Pernicious

Are any of those 5x2 blocks visually deceiving? E.g. plates which only take up what appears to be a few cm, but the block is then used? I mistakenly did a base design where I had the plate on the bottom of the bock, o anything I put on top of it "floated" 90% of a block off the ground. Same thing happens with like poles, walls, switches, torches etc.

RNG is a capricious god. Since A20, I've played 4 games to the first blood moon. (If you must know why, my friends and I are planning a long multi-day gaming session between Christmas and New Year, and I want to know the changes inside and out, and trying different strategies! Yep, I'm a min/maxer). I have to admit, the very first play through, I found a L6 Pipe Baton and a L6 Pipe Pistol in the first POI looted. Literally on the way to the trader - and thought the game had been massively unbalanced. But then, I made it the rest of the way to blood moon without finding anything better than a level 2 stone/pipe weapon. Another time, I found a level 1 iron pickaxe on day 3 or so - Ended up being level 9 by blood moon with a concrete horde night base, when other play throughs I was usually 6-8 with cobblestone and maybe the start of a concrete reinforcement. I don't know what the RNG numbers are behind the scenes - I'm sure a more experienced player will correct me, but usually how it works in games is that items have a number based on their desired level, the user has a base modifier and then a roll. So if say, a steel pickaxe was given number 200, players start with a base of 0, and roll 1-100, it's impossible to roll. However, add some lucky looter, some goggles, some biome bonuses, some container bonuses, some level bonuses, and their base is 100, then there's now a 1% chance (100 base + 100 rolled) that they might get something that appears early. As someone else mentioned before, sometimes there are loopholes, like sneaking into a difficult snow biome to raise your bonuses prematurely. This doesn't really mean the game is unbalanced, or bugged, although most people would call it "bugussing", "abusing the meta". Others complain they get nerfed when devs do something about it 😛 To be honest, some times I don't get why people don't just enjoy games for what they are. Life is random, some people have all the luck, others never get a even break. But at the end of the day, I paid $30 for this game. I've played it longer and more hours than 3 months of Netflix. Or two movies in the Cinema, or... literally anything else I spent $30 on. It's not like anyone's laying down their life savings, being forced to play it, or paying out a subscription fee for this game. Just enjoy it - or don't.

I've not played for more than about 90 minutes at a time (Just a bit busy - wish I could get a more solid block) But if it's starting fast, and slows down over a period of a couple hours, it's most likely a memory leak, which is a bug you can't do much about, except quit, reboot and go back in every time it starts feeling a bit slow. To see if it's even a memory related problem, while the game is going fine, press control-shift-escape, and make sure that the number in red, is still smaller than the number in green: (this is taken from my machine - I have 32Gb physically installed, and I'm using 16.0Gb. Repeat when it's slow. If the number in use is bigger than the available RAM, and it's crept up since the game was fast, memory leak is almost certainly the problem. You can Having more memory will delay the problem, having a very fast hard drive will also hide it somewhat. By the fact you said you will try defragging it, I'm guessing you have a spinning drive - By the way defragging it will have no effect. The Page File is usually created unfragmented, and is protected from fragmentation and can't be defragmented. Sorry, a bit too much detail to go into here.

Whenever something locks up for a while like that, my first thought is there's a big blocking I/O to something - I.e. process doesn't continue until the read or write is finished. Since memory and GPU are fast to write to, that usually means the hard drive, but no reason for it to do so unless you're changing biome, loading a large POI etc - unless of course you're out of RAM. In that case, your PC is constantly looking for something in memory it can write out to the hard drive, and then load something from the hard drive into memory, and that takes time. How much RAM do you have? It seems like a lot of people are having performance issues with low RAM since A20. Also, what kind of hard drive are you using? Spinning? SATA SSD? NVME SSD? Something else?

I'm currently running on a laptop i7-8665U with the inbuilt GPU. Not gonna pretend it's anything but 25fps on lowest setting, but it's playable, and if anything, it feels a touch smoother than A19. However, even with settings on lowest, and standing in the wilderness (very few POIs), I'm on 15Gb of RAM consumed on a machine that's been optimised for gaming. If you're in a city running 16Gb of RAM and you have your typical PC with all the bloatware running in the background, odds are as soon as you go anywhere with some POIs, you'll be spending all your time page faulting, and none of it rendering the game. No offence, but it astounds me that people are willing to spend $3000+ on GPUs, but not $200 on some extra RAM, then blame the games as "unoptimised" when their CPUs spend all the time trying to swap between memory and disk instead of feeding the GPU. Meanwhile, the GPU is sitting on 15% and running cold.

I've seen real life airtaskers requesting to remove a spider, so don't count yourself short. Clearing on Zombie is a real job In all seriousness though, probably a bug.

Uh - you don't even need one during generation. I run mine on a Supermicro server that doesn't even have a VGA output at all (All accessed through Telnet/ESXi) I found A19 Navezgane to run fine on 4 CPUs and 16Gb for 4 players. I bumped that to 32Gb for a custom 8k map, but it never took much more than 16-17Gb. Apparently disk IO is important once you have fast moving vehicles, so I put mine on an NVME drive, but I haven't ever had problems so I don't know at what point a SATA/SCSI/Nearline-SAS/SAS drive would be an issue, especially if it was in a speed enhancing RAID. The issue is loading up the next "chunk" and serving it to the client before the client gets there (Hence why it's more of an issue with the faster vehicles).

Huh. Interesting that it worked previously without opening the port, but suddenly broke. Out of curiousity I checked my firewall logs for that port. Plenty logs of me going out, but none of them for my friends coming into my dedicated server. Maybe a difference between P2P and dedicated server gaming? Anyway... Glad it's solved for you.

You're not really tweaking your PC, as the changes don't affect any other software. You're just changing the game's configuration, no different from changing the detail level on video settings, except you're doing it from the game launcher rather than inside the game. I use the following shortcut to implement the tweak: C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c start "7D2D" /affinity AA "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\7 Days To Die\7DaysToDie_EAC.exe" All that does is bind the game to use cores 11, 9, 7, 5 (I think - I did it a while back now). It made a massive, massive difference to me, on an 8086k/48Gb/3080Ti all duly watercooled and overclocked. I chose all odd numbers so that I don't get a physical core and its hyperthreaded virtual core competing for resources.

2 answers to that: 1. Use it to body shot a zombie, and see if the higher damage one kills it using fewer bullets. If not, just take the one with a higher clip size. There are just way too many variables for anyone to really advise you on that without testing. Which perks you've taken, which bullets you've loaded, game stage, how often you headshot, etc. 2. Stop stressing so much and just enjoy the game. As far as I know, there's no professional 7D2D eSports you're min/maxing for.

Almost certainly a low level packet loss somewhere between you two. Usually the only way pings get that high is due to lost packets being retransmitted and the backup packet getting there in time to be "useful" (that being a relative term, if you can't play) Not sure what your level of network knowledge is. It's clearly above the average gamer from your testing steps so far, but if the follow steps don't make sense, don't worry, it will probably resolve in time. 1. Enable pings to your router. It may be called ICMP 2. Find out what your public IP address is. 3. Have your friend ping your public IP address using "ping x.x.x.x. -t" where x.x.x.x is your public IP. 4. Give it a decent time. At least a minute, then cancel it with control-c. 5. Look for the summary at the end, and what the loss ratio is. If it's not 0%, there's your answer. If you want to go further, you can use the command "tracert x.x.x.x" and see where the packet loss/large jumps in latency starts. Losing all 3 packets on one line of a trace route is normal, and just means that router is refusing to answer. Getting only 1 or 2 of the 3 back indicates that router is where the problem is. If it's not the first or last hop, then it's an ISP problem and nothing you can really do about it. Finally, if you are really desperate to play and have decent network skills, your friend can try to VPN somewhere, since the problem only seems to occurring when you are directly connecting to each other. It might change the route taken. Using a VPN with something like Forward Error Correction can help with packet loss by recovering lost packets faster than a retransmit. Good luck.

It looks like my PC client updated automatically, and won't connect to my 19.5 server. So I go into steamcmd, update it - downloads about 9.8Gb and then in the web console, type version: 2021-07-30T05:03:34 134.658 INF Executing command 'version' by ControlPanel Game version: Alpha 19.5 (b60) Compatibility Version: Alpha 19.5 And still can't connect. Have I missed a step? Shutdown the server before upgrading, and rebooted after upgrading, neither has made a difference. Never mind. 45 minutes trying to get it to work including searching here, and as soon as I post a question, I find this thread which solves it: https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/24447-dedicated-server-wont-update-to-195/

Awesome. Thanks for that. Will save me a bit of time trying a strategy that might not be worth it.

Those error messages mean that first you couldn't finish a connection, and second, the program tried to send data down a connection which wasn't established. Without more info, it's difficult to assist you further, but I'd be looking at firewall/antivirus on both sides (client and server) first. And if you're crossing a network firewall/router, look at the firewall and network address translation rules there.

So Gazz, are you saying that there are a fixed set of shapes, and they are independent of what they contain? Sorry, seems like a bit of a sentence expecting prior knowledge or has some assumptions. Unrelated, I checked through the logs from yesterday and saw a lot of this: 2021-07-25T05:33:21 23457.472 WRN Entity [type=EntityItem, name=resourceScrapLead, cnt=50] fell off the world, id=23694 pos=(-1021.9, -0.6, -249.6) If that's what happens when they are crushed into debris, then there wasn't as much lead falling as I thought anyway, (maybe around about 50-60 lines of that) and I'll give up now. If that's just a small percentage that bugged out and somehow "fell through the floor to a -250 "z" position), and there are the hundred+ more I thought I saw before the crushing doesn't leave a log, this would be worth trying again. A block that was 15 x 15 x 12 deep or so, should have contained more than 50-60 lead.

Just popped into this thread to thank @Naz for his tips. I had actually given up on the low FPS issue a few days ago after trying a lot of things on the web (and not trying things that sounded like the author/vlogger didn't know what he was talking about). I have a 3080Ti, overclocked (and quite a high overclock too), 8086k overclocked (Again, 5.1Ghz all cores so not fantastic, but still above average), I was getting anything from >100fps, to mid 20s during a horde night. Tuning the shadows and reflections a bit, I could keep it to high 30s, even though the Nvidia Overlay said I was rarely using over 30% GPU. Set the affinity to only the last 4 physical cores as per Naz's links, and so far, I've cranked everything back up to maximum including shadows and reflections, and I'm averaging 80fps, with no drops below 58fps yet. GPU is now averaging in the mid to high 40s%. I haven't had a horde night yet though, but I'm pretty hopeful for a much smoother experience. Cheers @Naz. Appreciate the heads up.

I'm not 100% on this, but I think any block which hasn't taken any damage yet will become a bag. I.e. still 600/600 I think I need to test this more thoroughly. If it is 100% chance for undamaged blocks to become lootable bags, then cutting a 15 x 15 x ?? deep frame to cause a collapse is relatively quick and easy. Your tip about the campfires looks to be promising Might give it another shot, thanks!

Was hoping to post a screenshot here, but it seems like you need to host it elsewhere and hotlink. Oh well, this could be a hard thread to explain. So, quick question - are all ore veins roughly the same shape? After setting up a few mines, I started noticing that all of them so far, went down directly for about 8 blocks (with nothing around it), before becoming much wider, in an almost predictable manner. So I excavated two new mine sites, but instead of mining out the desired resource, I mined everything EXCEPT the desired resource. They're not identical, but they do look very similar to the pattern I described. Only asking this from another experiment - I tried to ahem.. Bulk mine by causing a mine collapse. It did work - kind of, when the large chunk fell, I had dozens, if not over one hundred of bags of the resource there for the picking, and thought I had found an ultra fast way to mine: Until all the soil collapsed down on it and buried it all and turned it into rubble. But I figured if each ore vein was largely similar, I could excavate all the soil away, and repeat the experiment, to see if I could cause a controlled collapse where I got to keep most of the resources as bags, rather than have them destroyed into rubble. Thoughts? Is it predictable enough to do that type of bulk mining?