Uncle Al

Zombison does trip nicely off the tongue. I'd expect a special event where carrying Taza's stone axe causes regular Zombison attacks. Not native to the region, but Zombeavers are already enshrined in legend from their movie appearance. They would also provide both a water threat and some serious block damage potential.

You deal with snakebite simply by announcing 'I'm a man. I can handle it.' https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1997-02.html

The jars logical disconnect goes away if you can accept that ground water is dirty enough so that it can never be effectively purified with what you have available, but still potable enough to be drinkable in an emergency. Sure it would be more 'realistic' if you could collect 'really, really murky water' (that can't be purified) from water sources, but the gameplay doesn't really need it. A lot of the grumbles I see come from folks who are fundamentally irked by 'game not being close enough to RL', who don't recognise that deviating from 'realism' in order to foster good gameplay is a good thing. Yes we could 'not need a skillup to put meat on a grill' but then we'd need more low tier, useless when you get past them, cooking recipes and more 'don't exist in the real world' high tier recipes. If you can cook grilled meat on day one, then grilled meat would be a low fullness/costs hydration recipe like all the other 'starter' foods, and we'd need something else to replace it as the 'decent fullness, doesn't cost hydration' option that rewards skilling up cooking. Weapons are the same. Yes we could have 100 weapon variants, but TFP seem (wisely) wedded to the idea that a weapon choice is seriously impactful in game terms. Using a shotgun plays very differently to a sniper rifle. How would using an FN FAL or a Steyr AUG be fundamentally different to the TAC rifle? It wouldn't be, so TFP don't bother putting such variants into the game.

The trader tier progression hasn't changed. New traders never used to offer higher tier quests when you first meet them, and they still don't. The way it works is you do X Tier 1 quests (7 I believe) and get an 'Opening Trade Routes' quest to find a new trader. The trader you've been working with will also increase to Tier 2, but will only start offering Tier 2 quests the next day. You can shortcut this if you really want to by logging out and back in again. The new trader will start at Tier 1, unless it's the same trader as one you've already worked with. Traders only have one progression, so if there are 3 Jens on the map, and you've unlocked Jen up to Tier 3, ALL the Jen traders will offer tier 3 quests, even if you've only just discovered their location.

Sounds like just a side effect of random loot. I'm pretty sure Home Cooking Weekly is the ONLY magazine that's in the cupboard loot table, so having maxed the series won't actually affect your rolls. If you roll a magazine it's going to be home cooking.

That's exactly what I was thinking. I will try and put one in, but it's a bit of a (totally understandable) faff as I'll need to create a game just to have a log file, or it won't pass the acceptance process and the report will never actually get accepted.

Yeah I was kind of reaching, because it really seems to me that this is a bug/oversight. It's reasonable that slugs might have lower total damage, compared to a shell where every pellet hits, but the proportion by which that damage is lower should be the same across all weapon tiers. The fact that the disparity is due to shotgun damage being increased, but not scaled for slugs, reinforces this. Has anyone put a bug report in on this, and if so, did it come back 'working as intended'?

Because the transition animations between standing and crawling aren't in game yet, zombies can flick between standing and crawling instantaneously. This can look like they're ducking, and cause attacks to miss. They also get an instant attack when changing stance, which can catch you off guard. I tend to avoid fighting anywhere there's a low ceiling. Doorways and the edges of attics with peaked roofs can be particularly bad.

I'm sure I didn't have a full set of Magnum Enforcer on that playthrough. I found a magnum suprisingly early. You could well be right though. That would explain it.

Is it possible slugs got tweaked in other ways, when they didn't get a proportional damage increase? I only noticed recently that the .44 magnum penetrates one target when using normal ammunition. That's a huge bonus to what would otherwise be an unremarkable weapon, for its tier, and it doesn't appear to be documented anywhere at all.

I'm fairly sure that since the last Alpha, traders attempt to avoid offering a quest again until they've offered all the other quests of that tier within their range. That tends to make quest distances go up rapidly once you've done all the nearby quests of a particular tier. I believe the quest list resets every three days, when the trader resets their inventory. So you can reset the quests offered list just by logging out and back in, but you may find you still only get long distance quests (because you've done all the close ones) until the trader does their three day reset.

70 Million Years to Die, Revenge of the Necrosaurs might have potential as a follow up game. Toxic waste spill in a natural history museum...you know how these things happen.

Options are always better, pretty much, so I do not disagree. I'm not sure how feasible optioning everything is, from a design and feedback point of view, but you're more knowledgable of dev intent than I am. Certainly the death options show there's still an appetite for adding at least some options early game. I'm not sure a 'deep draconian' edit is needed. From what I understand, the current design intent has shifted to intending players to hit the point at which their power curve flattens out at about 50 days, and a 'normal' game be viable for up to about 100 days. Trader rewards break this, unless you arbitrarily self limit. Trader rewards also trivialise the crafting and looting of non-consumable items, again, unless you self limit. These do not seem to be good design choices. Simply making trader rewards synch with level by basing them off lootstage or traderstage would fix the wild outliers and is in keeping with all the other design changes we've seen. The magazine system moved us away from 'a lucky roll can give you a Q5 SMG in week one' and that's a good thing. It seems weird the trader reward system didn't evolve alongside. Funnily enough the one non-consumable that quest rewards don't trivialise is vehicles. That highlights how important quest rewards are as a source of gear. Because traders don't hand out vehicles as quest rewards, and only give partial handouts as tier rewards, the vehicles side of quest rewards is actually well balanced. My current duo play is fairly typical - day 20, Q4-Q6 top tier guns, Q6 steel armour for my buddy because he got lucky on the armour tier reward and I didn't. (I'm still running around in Q3 leathers because that's what we can craft - again highlighting how imbalanced the quest rewards are.) We've just accessed motorbikes, and that's with pushing vehicle mags hard (He has grease monkey and loots ALL the magazine sources that can give vehicle mags). The bikes and my armour feel 'about right' for 20 days. His armour and the guns feel rather excessive... You make a fair point on self imposed rules. Maybe it's a me thing. I'll happily play self imposed permadeath all day long, although having the option added was nice, but trying to daily track and restrict my trader usage makes me feel like Cartman in the Southpark 'World of Warcraft' episode. He completely abandons questing and levels to endgame by just killing rats in the starting area. It feels bad...

It's not 'what to do if not quest?', it's 'quests are so good, why do anything else?'. And sure, this debate about 'just limit yourself to totally suboptimal playstyles, you'll have more fun' has meandered around on these boards for a while, but I don't feel it's a strong argument. There's a gap between 'minmaxers will find the path that's very slightly better than the others and pursue that exclusively' and 'doing one thing is so much better than all the others it seems like perverse game play to ignore it'. I'm not asking for perfect balance, I'm asking for BETTER balance. Currently the divide between questing and not questing is vast, in terms of rewards. Good game design does require that the player makes difficult, meaningful choices. When one choice is always better, in every situation, you've removed player agency. It's not some weird outlier 'speedrunners' breaking what would otherwise be a balanced system, either. When Tier 2 quests give out Q5 iron tools and weapons you're invariably going to have a situation where quest rewards totally outstrip what you can do for yourself, whether by buying, looting or crafting. Q6 steel weapons at Tier 4 doesn't help either, but you do at least have to do a significant number of quests for that. The other major factor is that there's almost zero opportunity cost to doing quests. 'The rewards aren't worth it' never applies because the rewards are just a freebie on top of normal loot and exp for that POI. Sure if quest POIs had an empty final loot room or something, then we might get the hard choices back (do I loot where I want or do what the trader wants?) but currently the small price of having to loot a specific POI, rather than chosing a target freely, is a tiny price to pay compared to the quality of extra rewards on offer.

I certainly feel that quest rewards should either be synched with lootstage/traderstage, or item rewards should be removed altogether. Removing item rewards would work fine if the the balance between how quests done and daring adventurer affect traderstage was reworked. Currently, daring adventurer massively overshadows quests done, which pretty much makes doing quests to unlock better gear for sale irrelevant. With 'how good gear I can buy from the trader' powerfully dependent on quests done, and quests providing (maybe slightly more than current) cash, you effectively have a self balancing reward system that's linked to player level. Doing quests gets you money AND makes better gear available to buy, effectively allowing you to pick your own rewards, but the gear available is still restricted by your level, because level factors into traderstage. My own view is 'do I drive a km to raid this house I'm not really interested in, because the trader will pay me to do it, or hit the garage a couple of hundred meters away so I can get the tool mags I want?' should be a hard choice. Currently you just do the quest 100% of the time, and the trader probably hands you a top quality tool anyway.

If it's lead that's limiting your ammo crafting, then Hi Power is almost certainly a bad call. Looked on as total resources to make a 7.62 bullet, Standard comes in at 16 and Hi Power at 19. Lead 2 4 Clay 2 3 Brass 6 6 Coal 3 3 Nitrate 3 3 So you don't make twice as much regular ammo as Hi Power, it's more like 20% more. If, and it's a huge if, gathering all five resources is about equal work for you/your team. 5% extra damage could be significant, notably because of the increased decapitation chance. There's a check of damage against target health in addition to the flat percentage chance from perk stats, so you'll see more one hit kills from Hi Power even if the extra 5% damage doesn't generally affect the number of hits required to kill from aggregate damage. Again, I don't craft much Hi Power at all, but I favour perception builds that love AP ammo and have brass to spare. I wouldn't feel comfortable saying Hi Power is clearly underpowered currently, although I suspect it might be. The biggest factor for me in not using HP is it won't stack with regular ammo, and I seem to pretty much only find regular ammo as loot. If, at high loot stage, a significant portion of looted ammo was HP I'd probably start using it more often.

This used to be the case but it was rebalanced, which is why 'Hollow Point' got renamed to 'Hi Power' for clarity. Hi Power ammo is now all round better than normal, as it does 5% more damage and is no worse against armour. AP ammo is better than Normal or Hi Power as it does 10% more damage than Normal, gets enhanced armour penetration, penetrates at least one target and gets extra target penetration when fired from a rifle (not an assault rifle) if you're perked into Penetrator. As far as I can see it's now a pretty simple progression of AP is better than HP which is better than Normal, if you ignore manufacturing costs. I generally can't see much point in HP ammo but as lead is usually your most abundant resource when ammo crafting, it might be worth it occasionally. HP takes twice the lead to craft compared to Normal, but doesn't cost more brass or gunpowder.

Just as an aside, when comparing a 'new' bow with the one you currently have, make sure you change them both to the same ammo type first. New bows come set at default stone ammo, and as you're probably using at least iron from fairly early on in the game, a Q5 primative bow will look worse than a Q2 when you first pick it up if you're using iron arrows in the Q2.

Whether you use an unperked weapon for a short or long while wasn't really relevant to my point. My core observation was that the suggested system of 'keep giving overpowered rewards but only if you can't use them' was still horrible. It also breaks in multiplayer, as you just swap stuff between you. So long as trader rewards are an entire tier higher than what you can craft or loot, they're unbalanced. In answer to a few observations above, along the lines of 'unless the rewards are great, nobody will do quests', that would be true if there was a real opportunity cost for doing quests. There isn't. You give up a bit of travel time and a more limited selection of target POIs for a potential reward streets ahead of what you can find, craft or buy. Target POI type doesn't currently matter that much, frankly. There's a bit of variation in the sealed crates, but the end loot is the same for everything of the same tier. Maybe if end chests used different loot tables depending on POI type it would be more impactful, but currently I will always clear a house 500 meters away rather than a garage next door, when the house comes with a cash reward and a very good chance of a top quality iron weapon or tool, and I'm grubbing around with mid quality stone. Quests get you a cash reward, progression towards the VERY impactful end of tier rewards (which are a bit better balanced as they're once per trader and actually take some effort to achieve), and gives you progression towards improving trader stock. They don't need a huge item incentive as well. The willingness to do scut work for the trader to get in his good books so you can buy useful stuff from them would be even more of an incentive if Daring Adventurer didn't so massively outshine the quest progression bonus to traderstage. When quest progression is giving 5% of your level per tier, and each level of DA is giving a flat +10, it's not hard to see why traders don't stock much useful stuff if you don't perk DA. I'm really surprised that whoever designed the systems had the sense not to make lucky looter a flat bonus, yet didn't follow that model for Daring Adventurer. Currently, one rank in DA is the equivalent of having completed ALL SIX quest tiers for a trader, when you're level 33. Below level 33, it's better than ANY bonus to traderstage you can get by questing. I feel quest tier should be way more impactful, more like 15% per tier, and adjust the base 100% of level to 80% or so. New traders would be a little bit worse than currently, the ones you've put serious work into would be quite a bit better. DA should give something like a free bonus tier (+15% per level) per point. Still very useful, but not insane at low levels as it is now.

With the current imbalance between quest rewards vs. magazine progression, that would cause the even more annoying situation that you'd probably be better off abandoning your perked weapon choices for what the trader gives you. The difference is that big. Anecdotal example I've used elsewhere, but I'll repost it because it really highlights how bad the issue is: My latest anecdotal contribution is day six of a new game. Went out, did a Tier 2 buried supplies which took no time at all, then while retuning home I got curious about one of the new Checkpoint POIs (A Tier 4) and ended up venturing into it and picking up a fair few things including the main loot. It was bloody hard killing mass soldiers using Q3 ish stone/pipe weapons, but it was great fun. At this point I've got a mix of crafted and found gear, plus a T1 quest reward or two. Pretty consistently using Q2-3 tier zero stuff. So far so good. Best loot I find in the hideous Tier 4 checkpoint is a Q4 primitive bow and a Q4 stone shovel. Both useful, great. Stagger back from the checkpoint mission of death and hand in the buried supplies quest that took me about 30 seconds to complete, he offers me a Q5 iron crossbow and a Q5 iron pickaxe. If you put in an exclusion for say, spears, because I was perking spears in that playthrough, then I can never get a wildly unbalanced T5 iron spear as a reward. But if I'm now going be offered a T5 baseball bat instead, then I'm better off totally ignoring my perked weapon and using the bat, rather than the T3 stone spear I can currently craft. Now not only is my magazine hunting invalidated, my perk choices are too. That's even more horrible. Unless quest rewards are somehow linked to level (via traderstage/lootstage etc.) then it's going to be almost impossible to balance the usefulness of rewards for the first trader you do work for against the fourth or fifth. I'm actually coming round to the idea, posted elsewhere but I forget by whom, that quest rewards should ONLY consist of dukes. That makes them inherently self balancing, as you can only buy what's available from the traders, and traderstage scales off level. Personally I think Daring Adventurer is totally out of whack, but apart from that, traderstage works pretty well.

Generally, locations with a name but no skull rating are 'fragments'. They're not a full POI, and don't have a 'loot room', and will never be the target of a trader quest. Kind of a 'Tier 0' POI. They generally seem to be used as small footprint filler to avoid too many open spaces on tiles, but some of them seem designed to make rather good starter bases.

A major issue with LBD systems is you have to do lots of what you don't like doing in order to avoid doing it. I find digging and tunnelling boring in 7DTD, but I like doing extensive construction, often with foundations. That means I inevitably end up putting some points in Miner 69er every playthrough. I trade time killing zombies for time I don't have to spend digging, basically. If I had to spend time digging in order to cut down time spent digging I'd be a lot less happy. LBD for crafting has inevitable issues, even if you avoid the error of the past of not tiering advancement. Even if you can't learn steel crafting by knapping enough flint, the actual process of advancement is pretty dull. Crafting a bunch of stuff is not an engaging process. You're watching a timer tick down. Now if crafting was destined to be something like what Everquest 2 aimed for, then great. Sadly I'd say EQ2 failed, but their design intent was to make time spent crafting as challenging and engaging as combat. It's basically a minigame of balancing some parameters and dealing with events as they occur, with some events giving risk reward options of gambling for a potential outstanding result at the risk of ruining your craft. It's not great in EQ2, but what they were trying to do is laudable. A crafting system like that might make LBD at least fun, although it runs into the problem above: People who hate the minigame don't have a method to avoid having to do it if the only way to skill up is by doing the thing you hate. I'm fairly certain a crafting revamp of that degree is not on the cards for 7DTD. I guess this whole discussion is a bit off piste, as there has been a 'never going back to LBD' proclamation by the devs, but I think it's worthwhile exploring what makes a good advancement system, generally.

Oh, I absolutely agree. That's what I meant by 'scale off', if it wasn't clear. If you used quest tier to calculate the trader stage of rewards in place of currently unlocked tier, which is used for calculating gear available for sale, then quest rewards would be slightly better than what you currently buy, if you're doing the highest tier of quest available from that trader. As a side note, I do think daring adventurer has way too much impact on trader stage though, and unlocked tier rather too little.

My latest anecdotal contribution is day six of a new game. Went out, did a Tier 2 buried supplies which took no time at all, then while retuning home I got curious about one of the new Checkpoint POIs (A Tier 4) and ended up venturing into it and picking up a fair few things including the main loot. It was bloody hard killing mass soldiers using Q3 ish stone/pipe weapons, but it was great fun. At this point I've got a mix of crafted and found gear, plus a T1 quest reward or two. Pretty consistently using Q2-3 tier zero stuff. So far so good. Best loot I find in the hideous Tier 4 checkpoint is a Q4 primitive bow and a Q4 stone shovel. Both useful, great. Stagger back from the checkpoint mission of death and hand in the buried supplies quest that took me about 30 seconds to complete, he offers me a Q5 iron crossbow and a Q5 iron pickaxe. That does not seem at all balanced correctly.... I firmly believe quest rewards need to scale off trader stage, and not be hard linked to the quest tier.

The big difference between bows and guns is velocity. Guns hit when the trigger is pulled, so shots will hit so long as every single bit of the cross hair is filled with target. With bows that's not necessarily true as there's a delay between firing and hitting the target. Along with projectile drop, you have to lead moving targets with a bow but you don't have to with guns, and head shots are distinctly more risky as the zed may twich their head out the way of the shot in the time it takes the projectile to hit the target. I notice a polymer string mod, especially on a compound crossbow, makes the bow behave far more like a gun, at least at short ranges, because your projectile velocity is through the roof and the hit delay is almost irrelevant. With lesser bows and no polymer string, bow accuracy is definitely inferior because shot velocity is a real problem. Your video link actually shows this really well. Look at how the zombie's head is positioned not when he releases the shot, but when you hear the clunk of the arrow hitting the wall a moment later. It becomes unsurprising he's missing all his shots as at impact time there's often barely a wafer of target inside the crosshairs.