[MOD] Better Than Giant Bees: Hardcore Survival

[Chaosocks]

You can roleplay that you're a guy sitting at a desk playing a modded video game in which you just spawned two miles away.

 

There you go. Most realistic roleplaying experience ever.

 

I also enjoy popping into mod threads going on about how they are completely different mods than the one I want. Thanks for stopping by.

 

That's got to me the least mature response I have ever heard. o_O

Wow, why does NO ONE on this forum have any respect for anyone else's opinion?

I basically just told you I liked your mod, and you say something like that because I had one tiny criticism?

 

Dear god, I should feel ashamed I guess, wanting to share opinions and ideas with another modder with similar ideas to me. Sheesh, I'm sorry.

[FlowerChild]

Dear god, I should feel ashamed I guess, wanting to share opinions and ideas with another modder with similar ideas to me. Sheesh, I'm sorry.

 

Not at all man. You shared your opinions on my mod and I shared my opinions on your opinions. You obviously don't agree with mine, and I don't agree with yours.

 

Throwing out the first opinion does not somehow guarantee immunity from having others expressed in return. If you would defend your right to express yours, I'd hope that you'd also acknowledge the validity of me expressing mine.

 

You think that being able to roleplay what happens when you die in a game and somehow magically materialize back into the world is an important consideration. I consider it entirely irrelevant because you're already so far out of the realm of believability in respawning in the first place that the exact mechanism behind how it occurs has very little impact on how a player justifies it. Opinions all around and everyone is freely expressing them.

 

IMO, what does become important on respawning is how much of the player's progress is retained, as especially in these kind of creative/survival games, perma-death and losing everything you've worked on is both harshly punishing, and discourages the player from building interesting stuff in the first place as they know they're inevitably going to lose it.

 

Hence why I lean towards a very similar respawn mechanic to what I've used in another one of my mods, Better Than Wolves, that has been referred to sometimes as a "persistent rogue like". The death penalty is severe and about as close as you can get to premadeath without the soul crushing experience of losing absolutely everything in a save. Thus, you still fear death and try to avoid it at all costs, but without discouraging player creativity in the process by making everything feel like a sand-castle that is about to get jumped on.

[Chaosocks]

Not at all man. You shared your opinions on my mod and I shared my opinions on your opinions. You obviously don't agree with mine, and I don't agree with yours.

 

Throwing out the first opinion does not somehow guarantee immunity from having others expressed in return. If you would defend your right to express yours, I'd hope that you'd also acknowledge the validity of me expressing mine.

 

You think that being able to roleplay what happens when you die in a game and somehow magically materialize back into the world is an important consideration. I consider it entirely irrelevant because you're already so far out of the realm of believability in respawning in the first place that the exact mechanism behind how it occurs has very little impact on how a player justifies it. Opinions all around and everyone is freely expressing them.

Now see, you didn't say that. I totally respect your opinion on what you like in games, and never called it into question, just stated mine. Now, what you did was mock me like a child for having a slightly different opinion then you. That's not an opinion, that's just being rude and bratty.

 

And some people enjoy trying to keep their game within the realm of possibility. Which is why i usually play one life deaths, so if I die, I die. I never asked, or even suggested you change your mod based on my opinion, I just mentioned I personally didn't like that part. Feedback matters to a lot of people, many people really do care to make not just the mod they want, but the mod other people want. I would rather assume someone might be open minded, and might care about my feedback, then just assume no one is ever open minded enough to listen, and I should never say anything opinion based to anyone ever because they might disagree and mock me.

 

Though I am starting to think that is true on this forum. e_e

 

EDIT TO YOUR EDIT: While I can understand that, I personally find building giant bases to be VERY OP and game breaking, so I put in a lot of limitation to make building bases harder, so a big base is not just an accomplishment but a good way of keeping yourself alive. I enjoy playing creatively, but that gets boring fast. I like risk, and slow paced intense gameplay that requires a lot of thinking. If you are running low on supplies, is it worth it to brave a trip to town, or do you stay low in your base and try to survive on corn for another week.

[FlowerChild]

Now see, you didn't say that. I totally respect your opinion on what you like in games, and never called it into question, just stated mine. Now, what you did was mock me like a child for having a slightly different opinion then you. That's not an opinion, that's just being rude and bratty.

 

As far as I can tell, you are commenting on something you haven't even tried, and offering in-depth advice on how others should tweak an experience that, again, you have not experienced yourself. You are now taking offense and making an ongoing deal out of it because I have treated those comments as such, and it's repeatedly bordering on an ad hominem attack on my level of maturity while you're simultaneously objecting to how people treat each other on these forums.

 

Am I dismissive of such opinions and consider them rather presumptuous, of extremely limited value and basically amounting to a bunch of random noise? Yes, entirely, and again, that's my own opinion which I've obviously conveyed quite well.

[Chaosocks]

As far as I can tell, you are commenting on something you haven't even tried, and offering in-depth advice on how others should tweak an experience that, again, you have not experienced yourself. You are now taking offense and making an ongoing deal out of it because I have treated those comments as such, and it's repeatedly bordering on an ad hominem attack on my level of maturity while you're simultaneously objecting to how people treat each other on these forums.

 

Am I dismissive of such opinions and consider them rather presumptuous, of extremely limited value and basically amounting to a bunch of random noise? Yes, entirely, and again, that's my own opinion which I've obviously conveyed quite well.

That mechanic is included in the vanilla game, and I use about 70~80% of these or similar edits myself before ever even coming across this thread, so yes actually, unlike what you believe everyone who's opinion varies from yours ever so slightly isn't totally insane having no idea what they are talking about. You know what they say about assuming though. I can tell what you are going for, I just think spawning in the woods and being forced to walk back to your base is a silly, pointless mechanic that adds nothing but walking time. Unless you are having DayZ withdrawals, I don't see the point in that.

 

And there is absolutely nothing remotely rouge like about spawning away from your base... "Rouge like" doesn't mean "walking simulator" you know, right? That's not an opinion, that's fact. The way I play, one life death games on random gen is in fact "rouge like", as rouge like implies randomly generated worlds and permanent death. Losing your character is the punishment, not 10 minutes of mind numbing boredom walking through the desert, to come home to your crops all grown up and the zombies wandering off.

 

Lastly, again, that's not an opinion, that's just being a rude, stuck up, bratty person. So no, I am not jabbing at your maturity, you are, cause a mature person doesn't treat the opinions of others like white noise after publicly posting their mod to an internet forum for modding discussion, and a mature person doesn't say "it's my opinion to ignore you and think you're stupid and there's nothing you can do about it so NGHH" ... that's something a 10 year old does. Especially thinking a personality tick like ignoring people who only want to offer you help is an opinion.

[FlowerChild]

Lastly, again, that's not an opinion, that's just being a rude, stuck up, bratty person.

 

Uh huh. Regardless, I'm done with this conversation as I see no value running in these kinds of circles while you insist on flinging mud. I'd ask you to please stop attempting to disrupt the thread and move along to an environment more suited and receptive to your tastes and opinions.

[Neb]

 

"avoid areas in which there are dogs "

 

"never go into the wasteland or burnt forest unless I am completely decked out with kit and ammo"

 

"dogs"

 

"dogs" "additional level of danger"

 

Guess I'm a pretty risky player in that case.

 

*Goes back to tromping around the burnt forest with only a sharpened bone*

 

On Topic: Love the new update, inability to make gravel is especially debilitating for my previous early game strategies.

 

Edit: Then again, I did start to use cooking pots after awhile. This is due to them being able to take a serious beating, easily picked up and the ability to be used as bridges/building "ladders"/etc..

[FlowerChild]

Edit: Then again, I did start to use cooking pots after awhile. This is due to them being able to take a serious beating, easily picked up and the ability to be used as bridges/building "ladders"/etc..

 

Well, that's another one for me to look at then. Are you saying you can build horizontally outwards with them? If that's the case then it should be easy enough to fix.

 

I use sofas to plug holes in defenses and such, but those things break to a stiff breeze and they certainly can't be used to build horizontal.

[FlowerChild]

Ok, it's a bit of a can of worms with the above. I was able to easily limit being able to build horizontally with the cooking pots, but limiting vertical stacking is a whole other matter.

 

I tried out a bunch of blocks, and you can even vertically stack campfires for a "ladder".

 

I'm not sure if the game currently has the ability to limit this. I've been playing around with a number of settings trying to get blocks to fall when placed on non-solid blocks like that, but so far, no dice :\

[FlowerChild]

Yeah...turns out even tall grass will support blocks above it. Never knew that and it's rather at odds with the whole construction stability system in the game.

 

For now, doesn't look like there's much I can do on that end. Will try to come up with an alternate solution to limit the effectiveness of cooking pots and campfires in that role though, since they are so easy to stockpile in the early game.

[zackss]

Yeah, I hear you on this one, and it's something I've been considering myself. Problem is that it isn't just limited to gravel, but extends to other blocks like dirt as well.

 

Will continue to consider the alternatives as I further develop the mod as obviously it can be used to bypass a lot of the construction limitations I have in place.

While it wouldn't help the use for climbing, you could make all the "loose" materials just ridiculously easy for zombies to dig through. If they can break through stone and wood, a little digging should be trivial.

[FlowerChild]

While it wouldn't help the use for climbing, you could make all the "loose" materials just ridiculously easy for zombies to dig through. If they can break through stone and wood, a little digging should be trivial.

 

Yeah, doesn't really help with the whole noob-tower (Minecraft term...not sure if 7 Days people use it) your way upwards by jumping up a single column of cooking pots thing though, which I think is the main problem here, rather than the defensive options it might provide (which seem limited to me).

 

I played around a bit with it earlier today, and it gets real weird real quick with big columns of half-floating cooking pots extending skyward, that allow you to both climb up high real quick, then come back down almost as fast, recollecting your materials along the way.

 

It's a particular problem with the pots due to the whole "hit button to collect" thing where you don't even have to spend time harvesting them again.

 

I may convert pots into a non-placeable item upon initial collection or something to work around that particular issue, but will likely have to come up with another solution for camp fires and any other blocks that might have this problem. Still thinking about it though and hoping there's some feature I've yet to discover in the config files that might help me resolve it.

[BloodSlinger]

You're essentially running into the vertical system that's been in place and discussed for a long, long time.

 

The only requirement is no space in the vertical column. It doesn't matter what's in it, as long as something is, and it's probably still possible to later remove (creating a space) without collapse depending on side connections and if it ever recalculates again (there were cases it didn't).

 

Haven't messed around with the stability system in a very long time so I don't have any notion if they changed any of that at this point. But, there's still a ton of players actively building massive constructions so they should be able to clarify if what I just said is still the case or if anything has changed in A10 related to it.

[Cork55]

FlowerChild, I tried to add a few recipes to your recipe file and now there are no recipes showing up in the game. I can revert to your base file, but can't seem to add anything new to the file. Have you seen this before?

[BloodSlinger]

@Cork55 - It's because there's an error in his recipes file.

 

@FlowerChild - you have this near the bottom:

 <recipe name="Fried Egg" count="1" scrapable="False" craft_area="campfire" craft_tool="cookingGrill" craft_time="5">
   <ingredient name="egg" count="1" />
 </recipe>

 

That's invalid. The name of a recipe is literally the name of an existing in-game item. Case sensitive and no spaces. That entry is causing the game to stop parsing all recipes following that entry.

 

You might want to use a recipe editor to eliminate all such types of mistakes. Just a suggestion

[FlowerChild]

You're essentially running into the vertical system that's been in place and discussed for a long, long time.

 

Yeah, this is just a case of me making faulty assumptions in the past based on how I thought the construction system worked. Given the horizontal stability system that I knew was in place, it never occurred to me to try to stack weird objects like that. I just took it for granted that situation would be handled appropriately, since the horizontal bit is the more complex case.

 

Even if there were just a flag in place to specify whether a block had a valid top surface on which to support stuff I think it would go a long way. I was digging in the configs for such a flag yesterday and figured stuff like campfires and grass would have it set, but only wound up discovering I could build on top of such blocks as well

[BloodSlinger]

@Cork55 - in case it's not obvious you can simply comment out or delete the invalid entry I described above. Also the fact you're saying nothing shows up after you make an edit implies you're doing something wrong. The XML parser in the game will process every valid entry until reaching an invalid element and stop.

 

So for you to see no recipes at all actually indicates an addition issue created by your technique / however you're editing it / probably missing a closing tag on an element or attribute. If you're doing it manually you may want to try the editor I mentioned until you're more comfortable with manually editing XML.

 

XML itself is a well defined structure, but does not forgive missing opening and closing tags or other minimum formatting of the structure to be considered valid.

 

I have no idea if FlowerChild did that in error or perhaps did it on purpose to prevent the normal means by which people modify recipes, but obliterating that invalid entry should do the trick as long as the editing is done properly.

[FlowerChild]

That's invalid. The name of a recipe is literally the name of an existing in-game item. Case sensitive and no spaces. That entry is causing the game to stop parsing all recipes following that entry.

 

Don't think that's the case man. Yes, the recipe is referring to the name of an item I've created as the output, and the name with spaces is what ends up being displayed in the absence of a translation entry which is why I've formatted it like that. I've run many tests to verify that it works as expected.

 

I've also had that recipe in different parts of the file before without error (I originally had it right after the boiled egg recipe higher in the file, then moved my additional recipes down to the bottom of the file for easy reference/merging).

 

If what you were saying is true, the recipe for scrapping clothing I've added would also cease to function, which is obviously not the case.

 

And no, don't want to use a recipe editor as ultimately that just slows me down and makes merging recipes from version to version of 7 Days more difficult

[BloodSlinger]

Don't think that's the case man...

 

Yes, it is.

 

Change your cloth entry following your "Fried Egg" to this:

 

   <recipe name="cloth" count="1" scrapable="False" tooltip="Cloth" craft_time="5" >
           <ingredient name="brownGrassDiagonal" count="1" grid="-2, -2" />
   </recipe>

 

Load the game and put a single grass in the top left. For some reason the cloth doesn't show up for crafting.

 

Go comment out your invalid "Fried Egg" entry and leave the cloth as was just modified, load game, grass in top left, you now make a cloth for that grass. Hence, the "Fried Egg" is breaking the in-game XML item parser preventing anything following it from being processed as normal.

 

 

Or to prove what I'm saying without doing anything more custom at all, move your "Fried Egg" recipe to the top of the file, save it, load game, go try to make a sharp stone. You won't be able to.

 

I've been doing this a very long time. I know what I'm talking about.

 

Edited:

For maximum clarification, this applies directly to - only - using the recipes file from your mod and no other file from it. That's the distinction. When the parser doesn't recognize an item (or encounters invalid entries) it halts there.

 

The reason it works with all files from your mod installed is because you define the literal name of that item as name="Fried Egg" in items.xml.

 

This is what I meant by a recipe name is the literal name of an item.

[FlowerChild]

Load the game and put a single grass in the top left. For some reason the cloth doesn't show up for crafting.

 

That's because grass has nothing to do with crafting cloth in this mod man.

 

I've been doing this a very long time. I know what I'm talking about.

 

Well...apparently you don't man, as like I said I've tested this extensively, it works consistently, and no errors have been reported by people using the mod either here, or over on my forums.

 

I'd very much appreciate it if you actually tested your assumptions before asserting there's an error in what I've done, as you're creating a lot of needless confusion here for nothing.

 

This is what I meant by a recipe name is the literal name of an item.

 

Yes, and given I define the literal name in items.xml this is not an issue. As I said, I'm using the in-game name of "Fried Egg" as the literal name both in the definition of the item and the recipe because in the absence of a translation file entry, the literal name of the item is displayed in game.

 

If I followed your poor advice, the item in-game would show as "friedEgg", instead of "Fried Egg". I've intentionally named the item that way in order to get a more reasonable in-game result.

 

Edited:

For maximum clarification, this applies directly to - only - using the recipes file from your mod and no other file from it. That's the distinction. When the parser doesn't recognize an item (or encounters invalid entries) it halts there.

 

Ok...so what you're saying is that if you only install parts of the mod it breaks the mod.

 

Gratz. Stunning observation there

[BloodSlinger]

The issue is I used only the recipe file looking for issues. I didn't put all the mod files over, therefore the new "Fried Egg" item didn't exist, thereby causing the issue.

 

What I said is 100% accurate regarding the fact a recipe is a literal in-game item. In this case this specific issue is on me, not you, for not copying over all the files and then examining the results. So, I'll take that hit.

 

In the end my goal was to assist Cork55 to understand why he's getting an error. Seeing the "Fried Egg" threw me off since it's such a common mistake, and was at the end of the file.

[FlowerChild]

In the end my goal was to assist Cork55 to understand why he's getting an error. Seeing the "Fried Egg" threw me off since it's such a common mistake, and was at the end of the file.

 

Ok, so what you're really saying here is that you made a mistake, and everything else you said previously is in error, doesn't apply to the mod, and you've essentially wasted our time and created a lot of confusion here for nothing.

 

Thanks for clearing that up without saying as much directly.

[BloodSlinger]

... If I followed your poor advice, the item in-game would show as "friedEgg", instead of "Fried Egg". I've intentionally named the item that way in order to get a more reasonable in-game result.

 

I wasn't giving advice. I was describing how every item ever created by TFP has been defined since the game came into existence.

 

Some people here help others often. No-one is perfect and mistakes are made, and some are simply a douche-bag.

 

Luckily everyone gets to read every word and decide for themselves which is which.

[FlowerChild]

Some people here help others often. No-one is perfect and mistakes are made, and some are simply a douche-bag.

 

Thinly veiled ad hominem because you made a mistake but don't want to really acknowledge it. Very nice.

 

You just had me jumping in and out of game testing your faulty assumptions man. Under such circumstances "sorry, my bad" is a fairly reasonable alternative to hurling insults.

[BloodSlinger]

... What I said is 100% accurate regarding the fact a recipe is a literal in-game item. In this case this specific issue is on me, not you, for not copying over all the files and then examining the results. So, I'll take that hit...

 

Perhaps that was buried in the flurry then, because I did of course account for the fact it was on me.

 

But I'll take the high road and go ahead - my bad!

 

It would still be good to know what Cork55 is doing to break the file to help him get past his issue.