[Follow up: Does anyone know how the +4 in lucky goggles affects loot stage?]

It's added as a flat bonus right at the end of the loot stage calculation, so yes the goggles have a trivial effect.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

It's a fair point there's not really a lot of room for more T3 weapons as the current ones do pretty much everything you want them to do.  Agility does manage to differentiate well (and archery would if bows weren't so inferior to crossbows).  A Desert Vulture is very different from an SMG, and both are good. I can't really see space for another shotgun or machine gun.  A bolt action .50 cal sniper rifle would provide a meaningful choice, but it would need to be able to one headshot kill demolishers to be useful.  OK if we're having .50 cal then a tripod mounted Browning MG that you need to crouch stationary for 5s before it'll fire, and you can't move without resetting the set up time, might have a use too.

 

It's most likely far to late in the game but with crafting getting divorced from weapon skills in (possibly) A21 there is room to have weapon perks buff fighting styles not gun types - so Str for close range, Per for aimed shots, Agi for rapid/hip firing and Fort for automatic fire bonuses or something.  That would make arming tactics a bit more varied across builds without requiring new guns.

[Iron Gut / Healing Factor Synergy]

'Natural' healing causes hunger - each hp of damage you heal costs one food.  Normally your natural healing rate is so slow (1 hp per 180 seconds) that you hardly notice this.  Healing factor speeds up healing which also speeds up how fast you're burning food to heal, so you do get hungrier faster if you're injured a lot and have healing factor.

 

Note that the total amount of food required to heal an injury is unchanged.

 

How this actually plays out in game varies a lot.  If you're careful and just taking occasional scratches, the healing you're getting from regular eating is often enough to keep your health topped off.  Healing factor can almost appear counterproductive in those cases as you'll heal the damage and then be hungry and at full health, so not gain healing benefit from the food you have to eat.

 

On the other hand, if you have access to plentiful food and are taking a lot of damage, healing factor is fantastic - you'll heal as you eat then heal again burning up the food you just ate in order to heal.  Then you eat more.  You basically trade additional eating for not having to use up medical supplies to top off your health.

 

Finally, iron gut reduces the food used to replenish stamina, but doesn't affect food burned to heal.  As such it doesn't really interact with healing factor either way.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

12 hours ago, Kalex said:

Nope, it doesn't appear to keep them together. My game stage is 82 but my loot stage is only 48.

 

Normal zombies should not be able to leap farther than players can.

Gamestage still works off level + days alive, while loot stage is purely based on level (which is then heavily multiplied by biome, POI tier etc.).

 

Very rapid levelling will actually bring your lootstage closer to your gamestage, as your days alive isn't going up.

 

That said, you'll be in the position where you're getting tougher zombies right now and you haven't had time to actually loot at your new loot stage, so your gear will be outdated for your gamestage.

 

If you're playing solo you could dial down your exp setting before a big build then put it back up again afterwards.  Otherwise, using pre-crafted blocks is probably your best bet.  Even if you use frames for the finesse/aesthetic stuff, doing the big simple blocky stuff, like foundations, in pre-crafted will noticably reduce the building xp you're seeing.  You'll need a fair few workbenches though as concrete shapes take a while to craft and steel ones are absolutely absurd.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

2 hours ago, pregnable said:

Have you guys ever talked about moving rule 1 cardio back into the agility tree? 

 

I like fortitude as well, so it does not really matter, but if cardio were in agility, it would probably be my perfect insane nightmare attribute, when I do not feel like going strength first.

It's probably more useful with an agility playstyle, but it still seems a really niche perk.  I don't think it would be overpowered if it just gave a flat 10% stamina regen bonus per point, and it would be a hell of a lot more useful.

 

10% regen would compare pretty fairly with sex rex (gives 8/15% stamina spend reduction plus bonus stamina on kills), and master chef (gives a 15% stamina regen bonus but you have to actually make the tea).

10 hours ago, Roland said:

The few of us who play together have talked about quests and whether it might be a good idea to have a 1-job limit per trader per day. It would slow down the questing a bit as well as encourage people to spread their work around to all the traders. Right now if you find a new trader they only offer T1 quests so you’d rather just work for your first trader. But if you can only do one job for your trader then you might feel better doing a T1 at the next trader as a bonus. 

Interested to know how that goes when you try it out.

 

A good middle ground might be if traders don't reset their quest list every day, they just add one quest to each tier list.  Or add one to the most empty tier list if refilling all the tiers is going to prove no restriction in reality.

 

That way you're still encouraged to shop around because a trader can get low on jobs or clogged up with stuff you don't want to do, but you don't have to run around the traders every day in order to do multiple quests.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

Just out of interest, do we know if the apparently weird effects of changing the loot percentage are:

a) Just one of those things

b) A known bug but just not a priority to fix anytime soon

c) Actually working correctly and I'm just not understanding how it's meant to work

 

Just started a new 75% loot game and it's been hammered home to me how badly eggs are affected - I've looted 180 feathers, averaging about 4 feathers per nest, and one egg.  Dropping to 4 feathers per nest seems perfectly reasonable for 75% but the egg reduction appears to be vastly bigger.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

I'm guessing the primary targets of the block HP change are doing things like making a pillar out of 4 quarter blocks instead of a single block - under the old rules it takes up the same space as a single block but has 4x the HP.   Although if 1/4 blocks still have full HP this still works!  Just can't use tiny poles for an almost free floating base.

 

Also skinning the outside of a wall with plates - doubles the HP of the wall while taking up trivial space.

 

I've abused the hell out of the smaller blocks, in order to make bases where the entire attacking horde is within the blast radius of a single grenade while still having a decent amount of structure HP.   Overall I have to say the change is probably a good thing.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

6 minutes ago, nielm269 said:

Was Nitrate veins removed from A20, I haven't found one yet and have been digging around like Clint Eastwood  in paint your wagon.

They're in as normal, far as I can tell.

 

Zoom your map all the way in and look for a white 2x2 pixel square.  That's a nitrate bloom.  Dig straight down from the bloom on the surface and you'll usually find a decent size vein.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

The only tiny negative I'm finding with the new building system is the loss of iron bars and catwalks.  Being able to upgrade them to cobble is actually a lot easier, and although it doesn't allow the spans iron did is generally fine for structural stability, but it feels like cheating and requires painting to not look odd.

 

In a perfect world right clicking wood shapes with a salvaging tool would upgrade them to metal instead of stone when using a builder's tool,  but I'm guessing that would go against the simplification initiative.

 

The new shape options are phenomenal.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

11 hours ago, madmole said:

We might have to completely rebalance weapon parts for 21 because of the new crafting system I'm working on. The system will make crafting more granular so you craft many ranges of weapons (crafting a blue pipe shotgun at skill level 25 or so, lets you craft a brown double barrel at that skill level.). Even an increase of 1 will allow you to potentially craft a little bit better weapon, so I can see players frequently re-crafting weapons in a long game to get the micro improvements as their skill goes up.

This is amazing news! Fantastic! Sounds exactly like the kind of changes I'll enjoy.

 

I'm hoping as part of your work you're revisiting the 'cannot craft level 6' design decision.  I know it might not even be relevant with legendaries coming and other changes, but although I think I understand the rationale, it is a decision that always seemed a real shame to me.

 

I can see a viewpoint that level 6 crafting allows someone to craft top level gear while 'sitting in safety' by buying and scrapping lower level weapons, and I'm pretty sure 'sitting in safety' goes against the game design intent, but:

 

• 10 points in an attribute is a hell of an investment (to get level 5 weapon skill that would be required for level 6 crafting)
• Relying on trader buys when you need something like 30 weapon parts for a craft isn't very viable - you would still HAVE to loot to get scrappable weapons.  Hell there's no reason the parts progression has to be linear.  Level 6 crafts could be 40 or 50 parts.
• Currently once I have a level 6 weapon, I get little joy out of any find except another tier 6 that might have better stats.  If I could craft, every weapon of the right type is a valuable find because it's progression towards crafting and getting another 'roll of the dice' on my weapon stats.  Equally all weapon parts become disappointing loot once I have a level 6 weapon.
• Because of the way equipment tiers overlap, I find myself frequently disappointed by level 5 top tier gear by the time I can craft it.  I get all excited that I can now craft say level 5 military armour because I've finally managed to acquire the perks and the schematics and the armour parts and the military fiber and.... I realise the level 6 cloth and leather pieces I already have are better than what I can craft.  And then I'm sad...  I realise changes to armour are going to probably (hopefully) make this go away, at least.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

1 hour ago, madmole said:

I scrap every weapon of the same class and buy tier 1 verisons from the trader and scrap them to get enough parts. It's worth it.

Not anymore you don't heh - Level 1 weapons (well, the ones that give parts, you can still get level 1 primitive weapons) have been removed from all traders.  I'm guessing the main reason was to get away from stupidly cheap $400 guns being available on day one, but a side effect is you can't hoover up cheap weapon parts any more either.

 

On an unrelated note: I haven't seen this discussed much, apart from a report from a streamer from Japan, but the amount of ammo in zombie loot bags seems completely excessive.  On 75% loot I'm getting maybe 4-7 rounds from ammo piles, which seems completely reasonable, and then wham!  a yellow loot bag will contain 40 rounds every time.  Not a bug per se so I haven't bug reported and I'm sure devs are aware and will consider tuning the balance further.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

On 12/10/2021 at 5:18 PM, Roland said:

Congratulations to TFP: They broke their previous record today on number of players concurrently playing the game. https://steamcharts.com/app/251570

 

Lathan also mentioned that we broke our record on Twitch a few days ago with 677 people streaming 7 Days to Die. (normally there are 100-200 streamers playing the game)

Congratulations!  Well deserved, loving the changes and new stuff across the board.

 

Well...spears could have got a bit more love, but hey, got to grumble about something.

 

Having an absolute blast both solo and in a duo game.  Feral sense is fun.  Type 2 fun, but fun.

 

Also getting playable performance on my total potato (A-10 7800 Radeon R7 and a GTX 950 card.  With 16GB of RAM and an SSD I'm getting mostly around 30 fps on low settings).

 

The farming changes are fine!  Maybe an increase of seeds in loot might silence some of the torch and pitchfork crowd over on Steam, but definitely a good balancing change.

 

Thanks for all the hard work.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

2 hours ago, Blake_ said:

I like the 4 supercorns per seed idea. The more seed yield is a no from me though, for the reasons I stated before.

 

Bones, lots of bones and murky water everywhere. Supercorn is little more than a very nice mid/late game commodity.

 

 

It's in the patch notes that all 'grandfather's' recipes now require supercorn, so it's still a luxury but now far more impactful than just a route to glue.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

8 hours ago, faatal said:

Well, my post was specifically about the game industry. I don't care how long it takes to do other types of programming. We do tons of experimentation and deal with lots of unknown problems. You know how many times I have to fix a bug that can take 5 minutes or 5 days? A lot. How do you schedule how long it will take to fix an unknown amount of bugs that take unknown amounts of time to fix? You guess and guesses are often wrong.

 

Another day or two until A20's playable so figured I'd join the peanut gallery of non-game professionals.

I was really struck by Chriss Bourassa (Red Hook - developed Darkest Dungeon) saying in an interview 'Writing games isn't like writing finance software, everything takes three times as long.'  I got to speculating 'Why?'.

 

Probably it's because everything has to be fun.  You can take a requirement, build stuff that appears to fulfil it, and perfectly meet all the acceptance criteria except for 'is it fun?'.  Guess what, that functionality isn't fit for purpose, and you get to do it all again.

 

The same thing doesn't happen in business software development unless you've really screwed up your requirements elicitation.  Double entry bookkeeping hasn't changed much since 1494.  Sure you get late requirements and emergent requirements and the client does a radical business change that means a piece of functionality is no longer needed.  All that means is they don't need the functionality, it's still done (and you still get to charge them for it).  Game functionality that isn't fun, isn't done.

 

Try visualising what happens to business software project management techniques if you add in a rule that every time a piece of functionality is complete you roll a die, and on a 1-3 you have to bin it and replace it with something else.

 

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

1 hour ago, BFT2020 said:

 

Bows in the game have never been pointless, but they are probably the only situational range weapon (not including turrets) when you look at them:

 

Ammo Type Weapon Base Damage rpm DPS 7.76 AP T3 MG 50 440 367 44 HP T3 pistol 70 130 152 9mm AP T3 SMG 8 480 64 7.76 AP T3 Sniper 50 140 117 Shot_slug T3 shotgun 96 70 112 Steel bolt T3 cross 45 75 56 Steel arrow T3 bow 31 75 39

 

Ammo Type	Weapon	Sneak - NHS	Sneak HS	Dam / shot (silenced)
7.76 AP	T3 MG	50	150	128
44 HP	T3 pistol	70	210	179
9mm AP	T3 SMG	8	24	20
7.76 AP	T3 Sniper	50	150	128
Shot_slug	T3 shotgun	96	288	245
Steel bolt	T3 cross	90	270	230
Steel arrow	T3 bow	62	186	158

 

I can't get the table option to look right, sorry.  The first table is straight DPS while the second table is stealth attacks (NHS is No Hidden Strike, HS is hidden strike).  Silenced is based on the HS column.

I'm fairly certain that's not how sneak damage works:

 

All weapons get a +50% damage bonus for a sneak attack, with no points in hidden strike, bows get +200%, so a 31 point steel arrow is 93 damage with no hidden strike and a 50 point 7.62 round is 75.  Hidden Strike adds an extra 50% per rank, so 250% at max rank.  That means bows do +450% damage at max hidden strike (171 for a steel arrow) and guns do +300% (200 damage for 7.62).  Note that bows are, relatively, a much clearer sneak attack choice when you don't have Hidden Strike ranks than when you do.  The upcoming improvements to archery damage will probably mean bows become the best sneak damage dealers irrespective of skill, though.  Bows are also totally silent which is not true for silenced guns - in fact silenced high caliber guns are only as quiet as an unsilenced 9mm.

 

Oh base damage for 9mm is 32 not 8.

[Alpha 20 Dev Diary]

21 hours ago, nielm269 said:

I have over 1800 hours and have bought many copies of this game for people (maybe my favorite game of all time), I have one small request..... can you make it so I can cut the arms and legs off a striper zombie and keep it in my base......  for um weapon testing (yeah I'll stick to that reason).

This is an excellent idea and just what we need to implement a proper LBS (learn by screwing) system.  The zombie type that you 'weapon test' on could give appropriate perk points - Big Mama gives Motherlode, Bikers give Grease Monkey, Skater Dudes give Parkour and so forth.  To gain Deadeye you need to perform a special move on any zombie with an empty eye socket.

[Repair Mechanics Improvements]

On 7/13/2021 at 1:09 PM, meganoth said:

Interesting ideas. I would say your suggestion 3 is nice but too complicated for 7D2D (and most other games outside the simulation genre). The game would need to remember and display a variable list of repair items needed for each and every repairable item.

 

Though the devs talked about a vehicle damage system that might actually implement your suggestion halfways in that different damage types would need different items to repair it.

But that's only for vehicles and at the moment it isn't on the published feature list of A20. And I would have expected an "offroad suspension mod" being among the mod list if it were a yet unannounced feature.

You make a fair point regarding complexity.  My thoughts on how to achieve the goals I stated were very much 'top of my head' stuff.  At the end of the day providing feedback on what might be good goals for a system is probably more useful than the how.  How a system is implemented is very much the preserve of the developers themselves.  At the core, what I really want to see is a repair system that forces me to make difficult, impactful decisions throughout the game.

 

Interesting info on the vehicle damage system.  I hadn't come across anything on that previously.

[Repair Mechanics Improvements]

I'm aware that an overhaul of the repair system probably falls under the heading of 'balancing the game economy' which is something that probably will not, and should not, be addressed until beta.  The current repair system is certainly 'good enough' for alpha.

 

That said, I'm hopeful there is a serious overhaul of the repair system planned for some point in the development roadmap.  The current system means that as soon as you have reliable sources of glue, cloth and iron, repair is a non issue.  The amount of those resources required is pretty trivial, so repair itself is trivial.  Even if the requirements were increased, they're very basic resources, so getting enough of them is unlikely to require impactful gameplay decisions beyond very early game.

 

I think the characteristics of a good repair system are:

1. The system requires a trade off between reliability (risk) and resources invested.  I.e. keeping your gear 100% repaired all the time is safest, but costs more resources than waiting until things break.  The current system actually does this, because a single repair kit repairs to 100% no matter how degraded the item is.  The current system doesn't do it very well, because repair kits fix everything and are trivially easy to make.
2. The system encourages a trade off between using lower performance but reliable equipment and very high performance, less reliable equipment.  Currently this doesn't really happen unless you randomly get a piece of gear that rolled high for stats except for durability.  Again, because keeping everything repaired is so easy, it doesn't really matter even then.
3. Items that require rare resources to craft also require rare resources to maintain.  The current system doesn't do this at all.  Repairs taking rare resources would mean the urgency of needing a particular resource to keep functioning at peak effectiveness stays as a thing beyond early to early-mid game.  Personally I find that situation of 'I could have a vehicle if I could just find a bottle of acid' enjoyable, and it drives gameplay.  Being able to create a similar situation later game (if the tyre on my bike goes, I currently don't have any acid to make a new one) seems like good gameplay.
4. Some unpredictability in reliability.  Unpredictability should increase for poorly maintained gear.  Currently this doesn't happen at all.  Everything works perfectly until it reaches zero durability. 

 

There are many ways to change the repair system to make those characteristics more prominent.  A few thoughts I've had are:

1. Number 1 pretty much takes care of itself, if we stick with the current model where repairing to full costs the same resources as repairing a little.  By making the actual resources required to repair more meaningful, the fact that you can choose to repair early or late would become a lot more meaningful.
2. Number 2 could be addressed by modifying item generation to a sort of 'points buy' system, where high stats potentially lead to lower durability, for equivalent items of the same tier.  I think you'd probably want it set up so that poorly statted items CAN have a much higher durability than ones with excellent stats, but it's not guaranteed.  So if a particular item has a base durability of 300 at quality 3, or whatever, a version of that item with average performance stats would roll durability between 150 and 450.  A version with good stats rolls between 150 and 300 and a version with really bad stats rolls between 150 and 600.  So you can still get items that are just all round crap for their tier, and equally some excellent items with decent durability.  Yes this system does mean that high precision weapons degrade faster, which makes sense, but also tough armour will usually degrade faster too.  That may not be strictly logical but it's good gameplay.  It also adds a lot more value to the armour perks' ability to reduce armour degradation and degradation reducing weapon/tool mods.
3. Number 3 can be addressed by making repair costs proportional to crafting costs.  Getting the proportion right is very much economy balancing, and will need some trial and error.  Something like 25% of crafting cost feels about right.  There's some additional complexity for items with multiple crafting stages, namely vehicles.  In order to calculate repair requirements the game engine would need to be able to trace the resources that were used to make the components.  So you might need a new headlight to fix your truck, but generally you don't need a new chassis.  For resources which are going to end up with a fractional cost (like engines for vehicles) you could roll against the percentage of resources required.  So if 25% of crafting resources are required for a fix, then 25% of the time a vehicle needs a new engine to be repaired, 75% of the time you can repair it without needing an engine.  I'd actually suggest rolling for each resource individually for all repairs.  So a high tier rifle that took 20 rifle parts to craft would roll the 25% chance (or whatever the right 'repair amount' turns out to be) for each of the 20 rifle parts that are in the original recipe.  It might take anywhere between zero and 20 rifle parts to fix, but the average will be around 5 (if the repair requirement was set at 25%).  That sort of ties in with unpredictability, which I'll talk about next.
4. Adding in unpredictability is as simple as having a (small) chance for an item to stop working every time it loses durability.  The chance increases the further the item is from full durability.  In order to balance the system using the values we currently have, you actually want items to keep working beyond zero durability, if you're lucky.  The actual calculations for where an item stops working are moderately complex, but the player doesn't have to be aware of that.  They just know that stuff is pretty reliable at high durabilities and likely to break at any time if durability is low.
5. Combining number 3 and number 4 (rare resources and unpredictability).  If you implement the approach where the resources required for a repair are 'rolled for', not fixed, you could make 'the roll' as soon as the item first loses durability, and display that information to the player.  That would lead to gameplay that 'My truck is at 99% durability and isn't likely to stop working any time soon, but I know the engine and two of the wheels are wearing out, and when it does break, I'm going to require new ones to fix it'.
6. There probably needs to be a requirement that items that require a workbench to make also require a workbench to repair.  That's an independent design decision, but makes unlucky failures are high durability a lot more impactful.
7. I recognise how difficult to implement these system change suggestions would be depends a lot on how the crafting system is actually constructed.  If you'd need to explicitly code a recipe for every single possible scenario of required parts then it's not practical to implement.  The solution suggestions are merely quick thoughts I've had, though.  I stand by the four desirable characteristics listed at the start of the post.  Any change to repair that makes those characteristics more prominant seems like a good thing to me.