[MOD] Better Than Giant Bees: Hardcore Survival

[Xamllew]

Hmm, so I have yet to find a skill book as of v1.13, can anyone confirm finding any so far? I have been through 3-4 towns, like 10 buildings and have found around 30 unusable books but not a single skill book. Gonna try reinstalling. They can't possibly be this sparse, if so, I will have found everything I need long before I find the books needed to make them.

[FlowerChild]

Hmm, so I have yet to find a skill book as of v1.13, can anyone confirm finding any so far? I have been through 3-4 towns, like 10 buildings and have found around 30 unusable books but not a single skill book. Gonna try reinstalling. They can't possibly be this sparse, if so, I will have found everything I need long before I find the books needed to make them.

 

Yup, I just started a new world and have found a few.

 

You might just be getting unlucky. 30 unusable books can be accumulated in 6 book shelves, and on average will be collected in 10, which really isn't that many. Rarity sounds about right to me, even if it represents a small bit of bad luck.

[FlowerChild]

Just as a follow up, based on the stats you provided, I believe there's about a 4% chance of looting 30 books from bookshelves without finding a skill book, or 1 in 25 times.

 

So yeah, unlucky, but not beyond the realm of reason. For a bit of perspective, that's actually WAY better (close to 10 times more likely) than the chances of being dealt pocket aces in any given hand of Texas Hold'em.

[Xamllew]

Just as a follow up, based on the stats you provided, I believe there's about a 4% chance of looting 30 books from bookshelves without finding a skill book, or 1 in 25 times.

 

So yeah, unlucky, but not beyond the realm of reason.

 

I'll keep looking but these odds are beginning to get more than I can believe, normally I'm finding at least one every other house. Is there any way I can check to see if they're in the loot list?

 

Nvm, I found the file and they're out there, guess I'm just one unlucky som'bitch.

[FlowerChild]

I'll keep looking but these odds are beginning to get more than I can believe, normally I'm finding at least one every other house. Is there any way I can check to see if they're in the loot list?

 

Nvm, I found the file and they're out there, guess I'm just one unlucky som'bitch.

 

It happens man. As I've mentioned before I'm not entirely happy with the randomness involved in the current progression, as there is the possibility you can play indefinitely without ever finding a skill book.

 

The odds of that happening are insanely low mind you, but I'd certainly prefer something a little more deterministic.

 

To keep in mind though is that you can survive indefinitely with just the starting skills. Everything beyond that is a bonus.

[LorenzoMatterhorn]

I love the idea of getting rid of the map and compass icons! I was actually thinking today that if I lost the map and all learned crafting skills when I died I might not play permadeath. But no map period would be fun too.

 

So after many more days and countless swings with the stone axe I finally decided I couldn't take it anymore. So I decided to mitigate the randomness. I added an upgrade to the stone axe. It requires a lot of scrap iron and metal pipes and the only change to the stone axe is a slight increase to the wood damage bonus. It's certainly no substitute for a fire axe but at least it gives me something to work towards.

[Xamllew]

It happens man. As I've mentioned before I'm not entirely happy with the randomness involved in the current progression, as there is the possibility you can play indefinitely without ever finding a skill book.

 

The odds of that happening are insanely low mind you, but I'd certainly prefer something a little more deterministic.

 

To keep in mind though is that you can survive indefinitely with just the starting skills. Everything beyond that is a bonus.

 

Yep, and once I do find a skill book the chance of it being the one I need are yet again a roll of dice, given this, I decided to just cheat in the major ones (pottery, forging, basic construction). Some of these basic books should be something like a 1/3 chance of being found IMO, especially since your mod adds in more books. The rest I'm fine with searching 30 houses per book but without the basic ones I really feel handicapped and that shouldn't be the case on day 20.

 

On another note, I'm not entirely sure how gun safes work yet, I've placed some 4 or 5 oil barrels around one to crack it (don't do this if they're upstairs) and nothing worked, blasted it about 10 times with a shotgun just for ♥♥♥♥s too.

[FlowerChild]

Yep, and once I do find a skill book the chance of it being the one I need are yet again a roll of dice, given this, I decided to just cheat in the major ones (pottery, forging, basic construction). Some of these basic books should be something like a 1/3 chance of being found IMO, especially since your mod adds in more books. The rest I'm fine with searching 30 houses per book but without the basic ones I really feel handicapped and that shouldn't be the case on day 20.

 

The thing is man, those aren't the "basic" books. Those three plus carpentry are basically the entire tech progression that's currently in 7 Days

 

One of the things that I dislike about the stock game at present is that you've essentially done it all in the first couple of weeks. While I don't like how random things currently are, I like the alternative way less.

 

Also, searching 30 houses per book is far from the norm. It currently averages 1 skill book for every 10 normal ones in bookshelves, with an average of 3 books per shelf, so as I said above, you just got rather unlucky. With the 30 books you found, normally you would have received about 3 skill books.

 

I think the question largely becomes whether you are enjoying the journey or just want to get to the destination. Once you can build structures freely and make yourself a sustainable fort is basically when you've "beaten" 7 Days, at which point, I know at least for me, it's time for a restart, and you're back to having nothing once again.

 

So, is it better then to go that route, or to invest more time in a single world over a longer span before getting to that destination? That's a question that will obviously vary from person to person, but I know I much prefer the single world with greater time in it approach and prefer to stay at the desperate survival and scavenging phase of the game for longer to that end.

[FlowerChild]

Oh, and on the topic of the greater number of books in the mod: you'll notice that one of the things I've done with that is split the "basic" skills you're talking about into multiple books. Forging actually requires the forge and pottery books. Building requires both Home Maintenance and Carpentry.

 

The reason for that is what I mentioned above, in that those are the key skills in the tech progression that lead to you beating the game and it being over and done with. They're basically the most powerful abilities you can gain, which is why I've split them up to make them more difficult to acquire, while the other skills are largely minor secondary abilities that help out, but which aren't total game changers.

[Tough.Resolve]

Oh, and on the topic of the greater number of books in the mod: you'll notice that one of the things I've done with that is split the "basic" skills you're talking about into multiple books. Forging actually requires the forge and pottery books. Building requires both Home Maintenance and Carpentry.

 

The reason for that is what I mentioned above, in that those are the key skills in the tech progression that lead to you beating the game and it being over and done with. They're basically the most powerful abilities you can gain, which is why I've split them up to make them more difficult to acquire, while the other skills are largely minor secondary abilities that help out, but which aren't total game changers.

 

Just to throw it out there, changing around the way that books spawn might help alleviate some of the RNG woes. Perhaps instead of adding the books to the current groups and therefore reducing the chances of each individual book dropping, you could add them to a new sub group. That way, the group being chosen would guarantee a drop of one of the new books, giving a higher chance of them dropping without raising the chance for each individual book. This could be further extended (depending on the amount of work you wish to do) by duplicating the bookshelf block (or using another, obviously) and giving it a higher chance to spawn these books. To further complicate things without making it easier for the player, also duplicate some of the prefabs that contain bookshelves and change the bookshelves to the new ones.

 

 

Oh, and thanks:

 

-Removed the ability to use toilets as a water source as that just provides an easy water supply in the wasteland biome, and doesn't go well with the many decorative options that they provide.

 

TIL you can get water from them (but not for long since I'm installing this mod )

[FlowerChild]

Just to throw it out there, changing around the way that books spawn might help alleviate some of the RNG woes. Perhaps instead of adding the books to the current groups and therefore reducing the chances of each individual book dropping, you could add them to a new sub group. That way, the group being chosen would guarantee a drop of one of the new books, giving a higher chance of them dropping without raising the chance for each individual book.

 

Yup, I realize, but I don't really see an advantage to doing it this way man. I don't really differentiate between stock books and the ones I've added for loot distribution, nor do I want to.

 

Stock books are heavily modified in BTGB anyways, so really, all books are mod books.

[Tough.Resolve]

Yup, I realize, but I don't really see an advantage to doing it this way man. I don't really differentiate between stock books and the ones I've added for loot distribution, nor do I want to.

 

Stock books are heavily modified in BTGB anyways, so really, all books are mod books.

 

Fair enough, I hadn't actually checked the changes you'd made. Though the regrouping could still be used to reduce or eliminate the occurrence of duplicate books in the same drop.

[FlowerChild]

Fair enough, I hadn't actually checked the changes you'd made. Though the regrouping could still be used to reduce or eliminate the occurrence of duplicate books in the same drop.

 

Doesn't really happen here. Loot probabilities are quite different than stock.

[FlowerChild]

[**** NEW RELEASE ****]

 

Version 1.14 of Better Than Giant Bees is ready for download!

 

Download Link

 

This release contains the following changes:

 

-Added plank drops to wood stairs on destruction.

 

-Changed wood logs placed as blocks to fall if unsupported from below. This allows them to be used as an early game building material while still providing incentive to progress towards more advanced construction techniques given a barricade made of them will quickly collapse when attacked. Note that this also applies to the upgraded forms of logs as well (reinforced with wood and scrap metal).

 

-Changed cooking pots, drift wood, and campfires to not be capable of being used in building unsupported horizontal "bridges", similar to the log change above.

 

-Changed the first aid bandage recipe to use a regular bandage and aloe cream, to make it more of an upgrade to the regular bandage.

 

-Changed (reduced) the overall probability of finding wrenches as they were a tad too common. Also moved finding them mostly in cupboards over to cars to have a little more control over how many the player has potential access to (given cars are rarer).

 

-Changed the iron fragment drops on some light fixtures to scrap iron for consistency with the brass ones.

 

-Changed brass items such as trophies, door knobs, and candle sticks so that they don't appear both in trash and from zombie drops and moved those same items to being found in dressers, as the game was over-saturated with brass, and that whole thing with zombies carrying around big brass items in their pockets was rather odd, even if they did seem quite happy to see me.

 

-Changed (reduced) the probability of finding cowboy hats, and removed the ability to scrap them into cloth, as the combination of their better-than-cloth stats, repairing them with leather, and finding them so abundantly was making them a rather weird and out of place item.

 

-Changed (reduced) the durability of hollow tree stumps to make them a bit easier to clean up after looting, and removed the wood plank drop from them.

 

-Changed metal store shelves to be much easier to break down for scrap iron, given those kinds of shelves are rather easy to break down

 

-Fixed a few boarded doorways that weren't dropping planks on destruction.

 

-Removed oil and gunpowder from both garbage and zombie loot given their value and to make weapon maintenance a little more challenging.

 

Enjoy!

[Dzeintra]

 

-Removed oil and gunpowder from both garbage and zombie loot given their value and to make weapon maintenance a little more challenging.

 

 

That's one thing that has confused me, greatly. Who throws out full bottles of oil? And is it like, any old oil, like olive oil, or peanut oil, or are you finding a whole bunch of wood-oil bottles, where you upend them on your wood stuff and rub it over to help maintain the wood?

 

I hope that maybe we can potentially get olive trees (that actually fruit) and squish them into pulp to make our own oil. At great expense of stamina. Sort of like stomping on grapes to make wine. You get exhausted, stink like rotten fruit and get -really- bad tasting wine.

 

Compared to the wine nowadays.

 

(And I'm an avid crossbow-girl. I only use guns for dogs usually, and there is a particular pleasure in sneaking up on a deer and shivving it with a sharp stabby thing)

[FlowerChild]

That's one thing that has confused me, greatly. Who throws out full bottles of oil? And is it like, any old oil, like olive oil, or peanut oil, or are you finding a whole bunch of wood-oil bottles, where you upend them on your wood stuff and rub it over to help maintain the wood?

 

I suspect it's intended to be gun oil, or some petroleum based oil which could be used for the lubricating and maintaining of firearms. Hence why it's used in the weapon repair kit recipe. The bottle kinda gives the impression it's motor oil, but I have no idea how effective that would be at cleaning a firearm.

 

Keeping it as a non-specific "oil" is probably wise from a design standpoint as well as that makes it flexible in terms of what recipes it can be made part of in the future.

 

(And I'm an avid crossbow-girl. I only use guns for dogs usually, and there is a particular pleasure in sneaking up on a deer and shivving it with a sharp stabby thing)

 

Well, that's likely because the crossbow is so overpowered that it makes firearms relatively useless by comparison.

 

Never said the crossbow isn't useful. More that it's too useful, and thus wrecks many other aspects of the game. Hopefully the pimps will eventually nerf the hell out of it to bring it more in line with being the easiest to obtain ranged weapon in the game (and the easiest to find ammo for as well), but as it stands, the game is just more fun without it.

 

With the way it is now, I doubt guns would have ever been developed historically, as there just wouldn't have been a need

[Dzeintra]

 

Well, that's likely because the crossbow is so overpowered that it makes firearms relatively useless by comparison.

 

 

True. I do look forward to future adaptations where you gotta adjust your angle for distance, and wind resistance, and bouncing off the trees you're trying to shoot through ... then you can get into the super fancy trick shots or whichever.

 

And I do know you dislike crossbows in your games, I rely almost exclusively on it but then ... I'm the girl that dies four times trying to make a sleeping bag. On the server I play I have a whopping score of 37. I have killed 125 zombies and died 19 times for it.

 

I love your ideas, and your humour, and the amount of effort you put into your mods and I would -love- to try them out. But I die 12 times just trying to survive the first four days. This is on a server where things are tweaked to be rather easy to survive in, plenty of food, water and foraging that respawns. I would spend more time dead, than alive, in your awesome mods.

 

I also like the giant bees. Food that comes to you! (And crossbows are one shot kills)

[Sadeyx]

Im pretty new to the game and not convinced that crossbows are that over powered, they could do with some tuning however!

 

The problem I with them is the very low resources required to make them. Is it not possible to adjust the recipes? Personally I would make them require TONS more wood and iron and not have them be completly constructable in one go. I would rather a system of crafting up the parts like with guns.

 

On top of this, I think if you increased the re-load time significantly that would nerf them enough. You could also make them deteriorate much faster.

 

edit - same with the arrows themselves :3

[razorboi]

This mod sounds wonderful, I am one who definetly loves a hard core survival game.

 

I was wondering if this mod would work on a multiplayer dedicated server?

[LorenzoMatterhorn]

Hey FC, on a whim I removed Weapon repair kits from the game (using your mod) and I've been pretty happy with the results. It makes finding guns or parts much more exciting and useful after you have already got a gun. In vanilla, once I had one of each gun I wanted I wouldn't even bother looting most safes or munitions boxes. Now, I'm constantly thinking "this shotgun only has 50 shots left before it breaks, do I want to waste them on this fatty?"

 

I'm still loving the mod btw, can't wait to try out the newest version!

[Cork55]

Im pretty new to the game and not convinced that crossbows are that over powered, they could do with some tuning however!

 

The problem I with them is the very low resources required to make them. Is it not possible to adjust the recipes? Personally I would make them require TONS more wood and iron and not have them be completly constructable in one go. I would rather a system of crafting up the parts like with guns.

 

On top of this, I think if you increased the re-load time significantly that would nerf them enough. You could also make them deteriorate much faster.

 

edit - same with the arrows themselves :3

 

There are a few things that can be done to better balance cross bows.

 

1. I have created an Archery Book and tied the bolt and cross bow recipes to it. This delays the ability to make a crossbow at the start of the game.

 

2. You can modify the crossbow recipe to require a weapon stock and small pipe(s) to further increase the time it takes to make a crossbow.

 

The biggest item missing is proper arrowheads. I hate that the game uses sharpened stones that don't even look like arrowheads. If I could, I would require them to be made from iron which would also require some effort to collect the required resources.

 

Another idea that could be used would to require the player to equip some sort of quiver that would limit the number of arrows that could be carried.

[Xamllew]

Bone could also be used for the arrowhead, bone desperately needs a use anyway.

 

I suspect it's intended to be gun oil, or some petroleum based oil which could be used for the lubricating and maintaining of firearms. Hence why it's used in the weapon repair kit recipe. The bottle kinda gives the impression it's motor oil, but I have no idea how effective that would be at cleaning a firearm.

 

Keeping it as a non-specific "oil" is probably wise from a design standpoint as well as that makes it flexible in terms of what recipes it can be made part of in the future.

 

 

Motor oil can be used as an improvised gun lubricant, in fact some gun owners prefer it. Works the same way in a car. I think it works best given the post-apoc circumstances. I agree that keeping it as generic oil makes the most sense, but I like to imagine it is motor oil because it makes it seem like you're using what you got at your disposal.

 

One thing I'm not cool with however, is sticking some strips of metal onto your hunting knife to repair it, that stuff is just silly. I think repairing metal tools and weapons such as pickaxes or knives should require some time in front of the forge and, maybe in the future, on the anvil.

 

 

Changed wood logs placed as blocks to fall if unsupported from below.

I'm not crazy about this, mainly because I'm working on a log palisade around my fort, I use logs for the aesthetic, but now they're going to be torn down in minutes.

[Peppino]

You see the part in the thread title about hardcore survival? Then why you asking me to make it less hardcore?

 

I don't like giant bees thematically, but no way I would take them out entirely as they fill a valuable gameplay role. Same for dogs, except I think they're fine thematically.

 

hardcore survival like to die of thurst or to die of getting raped by zombies? In my opinion both of them belongs to survival in 7D2D. One thing to makes the difficulty more balanced is, to reduce a bit the zombie count at day especially outside of towns and buildings. Why? Because zombies at day are just a pain in the ass and thefore no challenge because a walking zombie at day is just a reason to run around. The day belongs to get food over the day and the night. The REAL zombie challenge must be at night: running zombies, low visibility and MUCH more zombies. Thats the time for zombie survival and to defend the base u build up at day. Nevermind, it's just my suggestion after 600+ hours played in 7d2d

 

In my opinion bees just suck around and doing almost nothing atm except of stressing the server performance. Dogs are OP with the highest grade difficulty and are mostly the sentence of death without weapons. Thats no challenge.

[FlowerChild]

I was wondering if this mod would work on a multiplayer dedicated server?

 

At present it sounds like custom items with custom recipes bug out unless both the client and server have the mod installed, which is a problem common to all 7 Days mods that add that kind of stuff, not just this one.

 

So, the answer will depend on whether it's a public server or a private one where you can get all the players to install the mod as well.

 

Motor oil can be used as an improvised gun lubricant, in fact some gun owners prefer it.

 

I figured it probably could, but didn't want to say for certain as I've only maintained military firearms with issued gun oil, and never bothered to ask what was in the stuff

 

Thanks for clearing that up. I was regretting never finding that out for myself in the past when it came up.

 

One thing I'm not cool with however, is sticking some strips of metal onto your hunting knife to repair it, that stuff is just silly. I think repairing metal tools and weapons such as pickaxes or knives should require some time in front of the forge and, maybe in the future, on the anvil.

 

Yeah, the metal strips bit is quite the abstraction, but it still works rather well in terms of spending your limited resources (at least here) on maintaining various items.

 

Also, a different repair system geared towards being more "realistic" would likely have to also rebalance durability. Personally, I'm fine with how it is.

 

I'm not crazy about this, mainly because I'm working on a log palisade around my fort, I use logs for the aesthetic, but now they're going to be torn down in minutes.

 

Well, that's unfortunate, but the mod is still heavily WIP and thus changes like this are inevitable. I wasn't even aware logs were placeable until someone told me about it a couple of days ago, and my immediate reaction was to want to rip out being able to build with them entirely.

 

After doing a test-run up to the 7th day horde yesterday though, I decided they made for a really interesting early game building material *if* that change was made. Otherwise, there's no reason to ever really want to upgrade to frames etc., at which point the whole skill progression falls apart.

 

So, too bad about your fort, but I'm certainly not going to avoid changes that need to be made for stuff like that.

 

Nevermind, it's just my suggestion after 600+ hours played in 7d2d

 

How much have you played the mod though? It's probably best to refrain from making suggestions about it unless you've invested some time in the mod itself as the balance of it is quite different than stock.

[Xamllew]

I guess I can settle with just using those odd looking plank pillars.

 

Yeah, the metal strips bit is quite the abstraction, but it still works rather well in terms of spending your limited resources (at least here) on maintaining various items.

 

I don't think it works very well at all currently, I mean, once you've got a forge you can craft ingots, one ingot makes 4 refined bars which makes 12 pipes, 12 pipes makes 60 strips, so one ingot is enough to fully repair any tool.