Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[RevenantWit]

@MadMole Just curious what exactly is more difficult in A18 aside from rage zombies and one new zombie? From everything I've read so far I didn't see where anything was made more difficult in any way I'm sure I could have missed some stuff though. Everything I've seen so far though seems to be drastically simplifying things and making them easier but again I could have missed a lot.

 

I'm sorry but I still think that this game needed more zombies not less and now there is less in poi's and in the wild that kind of saddens me quite a bit. I also still think this game would really benefit from tying food, thirst and stamina drain to difficulty and would help solve a lot of complaints in that department.

 

Anywho just my two cents not that it's worth anything I was more just curious what was actually made more difficult.

[Genosis]

Madmole,

 

if you can manage to remove the gap in between ground blocks and the others, much would be solved- for farming aesthetics and for all of the POIs merging with terrain and player buildings too.

 

Is that doable ?

 

This. Absolutely this. It's been a eye-twitch thing ever since I started playing the game back in A16 when I found out the game existed.

[Ouch Quit It]

Can u elaborate?

NOW...That is funny

[Zombie_Jam]

Holy crap, that was intense! The latest farming $#itstorm was like seeing the forum turn into a horde night for Joel!

 

I could see them trying to get part his defenses, and him bashing them with his flaming spiked club.

 

You guys are all long time distant freinds, and I hate seeking you all at each other's throats, but I think we CAN all agreed everyone's is here because they are passionate about the game.

 

I figure if we don't like the new farming changes, well just add that big gaming mod once it's updated, and just keep movin on.

 

MM, I know you are passionate, but don't take the crits personally. You've created something people love enough to fight about, and that's an accomplishment in itself.

 

This isn't Jerry Springer or Oprah.

 

It's farming's funeral.

 

*raises glass*

[Onahot]

Long time lurker.

Can "farmers" and avid gardeners please stop spouting off. This game doesn't have farming, at best it is allotmenteering. You don't "farm" hectares/acres of land, that is farming. You may garden a 10x10 plot. I AM a professional gardener, and have been planting vegetable crops by hand for years. Must have been doing it wrong all this time! As for hoeing, that is for weeding, not tilling the earth. MM has done the right thing, always drove me nuts you need a hoe to plant!

 

Please remember this game doesn't have "farming", and try the damn thing before you go all radio rental about it.

[madmole]

Make wolves scared of torches.

 

Good idea..

[Ouch Quit It]

At least it wasnt 5 harrassers jerkin you

 

Lol..killing me...i was thinking same things...lol

[madmole]

OOOH CANNED WATER. Im talking about the buckets!

Sorry about that! I could give 2 ♥♥♥♥s about the can. yea that was a nifty trick but was stupid.

 

I mean the actual buckts. like to transplant water blocks froma river or lake so we can create a well or moat.

 

Buckets are still a thing.

[RipClaw]

No that just makes it easier and easier to grow a farm because you exponentially get more seeds. Grow 5 crops, craft to a seed if you have the recipe or perk, and thats it. Simple, but its a tangible sacrifice. Do I want to eat this yummy corn today or starve a bit and have 2 corns in 3 days?

 

All right, then I'll probably have to search the garbage cans and garbage bags for seeds when the plants on the fields of the farms are all dead. You can't find potatoes or corn in the wild and the plants from the fields were always a good start for my own garden.

 

Garbage bags and garbage cans will get a higher priority for me when looting.

[Locusta]

Long time lurker.

Can "farmers" and avid gardeners please stop spouting off. This game doesn't have farming, at best it is allotmenteering. You don't "farm" hectares/acres of land, that is farming. You may garden a 10x10 plot. I AM a professional gardener, and have been planting vegetable crops by hand for years. Must have been doing it wrong all this time! As for hoeing, that is for weeding, not tilling the earth. MM has done the right thing, always drove me nuts you need a hoe to plant!

 

Please remember this game doesn't have "farming", and try the damn thing before you go all radio rental about it.

 

You must have never planted potatoes before then.

 

 

Loc

[Zombie_Jam]

Just place them on the ground so they are waist high. Why bend over or crouch to work? Make a green house, nobody would put their crops out in the open anyway in an apocalypse.

 

Yeah because the advent of walls and fences aren't a thing, right.

 

Also people like making big farms, whose going to make a 100 x 100 'greenhouse.'

 

Maybe you missed my comment to Sage (MechanicalLens) - tilling hundreds of blocks isn't anywhere near as tedious as making hundreds of planters to go in hundreds of holes, or hundreds of placements for an obscenely large supergreenhouse to encase everything.

 

Hoe + land = beautiful.

Planters + base buildinf = beautiful.

 

Farming gone + crafting/ potted plant fettish = a nightmare.

[SrslyGTFO]

It isn't hard to add a fertile dirt block that extends the farm plot to appease this, but I really like working at a waist high level like now, I can't imagine people doing it the old way. We'll release as is and consider it in a few weeks after people have settled down about it. Its no different than a block next to your base how that looks.

 

I think a craftable, fertile ground block (same recipe as farm plot, but without the wood?), would solve the aesthetics issue. Then, the modders could probably mod in a tool-based method to convert forest ground blocks into fertile ground blocks for additional farming methods.

 

I have no issue with vanilla having simple to understand methods of doing things, and having the framework for modders to add in-depth new ways to do the same thing for bigger returns and new gameplay styles.

[Trekkan]

I'd like to be able to do some things like that.

 

If you do, please make this optional. Please see the "We have vertigo" argument months back.

[madmole]

Method of farming? Who cares

Cans of water? Who cares

Even less zombies than the less zombies they previously reduced it to? Thats one I care about

 

I would have preferred wilderness spawn levels to be an option with their default at what they are planning, clearly stating increasing this setting will adversly affect performance.

 

In addition I would have preferred the reduction to coincide with getting random encounters. Instead of playing A18 for a year in a more lifeless world.

 

Its suprising to see with how much work went into things like occlusion culling and other optimizations and we still have to resort to this (reduce zombies). The root cause of the massive performance loss between A16 and A17 was clearly NOT the number of zeds in the wilderness. Was it ever identified?

 

I can honestly say this is the first bummer A18 news, but, I hope Madmole will prove me wrong and we see just how all the pieces if A18 fit together as a whole next month.

 

No we didn't do it for performance, we did it for gameplay and it is a performance bonus. We have rage zombies now, they get mad when hit and basically sprint in your face. This is overwhelming to new players and with bread crumbs it felt like the whole city came to my poi and sandwiched me in there. There are still plenty of zombies in the wild, the number and what it does is deceiving. Last night I had 5 snow zombies from across the lake raid my dig quest and I got rekt, no way out. I was in that hole for under a minute and they broke out my frame box and dropped in the hole and I was toast.

 

Putting it simple, A18 is much harder than 17 "in the wild". There are cougars that pounce on you, coyotes that are fast, vultures etc. Its nasty. So nasty we set the default difficulty to adventurer and the team was still getting raped and it just felt like the biome zombies were this annoying pest that hunted you and there were way too many of them, maybe Shawns voodooo ai code is so nice now that there were always a LOT more zombies than we ever knew there were.

 

So we turned it down, there are still a lot, and they are pain in the ass, combined with rage speeds and animals, you will thank me for this change. The AI is so much better they hear and investigate to a new player with a fresh look at 18, I should have kept my mouth shut, nobody would have noticed, but instead it would be oh wow I'm surrounded and this is scary af.

 

So yeah the idea of less zombies sounds bad on the surface. Put simply there are less stupid zombies that can't find you or hear you idling around wasting cpu, but now more zombies (than 17) trying to eat you in your face. How does that sound?

[Survager]

MM, do you plan to do something with the crosshairs when using an optical sight? Now the movements are very sharp. Can you add some kind of smoothness or inertia when moving the crosshairs in aiming mode?

[madmole]

Long time lurker, posted once or twice. Also kickstarted the game back in the day.

Just gotta say removing zombies from the wilderness makes me pretty furious.

 

Like farming who cares, probs for the better. But removing zombie spawns from the wilderness is some real dumb ♥♥♥♥. For what? Random encounters in a year for a19? That is BS TFPآ’s.

 

Guppy, I know you aint a dev but my god my dude Iآ’ve been lurking here for years and you damn well should be. You know what this game needs. Keep up the good fight brother, but Iآ’m afraid the ships going down.

 

I canآ’t wait for A19 when Joel is talking ♥♥♥♥ about A18, and how bad it was recieved, same thing heآ’s doing with A17 now.

Sorry but thats the way youآ’re heading removing threat from the world and forcing people to go into POIآ’s or BM to experience Zeds.

 

Sorry for the huge post, passionate and frustrated fan here who will probs get chewed out by MM as Iآ’ve seen him do to others.

Donآ’t care. Iآ’ve had enough.

 

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?111778-Alpha-18-Dev-Diary!!&p=1015216&viewfull=1#post1015216

[Ouch Quit It]

Farming is not simple. And it shouldn't be in game.

 

Totally agree Gup...i wouldnt even mind adding 5 gallon buckets in game to start planting or gathering water ...i would do that before the box in real life...especially a nomadic one.

[madmole]

I typically play either on 90 minute days (just to give me some more resource gathering time) or 60 minute days. I'm curious, how do you think a 90 minute playthrough will fair in A18?

 

One hour is perfect to me, but to each his own

[madmole]

If you think you're going to see a performance increase because by zombies were cut in half you are quite mistaken. I don't care what kind of potato you have, biome zombies never amounted to more zombies in on a blood moon... ...and if your PC could handle those then your PC could handle biome zombies.

 

Sometimes I would see a poi in the distance, and I might want to go investigate, but then I might see three or four snow zombies milling about, and I had to rethink visiting the POI because of those zombies. Now I don't even have to worry about seeing them. Straight to the POI so I can cheese that AI.

 

*Yawn*

 

Again, it wasn't done for performance.

[madmole]

TFP thank you all for this interesting place to talk about how awesome A18 is and all the features! better farming, less ninja wolfs, a return to books in loot, better mining, quests, new POI's, perk tree fixes, different ways to play the game, the list goes on and on! i only have 120 hours in the game i am a newb but im excited to play and love all the news you have posted. not gonna lie Madmole has me scared im gonna die lots of times from making rookie mistakes and playing it like alpha 16 or 17. good times ahead!

 

Its definitely more intense than any previous version.

[The Gronk]

Just place them on the ground so they are waist high. Why bend over or crouch to work? Make a green house, nobody would put their crops out in the open anyway in an apocalypse.

 

Why go to the effort of building raised beds? We have fields around here with medieval raised beds and they barely get to knee height.

 

At least tell me that sunken beds don't have a motorcycle trap around them in form of a soil/block boundary.

[Locusta]

No we didn't do it for performance, we did it for gameplay and it is a performance bonus. We have rage zombies now, they get mad when hit and basically sprint in your face. This is overwhelming to new players and with bread crumbs it felt like the whole city came to my poi and sandwiched me in there. There are still plenty of zombies in the wild, the number and what it does is deceiving. Last night I had 5 snow zombies from across the lake raid my dig quest and I got rekt, no way out. I was in that hole for under a minute and they broke out my frame box and dropped in the hole and I was toast.

 

Putting it simple, A18 is much harder than 17 "in the wild". There are cougars that pounce on you, coyotes that are fast, vultures etc. Its nasty. So nasty we set the default difficulty to adventurer and the team was still getting raped and it just felt like the biome zombies were this annoying pest that hunted you and there were way too many of them, maybe Shawns voodooo ai code is so nice now that there were always a LOT more zombies than we ever knew there were.

 

So we turned it down, there are still a lot, and they are pain in the ass, combined with rage speeds and animals, you will thank me for this change. The AI is so much better they hear and investigate to a new player with a fresh look at 18, I should have kept my mouth shut, nobody would have noticed, but instead it would be oh wow I'm surrounded and this is scary af.

 

So yeah the idea of less zombies sounds bad on the surface. Put simply there are less stupid zombies that can't find you or hear you idling around wasting cpu, but now more zombies (than 17) trying to eat you in your face. How does that sound?

 

So let me get this straight...you removed zombies only to add the rage mechanic to HELP newbs? Don’t you think the rage mechanic will end up being the rage-quit mechanic for newbs?

 

A17 - get boxed in by 10 zombies, you have a slim chance of surviving

A18 - get boxed in by 5 zombies with rage mechanic, get rekt

 

Is this accurate?

 

 

Loc

[madmole]

That's nice for you and your builds, MadMole but you aren't everyone else.

 

Some people like crude designs and you shouldn't shut them out. You keep your beautiful flush boxes but give others the option to keep old style tilling of shaiyt mountains. When you going to get stuck in to this conversation re: the your sacrilege against farming? 😏

 

P.S - I must admit, your 'voxel turd block' remark was hilarious 😂🤣

 

I mentioned we can consider bringing back voxel turd blocks after 18 drops, I think we need real feedback from hours logged. Its not far now. 23 mfs.

[Gazz]

Why so much emphasis on the new player? Like seriously? Where is this coming from?

I think you are forgetting that today’s gamers are pretty good at figuring things out.

No, they're not.

The majority of the typical starting problems in A17 could be avoided by reading the item descriptions or even... gasp... the journal entries explaining how stuff works.

 

If you watched any of the streams (performed by Today's Gamers)... that wasn't happening.

 

The reason why gamers think they are so smart is that many games are now focus-grouped to death and go out of their way to hold the gamers' hands. 7D largely allows players to do what they want when they want and that doesn't always work out well. =P

[madmole]

Farming is not simple. And it shouldn't be in game.

 

Its arguably more complex than 17. Why should farmers need blacksmith to get started?