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Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!


madmole

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!  

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  1. 1. Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

    • A18 Stable is Out!
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    • :)
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We regularly find 3 or 4 guns per day starting around day 6 or so. Very early days not so many, but it's pretty easy to find guns in the first day or two. Usually we dump them into a gun box until that overflows and then we go through and aggressively scrap all of the lower level ones because the mechanical parts sell for more than the guns.

 

Yes some balance and we'll be in a good spot. We'll make sure you aren't swimming in firearms especially the top tier ones and I think it will play sweet.

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Honestly you just make the rabbit/stag AI target a block with keyword crop. Done.

 

This will inadvertently let us create animal traps, which is awesome. All you got to do is make it so they can go into a space but can't get out (with blocks) . Which is simple.

 

Killing two birds with one stone here.

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LOL Garden heat map. You guys can mod it in. Honestly you just make the rabbit/stag AI target a block with keyword crop. Done.

 

I would like to see the xml rule for entities that allows them to target specific blocks. Would make modding so much easier (or is that something that is coming in A18?) I hope this means the event system is being extended upon to blocks in A18, where a block can have tags just like items and entities can have now.

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I would like to see the xml rule for entities that allows them to target specific blocks. Would make modding so much easier (or is that something that is coming in A18?) I hope this means the event system is being extended upon to blocks in A18, where a block can have tags just like items and entities can have now.

 

I think its coming to A18, we need block tags.

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Regarding Farming.

What i expierienced, in almost every playthrough:

You plant your first Seed, that you really really had to find.

you yield from the harvest and turn them into Seeds.

Plant 2 Seeds

Plant 4/8/16/32... Rich as Hell.

 

You forgot that you need 4 items to make a seed. To get exponential growth you would have to get 4 items from each plant. But you have to be at level 4 in "Living of the Land" and you have to be at level 7 in Fortitude. In total you have to invest 14 points to reach this level.

 

You have to invest 4 points in Intellect + Master Chef if you want to make vegetable stew.

 

Meanwhile the hunter is laughing because he finds meat and eggs everywhere and he only has to invest one point to make bacon and eggs.

 

In addition, the farmer first has to make a hoe or find one and then can start building a garden.

If you are not lucky enough to find a hoe, you can only make one yourself at level 20. And to do that you have to invest a total of 7 points in Intellect + Hammer and Forge if you don't find a hoe somewhere.

 

So the hunter gets along with one point and needs only a bone knife which he can make in the first 5 minutes of the game while the farmer has to invest up to 21 points to get an garden up and running and another 4 points to make vegetable stew.

 

And with the announced changes in A18, a seed needs as many as 5 items and 50 nitrate for production. Do you want to punish farmers even more or is that enough?

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My only concern with having animals eat crops is that it could turn a garden into a meat delivery service rather than a control on farming output.

 

A valid concern, which I think is addressable. Balance it so the game only spawns a 'screamer animal' like a rabbit once the theoretical vegetable yield of the farm is well above the theoretical meat yield from the animal(s). In other words, they can do more damage than you can recover through their meat. Also, don't keep animal corpses around for too long, so that if the player wants the meat, they have to be nearby and grab it quick (as it is with loot bags). They can't come home after a day out and pick the meat off of the spikes. Or, use an 'infected animal' that doesn't yield fresh meat, as someone suggested.

 

Lastly, if someone gets a little extra meat as a result of their garden, that'd feel cool. If I could make meat stew sometimes instead of vegetable stew by catching the animals attracted to my garden, I'd feel like a pretty shrewd survivalist. It would even scratch that itch for animal husbandry, without needing to explicitly code a new system for it.

 

Seasons sound sensible, but I think Madmole's concern about players joining a server at the wrong time is valid. Just because the timing of the Blood Moon is bad that way, doesn't mean they should add more systems that work against game balance.

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A valid concern, which I think is addressable. Balance it so the game only spawns a 'screamer animal' like a rabbit once the theoretical vegetable yield of the farm is well above the theoretical meat yield from the animal(s). In other words, they can do more damage than you can recover through their meat. Also, don't keep animal corpses around for too long, so that if the player wants the meat, they have to be nearby and grab it quick (as it is with loot bags). They can't come home after a day out and pick the meat off of the spikes. Or, use an 'infected animal' that doesn't yield fresh meat, as someone suggested.

 

Lastly, if someone gets a little extra meat as a result of their garden, that'd feel cool. If I could make meat stew sometimes instead of vegetable stew by catching the animals attracted to my garden, I'd feel like a pretty shrewd survivalist. It would even scratch that itch for animal husbandry, without needing to explicitly code a new system for it.

 

Seasons sound sensible, but I think Madmole's concern about players joining a server at the wrong time is valid. Just because the timing of the Blood Moon is bad that way, doesn't mean they should add more systems that work against game balance.

 

How is it valid, when new players gets buffed with the newbie coat that protects you from temperature?

edit: About the seasons..

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A valid concern, which I think is addressable. Balance it so the game only spawns a 'screamer animal' like a rabbit once the theoretical vegetable yield of the farm is well above the theoretical meat yield from the animal(s). In other words, they can do more damage than you can recover through their meat. Also, don't keep animal corpses around for too long, so that if the player wants the meat, they have to be nearby and grab it quick (as it is with loot bags). They can't come home after a day out and pick the meat off of the spikes. Or, use an 'infected animal' that doesn't yield fresh meat, as someone suggested.

 

Lastly, if someone gets a little extra meat as a result of their garden, that'd feel cool. If I could make meat stew sometimes instead of vegetable stew by catching the animals attracted to my garden, I'd feel like a pretty shrewd survivalist. It would even scratch that itch for animal husbandry, without needing to explicitly code a new system for it.

 

Seasons sound sensible, but I think Madmole's concern about players joining a server at the wrong time is valid. Just because the timing of the Blood Moon is bad that way, doesn't mean they should add more systems that work against game balance.

 

I'm pretty sure they'll balance it so it isn't OP. Also, one rabbit can destroy your entire farm. You don't need a swarm of them, they are not locust.

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Regarding farming, we're doing this for A18. Baby steps and balance.

 

Living off the land

T1: Harvest 2

 

T2: Can craft flowers - Aloe, goldenrod chrysanthemum, yucca

 

T3: Can craft berry and veggie seeds

 

T4: Harvest 3 crops

 

T5: Can craft mutant seeds

 

Add 50 nitrate to seed recipe. Change to 5 crops.

 

add wild crops to biome spawning

 

Add seed schematics to allow non farmers to craft seeds.

 

Add zombie and stag trampling but not players trampling.

 

Trampling might not make it in, need programmers for that.

 

Sounds good. We'll see how it plays out in A18.

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If I just murdered someone and their bag teleported to the trader I'd be mad. That is MY loot. You have to think of SP, Coop and PVP settings when you design. That only works for SP.

 

Joel, but if the item disappears from the bag only after half an hour of real time ... if no one took the bag (whether it is a friend or an enemy)? ) It looks like it will work everywhere)

 

And if in the settings it is that the items from the belt do not fall, then the item that is on the belt will be climbed immediately, and the one that is in the bag in an hour. If player want the he is not to lose the belt, he will lose two items at once. The best item from a belt and the best item from a backpack.

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Wow, awesome..

 

Would be nice if u can stack a few in one inventory slot. I know that prob wont work tho... different qualitiy levels..

 

It would be both good and bad if we could have only one in hand (stacked). Imagine the fun in both situations, based on difficulty.

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No I assure you they didn't seek and destroy crops. They chased rabbits and stuff, so thats probably what it was.

 

Oh ok. It very well may have been that as I could not see the ground well on the videos. They were usually showing the destruction in large corn fields.

So the complaints about it were just that they got trampled? Why didn’t players just protect their crops? It’s not like that wouldn’t be fun. Not seeing the problem.

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This is beautiful. Simply beautiful. Nothing can compete with this. This is complete mastery over the voxel world.

Through the alphas some inspiration was drawn from other games and developers... but this will be a source of inspiration for other games and developers.

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