Whorhay

I usually play permadeath in my solo games and I frequently get bored before Demolishers show up, and roll a new world with another build. When I do stick it out long enough for Demo's to show up I tweak my base design and nothing really changes. I hate the bullet sponge method of increasing difficulty as even on Nomad zombies are tougher than they ought to be. Maybe my next re-roll I should force myself to start in the desert or something. My only deaths thus far in A20 have been once at the last room of a T5 when the game dumped 20+ zombies in my lap and it turned out that half a stack of ammo wasn't enough for a T5 anymore, and once early game when I was clearing a PoI at night with pipe weapons and had a wandering horde plus a direwolf come join the fun right as I engaged the zombies in the final room.

Is it mind boggling for anyone else that the devs are seriously considering changing a mechanic so drastically purely so we can have prettier bandits? Like someone else said make a few models for each faction and call it a day.

After playing for awhile I don't think the farming really needs any fixing. I just don't bother farming unless I can go 3 of 3 in LotL. In Solo games food doesn't really seem like much of a struggle after the first few days just eating everything I find and boiling or charring meat. In Multi-Player the food pressure is definitely much more noticeable but then it's also easy enough for one person to go Fort first and be the farmer, and it's likely that someone will already also be delegated as the Int first player so it's not like someone having to play a role is unprecedented. It might be arguable that getting the initial seeds could be a challenge except that there appear to be pretty sizable farms scattered all around that can supply plenty of stuff to turn into seeds.

The restore power quests are definitely harder than the Tier you get them in, that said they can be trivialized if you understand the mechanic. First thing you should do is clear all the world spawn zombies in the area. Then right at 22:00 start the quest and move through the POI killing every single zombie. Once all the POI zombies are dead go back and turn on each generator, this does not have to be done before dawn. The generators make a ton of racket and will call in any zombies in the area that you haven't killed. But if all the zombies and hostile animals are dead then nothing untoward should happen. The biggest danger, provided you are capable enough to clear a poi of whatever tier it is you're doing at night, is that a wandering horde will spawn after you start and be lurking around for when you start a generator. So take a peak around before starting the generator and have plan for escaping if a horde comes in right when you start the generator.

AOE damage like Molotovs, Pipebombs, Grenades, and rockets have been working for full xp since at least A16. At least I think that is the last time I did a pit trap base where we would just stand around all night tossing explosives into the pit with the zombies all night. We'd have to reset the server every couple in game hours because with max zombies alive maxed out you just cleared the horde amazingly fast. With a shotgun and single block wide corridor I haven't seen a horde not get cleared before 4am until well over 100 gamestage. I do play with 16 alive on Nomad though as otherwise the horde is just more of a trickle and could probably be managed with a wet noodle for a weapon.

The shotgun seems more than adequate to hold off and slaughter multiple hordes all night. Early game getting 2-3 kills per regular shotgun shell is routine.. Later on because so many of them are feral and radiated getting 3 kills in one shot is much more rare but you still get two kills per shot very often. I use a 5 block long 1 block wide hallway for the zombies to get to me with some electric fences to slow them down a bit. The primary slowdown that keeps me from getting more kills is the run time from when the zombies spawn in to when they get within range. I think the perfect setup for absolutely maximizing xp would be to cover the spawnable area with electric fences and shotgun turrets a few blocks above the grounds surface facing down. Sure you only get 50% xp per kill but you'd possibly be looking at a spawn to kill time of a few seconds or less. The through put could be amazing, though I think that would be a little to resource intensive just to get setup. Although I guess you could maybe do it in a part of the map where the zombie spawn area is restricted to a smaller space. That said I don't know if the game just aborts spawning the horde if it fails to many times to find spawnable surface. Barring the above the fastest way would probably be to use tons of explosives and set your max alive as high as possible.

If the new Crack-a-Book T5 is faster to clear than the old one, it's only because there are multiple places where you are essentially guaranteed to aggro 15+ zombies. The way it worked before it was possible to clear it more sneakily. Now you walk into a new floor, and maybe sneak kill a couple before having more than a dozen trying to jump you all at once. Then you either kill them fast and the floor is cleared or you die.

Having a concussion also reduces all your stats by one point I believe.

I pretty much always carry all of the tools, which could strictly speaking double as weapons. However the only things I carry specifically to use as weapons are a melee weapon, usually club or sledge, an "oh @%$#!" machine gun, and then the gun I'm perked for which is usually a shotgun.

The big upside from this is that if a Vending machine is working in a POI it'll always be that way. So you don't risk losing a good vending machine by doing a quest in a POI that had a working one.

So far every time I've completed my T3 quests I've been offered a chem station. I could just be getting lucky on the rewards though. I do seem to see completed stations as well as beakers sold pretty frequently.

Chem Station seems to be a guaranteed offer for finishing Tier 3. Tier 4 rewards seem to be entirely random, I have seen a variety of vehicle bundles offered at different tiers but the Bicycle seems to be the only guaranteed one.

If you found Feral zombies in the POI you were clearing on day 1, and before nightfall, then you were for sure not clearing out a Tier One PoI, possibly not even T2 to T3. Like others have said it sounds like you've been horrendously unlucky with wandering hordes, both in the type of them and the timing.

I thought that had already been done, it just wasn't very extreme.

You don't have to move to each new trader to get higher tier quests. The trader you've been reping up with will offer better quests as you rep up with them. PoI's already scale up in difficulty. Making the higher tier poi's spawn predominantly in harder and harder biomes is a bad idea for balance reasons because you'd be compounding difficulty scaling factors. If they wanted to do that for RWG they'd probably have to reduce the difficulty of each of those factors individually. It'd be a lot easier to manage in a prebuilt map like navezgame, but I think most of the user base prefers RWG.

Isn't the Chemstation a guaranteed result of completing seven T3 trader quests? It seems like you can get that bonus multiple times, even from the same trader. So why not just do a bunch of quests? I understand that taking the motorcycle package is mighty tempting but at best that will be worth two acid and some steel, whereas the chem station represents five acid and a beaker. Makes for a pretty clear choice to me, and like I said you can at a minimum go to other traders and quest until you get offered a Chem station for completing the T3's again.

How about rather than limiting the distance from a trader the quest can be, weighting it so that closer PoI's of the appropriate tier are more likely to be chosen at the lower tiers. As you move up to higher tier quests then the balance starts to shift to sending you places that are farther away. Maybe add an incentive to travel those long distances by increasing the reward based on the distance. It'd make a logical sort of sense as well, since the trader would offer little reward for running an errand that is just a block or two away, but asking you to cross the map and kill a hundred zombies would be a much bigger ask. As it is I've been passing up on tier 5 quests because they seem to have been tuned into death traps that take more than a game day to complete and the rewards aren't noticeably better than running a tier 3-4, especially considering how fast you can knock out those easier quests. Hell I can complete a clear and fetch T3-4 in 5-10 real life minutes using melee for all but the hairiest spots. I like to have questing days where I just focus on busting out all of them that I can since I max out daring adventurer and get double item rewards.

If anything the Pipe Baton should get a buff. It's equivalent to all the other starting melee weapons, but instead of being crafted from basic stone age materials it requires glue and pipes. A better fix though would probably be to make the wood club benefit from either Pummel Pete, or Electrocutioner, whichever is higher. Then move the Pipe Baton up to being the Tier 2 weapon, and then bump the Stun Baton to Tier 3. I think what I'd really like though would be unbinding the melee weapons from the different attributes. Then change the melee skills to give generic bonuses to all melee weapons. So you'd have one for raw damage %, another for knockdown, another for stun, another for dismember, another for attack speed

I think they actually talked about a map like this in the Dev talk video series. They were saying though that having too much city caused incredible lag and was not stable.

And the Green Barrels also give a pretty good amount of acid when wrenched, not sure if that is tied to the book though.

Even with default settings getting to lots of electric fences on day 5 or six is pretty easy, and that's without finding the nerd glasses. I do it by focusing on Int at first and only spending a few points in the other attributes until my base is ready. Days 1-4 are spent questing and gathering materials from POI's. Day 5 I start building the base and if I don't have the skills to make the electric fences when I start on that I'll have them before the base is all finished up on Day 6. That leaves me an extra day to do more quests and gather any supplies I'm short on for the first horde. My base is usually a free standing structure built on stilts with an enclosed elevated path for the zombies to come and eat me. I usually have 8 electric fence posts up but it'd work with just 2-3. No "cheese" outside of giving the zombies a single easy path to get to me, and it's not even long and twisty, just 5 blocks long. I keep the path short because shotguns have pretty minimal range and making it longer means it takes longer to kill each zombie, which holds up another zombie from spawning and getting close enough to be killed. For the early hordes the only problem is that the hordes only take a couple in game hours to mop up, so I usually do the logout and back in trick to keep the fighting up until morning so that my base gets a bit of a workout. That's all basically the same as in A19, when it worked great with a blunderbuss or two. I haven't noticed the fences being less effective than before, you know other than when I've forgotten to turn them on. I do really like that the pipe shotty uses the same ammo as the others, that was always an early game balancing trick trying not to make too much blundy ammo so I'd still have powder to make shells when I got a double barrel.

I've found plenty of sewing kits in trash piles, haven't been an issue at all in single player though a bit tight in multiplayer with 3 people. Acid though has been rough even in single player. I made one wheel so far, found or bought the rest of the wheels for the vehicles I've made. Now can't find any acid to make a chem station despite having the book for getting acid from salvaging and stuff.

I don't race for levels or do stuff to deliberately pile up levels. Tons of stuff is level gated though, and so if you want to be able to do stuff other than deliberately hobble yourself then you'll take every opportunity to earn exp. Gamestage advances with days played as well as player level, so by not leveling you're possibly just hurting your chances by getting behind the curve.

I feel like Learn By Doing is only an issue when it is something that offers a big enough advantage that it becomes a good trade off to do that grind, but the grind doesn't have any benefit other than increasing that skill. In Valheim there didn't seem to be any noticeable benefit in leveling up skills so I've never bothered trying to grind up skills. In 7DTD grinding out skills that increased the quality of tools and weapons was clearly worth it to some degree and so people felt like they had to do the grind, but they didn't enjoy it and there wasn't anything to be gained by doing that work other than the skill increases. Personally I enjoyed the grind to a point because I turned it into a minigame to be played at night to pass the hours of enforced inactivity in the early game.

I'm on day 68 and haven't had a horde last all night yet. I'm playing on default 60 minute days so maybe my nights are longer than yours. I am playing with max alive 16 though so the moments when there isn't a target to splatter aren't real common on horde night. I think the problem though isn't that players can progress too fast, I think it's that the game pushes players to advance as fast as possible. From day one you can run into ferals in PoI's that maybe we should know better than to be venturing into, and just sprinkled around after dark. Knowing that the horde is coming in a few hours and with pressures to get food and build a base, the game strongly pushes players to level up and fast. Personally I like that kind of pressure and stress in the game, as it is what makes replaying the game over and over fun.