Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[madmole]

Thinking ahead here. I know food spoilage is off the table so I won't suggest it here. What would be cool is when or if you get a reputation system in game with different factions you could tie food to said system. Say a specific reputation quest where you need to feed the colony. You can base the requirement on "Max Stamina" for food and "Water" for drink.

 

It would work like this:

 

Quest - The White River Clan needs Food Items Worth at least "600 Max Stamina (food) and 300 Water (drink)". Doing this quest will grant you +Reputation or put you in good standing with them for a certain amount of time. Depending on system you go with.

 

This system is intentionally left arbitrary so people with different recipes can complete the quest.

 

This would provide a late game Item Sink when you have more than enough food and drink. Best part is it will benefit you too.

 

This system could also apply to other items in the game like weapons, clothes, building mats and would be highly moddable.

 

 

This would be a cool system imo.

I'd make it more specific and raise the difficulty at each tier like a variety of things you need so its not just unloading your unwanted food stocks, like I'm planning to do with the gathering quests.

[madmole]

When a company unrelated to the developers of the game puts in the amount of effort and money required

 

Surprised Microsoft hasn't shut them down for trying to monetize their minecraft mod. Looks pretty good though. I didn't read exactly what they are selling so maybe its legit.

[madmole]

I see and understand. This alpha is just awesome. I share the excitement of a18 in an ackward nerdy way.

 

About legendary stuff; My soft concern is that Bethesda tends to do a consistent but predictable system where only 1 weapon is THE BEST weapon of its type ( even in Fallout 4) . But then again 7dtd current design is quite powerful. Having a more varied-many legendary weapon system with lotz of names and hidden effects and pros/cons would be awesome. Imagine looting a house and finding Grandpa's legendary skirt with 10% armor rating lol.

 

Good day and happy gameplay.

 

We are a smaller team and our strengths are systemic designs that use a lot of procedural generation where they are larger and focus more on making specific items in specific locations for the most part. The pros with procedural and random gen are you get more replay value and never get the same exact experience twice, where their method you get precise results and higher fidelity and control, but less replay value. Like one cryogun is the same as the next for everyone. Megaton is identical every time, etc. High Hrothgar is a 99.9% predictable experience, etc.

[madmole]

Madmole......will A18 get rid of the Death penalty when you die.....hated the fact that it put you too far back in charecter progression. The fact that you stubbed your big toe and now you forgot how to tie your shoes was pretty annoying... Has that been tweaked or removed...i hope.

 

Regards

 

Ouch

 

No and its not as big of deal as you make it out to be. Just don't craft anything with quality while your debuffed and its no problem, or have an item that raises your attribute on to counter the effect. We already shortened it to half a day or something. I was thinking vitamins can reduce the timer on it faster to give those an actual strong role in the game.

[madmole]

Stun rod looks rad. I hope you guys are going to put in other creative weopons like the stun rod and the junk turret. I would love to see a railgun. You could put it in with the rifle category.

 

 

 

https://imgur.com/E5sP7Dp

 

We have one on hold for now, it didn't make sense adding another rifle while other trees didn't even have one yet (brawler, turrets, electrocutioner, etc)

[madmole]

Awesome stuff, TFP! The reworked perks, new weapons, and terrain is fantastic. Sidewalks/curbs!

 

Is there something different with the edge if the water?

 

I believe the new shader or rwg made it look nicer.

[madmole]

I assumed this was the way 'smell' worked already as I thought 'heat' was a metaphorical catch-all; like a heat map of activity.

 

It would make a lot of sense to have smell, sound, actions, and temp heat all abstracted nicely as 'heat'.

 

I think it did, but it also attracted nearby zombies.

[madmole]

With Heavy Armor, the Strength tree shouldn't need to heal as often. It's the price you pay for being a juggernaut -- less healing capability for the best damage dealing + mitigation. Fortitude already has Pain Tolerance for mitigation anyway, and even a STR character should be able to cook if he finds recipes. That seems pretty balanced too, but I can live with it either way.

 

Regardless, the new system looks great!! I'm guessing the Intelligence tree is really not ready for prime time, since some of those perks are gated/locked. As for Charismatic Nature, I'm a bit sad that perk is useless in single player.

 

We'll come up with something. Like advance in reputation among the traders faster. We originally intended a reputation system, so every trader is a jerk like trader rekt early game then advance to hughs set, then bobs the joels etc, basically go from being jerk to being super nice. Bartering and doing quests for this guy increases your reputation and then when it hits a certain level he's nicer and would let you choose higher quests a bit faster.

[madmole]

You could do a cheap ducttape, flashlight, headgear recipe, and the flashlight falls off after a while and has to be recrafted or stops working and has to be repaired. Can modded clothing items decay like tools do? Can they be tied to too usage /performed player actions?

 

Sounds like that what would happen to me until I get more proficient with macgyvering trinkets, or find a mining helmet / real light attachment item

 

I asked for an item degradation method the other day so modders can do spoilage and we could make torches degrade and do a variety of things with it.

[Shineblossom]

No and its not as big of deal as you make it out to be. Just don't craft anything with quality while your debuffed and its no problem, or have an item that raises your attribute on to counter the effect. We already shortened it to half a day or something. I was thinking vitamins can reduce the timer on it faster to give those an actual strong role in the game.

 

Die = get your weather resistances lowered. In frost biome. Your stats go even lower because of the cold. So now, you lose hp regen, you lose damage, you lose your ability to keep distance from zombies

 

We have one on hold for now, it didn't make sense adding another rifle while other trees didn't even have one yet (brawler, turrets, electrocutioner, etc)

 

Railgun sounds great for inteligence tree imho. After all, it is THE science tree. And would look better than running around with a turret

[madmole]

No, company: https://continuum.graphics/store

 

But sure, modders can do it as well. Bottom line is, all of that is great but wasn't made by the developers so it's a bit unfair to use it as comparison and then ask TFP when they'll implement ray tracing.

 

Ray tracing is about 2% of the final image there. Most of what you see is just pbr textures. Ray tracing is coming to games, but its another feature that might destroy the framerate we would shy away from for a while until we get performance in a good place.

[madmole]

Like the change that Tool crafting quality is now pegged to Miner 69'er now. But how is the scaling between Miner 69'er and Mother Lode? I think there was an ongoing issue in A17 whereby Miner 69'er was causing less yield from mining (especially boulders) if we were to spec more points into it. Hence the general consensus was to just max points in Mother Lode but to not max out Miner 69'er.

 

Please ppl for the love of god read. FIXED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[madmole]

Because you can't craft a real military type gun on a wooden workbench with wrench and hammer in real life. you need a special metal cutting equipment, welding set. Furthermore, I suppose it would be more reasonable to force player to leave their comfortable bases to go looting for weapons. However, maybe it could pay off if player could upgrade guns' stats on workbench at the cost of appropriate parts, instead of crafting a new weapon?

 

Guns are now crafted from parts and various resources, so yes you can build one on a workbench realistically, which by the way does not govern any of our decisions on design. You cannot craft these parts you find them or scrap weapons to obtain the parts.

[madmole]

yeah, this kinda strange too, but there's no suitable alternative for now, I think.

 

Haven't seen anyone rage quit because they can carry 100 tons of stone yet either. Fun trumps realism.

[OzHawkeye]

I asked for an item degradation method the other day so modders can do spoilage and we could make torches degrade and do a variety of things with it.

 

I think that's a great way to handle it - the more access modders have, the more mods they'll make, and games like Minecraft / Skyrim etc show how powerful and inventive modding communities can become when they have a great deal of access to the game. I'm not a fan of food spoilage myself, but if I can mod it in / out, I can see lots of mods making use of it.

[ReaperXGen]

Guns are now crafted from parts and various resources, so yes you can build one on a workbench realistically, which by the way does not govern any of our decisions on design. You cannot craft these parts you find them or scrap weapons to obtain the parts.

well, now I have to agree. that's pretty logical.

[Gnomaana]

Madmole......will A18 get rid of the Death penalty when you die.....hated the fact that it put you too far back in charecter progression. The fact that you stubbed your big toe and now you forgot how to tie your shoes was pretty annoying... Has that been tweaked or removed...i hope.

 

Regards

 

Ouch

 

On a snarky note: Have you ever died and popped back to life in your bed miles away? Maybe that is what would happen. Lol

 

Non snarky note: Death has to have SOME downside or there is no point. With no penalty at all to death the fastest strategy for some buildings would be to place a bedroll near and just kamikaze the building over and over until you clear it.

[Gnomaana]

I wonder that too. I think those people are either lazy or ignorant maybe both. It's like they want everyone to play the way they want and I also don't understand their urgent of making things overcomplicated(the recent example of that I saw was suggested by someone is the restriction of using tools/weapons while climbing the ladder and things like that).

 

Or maybe they would like their "Survival Horde Crafting Game" to, you know, have SOME elements of survival in it? Maybe? Nah, I'm sure they are just lazy.

[SnowDog1942]

I asked for an item degradation method the other day so modders can do spoilage and we could make torches degrade and do a variety of things with it.

 

Please dont make me micro manage torches

[RestInPieces]

Please dont make me micro manage torches

 

Use electricity like a normal human being! But seriously, unlike food and even if I would personally enjoy torches degrading I wouldn't be in favor of a decoration element being subject to these kinds of rules, much less one that will, perhaps, become annoying to replace.

[SnowDog1942]

Use electricity like a normal human being! But seriously, unlike food and even if I would personally enjoy torches degrading I wouldn't be in favor of a decoration element being subject to these kinds of rules, much less one that will, perhaps, become annoying to replace.

 

I dont like electricity lights, the torches are better. I guess thats a whole other issue. Elecricity is great, but the lighting sucks currently.

[RestInPieces]

Death has to have SOME downside or there is no point. With no penalty at all to death the fastest strategy for some buildings would be to place a bedroll near and just kamikaze the building over and over until you clear it.

 

Indeed - death means nothing without actually having a downside. The current downside is IMHO extremely lenient. Frankly, it doesn't make me fear death in the least - it's more like a minor annoyance. Yet for whatever reasons there are people who just wouldn't like to be penalized at all.

 

DP severity has to become an option.

 

I dont like electricity lights, the torches are better. I guess thats a whole other issue. Elecricity is great, but the lighting sucks currently.

 

Agreed - and a game in which building plays such a huge role should not take away aesthetic options in favor of some small immersion gain.

[madmole]

@madmole or anyone at the dev team: please tell me that different icon means different model; tell me that now an iron axe looks different than a steel axe!!! QoL

 

Placeholders.

[madmole]

Perhaps we're looking at this the wrong way. If there were a secondary use for food instead of just keeping the player alive it would help reduce the stockpiles.

 

The real life secondary uses for spare food are usually animal feed, fertilizer, or other types of food (fruit to jam being an example of the latter).

 

There is, its called the sell button.

[madmole]

@madmole

 

I haven't finished watching the video yet but I have a question. What perks can be found as books excatly?

 

Can you please either put it in game, or give us a comprehensive list? Or can all perks be found as books?

 

Update is looking awesome btw.

 

No perks can be found as books. Books are their own thing. There are schematics for everything perks unlock so you aren't forced into buying that perk unless you really want the perk parts of it, like damage bonuses etc.