Uncle Al

I've always assumed that a weather/temperature balance pass was on the cards, but dependant on doing the clothing overhaul first. Nice to have it confirmed temperature is definitely due to be looked at, though. Temperature effects seem fair game to be reasonably punishing, as they're something that doesn't really kick in until the player is ready for them. You choose to go to other biomes so completely new players aren't going to get destroyed by punishing temperature effects. There should be only so much harm the forest is going to do to you. Having a temperature system that's mildly impactful at forest temperatures, but gets very significant in extreme biomes, seems perfectly feasible and desirable. So a new player feels good about getting their first real clothes because they aren't cold at night, but aren't being shoved into death spiral by temperature effects. Equally I feel that getting full body immersed in a lake in the snow biome should kill you pretty quickly, unless you very rapidly find shelter and a heat source. That seems the sort of difficulty it's fair to throw at players because by the time they're wandering the snow zone they're not completely new.

Yes, the average yields are 2, 4, 4.5, 6.5 for 0,1,2,3 perk points. The main benefit of going to 2, except as a stepping stone to 3, is you get nearly all the useful seed recipes at 2 points. I imagine there may be a small tweak to yields when the new crafting comes in, as that benefit disappears.

Yes, that's exactly what I meant. Two pairings not lumping them all into a single perk!

Some love for the really sub-par perks as part of a general perk overhaul would be lovely, even if they're not directly impacted by the crafting change. Combining animal tracker and the huntsman, and also lockpicking and treasure hunter, into single perks is a standout quick win as far as I'm concerned. Oh and changing Rule 1 Cardio to a flat stamina regen bonus while we're at it. I'm still not convinced I'd ever take them but I might at least think about it.

I don't understand what they're seeing if that is their point? There are no dimishing returns except for zero perk points in that table. A diminishing return would be a negative number in the final column. There aren't any except for zero perk points. Even the really unlucky crops like only getting six corn seeds back with two perk points are showing a net gain. Diminishing returns on zero perk points is by design. The stated intention is that crafting seeds is a bad idea if you have no farming skill at all.

I'm not one for a daily limit. It just seems arbitrary and pressures a player to do particular quests (clears) because you don't want to 'waste' a quest slot on a fetch quest that brings lower rewards. I do like the way traders run out of work, and having them have more jobs but not refilling every day might be good. Moving to something like 10 quests and they restock when the trader does. There's also what I assume is a bug that logging out and back in again regenerates the trader's quests. I'd love it if traders prioritised each tier by distance, and had quite a high maximum distance, so they give quests further and further away as you progress in the tier. Especially if you keep repeating a lower tier you'll get more distant quests. This would also allow a rule that a trader won't repeat a POI until every POI of that tier, within their maximum distance, has been quested at least once. That would avoid the situation where you keep getting repeat quests to the same POI. Implementing such a system would require keeping track of which quests have been completed by each individual player, and might get problematic in multiplayer if everyone who starts together is getting identical quests, but those aren't insurmountable difficulties.

Voodoo doesn't fit very well into games generally, on the side of the protagonist. The issue is that invocation is a core practice. A person becomes a vessel for a Loa. That's why they're nicknamed 'Divine Horsemen'. We're the horses. A lot of effects where your screen goes black, two days pass and a bunch of stuff has happened isn't really very engaging. Something like invoking Maman Brigitte as your end game goal could work I guess. Avenging disrespect of the dead and healing are both in her domain so she'd make a reasonable zombie plague cure.

Specifically the spike on the DK Competence vs. Confidence graph known as 'Mount Stupid'

I see what you're saying, and to clarify: I wasn't looking for the exact formula, just the concept. Basically 'does a perked character loot slightly fewer magazines, on average, of the things they're not perked into, or do they loot the same average haul of their unperked subjects while also picking up a few extra magazines of the things they are perked into?' The repeated concern that some folks keep throwing out is that the new system will negatively impact co-op games if there are stay home characters on the team, and/or the team uses dedicated looters. If the weighting is a straight bonus that's not a concern. If it's a shift in weighting but doesn't add any more magazines for the same quantity of looting, it potentially is. As you rightly say, if the weighting impact isn't drastic, then even the 'reduce the things you don't have perks for' approach isn't the co-op play apocalypse that some Steam posters assume, but those concerns can't be dismissed out of hand. If the perk weighting is a straight up bonus, they can.

That's actually one of the things I like most about the change, as it inherently balances up traders a bit. Now 'do I go run tier 1 quests and loot mostly houses and get quest rewards while hopefully finding a cooking pot, or ignore quests and turn over hardware stores and gas stations hoping for forge ahead magazines to make a forge?' is a meaningful choice on day one. I love meaningful choices with no clear optimal answer.

It would be nice to get an official comment on how the weighting works, if somebody in the know has the time. For simplification we'll assume only three crafting skills: clubs, knives and bows. I go out and loot 30 magazines. With no perks let's say I'll average: 10 club magazines 10 knife magazines 10 bow magazines With some perk points in clubs (only) does the expected average become more like: A) 12 club magazines 10 knife magazines 10 bow magazines OR B) 12 club magazines 9 knife magazines 9 bow magazines

There's no World of Warcraft 'bind on pickup mechanic' though. If they loot a club magazine, they can just hand it to you. Also from almost everything we've seen stated, the 'find magazines appropriate for your skills' mechanic is a straight bonus. So specialising in clubs doesn't make you find less magazines for other weapons, it just gives you a chance to find bonus club magazines. If it works that way there's no need to get obsessive about who opens what container. My only slight worry is that there was a mechanic mentioned briefly that 'the skills bonus stops working when you reach max crafting'. That wouldn't be needed if the skills influenced looting was a pure bonus, so possibly you do find less magazines of types you don't have perks in if you perk heavily into specific skills. Even if the system works that way, a group should still be able to do fine by just looting freely and then sharing magazines. It does mean having one dedicated looter with max lucky looter could cause problems with mostly finding magazines that match the looter's other perks.

Pack mule still has some value as it allows you to use additional armour mods instead of having to use up a slot in each piece of gear with a pocket mod. Well insulated allows you to wear a college jacket for a speed buff instead of a duster/puffer jacket in inhospitable climates. Grease monkey - yeah in single player at least it's redundant once you've used it. All of these though are, I hope, going to change in the future. At least the systems they impact are set to change, hopefully making them more valuable in late game. New armour system is going to potentialy impact pocket mods, weather protection and armour mods generally. Not having to rely on pocket mods may be really valuable in a system with only four apparel slots. Equally you may not be able to cap inventory with just pocket mods in the new system. I'm also really, really hopeful there's a plan to make temperature more impactful again. Logically you'd do this alongside the armour system revamp, so I haven't been surprised nothing has been done on that for a while. More impactful weather plus potentially not being able to achieve total thermal protection with mods alone (possible in the new apparel system) would potentially make well insulated very valuable indeed, even late game. Grease monkey, as you correctly note, is one of those perks that pretty much has to be tweaked under new crafting. Having a perk that only has the effect of lowering the resource cost of something you probably craft once, and buffing your magazine drops a bit is comically bad. We have to wait and see really on this one. If after crafting and armour changes, which we know are coming, and a perk rebalance, which is almost certainly coming, there are clearly perks that are only useful early game, I'll have to accept that making all perks at least slightly useful all game is not a design goal. I really hope that it is, but I accept I've never heard anyone in authority state that. I have inferred it from existing design decisions.

I disagree. There are things that get less useful late game, but very few things become totally redundant. This seems to be a conscious design decision. I'm really happy about that but that's a personal preference, as I hate heavily enforced early/late power curve systems. I appreciate why they exist but I personally don't like them. The existance of fergettin' elixir would make those kind of systems a really bad fit for 7DTD anyway. You'd end up with a very limited optimal skill progression where you take all the early power curve stuff then respec and take the late stuff. For crafting under the magazine system, even though you haven't spent perk points, you've spent effort and modified your strategy around crafting if you want to reach maximum skill. Taking magazine quest rewards, searching every mailbox you see, targetting gun ranges to find magazines to improve your gun crafting or whatever. To suddenly get a drop that makes all the effort you put into a crafting line worthless feels bad. Being able to craft Q6 if you've already got a Q6 drop isn't a huge advantage, but you can still use the parts you find to craft more Q6 items and hope for a better stats roll. You're getting a little something for your effort. Not much, but a little. It also means parts are still mildly useful drops into end game. That feels way better than 'crafting is totally irrelevant now, never open that page again'

I agree it's a decent looking piece of design, from what we've been shown, but I do have a couple of concerns regarding supporting systems required to make new crafting really shine: Removing the Q5 crafting cap. Madmole has said he'll consider it, so I have hope. Without that, however shiny our new toy is, the entire tool/weapon/armour half of the system just becomes redundant as soon as Q6 gear becomes available. That seems like a terrible shame. Doing a perk rebalance. Without that we're going to have a ton of sub-par perks who used to have some value because they granted recipes. Master Chef, Advanced Engineering, along with half the INT tree, and even LotL 2 are glaringly bad when they no longer provide crafting recipes. Putting points into a terrible perk just to weight your magazine drop chances would feel horrible, especially if you're then unlucky with getting spec appropriate drops. I'm sure the designers have already considered these issues when desiging the new crafting, so I do have plenty of faith that we'll get them. Or we'll get something else to mitigate the issues the new crafting system would have if it was just dropped into the rest of the game with no changes to other systems. What I'm really hoping for is a perk rebalance that increases the value of the perks that lose recipes, while also bringing a bunch of the other unloved perks up to par a bit.

You can take every perk. You end up with about 20 perks points left over that you can't spend if you go all the way to the level cap, which is 300.

Good thing salvager and demo man are in the same skill tree... Once you get salvager 4, a tier 5 basic wrench and an ironbreaker mod you'll one shot most salvagable objects as your block damage reaches 100 on iron. Cars are pretty good for springs but it's beds, especially bunk beds that are an absolute goldmine. You get ten springs per bed. One army barracks or ranch bunkhouse will give you well over 100 springs for literally a couple of minutes' work. Grenades pack a seriously increased punch over a pipe bomb (5m blast radius instead of 4m hits a lot more targets - the 30% extra damage is also nice) and take only very slightly more gunpowder. Pipe bombs do a great job early game, though. The things I don't find that useful are contact grenades. They're handy to deal with roaming hordes when out and about (I play Khaine's mod so huge roaming hordes are common) but for base defence you want to be able to bounce your grenades down chutes. A favourite of mine is making the outside wall of my base out of shallow 'v' gable blocks then put a catwalk of bars around the outside about six blocks up. The 'v' of the gable blocks leaves channels down to the ground which you can drop a grenade down in between shooting through the bars.

Less so than you would think. Early game your skills are more important than materials. You're mostly working with stone, wood, plant fibres etc. to make your gear, so you can just gather more to recreate your basic tools/weapons/armour. Once you're into midgame you are most likely moving into harder biomes and/or higher tier POIs. So when you die and lose a bunch of gear, you drop back a biome for a while, or dial back the tier of POIs you're exploring. Or you say 'but I really want to replace my good stuff with good stuff' and go YOLO the wasteland and let the chips fall where they may. Meaningful player choices are one of my favourite things. On death I'm frequently faced with 'is my backup gear good enough to try and stay in my current biome, and rapidly gear up, or should I be slow and cautious, drop down a biome and gradually build my gear back up?'. That's a really meaningful choice.

Turn on 'delete all on death'. Trust me, you will now notice a penalty when you die. I'm finding it a really good setting. A little more forgiving than permadeath, but still makes death a really significant event. It's also a penalty you can mitigate by good preparation, i.e. making sure you have backup equipment. It's too severe for a default setting though, so I'm not surprised it is not the default option.

Because you're ignoring the 'for a given baseline difficulty' part. The solid design principle is that if you take larger risks at a set difficulty, assuming the larger risks are aligned with game objectives and you're not just randomly handicapping yourself, you get the chance of larger rewards. Exploring a dangerous biome does exactly this in 7DTD. An equally solid part of the principle is that if you raise the difficulty level then you get larger risks with NO larger rewards. That's pretty much what defines the concept of 'difficulty level'. Lowering rewards without decreasing risk is also a valid raise in difficulty level. Do you expect putting loot to 25% to also reduce zombie hit points to a quarter of their normal value?

I completely agree on this one. I think if the attributes had been called something like "Thug, Hunter, Technician, Assassin, Tough Guy" or whatever, then much of the dissonance a few people get from the attribute system wouldn't occur. I do understand why 'How come putting points into strength doesn't make me hit things harder with a spear?" is a complaint that comes up fairly regularly. Folks are used to thinking of attributes working in a certain way in RPGs. In 7DTD they are called attributes but actually much closer in function to what would traditionally be class levels. Not certain how much effort a change would be. Might be worth considering to make the game more intuitive for new players, but I doubt it's a top priority even if it has been considered.

It's not really a massive change. In A20 in order to craft anything beyond iron tier tools and melee weapons you need parts, and for anything beyond basic weapons you need schematics. To get both of those things you need to loot or buy them or be given them by other players. In A21 you need magazines and parts to craft. If you don't loot you'll need to buy them or be given them by other players.

Apologies - double posted in error.

Seems to be a bit of confusion here. The actual game design principle is 'for a given baseline difficulty, increased risk should lead to potentially increased reward'. The whole point of difficultly settings is they increase difficulty, not rewards. As mentioned, moving to other biomes does increase both risk and reward - you get a more difficult environment and better loot. Or you can increase some difficulty settings and also increase loot settings if you want harder zombies and more loot. Difficulty settings that increase rewards are really bad design, because they don't do what they should, i.e. increase the difficulty. You see this a lot with CRPGs if higher difficulties makes more enemies appear in combats. The extra enemies give more exp, you level faster and actually end up with an easier game when you set the difficulty harder. Good designers reduce the exp for enemies proportionally to the increased enemy count to stop this happening.

I believe the other thing that difficultly affects is the chance of a zombie going into rage mode when taking damage. There are a lot of settings other that the one labelled difficulty that will make the game harder. Turning up baseline zombie run speeds, turning on feral sense and turning on delete all gear on death will all give you a harder game. Increased risk vs reward doesn't work with difficultly settings. If you give more loot on harder difficulties, they don't really become harder. The game correctly separates the two so difficulty settings don't affect loot.