[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

Seems like TFP could pretty easily resolve all the "I want to melee enemies without it being cheesy" arguments by just making a window type that can be melee'd through but not crawled through, and without the high health of a full block.  Maybe something like a hatch frame that can be open and closed

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

6 hours ago, Mechanimal said:

Nearly everyone, including myself, seemed so excited... for like a week. Now no one knows what is going to happen by the time this issue settles back down and gets finalized.

 

I assure that barely anyone cares about the block changes lol. There are a dozen or two people fired up about it at most, but checking somewhere like Reddit where there's 600-1,000+ people on the sub at any given time I don't even see a single thread on it, and even that is a tiny tiny tiny sample size compared to the 48,000 people playing at the time of posting this message

 

Fun fact, while checking if literally anyone outside this forum cared about the change, I saw other people sad that the pipe baton has cool animations but is utterly useless past early game lol.

 

I am honestly baffled on why TFP will spend tens of thousands of dollars making animations, models etc for stuff and then just . . . not care about making it actually useful or something players will continue using.  Like . . . the works is quite literally already done , all that's left is just the easy stuff of changing a couple of lines of code to give it a chance to stun zombies or allow it to accept a "tazer mod" or something so it scales with it's own perk line. The mod would require new assets, but just giving it a chance to hit a "pressure point" and "stun" the target for a few seconds would give you a reason to invest in the perk line while using it

 

bUT tHaT wOUlD bE oP

 

Have y'all even read the club line? It has a super high chance to stagger / stun / knockdown and does stupid high extra damage to stunned targets, all while it literally has better stats then the baton to begin with.

 

Make Pipe Baton Great (to begin with) and give it a steel reskin for a t3

 

 

3 hours ago, dcsobral said:

And I know people who stopped playing because of that.

 

People stop playing all the time no matter what. Like MM said, A20 isn't going to fix burnout and if someone quits because they can't find an auger or steel pick in the first week then it be like it is. The loot change undoubtedly increased player retention,  and made it so 95% of the items in the game weren't pointless. Finding a steel pick day 5 meant you no longer cared about any iron or lesser drops you found. 

 

It honestly feels bad skipping tiers for most stuff. I found a level 3 auto shotgun in A20 too early and went from double barrel to auto and bypassed pump entirely, and feel kind of robbed. I almost stopped using it just to use the pump shotgun for a bit lol

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

All this rage over building blocks reminded me of the sheer R A G E people spewed out in A19 when the loot was changed to where you wouldn't find steel tools week one. So many wall of text rants about how they would never play again and how it made it pointless to do PoI before X week because all the loot containers  would have lower tier loot so they had to wait until gamestage X to get anything good, and how it made no sense that a sealed wooden box had a stone axe in it etc etc etc etc

 

Loot change was healthy for game. Block change is healthy for game. Farming change is healthy for game.  Drone change to scale with Int and Pipe Baton change to actually scale (well) with the baton tree will be  healthy for game.

 

I can't remember the drama of the week (drama of the alpha?) for A17 and A18 etc, I'm sure they had something that triggered a horde night on the forums for Roland to sigh at

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

5 hours ago, overgoat said:

In the new release I've noticed my robotic sledges aren't engaging enemies anymore.  I've tried different sledges, moving them to new locations, and logging in and out, but they are just ignoring enemies.  Is this just me or can anyone else confirm they are seeing it to?

 

 

 

I've mentioned this a few times, hopefully @faatal gets time at some point to investigate it since he fixed the junk sledge back in A19. The Junk Sledge tracking is significantly worse in A20, I think it's because of the zombies doing the new crawl animation and making the sledge miss.

 

You can easily test it by putting two junk sledges in front of a door to try and push zombies out of it, and having a handful of zombies try to get through it. Any runners especially will just run right at them and zoom up and over and barely take damage before ripping your nipples off and eating them like pepperoni.

 

Junk turret and sledge are also *extremely* bad about falling through floors in A20. I'm assuming the new block system did something to the floors, but they are essentially unusable in T5 skyscrappers or any PoI where it is mildly laggy. They will fall through the floor mid fight, and especially post fight for some reason they will stop firing and then just slip away to go chill on the bottom floor of the PoI

 

It's a shame, Junk sledge was by far the coolest thing in the game imo and I loved them, but they are fairly useless in A20 besides for cheese bases

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

25 minutes ago, dcsobral said:

Actually, yes! Kage tested it on today's video (linked below), and he DID die. Well, he died on the previous video, before horde night, but you didn't specify when. But he had to almost immediately fall back to his hatches which have not been nerfed and, by the shape logic, should have been.

 

I mean, why would like 20 cobble worth of material hold out that many zombies for the entire horde night without repair lol. From a balance standpoint that cobble pole *still* lasted a really long time against like 20+ zombies. And half the issues he was having was he couldn't aim  and then shot the cobble pole himself with his shotgun which does a ton of block damage

 

I don't think it's that unreasonable that you would need to have something a bit less cheesy than literally 20 cobble to stop an entire horde all night, especially with the traders now giving you five hundred free cobblestone / cement blocks that you can instantly place down without any material cost investment at all. Besides that, I thought you guys were arguing that the reason people were upset wasn't because of melee cheese bases? That pole he was using was nothing to do with aesthetics and purely to do with melee cheese lol

 

I dunno, horde night is supposed to be scary. If you want to build an aesthetic castle then by all means do it, but do it with the knowledge that a few decorative blocks might get broken if you fight the horde night in it. If you are trying to build an actually efficient horde base then just build it in your back yard or across town or wherever you want, and you can still live in your castle or wooden house or w/e

 

You still can build OP AF cheese bases if you want anyway, the one Kage shown doesn't even look efficient. All you have to do is build a couple of stairs with junk sledges where the zombies take forever to jump up and get yeeted, and have an area where you can throw explosives at the zombies. His base would have held out 100% okay if he'd had a one or two block stair case leading to the tunnel entrance where they had to jump to land on the block the sledge targetted, before jumping one last time to enter his tunnel. The cobble half blocks would have held out fine against the few zombies that managed to make it past the sledge.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

I haven't seen this much over reacting since the farming rage.

 

Shape health change is meh, but it's a simple fix to just make it cost less resources. Or not, it's not the end of the world if it costs the same for something that's just aesthetics. Easiest solution is just don't fight hordes in your main base if you are worried they are going to break your window trim

 

Them breaking it just lets you rebuild it and get more exp anyway, and I can 100% guarantee you that almost nobody that plays the game will even notice the block health nerf besides a vocal minority on forums like this. It's part of the alpha experience, things change mid alpha. Y'all wouldn't have even known the blocks originally had more health if the alpha had came out two weeks later.

 

If we hadn't gotten the alpha with the full health blocks, it would have barely been a "quirky foot note" for most people, like how if you change the shape of the storage box to a cabinet it has less storage slots.  Yeah it would be nice if the storage box options all had the same number of  slots, since they cost the same resources to make. But at the end of the day, we just suck it up and either use ugly boxes or use cool looking ones with less storage and shrug

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

3 hours ago, retrogamingdev said:

What are "boss hordes"?

 

I'm pretty sure "boss horde" is the internal term for the spam of high level sleepers that guard the loot room at the end of a PoI. They will reset and teleport back to position if they fall off a building and deaggro, and it seems there were situations that would cause the quest state to get messed up when the player didn't just kill them outright

 

2 hours ago, retrogamingdev said:

 

Why can't anyone of the mods answer this seriously?

 

Forum mods = / = developers, they either have lives and are busy, don't know because they aren't QA or developers, or don't like you. Possibly all three

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

You don't fail the quest once dawn starts, so you could probably cheese it by just standing there afk until dawn but that's boring.

 

I really like the idea of the night quest, just wish the reward was better. I hope they explore hard quests like that more, like force enabling feral senses and nightmare run speeds while in X tier PoI or after accepting X quest type. They could even force raise difficulty to make zombies more durable etc, there's a lot of neat options they could pursue for making some new quest types that are highly challenging but also rewarding

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

1 hour ago, meilodasreh said:

still unclear to me what MM meant. Says ALL, but then gives example with trader.

 

He was playing a test run, found a trader with all stations working and it ruined his test run, so he told them to make ALL stations the player didn't craft be destroyed

 

You cannot find working stations anymore

 

 

 

Quote

• In A19 items got increased scrapping speed when scrapping to iron. Updated all other scrap actions to the same speed. 

 

Huuuuuuuge!! Screw the brass scrapping time

 

Quote

Slightly lowered the stamina use of the pipe baton 

 

I won't say no to it, but it's weird this is the only change on pipe baton. It still isn't very clearly mentioned in the UI, I've seen many people confused on what attribute pipe baton belongs to and whether it scaled with the electrocute perk line at all

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

2 hours ago, Generris said:

I'm a complete noob still getting used to the game, but is mandatory skill point allocation the only consistent way to get a workbench? Because if so, that's pretty bad design. All of your free points just go into the workbench, so what's the point? Might as well just give everyone the workbench from the beginning and not bother letting them think they just got some useful skill points...

 

No, you get work benches by buying them, finding the magazine that teaches you to build it, being given one for free by the trader, OR by using the perk points to unlock it.

 

Just go do quests and you will be handed one by the trader at like trader level 2. By the time you even need a workbench the trader should have given you one for free or offered one for sale. I haven't wasted points on a work bench in like 2+ alpha now, there's no way I'd even find the parts to craft one before I'd already just bought one or been given one by the trader. The hammer alone took me way longer than the trader reward workbench did

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

6 minutes ago, Callum123456789 said:

screamers can be good but when you have a higher game stage lets say you farm them things can get out of control fast for example in a19 i was intentionally using an auger to destroy a building to build up the heat map she creamed a few times called in more screamers and spawned too many radiated which were consisting of normal zombies but then the Wight's cops and bikers which those guys are nasty in groups and i almost died.

 

2 junk turrets watching your mine shaft entrance + robot drone to tell you when someone is sneaking up if they somehow got past your turrets + rockbusters for extra $$$ + an audiobook to listen to while you turn your brain off and hold m1

 

That's the secret sauce of mining in A20. Just go back up and refill the drum mags on your turrets every once in a while and collect all the loot bags, and go back to your mineshaft.  I mine at night with feral senses on for extra exp

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

27 minutes ago, Callum123456789 said:

avoid screamers  

 

Imagine avoiding all that free exp, smh

 

 

31 minutes ago, dcsobral said:

He said the skill would increase by reading stuff you find in loot, so no, it's not LBD.

 

Yep, they seem turbo against LBD for what ever reason. I honestly don't get the hate for it that people have, it just rewards you for having a play style and sticking to it, but I guess filthy casuals that can't make up their mind want to be a jack of all trades master of all, with minimal investment besides instant gratification perk points. Kids these days, they never would have made it in the days of Oblivion and earlier RPGs

 

Just from the way Madmole has described it, it sounds like your skill in crafting goes up by looting books, but there being so many crafting levels makes me think you probably can assign points to various crafting trees, and the points probably come from finding books.

 

Like you read a book and get 10 crafting points you can then allocate to shotguns, tools, armor etc

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

32 minutes ago, madmole said:

LBD is not coming back,

 

 

You heard it here first folks, rev up those hype machines and ready the pitchforks if the final end result doesn't match what ever expectations you whipped up!!

 

 

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

I dunno what people are on about, the new building system is a trillion times better. The shape menu, being able to upgrade everything to cobble, the VASTLY faster upgrade speed, the trader offering 500 blocks as a reward etc

 

The only minor issues I have with the building system atm is just that it seems like not all shapes are equal health, and for storage they don't all have the same number of storage spots. So if you want to make your base look nice and use cabniets instead of the writable storage box, it has way less storage capacity.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

1 hour ago, CoolJ said:

I've got two supercorn seeds that I got from bundle crates. It seems pretty rare to get supercorn in those bundles because I have been watching all the Lets Plays from the usual people and so far none of the farm bundles they have opened have had supercorn

 

I dunno, I got a super corn seed from my first farm plot reward I accepted at like level 3, and with 1 point in LoTL I've gotten a seed back every harvest, and have made enough super corn to craft a second seed pretty easily, to increase my supercorn output.

 

I don't actually have a use for Supercorn at the moment though lol, I've got more glue and duct tape than I have any need for, which is shocking since you can usually never get enough. I've just been buy glue and duct tape from traders in stacks of like 20+, and have had 2-3 learning elixir (I think that's the only other use of super corn?) sitting in my box for horde nights just from loot

 

Much more important than supercorn for me, is potatoes. Frickin potato seeds, I've got one little plant giving it's all to give me taters, and it's not enough. It's never enough

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

3 hours ago, Weazelsun said:

Any plans to give the pipe baton a stun effect? Could last for 2 - 4 seconds. Seeing as it is a baton and all. As for an indicator showing the pipe baton is ready to stun, maybe an overhead strike animation or a shove animation with the pipe baton horizontally. Wait or a leg strike as it is done in real life by some officers.

 

Second this, I've been asking for this since the streamer weekend lol. The pipe baton working with the stun baton perk tree would make sense, as it currently doesn't scale with it and can't use mods from it, so it's hard to even have enough mods for the pipe baton, and the pipe baton is just a worse club in every possible way besides animations

 

I'd love if the pipe baton could get some sort of a psuedo stun, and then if we got a t3 steel baton that used the pipe baton animations and stun baton electricity and mods

 

3 hours ago, Kalex said:

It's very disjointing to have a different attack style and animations between the primitive tier and the higher tiers of the same weapon line.

 

Go with the pipe baton animations for stun baton imo, and redo stun baton. Pipe baton animations and attack pattern is amazing, and I'm tempted to use it even now with a t6 fully perked out and modded stun baton. The stun baton is just so much less fun to use and does way less damage than it's t0 counterpart. You go from being able to easily kill zombies on your own, to mostly just stagger locking them and then beating on them while they are stunned

 

 

1 hour ago, fragtzack said:

The original learn by doing system highly encouraged grinding to raise skill points. To the point of unattended bot usage. 

 

I mean, rewarding someone for spending hours grinding is fine imo. If someone wants to sit in a mineshaft whacking rocks for 4 hours irl to raise their mining skill then there's no reason to say they can't. Like wise if someone was going to go to the trouble to use a bot to cheat they might as well just use the console to level instead. A big part of the balance philosophy atm seems to be based around players just having an honor system of not making the game unfun for themselves like nerd poling up to the top of a PoI to get the loot. 

 

Pretty hard for the devs to regulate a mostly single player / coop PVE game if a player wants to be a try hard to optimize for the top 1%

 

Learn by doing is better for a dedicated player, while just instantly getting stronger for points is better for a casual player, but TFP will probably go for a system between the two. Judging by Madmole mentioning 25 in shotgun crafting skill / shotgun skill, we might see something like a level 100 cap on skills and you get X points per level you can allocate w/e you want. Having more than 5 levels to a skill will let you express it way more and have more nuanced builds, which I'm all for

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

3 hours ago, madmole said:

skill level 25

 

Madmole just dropped some dank spoilers there for A21 that few people are talking about, wtf guys.

 

This sounds exactly like what I was saying back in A19, where there was no point in crafting lower tier armor because you could craft the same level higher tier version. Adding a "skill level" that goes up to a higher level than 5 sounds very promising. It also sounds like we are getting that perk rework I want!

 

Can anybody say "learn by doing" because I am hearing "learn by doing lite mode" which I love. Instant gratification from just applying skill points is okay for babies and filthy casuals, but it isn't really conductive to long play throughs and unique builds. Back in the LBD days I'd spend entire nights in a mineshaft increasing my skill while my friend would spend all his time running and gunning and raising those skills, and we would end up with very different builds and play styles. Now the only real build difference is just which weapon you want to use while you run and gun

 

That single throw away line by MM has me suuuuper excited for A21 already

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

It's so nice seeing the big skyscrappers, nearly 800 hours before A20 and I'd seen a grand total of like 2 before lol

 

Now if only my junk turrets weren't unusable in them because they fall through the floor T_T

 

"Oh, you're surrounded by zombies and getting beaten to death? It'd be a shame if I . . . . ran away and saved myself" ~ Both of my junk turrets, multiple times, 2021

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

3 hours ago, JaxTeller718 said:

lets not talk about why anyone would want to take clubs or blunt weapons when bleed on knives is always a better bet.

 

Clubs are OP AF lol, especially when you perk into them. Clubs get barbed wire and spikes mods as well, which makes them even more ridiculous. I ran a series of tests in A19 to test how each weapon did against an incremental number of irradiated wights, and clubs absolutely destroyed everything besides junk sledges. Junk sledge seem much weaker in A20 though with the new zombie dodge system, so club is very likely king of melee in all situations

 

You don't have to rely on slow DoT bleed systems when you can just kill the target instead in a couple of swings of your club

 

3 hours ago, JaxTeller718 said:

Sometimes it feels like this is being balanced by three different teams

 

I feel this way about the game design more so than the balance. It feels like there are several groups of developers working on different systems, but without a whole lot of inter group discussion to touch base.

 

One team will design a cool feature, but then it doesn't really interact  with the other systems, or does so in a janky way. You see it with things like the drone and pipe baton where they are really neat and someone put a ton of work into designing it and animating it etc, but then nobody checked with the team in charge of balancing the perks to make them actually interact with the perk system. Like how the pipe baton isn't even mentioned in the intellect ui and doesn't really scale with the stun baton perk line much at all. You end up with this really neat weapon that is well designed, but doesn't fit into the existing system and is basically pointless to invest in. Junk turret shells are another example where it is a neat idea, but nobody talked to the balance team to compare the cost of crafting them vs just using an unperked double barrel shotgun to notice that they cost way too much for something that fires as fast as a junk turret does, and do way less per shell than just crafting a real shotgun bullet does

 

Things like that will probably get polished before the game goes gold, I just chalk it up to the game being early access and still in development, which is a good thing imo.

 

  

11 minutes ago, DarlingCows said:

Ok I’ve done this before where I log out right before day time after a horde night after I’ve finished my horde night early. But then I logged back in and the horde started again but I’m not at my base and I die. Can this be changed? 

 

 

if this is replicable then that sounds like a great way to make a crap load of EXP and loot bags lol. The last few hordes I've done have given me way way way more ammo and explosives back than I spent killing them, you could probably just relog a few times and gain like 20 levels and thousands of bullets in a night

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

For added fun, I highly recommend this mod to make the roaming hordes bigger. With feral senses on you can get some legit zombie movie moments when suddenly 20-50+ zombies come tearing their way into a PoI / your base. I spent several hours trapped in a trader's PoI as it was sieged by a horde, and early game I pretty much was always crouched all night with my lights off trying to stealthily open chests etc. 

Def added a lot of scary moments to the early game, and after using it I feel like vanilla roaming hordes should be at least 2x size

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

1 hour ago, Gazz said:

there is no one I need to impress with x zombies killed per day. =P

 

Devs confirmed to be filthy casuals

 

SMH I bet Madmole has least a 40 to 1 KD ratio, get on his level

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

2 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

I didn´t try it myself yet, but there are several people saying that they could avoid that stealth check, wich i guess is still connected with the sleeper volume, by breaking walls and getting sneak kills easier than actually beeing silent using the intended way. That is a huge flaw in the stealth system.

 

I can confirm this is the case, and it's why I still think stealth is a noob trap perk. I have zero points in stealth and will regularly clear the entire sleeper room by just crouching down outside it and picking them all off with an unsilenced rifle, or in many cases, literally pulling out a shotgun and just blowing their heads off from 30 feet away while their buddies sleep next to them.

 

You can still break a block to get a better angle into the room for more head shots and they zeds don't care, they only care if you step into the room or if you miss a shot and damage a block in the room, which seems to count as you being in the room with them, but it usually only applies to the floor and not the walls.

 

Stealth as a whole is always going to be a fairly awful skill because horde nights exist, which means your entire build is useless on the hardest night of the week. Especially in coop it's hard to compete with a dude who just holds Shift + W + M1 with a shotgun and clears the entire PoI before you have even crouch walked past the first floor

 

  

9 hours ago, MechanicalLens said:

So I just accepted the traps bundle for T1 quest completion in a creative test world and they are... really quite very horrible? 5 wooden spikes, 5 barbed wire fences, and 15 landmines? That almost feels like a trap, pun not intended. I was expecting a dart trap and/or a blade trap and/or electric fences but...

 

Constructive feedback time: Please TFP, please make this bundle type worth its weight, because currently... it's very bad. haha

 

 

Yep, my friend picked a level 2 or 3 trap one for some unknowable reason, and got like 5 metal spike traps and a couple of land mines. Meanwhile I was like . . .  but the farm plots / mods / vehicle parts dude wtf

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

3 hours ago, Scyris said:

Lastly the stat system needs to go in the garbage can, seriously its garbage. It was supposedly made to remove level gates, except it just made the problem worse, as there is now 5 gates instead of just one. Lower it to 3 stats, 1 has all weapons, 1 has all defensive stuff, last has survival stuff like cooking etc.

 

Yeah, I've been saying it since the change a few alpha ago, but I don't think the current attribute system makes sense.  You "waste" points by putting them into an attribute that gives you nothing if you aren't using the weapon type for it. Like if I want to be a better farmer, I have to waste like 7+ points leveling up a trait that only raises m60 and brass knuckle damage even if I'm using a shotgun and a club. I get absolutely nothing out of those 7 points, and it feels bad and makes me just not want to get an otherwise interesting perk 

 

I would vastly prefer if raising the attributes . . . y'know raised your actual attributes. 

 

Raising strength = makes you stronger, so you can carry more stuff. It could literally just give you innate Pack Mule to open up new inventory slots

 

Agility = you're more agile. Either give innate Parkour or Cardio

 

Intelligence = you're smarter. It could unlock crafting perks as you raise it, or give crafting cost discounts etc

 

 

The current system makes you waste a ton of points on things you don't care about, just to get a single perk you *do* care about. I'd prefer just having a damage tree, crafting tree, and mobility tree, where you can put points into the base attribute and then just pick the perks that align with the weapon or play style you actually intend to use .

 

You can pretty easily slot the currently existing perks into a tree that makes sense, or give them innately at certain attribute levels like 5 Strength or w/e. If you level too fast, the devs can always change exp needed per level or exp gained etc

 

 

 

I doubt we will get another perk / attribute overhaul though as the devs are trying to wrap things up to go gold, but I def agree that the attribute system would be one of the main areas I think needs another pass to make it actually make sense and make it more rewarding / engaging for the player

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

Yep, once you get the perk to get acid from cars you have an essentially infinite supply of it. Honestly, with the player being given a free bike and a motorcyle starter kit, I've not really needed acid. I only needed it to make tires for a second bike for my friend, but ended up just buying a minibike before I found the acid.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

3 hours ago, faatal said:

We don't have a hunched over anim, so I made do with what we have. It needs more work.

 

Something I've noticed is it seems like the crouching animation has messed up Junk Sledges where they don't hit very reliably anymore. If you put your sledges in front of a door, the zombies will be ducking and jumping so much the sledges miss and a bunch of the zombies will just zoom right through without even being clipped

 

It happens a lot with fast zombies like wight and ferals, they will just rush right up to your junk sledges and carry on right past them