Uncle Al

Funnily enough I've found one on day 2 in my latest playthough. All it's really meant is I haven't bothered building a dew collector yet, and I'm on day 6. It's worth noting that murky water only gives about 12 hydration, rather than 20 for water and 24 for teas, plus their other benefits, so it's useful having the filter to top out your hydration but it's still useful finding water and making teas and glue. In fact I've recently found the wasteland treasures book that allows making pure water, so the filter is going to be mostly redundant as pure water's stamina regen and efficient digestion buffs are too good to pass up. At 60 hydration a bottle, hydration is a total non issue once you find that recipe.

Just had exactly the same in my last game, which I'm abandoning due to the patch. Felt VERY strange to have the crucible available for sale with zero quests done, no points in daring adventurer, and level in the low 20s. I'm over 50 books away from crafting a crucible, and have a point in advanced engineering. Finding a Q6 iron pickaxe in a snow biome car at level 20 also seemed a bit early, although I could already craft Q5 by that point. Likewise getting a Q3 iron crossbow for a Tier 2 quest reward. Especially now crossbows are ranked way above their bow equivalents in crafting. I do quite like that change though as it means crossbows can be just straight up better than bows, balance wise, which they always were. The effect of perks on magazine finding is a lot stronger than I expected. By day 14 I'd completely maxxed out spear and salvage tool crafting (75 magazines each), with 4 points in both skills (and only added the fourth skill point for the last couple of days). For crafting lines that I have no perk investment in I'm barely into double figures in most cases. Skills with one point I'm in the teens to twenties. 10 magazines for no points, 20 odd for one point and 75 for 3-4 points is a massive variation! Couple of minor other observations: Fruit and vegetable prices seem very high. I'd expect those prices for 5 of berries or whatever, but for 1 it's extortionate and pretty much never worth spending the money. Almost the same cost to just buy the finished foodstuffs. Fruit and vegetables used to sell in units of 5 and now sell singly, so it's possible the prices weren't changed to reflect the smaller unit quantity? I thought parts were too rare and expensive, until I saw the new recipes! One part per quality level is a superb change. Slightly ameliorates the 'not worth crafting Q1 or Q2' for guns at least. For tools and melee it's still better to stay at T5 iron then jump to T3 steel, but I happily crafted a T1 lever action rifle rather than a T5 hunting rifle because not being single shot is such an improvement and the lever action rifle only cost me 1 rifle part which I can get back when I scrap it, as my crafting skill improves.

That's when you release the walktapus instead. All that tentacly goodness with bipedal locomotion on top.

From what I've seen, the stamina reduction for tool use will be rolled into Miner 69er, in the same way the reduction for using a particular weapon skill is included in the weapon skills. You're probably actually better off in A21 if all you were taking Sex Rex for was tool use, as you will presumably being putting points in Miner 69er anyway.

He rightly yelled at you because the sexy chest hair bandit should be modelled on Sean Connery, not Burt Reynolds:

There's certainly merit in the idea of time pressuring the player in certain areas (the tank capacity in this example) but I think existing systems could do that perfectly well without adding new elements such as toxic gas. Radiation is the obvious one, and we may well see something of that nature when the clothing overhaul comes in. I'm rather hoping the weather/environment update brings in similar concepts: That the extreme biomes are unsurvivable indefinitely, in the open, without very high end and hard to source outfits. Something like a 'core temperature' value that means you have to get indoors and warm up, or under shade in the desert, regularly while in those areas. It would make the higher tier biomes feel very different to the forest, and should be able to be balanced so it adds excitement to gameplay rather than just being a chore.

There are definitely perk changes to compensate for the loss of recipes from perks. Some perks had almost their entire value in the recipes they brought, so they should have been tweaked. The only confirmed changes I've seen are: Sex Rex being moved to individual weapon skills so having skill with a weapon or tool lowers stamina cost for using it An attack speed up skill is being added to all attributes that speeds up attacks with weapons associated with that attribute Master Chef significantly reduces cooking times and cooking times have been increased across the board to make the skill more impactful Grease Monkey increases the effect of repair kits on vehicles - kits no longer do a full repair and vehicle damage is significantly increased to make the skill more impactful The third one makes me a bit nervous, as I really don't think it goes far enough to prevent Master Chef becoming a 'never take, ever' perk. I think it really needs significant resource use reduction and/or increased buffs to foods cooked with skill to make Master Chef a viable pick. I'm waiting and seeing on the Grease Monkey change. Depending on the impact of increased vehicle damage and repair kit scarcity (due to water/glue changes) it could be almost mandatory for the careless driver or a 'not really worth bothering with' perk. Then again I'm still massively hoping for animal tracker being combined with huntsman and other such tweaks to significantly reduce the number of 'I'm never ever going to take this' perks. I live in hope.

It's more than just an increased spawn count, though. Was mention that the zombies in an infestation are 'faster and harder to kill' so it appears there's a few difficulty tweaks to what you're facing.

It's fairly straightforward to make mining faster, without modding or using creative, just by turning up player block damage in the game settings. Putting that to 200% or something will make you mine just as fast with poor tools as the speed you're used to with good ones. Sure it'll mean you'll mine insanely fast if you ever get to top tier tools, but you can always just turn it down at that point. Equally if you hate the process of mining then leave it high and you can tear through blocks without the issues you have with the augur.

Very enjoyable stream. I was most intrigued by the stuff I had no inkling was going to be in A21: the changes to difficulty scaling that I think are going to be hugely impactful. Having effectively POIs up to tier 8, Tier 5 + Infestation mission + biome dependant spawn scaling in POIs, gives more end game activity options and fixes one of the current major problems with biome scaling. The current issue is that sure, the wasteland makes POIs harder because of streams of enemies attacking you from outside while you're clearing, but the enemies within the POI aren't really more dangerous even though you're in the wasteland. That means once you have a vehicle the snow biome, especially, is pretty much a free massive loot increase, as you can drive past the dangers and clear POIs with a vastly increased loot stage. Better POI danger biome scaling should make the risk/reward equation much more balanced. Infestation missions being considered an additional tier is really smart. POIs bigger than existing 5s would probably be unwieldy, but making the existing POIs harder for an extra level of rewards I can totally see working. I'm assuming there will be a tier 6 of trader rewards, which will be entirely tier 5 POI infestation missions, and a tier 6 completion bonus. That also (hopefully) allows moving true end-game stuff (quality 6, top tier gear) into a really hard to obtain category of rewards. Great job!

For all past Alpha releases, that happens the weekend before release of the first experimental iteration. Standard practice is bunch of dev streams, streamer weekend, general release to Steam on the Monday. I see no reason this one is going to be any different.

This is why I stopped collecting them. These days I'm an ex-tractor fan.

Crafting unlocks are being moved to magazines, a different thing. @RipClaw is, as far as I remember there being a dev comment on this, quite right. The books that grant knowlege of schematics like steel spear, steel clubs and M60s are to be replaced, in the same way that schematics themselves will no longer be a thing except for weapon/armour mod schematics. Thinking about it, Strong Arm and Punctured Lungs in Spear Hunter will need replacing too, as they're only relevant to throw attacks.

I'm all for keeping them separate to allow flexibility in options settings, but I agree loot abundance needs to affect, or have additional settings for, mining, salvaging and quest rewards. Currently I know that reducing loot immediately optimises a 'quest/salvage/trade' playstyle and although I could work around this (no trader run) it would be great if I could play the entirety of the game at higher scarcity without having to self impose 'no trader' or 'no salvaging' rules. Non monetary quest rewards are a bit tricky but it could be done. Give each reward a chance to be downgraded one or more tiers (chance based on how far below 100% loot is set to), and if it goes below tier 1 it's replaced with 'my undying gratitude'. Although you'll always pick the rewards that aren't nothing, you'll still significantly reduce the chances of getting an optimal reward. If all sources of loot are equally reduced you don't actually have to affect barter prices as they'll self adjust.

And there was I thinking I was the only person to randomly drop Zardoz pics on my friends so that they will never look at Sean Connery in the same way ever again. The gun is good, the @%$# is evil!

As far as new crafting goes I'm assuming the desired sweet spot for knowledge vs. parts drops is that players don't always craft a new item as soon as the get the required knowledge, but equally avoids the current situation where you hang on to your parts for a very late craft. Thus maximising meaningful player choice. It occurs to me there are a couple of parameters that heavily influence this behaviour: How many parts higher tier versions require over lower tier versions, and the degree to which higher tier versions of items give back more parts when scrapped. If a Q4 item was giving back 80% of the parts required to make it, or similar, that would push things strongly towards 'always craft as soon as you can'. If it stays at more like 15%, as it is now, that pushes heavily towards 'craft late'. A bit of playing around with those ratios should allow for fine tuning to hit the sweet spot for the majority of players. Without telling the devs what's easy and what's not (as an agilist I'm a firm believer that only the people who are going to do the work get to estimate it) it does strike me that you may well be able to vary those two parameters without making significant changes to the rest of the system, giving a lot of flexible control over the incentives to adopt a particular crafting behaviour. This is a good thing.

From previous dev streams, factions and an end game storyline are planned for gold. The way it was described was having two factions, White River and the Duke. Gaining rep with one unlocks some additional quest lines for that faction, but locks you out of the other story line. It was also implied that allied factions would be non-aggressive in settlements but still aggressive in the wild. So no breezing through a POI and looting without risk just because you're friendly with the occupying faction. It was all pretty vague but the intent is definitely there. I also have the impression that the 'game ending' event (although it wouldn't actually end your game, you can still sandbox as much as you like) is either killing the Duke or Noah depending on which path you take.

I'm with you that I pretty much always take a bit of mining skill in a solo play through, but the point investment required to be decent is pretty small. Strength to 2 plus a cigar and three points in miner 69er makes you a very capable miner. Mother lode to 3 as well is a nice bonus but I don't find it necessary. Using rock busters, which is easy enough to do for all dedicated mining days once you're into mid game, effectively gives you a point in mother lode for free, too. The biggest 'must have' reason for miner 69er I find, if I'm doing a lot of construction, is you really have to go to 4 points (and thus need 4 in strength and a cigar) to be able to one shot dirt blocks. That's a huge time saver if you're building serious foundations or doing underground construction. I'm fairly sure you CAN one shot dirt with miner 69er at 3 but you need a fully modded Q6 steel shovel that rolled lucky for stats. Having the perk at 4 lets you one shot with a Q5 (which you can also forge yourself at that skill level) so is a lot easier to achieve. The ideal solution there would be variable damage rolls, but that's not something that seems to be on the devs radar. Fixed damage is a major issue with how harvesting works, because the difference between doing 190 and 200 block damage with a shovel, or 90 and 100 with a wrench, is vast. Those last few points of damage basically double your efficiency.

My dream is a trader offers every suitable POI within range (say 1km per tier) before offering the same location again. So rather than a day count, a POI doesn't come around again until all the other locations in that tier have been offered. That probably gets complex for multiplayer though.

I can't point you at an actual quote, but I'm fairly certain it's been stated that collectors aren't affected by which biome they're in. They're also not affected by weather.

I remember the original dev comments, to an extent, and it was more along the lines of 'at full crit resistance you cannot be crit' than 'at full health you cannot be crit'. The dev's point was the first hit you take will never cause a crit if you've been out of combat for a reasonable time before getting hit. If you're taking hits while regenning health then I'm fairly certain you can take crits even at full health, because your crit resistance will have been pushed down even though your health is staying at maximum, because you're regenerating faster than you're taking damage. My understanding is: Getting hit debuffs crit resistance. That debuff goes away fairly rapidly with time. A few seconds without getting hit allows your resistance to recover. You CAN see the effect of this debuff if you look at your character screen. Being at low health increases your chance of being critically hit. That penalty only goes away when you heal the missing health. This does NOT show on the character screen. From the 'cannot be crit on the first hit' dev comment, it seems likely that 'full' crit resistance will protect you from a crit no matter what your health is. So being at low health means more hits will be crits, but the first few of these will likely be shrugged off by your crit resistance. Mechanically this does imply a 'two roll' system where a hit 'rolls to see if it is a crit' and then the crits roll against your crit resistance to see if they actually inflict a status effect.

The probability graph for 'not coming out this year' drops off a cliff on January the 1st, though.

Admit it, you're baiting a @SnowDog1942 trap with this one, aren't you...

I'd counter by saying that game systems that have virtually zero impact on gameplay are not 'functional'. Water was a total non-consideration past day one - according to playtesters, the changes fix that. Crafting of levelled items (tools, weapons and armour) was utterly pointless (bar maybe crafting a Q5 tier3 version of your primary firearm precisely ONCE per playthrough) - again, according to playtesters the new system leads to regular crafting throughout your playthrough. From what I see, there is a roadmap, or at least a product backlog, that lists all the game systems that don't yet align with the design vision and require more than just balance tweaks (which can be done in Alpha) to remedy. Each alpha attempts to remedy a few of those systems. If, after live playtesting of an alpha, the solution gets in the neighbourhood of the design vision, it then gets left alone. If it doesn't, it gets reworked again. That's pretty much textbook iterative product development.