Instead of Stone Age...

[Ripflex]

Instead of stone age weapons and tools, why not make them Scrap Age !  Yes, make the lowest levels stuff repurposed scrap equivanced weapons and tools ?  This way it makes more sense finding around everywhere.  The stone axe and wooden club fine for the start but then players need to scrap metal stuff and mine a few iron nodes to move up from there ?

 

This would make more sense than finding stone tech everywhere, but repurposed scrap tools and weapons (melee)...

 

Just a thought.

[pApA^LeGBa]

I would prefer a scrap age after the stone age tbh. The new slower progression in early game is nice but after the stone age things still get too easy very fast.

[Vanetooth]

A scrap age would be cool. I do like the new progression but I also do like my immersion, and finding a tier 2 wooden club in a shotgun messiah crate kinda breaks that. 

[pApA^LeGBa]

@Vanetooth Well, what you gonna do with the shotgun crates during the stone age? Not sure if you can tie their existence to game stage, and how would you introduce them in the game after you reached a game stage where you find the proper loot in it? Just making them pop up in POI´s that didn´t have them before would break immersion even more.

[Vanetooth]

@pApA^LeGBa Just an idea here, but what if you had to be a certain level in a certain perk to be able to open them? like what if they made it so you need 3 points in lucky looter to be able to open it? or maybe you could have it so you can't use the gun until you put a point into the governing perk. I mean realistically if you don't know how a gun works you probably won't be able to reload/maintain it. Maybe you can get guns but you can't reload them until you put a point into it's perk? Not too sure though, grasping at straws here. Balancing realism and gameplay is tough.

[pApA^LeGBa]

People would just rush lucky looter or the needed perk then and balance would be messed up. I could see a renaming it to Weapons messiah or some other not gun specific name.

[Vanetooth]

Could always just make it require like 5 points in perception before you could get it, but I see what you are saying. Would make more sense if they named it a weapons crate and then added scrap weapons. Still think it's ridiculous I can find "primitive" weapons in crates and stuff like that, would make more sense if we could only find stone tools and primitive weapons in like survivor camps or something.

[Ezed]

I'd give the stone axe melee stats like a club, digging stats like a shovel and call it the starter multi-tool.  Keep the primitive bow so those two tutorial items stay, but don't appear in loot tables.  Then, just have 3 tiers (or 4 or whatever they want) of actual commercial type weapons for each tree that you can buy or loot or eventually craft.  

 

 

 

[mr.devolver]

2 hours ago, Ripflex said:

Instead of stone age weapons and tools, why not make them Scrap Age !  Yes, make the lowest levels stuff repurposed scrap equivanced weapons and tools ?  This way it makes more sense finding around everywhere.  The stone axe and wooden club fine for the start but then players need to scrap metal stuff and mine a few iron nodes to move up from there ?

 

This would make more sense than finding stone tech everywhere, but repurposed scrap tools and weapons (melee)...

 

Just a thought.

 

Why not both? How about stone age and then scrap age? Maybe with a little bit faster transition between them to make sure that the players won't get bored by the time they get some good stuff.

[Solomon]

2 hours ago, Ripflex said:

Instead of stone age weapons and tools, why not make them Scrap Age !  Yes, make the lowest levels stuff repurposed scrap equivanced weapons and tools ?  This way it makes more sense finding around everywhere.  The stone axe and wooden club fine for the start but then players need to scrap metal stuff and mine a few iron nodes to move up from there ?

 

This would make more sense than finding stone tech everywhere, but repurposed scrap tools and weapons (melee)...

 

Just a thought.

Stone axe too is kind of pushing it, im not sure about you but as a kid i tried to simply break a rock in half in a line and it managed to shatter into 3 pieces. Its quite hard to make even stone arrowheads and such, the stone shovel is downright impossible to make in reality.

 

Scrap items on the other side actually make sense, a wooden shovel, simple wood arrows without a head part, any sturdy piece of metal as an axe and soo on.

[Vanetooth]

True, would make more sense if they added wooden arrows that were literally just sharpened sticks with feathers. Stone shovel never really made sense to me either. Yea in terms of realism the tools are interesting to say the least. I'm a huge fan of progression in terms of both tools and skills, and I think the game would benefit from more tiers of tools. Especially since the devs haven't added a late game yet and seem to be just trying to prolong the early game, more tiers of tools/weapons could really help with that, especially if done right.

[doughphunghus]

I feel TFP aren't going to go for it, but yeah I agree.  maybe give the player a pocket knife as a starting item (or you have to find it...or "craft" it by finding scrap metal and "sharpening" it, and you need it to craft sharpened things like crude arrows (mentioned above) .  Also: plain wooden "stick/stake/spear" you have to have some wood and a sharpener for.  Maybe just find "sharpened metal piece" on the ground, or something.   I don't know how to "tier" all this stuff and make it useful past "super-super-super early game" but maybe make about 5? things you can quickly pick up/find fast that are almost useless but can allow you to kill a zed if you really fight them with it.

 

Stone shovel: yeah, never something I liked as a concept.  I heard someone mention on the forums about "using a road sign and bending it" to make a shovel which would be cool, especially since there are road signs in the game...but not super common to find them.  Maybe a "wooden scoop" or (someone else mentioned somewhere) a " bone shovel" crafted from bones.

 

Back to the crafting basic things: Maybe the backpack needs "tool slots" to craft certain things like the forge/chem station?  Like, you couldn't craft certain beginning game tools (like stone axe, spear) without a pocket knife, ummm....a pair of pliers, screwdriver...(you get the idea, make certain "commonly found handyman tools" required to be in your backpack crafting slots.  Maybe there are 10 tools and you can only equip 3 at a time in those slots.  If this were done, then having a "super-super-super low tier weapons/items would be a necessity in early game until you found the handyman tools to then craft the low level axes/spears.  And additionally: if you were 'out and about" and you needed arrows, damn, you had better brought your pocket knife.   Maybe you eventually craft a "better backpack" that has more slots to hold all the tools so crafting then returns to what it is today.

 

I know this level of "low level grind crafting" will put off a lot of people, but just throwing out how I think it could work and still feel "survival/real".

 

[iamnuff]

Scrap age makes a lot more sense. 

 

We're post-apocalyptic survivors, in-or-around a city that still stands. 

We're not cavemen. 

There's a whole world of worked iron and random metal junk out there. Why would anything be made out of rocks and sticks? 

 

This isn't Conan: Exiles, or Far Cry: Primal. The tone for even the most basic of items should always have been 'scavanged from a ruined city' 

Not 'I lashed a rock to a tree-branch and can now defend myself from sabertooth tigers' 

 

Honestly? The early game is slow as hell, but that wouldn't bother me as much if it wasn't so tonally all over the place. 

 

I don't want to raid a Working Stiff store and find crates full of stone tools, as though they were having a clearance sale directed towards cavemen. 

Granted, finding scrap tools packaged neatly into boxes as though awaiting shipment wouldn't make perfect sense, but it wouldn't look as stupid. 

Have most of the early tool or weapon recipes use less stone and more scrap iron. 

 

Bow still makes sense (though i'd like to see an old-fashioned sling, made from cloth or leather scraps) because bows can more-or-less only be made from wood, but stone melee weapons or tools will never look anything other than weird. 

 

 Have the player hack up a wrecked car or a metal door. A stop-sign or a railing for their first iron scraps, and then have them make themselves a makeshift tool out of that. 

[alanea]

well  ultimate solution for  tool /shotgun crates in stone age would be finding broken useless guns .. that can be scraped for parts:D

 

its likely only way to  fix " immersion of sealed boxes full of stone tools"  that doesnt completely annihilate progression

[RipClaw]

On 9/21/2020 at 7:39 AM, iamnuff said:

We're post-apocalyptic survivors, in-or-around a city that still stands. 

No we are players in front of a computer

On 9/21/2020 at 7:39 AM, iamnuff said:

We're not cavemen. 

Do not underestimate the cavemen. They were much more survivable and inventive than many people today.

On 9/21/2020 at 7:39 AM, iamnuff said:

There's a whole world of worked iron and random metal junk out there. Why would anything be made out of rocks and sticks? 

Because you can easily pick up a stone but not scrap metal. At least in this game.

 

[Liesel Weppen]

21 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

Because you can easily pick up a stone but not scrap metal. At least in this game.

I like the ideas.

Craft a stone axe which is just used to collect first metal scraps or make the game able to hit metalstuff just with a blank rock in you hand to get some scraps or use your pure hands on car wrecks just like an ultraslow wrench.

 

I don't like the idea of having a starter item that allows you to do so, because if you drop/loose it, you can't start over.

 

Anyway, i guess it wouldn't change the speed. Scrap age would just be a "reskin" of the stone age that replace stone with scrap metal in the receips.

 

I recently started a new game and quit again on day 2... it's so @%$#ing slow that i simply want to skip it. There should be an option for quickstarting games. E.g. start in iron age with 10 free skill points (or how much someone usually hast when he enters iron age) and some iron starter tools. (I know i could also cheat this, but it's still anoying)

[Jakmeister999]

5 hours ago, alanea said:

well  ultimate solution for  tool /shotgun crates in stone age would be finding broken useless guns .. that can be scraped for parts:D

 

its likely only way to  fix " immersion of sealed boxes full of stone tools"  that doesnt completely annihilate progression

I like this idea. And if TFP want to slow the early progression, they can take away the repair kits from the loot table before Level 50, and you can only make them if you have Advanced Engineer Level 2 or finding a schematic. (Or buy it from traders for an increased price) 

 

For the stone vs scrap age, how about making the stone axe just a pickaxe, and put a tiny amount of iron back to the boulders, so you can still mine just enough iron to make a scrap axe or shovel?

[RipClaw]

1 hour ago, Liesel Weppen said:

I like the ideas.

Craft a stone axe which is just used to collect first metal scraps or make the game able to hit metalstuff just with a blank rock in you hand to get some scraps or use your pure hands on car wrecks just like an ultraslow wrench.

I like the idea as well but the Fun Pimps have made their decision and that should be respected.

They would also have to design new models for the scrap pickaxe and the scrap shovel and that would need additional development resources.

One reason why they decided against a scrap age is probably that it is too close to iron. At least that's what I heard from a developer.

 

By the way, to punch a car with your fist to get scrap metal is even more unrealistic than to punch a tree with your fist to get wood. But it is common in survival games to punch trees for wood.

1 hour ago, Liesel Weppen said:

I don't like the idea of having a starter item that allows you to do so, because if you drop/loose it, you can't start over.

In an early access game I played a while ago this was exactly the problem. You found a hammer at the beginning of the game and if you lost it, there was no replacement. That's why the developers later made it possible for you to build your own hammer from materials you could find.

1 hour ago, Liesel Weppen said:

Anyway, i guess it wouldn't change the speed. Scrap age would just be a "reskin" of the stone age that replace stone with scrap metal in the receips.

 

I recently started a new game and quit again on day 2... it's so @%$#ing slow that i simply want to skip it. There should be an option for quickstarting games. E.g. start in iron age with 10 free skill points (or how much someone usually hast when he enters iron age) and some iron starter tools. (I know i could also cheat this, but it's still anoying)

If you invest one point in Advanced Engeering and one point in Miner69 it is no problem to have Q2 iron tools on day 2. You just have to craft them yourself.

 

One problem I see is that people are so obsessed with finding everything instead of investing the time and resources to craft something themselves. Mining and resource gathering is labeled as boring and every minute you don't kill zombies or loot is considered wasted. I think it's a pity that people rush through the game instead of enjoying slow progress.

 

I have looked at the XML files and it would be no problem to make a mod that allows this kind of quick start. The inventory of the player is defined in the entityclasses.xml and the number of points you get for the starter quest is defined in the quests.xml. It would be no problem to add XP to the 4 points you get for the Starter Quest that are enough to have a gamestage high enough for the Iron Age and to add some iron tools to your inventory. But I don't know yet how to define the quality of the items.

[Liesel Weppen]

23 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

I like the idea as well but the Fun Pimps have made their decision and that should be respected.

They would also have to design new models for the scrap pickaxe and the scrap shovel and that would need additional development resources.

They make new zombie models, but don't have the workpower for new scrap-tool models. I know those kind of excuses.

I don't really care for that, i just described how i'd do it. Stone tools are not that big problem for me, i just imagine those were scrap metal tools. Besids usually you wouldn't find a shovel built out of an road sign in a box of a tool shop...

 

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By the way, to punch a car with your fist to get scrap metal is even more unrealistic than to punch a tree with your fist to get wood. But it is common in survival games to punch trees for wood.

I more likely can rip of the fender of a car with my bare hands than knock down a tree with my bare hands.

And btw, in 7d2d i don't punch trees with my fists at start. I hit those tiny little bushes that give you 1-2 wood.

 

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One problem I see is that people are so obsessed with finding everything instead of investing the time and resources to craft something themselves. Mining and resource gathering is labeled as boring and every minute you don't kill zombies or loot is considered wasted. I think it's a pity that people rush through the game instead of enjoying slow progress.

Oh, i do both and i do not hurry. Since i go looting the early days, mainly also because i need food and dukes, my first priority is not to build iron tools. I usually skill some misc skills first (sex rex, healing factor, lotl, master chef, melee weapon i'd like to go for). For looting i don't need iron tools, basically i need iron tools first, when i go chopping wood or mine. Until i start doing that, i usually found some tools already. So imho the progression is quit good.

But man, stone tools are so fu... slow. I wanted to start my first base in one of those edge-house-ruin and need to pick away those blocks of scrap on the ground floor so that Zs couldn't run up to the 1st floor. That would have been just like 20 blocks to be removed, but it almost took 1-2 minutes with a stone axe and constantly running out of stamina (that would have been even worse with iron tools) for 1 block, so i lost interest and stopped the game as soon as it started. That's why i want to start not just with iron tools as starter equipment, but also with some skillpoints.

 

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I have looked at the XML files and it would be no problem to make a mod that allows this kind of quick start. The inventory of the player is defined in the entityclasses.xml and the number of points you get for the starter quest is defined in the quests.xml. It would be no problem to add XP to the 4 points you get for the Starter Quest that are enough to have a gamestage high enough for the Iron Age and to add some iron tools to your inventory. But I don't know yet how to define the quality of the items.

Yep, the quality is one problem, also when using creative menu. Because i still want to start with lvl1 tools.

[alanea]

8 hours ago, Liesel Weppen said:

I recently started a new game and quit again on day 2... it's so @%$#ing slow that i simply want to skip it. There should be an option for quickstarting games. E.g. start in iron age with 10 free skill points (or how much someone usually hast when he enters iron age) and some iron starter tools. (I know i could also cheat this, but it's still anoying)

 

oh  god  so you didnt  move from  1st 1/3  to  2nd  1/3  within  60 minutes?  god  thats awfull refund immediately :D

[Liesel Weppen]

16 minutes ago, alanea said:

oh  god  so you didnt  move from  1st 1/3  to  2nd  1/3  within  60 minutes?  god  thats awfull refund immediately

oh god, i bought 7d2d like 5 years ago (when was alpha 15 released?) and played the early game already hundrets of times and will hit 1000 hours played soon. It bores me because it is so SLOW gameplay, especially after i did it that often, and with the stone-age-machanic it basically became pure fast-forward grind until i become able to build and quest without it taking ages. I already did it 3 times in A19. I most likely will do it again in A20. I don't want it to be removed, i don't want overal faster progression, i just want to be able to start a playthrough with iron age.

I'd more likely stay 20 days longer in iron age then playing 10 days in stone age AGAIN just to "wait" for iron age. And the age for me also includes some skills. Having an iron pickaxe on day 1 is almost worthless if you run out of stamina after each second swing.

 

Same like you can start civilization also in middle age instead of stone age, if you got bored by researching pottery for 5 rounds before you can do anything further.

[RipClaw]

7 hours ago, Liesel Weppen said:

Yep, the quality is one problem, also when using creative menu. Because i still want to start with lvl1 tools.

I have created a small modlet. It was easier than I thought. The quality can be defined pretty easy.

 

At the end of the starter quest you get the usual 4 skill points but now you also get an iron pick Q1 and an iron shovel Q1 plus enough XP to jump to level 11 which gives you additional 10 skill points.

So you are on gamestage 12 which is the beginning of the Iron Age. However, the chance of getting T1 items is still very small and they have only a low quality. You will mostly still get T0 items.

 

A19Quickstart.zip

[Liesel Weppen]

1 minute ago, RipClaw said:

So you are on gamestage 12 which is the beginning of the Iron Age. However, the chance of getting T1 items is still very small and they have only a low quality. You will mostly still get T0 items

That's everything i wanted. THANK YOU.

[Roland]

5 hours ago, Liesel Weppen said:

That's everything i wanted. THANK YOU.

Alternatively, you can open the console with F1 and type: giveselfxp 10000 

 

Repeat that until you are level 12 or 13 or even higher. You can make the number larger or smaller to increase your level faster or slower. Spend the skillpoints all at once or just a few at a time depending on your own sensibilities. This keeps your game unmodded if that matters to you.

[alanea]

18 hours ago, Liesel Weppen said:

oh god, i bought 7d2d like 5 years ago (when was alpha 15 released?) and played the early game already hundrets of times and will hit 1000 hours played soon. It bores me because it is so SLOW gameplay, especially after i did it that often, and with the stone-age-machanic it basically became pure fast-forward grind until i become able to build and quest without it taking ages. I already did it 3 times in A19. I most likely will do it again in A20. I don't want it to be removed, i don't want overal faster progression, i just want to be able to start a playthrough with iron age.

I'd more likely stay 20 days longer in iron age then playing 10 days in stone age AGAIN just to "wait" for iron age. And the age for me also includes some skills. Having an iron pickaxe on day 1 is almost worthless if you run out of stamina after each second swing.

 

Same like you can start civilization also in middle age instead of stone age, if you got bored by researching pottery for 5 rounds before you can do anything further.

 

game have  3 phases  stone iron steel .... a17-18  just spoiled people by giving them everything in first week .. even Q steel making them bored with no goals after 30  or 50+

 

now we have roughtly  1 week of stone  1-2  iron then steel

sure its just  increasing chance to appear .... but droping iron  in week  2  is common  .. same as steel in week 3 and later

little broken by few facts

- toilets drop iron tier knife and  pistol from day 1

- traders sell  Q1-4 ..  firearms from day 1 (mostly low tiers like pistol or hunting rifle)

- candy gives +5 gamestage   +10%so day  1 level two with candy is enought to have basic chance for iron tier

-  it takes 1 point to unlock forge and  1 to unlock iron tools sot here is potential  to make Quality  2  iron tools on day  1  if rushed  or if you find working forge  .... day  2-3  if you dont

 

is this progressions so slow ?:D i mean you cant survive  first hour or two using stone tools  before you move to full iron self crafted set?

 

1-2 hour of gameplay  to move from early to midgame  what you want  ?   first  30 min stone  60min + steel 2 hours Q6 steel ?   nope progression is rather quick .... its not like you play  30 days  with crossbow and stone axe

 

some people will just keep complaining spoiled by a17-18 steel tools from start (my a18save dropped Q3 steel  shovel from first looted car before even finding city)

because they feel that someone took advanced stuff from them .. forcing them to play with tools ..

(that are not that much worse actually stone shovel can still 2 hit dirt/graveland .. and iron pickaxe is comparable to steel because you simply cant use its potential early because you cannot sustain that stamina cost even with coffee)

 

some people are just so spoiled from last two alphas they expect augers from first  working stiff tools they loot on day  1  ..and wont accept anything else .. sur ei agree  loot need some work ... it feel unrewarding in some areas but progression is rather fine .. especially considering you can craft iron so early effectively skiping primitive tier

 

and if you loot few toilets  you are pretty much guaranteed to have atleast q1 pistol early

 

what really sucks is just primitive/wood bow