts mid game most when a group needs glue/duct tape for a million different things so more collectors need to be placed. Turrets may not be accessible and perhaps ammo is still a bit limited. But late game it's basically a non-issue.

Irony is I could see a fusion of LBD and the current LBR being more or less what Darkness Falls had (back when I last played it during A19). Will be curious to see how Khaine handles it when DF becomes A21 compatible. Seeing that I didn't play the game until A17 (ie after LBD was removed from vanilla), I'd have to say I like the current LBR system over A17-20's learning via perks ie I killed a bunch of zeds and now I'm smart enough to build a truck.

While the spear is (rightfully) the new hotness, A21 has made the Fortitude fist weapon brawler playstyle absolutely bonkers. Being able to simply dump all your points into fort without picking up strength for sex rex and agi for flurry has benefitted this build more than any other. Couple that with the easier access to consumables (Moonshine in particular) and I've spent the last 2-3 bloodmoons on my friend's server drunker than @%$# and fistfighting the entire horde in the entrance to a Town Hall POI. Personally hope they don't nerf the availability of consumables because it lets the fortitude tree (moon)shine. When A21 goes stable and we start over, I'll either try out spears or go agility, since I'm certain at least 1-2 of my friends want to do drunken brawling like I have so far in A21.

This is a known bug with quest rewards and will be addressed: I, too, have also run into the same sort of awful quest rewards. Did a T2 and a T5 in the wasteland with a friend just now and we both got better stuff from the T2, lul (aside from the extra dukes + xp).

I've been planting 10 of just about every crop in our farm and they all seem to come up at the same time, but I'm also not watching them like a hawk. Plant the seeds, do stuff for a couple days or so in game, then check again. Long as I planted said crops at around the same time, they were all ready around the same time.

Just some thoughts on my experience thus far; picked up the game right when A17 hit and just crossed the 2k hours played mark during my current run of A21. Said run is on a server with 5-6 friends, insane difficulty, now on day 49. I'm specced into Fortitude; others are specced into other stats, so we've spread the crafting out accordingly: - Water changes made early days a bit of a pain due to no dew collector but once we got those up and running, not so bad...until mid game when glue becomes a necessity for seemingly everything. We've managed to keep it going, but we're somewhere between 15-20 dew collectors now next to our base. - Fortitude build, which I haven't done since A18 or whenever it got it's overhaul to be the beer-swilling fist fightin' farmer, has benefitted MASSIVELY in A21 now that it doesn't need to dip into 3 trees to reach max effectiveness (ie sex rex and flurry of blows from strength and agi respectively). I still lament the nerf to 7.62 stacks being 150 instead of 300 (which they were in A17), but alas (and I know, there's certainly a mod for that somewhere). - Crafting by reading: We've had good luck with this system, I guess, since we've divvied up the crafts based on who took what stat line for perks. By day 40 I already had knuckle weapon and machine gun crafting maxed out. Worth noting: We continued our playthrough from b307 to b313, but in all seriousness, whatever nerf was done to the books seemed to barely affect us aside from the book bundles being lowered. It's actually been a nice change of pace crafting decent weapons from each tier, because the best machine gun we've seen so far is a g5 AK...which I had already crafted a good week prior and was already on a g5 TAC when said AK dropped. We've mostly been in the forest, so that's probably a reason why. Items not needing so many of the parts each (5 each for g5 vs. 15 in A20) has been a godsend. - Trader quest rewards have been good...up until T5. We've done a couple of T5s and aside from one person getting a g5 junk drone, the rewards from those have been abysmal. A g2 pistol as an option for a T5 fetch and clear? Absolute joke. T2s having forged steel as an option has been fantastic, especially when you find schematics for nice mods early on but can't make them due to no steel...or a little later, when you can make motorcycles but don't have the crucible. - Vending machines: One of my crew thinks they're OP and going to be nerfed, but consider we're a group of folks playing together; we're pooling massive stacks of dukes quickly, so we're able to keep nice thinks like learning elixirs, moonshine, and mega crush stocked. I'm digging the easier access to consumables, especially the Grandpa tier stuff because obtaining acid in our current playthrough has been a massive PITA. No one's found the Wasteland Treasure book for acid yet, and it wasn't until day 35ish we had enough for a chem station. I would think for solo play, the prices for vending machine items are about right. Groups can abuse them a bit, but is it game breaking? I don't think so. - Infestation quests: These are fun as heck to me and a simply way to re-use lower tier POIs. Yet to do a T6 infestation but that's mainly been due to getting our ammo situation sorted. We've had 1 or 2 of the infestation quests not spawn the bonus chest at the end; for one of those, I know for fact we didn't path thru the POI as developers intended, so I'm pretty certain it's tied to that. Bit annoying, especially since those bonus chests help to restock ammo more often than not. - Miscellaneous stuff: Sex Rex being gone and the stam reduction for salvaging being tied to Salvage Op makes that perk near mandatory if you want to wrench stuff down efficiently and without having your character sucking wind not even halfway through. Also the nerf to gas from wrenched vehicles is pretty damn harsh; we almost had to go back to bicycles due to not being able to get a chem station up quickly; personally think the gas should be bumped up a little bit from current, but not back to A20 levels where one almost didn't need to ever mine oil shale. The bonus xp from bundling ore courtesy of Art of Mining v5 no longer seems to be a thing according to our strength player...booooo. Also, who do I have to bonk over the noggin to get bulk ammo crafting for at least basic 7.62 via Automatic Handbook set bonus...it's rather bizzare that bulk ammo crafting goes to the book set for one of the most ammo efficient weapons in the game (rifles), but I digress. Overall this update feels like an improvement over A20 in more or less every way possible, but I'm stating that from experience of one incomplete playthrough of A21 vs. the 2-3 complete playthroughs of vanilla A20 that we did over the past year and change. We'll probably be doing a fresh one once A21 goes stable, then likely dabble in some of the overhauls once they're updated. Personally I may go about a solo playthrough at some point because I'm very certain I'd allocate perk points quite differently compared to a group setting like I'm usually in.

I rolled up into this thread thinking OP was wanting the SMG buffed so I was like "lolwut?" 😛 I've used the SMG extensively in A20 without much issue, but if I could have one change: A T3 weapon shouldn't be using a massive Mega Crush can as a silencer...or if it is, maybe wrap it a la how silencers appear on the sniper rifle? Very pet peeve level request of mine and no, it won't stop me from using the SMG when I go agility builds in the future 😀

TIL a tank top and short shorts are "controversial" 🙄

Most of my playtime on this game is multiplayer, hence why my opinion on the matter will seem skewed. But the quality of the zed models smokes the player models in comparison. Not to where the game's literally unplayable, of course. Additional zed models/variety would seem to be a post launch thing they could add, since I dare think the art folks currently have their hands full.

Sure, the variety of zeds (or lack thereof) is annoying. But getting updated player models along with bandits (which will go some way to adding to enemy variety) is (IMO) more important at this point. How long has the current player model been in use? I've only played since A17 and it's been the same since then at least. Seems TFP agree on that since that seems to be projects consuming their character art folk's time based on last night's dev stream. Would love to one day see additional zeds and/or some variety to the current ones as mentioned over the last page or two. Worst case I can look into what modders have provided.

I find the feedback about the female outfit that's pretty obviously a homage to Lara Croft rather bizzare seeing that it and the female bandit were the only newer female npc models shown. Now if the female version of that wasteland assassin set is showing skin every which way, sure, a bit bizzare, but I figure it'll be more or less identical to the male counterpart.

After having watched the first dev stream, if there's any one thing I'm personally looking forward to the most (aka what I'd classify as a "banger"), it's definitely the trader stage + rebalancing. It'll be super nice to not have to intentionally not use the traders and have them offer reasonable loot (IMO) for a change. Traders have been stupid good for at least 2 alphas now.

I take it the armor overhaul or however it's framed that showcased a bunch of different armor/outfit sets in that first set of A21 dev streams way back when (almost 2 years ago now) is on the back burner for now? Given the wording of the OP, sounds like we're getting updated art for the iron and military sets for A21. Have to say I wasn't a fan of some of the concepts (namely the int armor set) but some of them were pretty good (the maurader or w/e set that had a big barter bonus as a final set bonus). Fan of the whole set bonus idea altho keeping the sets "balanced" could be a fun endeavor (the magazine sets send their regards).

If I'm running an agi build, I stick with padded until getting some good armor mods, then I begin moving into military pieces unless I manage to high roll on a g6 leather piece. Loosely related to the topic: What do we think needs to be done to make leather armor more appealing? I'd say cut the movement/stam penalties down since it already offers a decent armor rating jump over padded. By the time military armor is showing up, advanced muffled connectors should also be dropping/available.

A17, in one of my first ever playthroughs, I spawned in the wasteland with a hill right behind me. Ran atop the hill to get a lay of the land and right below on the other side of the hill was a zombie bear. Was far enough away I didn't aggro it, but also couldn't see anything but wasteland and maybe some burnt forest nearby. Pretty sure I died to a landmine not long after. 😛

Nifty idea, OP, but how would that work work with moving items into containers? Say I've maxed out the perk and have a stack of 600 9mm, then move it into a chest...would it split into 2 stacks of 300? Could be a PITA to code, but that's not my area of expertise.