Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[Beelzebubs Ghost]

I remember reading a post on here recently that went along the lines of 'even if The Fun Pimps used child labour' the die hard apologists would defend them for it.

 

Seems true to be honest. There are so many zealot-minded individuals on here who are quick to celebrate the introduction of a feature, and quick to turn on it when The Fun Pimps decide to remove, nerf, or change it beyond all recognition.

 

I wanted to weigh in on one of these changes, farming in particular since it's a hot topic for A20 and something I actually care about a lot.

 

First, we had nomadic farming back in the day which was amazing, immersive, took some effort and had the introduction of fertiliser in order to yield more crops. We had the ability to till land anywhere and set up small plots - an absolutely amazing game feature that let us feel part of the world in a way I thoroughly enjoyed.

 

Then we had the black and white fallacy step in. We couldn't have both wild planting and crop plots, but only the latter, which; whilst great for integration in building, demolished the charm and immersion of wild planting.

 

What this did come with however was the harvesting of crops and auto-replant if you like (degradation to a young plant). This was a slight offset of what we lost, and in and of itself, a nice feature. Now we get crop harvest with only the chance of a seed. Wtf?

 

I think those zealots who can't see any fault in anything The Fun Pimps release need to keep one thing clear in their minds, especially regarding the 'overpowered' farming claim, which is utter garbage.

 

Farming is necessarily static. You can't make a farm and abuse it whilst moving from place to place, not without giving up time and resources to go back to it. If people spec into Living off the Land, and put work and time into making a small farm then they have earned the sustainability which comes with it, at the cost of being fixed at their base location.

 

Even if they took the plots with them, it still requires setting up a new farm and replanting, waiting for the crops to grow before they can do anything with them. I imagine many people; especially given the new variety in POI's are going to be spending way more time looting and scavenging food along the way than dedicating time to farming anyway, so those who do dedicate time to creating a sustainable food source should be free to do so, and the mechanic should be left unmolested.

 

People like @[email protected] may be seen as a gadfly, but it's people who object to developments where some serious attention should be allocated, because echo chamber mentalities may bring comfort, but opposition gives opportunity, through feedback. These opinions are valuable.

[POCKET951]

4 minutes ago, CoolJ said:

Indeed. Those pipe weapons look awesome. I can already see my self doing runs where I am only allowed to use pipe weapons. Or a theme run like a cowboy run. Look, at that, there is already a revolver available from the start of the game now. I just wish it was single action. Seems to me like it should be. A single action revolver is a lot easier to improvise than a dual action one. I get the magnum should be dual action because that style of revolver is dual action. The pipe version should be single action. Maybe later they could add a fan fire ability in gunslinger.

 

 

[Aldranon]

There are several ways TFP could do bandits in my thinking and each one would require a smarter AI.

 

1) Bandits are just zombies with guns, very little changes needed.

2) Bandits have a "Shoot, Scoot, or Hide" algorithm based on damage done and received.

3) Bandits have the above 2 plus an "Elite squad" AI that tries to pin the player down with suppressing fire and flank the player for some kill shots.

[CoolJ]

1 minute ago, POCKET951 said:

lets just make an example with how it currently works

say we plant 10 Blue berry seeds and we have living off the land 3

we will get back 60 fruit and 50% chance to get seeds

say were unlucky and we only get 4/10 back

we plant the 4, and then craft 6 x 5 (30) so were left with 30 blueberries.

 

Seems reasonable. you could get super lucky and get 7 out of 10 though and only spend 15 blueberries replanting and net 45

 

suppose you get really unlucky..you get only 2 seeds back... you used 40 blueberries to replant and you still net 20 ..you can still make stuff and sustain

honestly these changes seem reasonable

however, it makes farming much more laborious and tedious

I know it isn't in A20, but if farming is going to be this  micro intensive than I think having a farming tool for A21 to speed up the process would be really nice

 

What if you only have one seed? What if you don't get one back? Too bad? Some crops are not easy to come by. Like I have had several random gen worlds where there was no Carl's Corn POI on the entire map. I looked in the XML and it just wasn't there. The only choice is to get a seed from loot in that case. Finding new ways to make your perk points worthless is not my idea of a well designed mechanic.

[POCKET951]

9 minutes ago, CoolJ said:

 

What if you only have one seed? What if you don't get one back? Too bad? Some crops are not easy to come by. Like I have had several random gen worlds where there was no Carl's Corn POI on the entire map. I looked in the XML and it just wasn't there. The only choice is to get a seed from loot in that case. Finding new ways to make your perk points worthless is not my idea of a well designed mechanic.

That is  a problem, if you only have one seed and don't have living off the land 3 and you don't get it back you are boned

as I said in a post above, maybe the most obvious solution  is to make seeds cost 4 of X plant so when you get double harvest you break even with minimal investment

but I can see where you are goin with this. imagine you are trying to start a supercorn farm.. you get 5 and turn it into a seed. you harvest it and you get 4 back and no need. GG you are boned and can't do it anymore unless you can find another seed/carls corn

that could lead to a @%$#ty game play loop.

 

They did how ever add super corn to grandpas recipes. We will find out how to make it soon. but then again that is also a problem solved by skill points. which isn't always fun

 

 

[Jost Amman]

31 minutes ago, Khalagar said:

Another thing I'm confused on as far as the "You already did tons of work so . . . why not make it usable??" line of thought, is why are there no new T5's? 200+ new POI but none are t5's even though some seem as big or hard etc. Seems really weird to me to not just flag a couple as T5 for now to expand the end game more and then work on the "story t5s" later

There's ONE new, as far as I can tell (they were 6 in A19, now they're 7).

[Jost Amman]

16 minutes ago, Beelzebubs Ghost said:

People like @[email protected] may be seen as a gadfly, but it's people who object to developments where some serious attention should be allocated, because echo chamber mentalities may bring comfort, but opposition gives opportunity, through feedback. These opinions are valuable.

I agree on the general idea that new features should be challenged by players depending on how fun or useful they seem to be.

 

However, there's still the balancing issue that the developer will need to address: we, as players, are of course all about keeping what is fun/convenient for us (e.g.: all cars should be drivable, crops should be a permanent source of food, pipe weapons should do more damage, the drone should be able to shoot zombies), but in the end most players will never make the hard choices which will effectively balance the game to make it more "fun" in the long run.

 

I'm not saying every choice the devs make is great, mind you, I'm just saying that we should at least give it a shot before taking up the pitchforks.

[Khalagar]

39 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

From what I understood, the drone is a very important step towards the addition of Bandits in A21.

After all, if an "NPC" is already able to navigate the world, follow you and execute simple commands, then you have 20/30% of the Bandits/NPC AI already done IMO.

 

The drone seems to teleport to the player / teleports through doors / flies over obstacles etc, so I don't think it would help all that much with bandit AI pathing.  It's mostly weird how much work went into the drone, then how little they seem to care about it. It would be like if one of the devs was like "I spent 4,000 man hours making a new system to spawn caves under the ground for players to explore!" and then it was never talked about on stream and no other parts of the game tied in or interacted with it etc lol

 

I def think Woodle finding one day 1 was a bug, Misuto has been streaming like 7 hours and hasn't found one even while finding all kinds of other stuff

 

  

3 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

I agree on the general idea that new features should be challenged by players depending on how fun or useful they seem to be.

 

 

Yeah, a lot of suggestions are just things that are a LOT of work for the devs. I feel like mine at least are just number tweaks / minor changes since they already did the ground work. Things like make the drone mod buffs scale with your perk investment to be better for people invested in it, or just change a flag on some of the PoI that are hard to be t5 instead of t4 as a temp fix for the lack of t5 diversity etc.

 

There's a ton of little minor things that are just quality control stuff, like robot turret shells being bad or the pipe baton being a club but worse since it attacks slower and also can't use as many mods etc.

 

Not a game breaker or anything, just polish stuff

[Kalex]

50 minutes ago, CoolJ said:

 

This was a mistake. Not having to replant the entire garden every time was a feature. If you want to slow down crops, make them take longer to grow. The whole RNG and replant thing is bad design. There was a reason farming was changed so we didn't have to replant each time. Because it isn't fun and it isn't necessary. They already grow at a pace that is comically fast anyway. At least they did in A19. There is no reason to force us to replant and then give some trash RNG. The other system was better, even if it was too fast.

I disagree. The only perennials you farm in real life are fruit and nut trees/bushes. Every other crop you have to replant after every harvest.

[Beelzebubs Ghost]

22 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

I agree on the general idea that new features should be challenged by players depending on how fun or useful they seem to be.

 

However, there's still the balancing issue that the developer will need to address: we, as players, are of course all about keeping what is fun/convenient for us (e.g.: all cars should be drivable, crops should be a permanent source of food, pipe weapons should do more damage, the drone should be able to shoot zombies), but in the end most players will never make the hard choices which will effectively balance the game to make it more "fun" in the long run.

 

I'm not saying every choice the devs make is great, mind you, I'm just saying that we should at least give it a shot before taking up the pitchforks.

 

The problem is; much like zombies digging, many features are opposed vehemently by people who won't even be affected.

 

It's funny to me, and quite sad, that those who want the above ground challenge (to use a previous example of an implemented change) aren't only opposed to disabling zombies digging, but also even against the idea of a slider to disable it. Same goes for some who are suddenly all 'Farming is OP' and could easily take their own advice and not farm, but won't because they don't want others to have the convenience of sustainability; or perhaps because the nerf is a new and infallible Fun Pimp change.

 

Trying to avoid false dichotomies, we could have cars as pipe weapons - variation in weapon stats analogous to some cars being able to be fixed.

 

The other poster actually has a good point  - being able to do up some of the world vehicles will retain their aesthetic properties while giving players an amazing functional opportunity.

 

Speaking of pipe weapons, why the hell can't we just have a length of iron pipe to batter the zombies with, or a huge rock, or a plank of wood, more post apocalyptic melee weapon variety instead of elaborately designed pipe guns of hand crafted wooden clubs.

 

A separate point, I know, but it seems the Devs are going for a more complicated eye candy appeal than raw post apocalyptic survival experience in some respects.

[Jost Amman]

22 minutes ago, Khalagar said:

 

The drone seems to teleport to the player / teleports through doors / flies over obstacles etc, so I don't think it would help all that much with bandit AI pathing.  It's mostly weird how much work went into the drone, then how little they seem to care about it. It would be like if one of the devs was like "I spent 4,000 man hours making a new system to spawn caves under the ground for players to explore!" and then it was never talked about on stream and no other parts of the game tied in or interacted with it etc lol

 

I def think Woodle finding one day 1 was a bug, Misuto has been streaming like 7 hours and hasn't found one even while finding all kinds of other stuff

Yeah, even the devs said it, the drone path-finding is not "good as it is" for walking NPCs, but it's definitely a step forward.

The teleporting mechanic was not done because the drone is not able to fly-path-finding, it was done to avoid the drone be left behind if the player is moving very quickly.

8 minutes ago, Beelzebubs Ghost said:

The problem is; much like zombies digging, many features are opposed vehemently by people who won't even be affected.

You're probably right on that, but hear this: those opposing some ideas don't do that just out of spite for something they don't want.

 

They probably do it because they know that the devs have limited time and resources. If an idea you (them) consider "bad" or useless gets approved, part of the devs time would be focused on developing that idea. That time is lost for them, because they'd rather have the devs focus their efforts on something else.

 

So, in that regard, they are affected by your idea.

[Burrfly]

1 hour ago, Khalagar said:

why are there no new T5's?

 

This is what the alpha 20 official release notes states, tho:

• Many Tier 3 and 4s have been added with some new and updated tier 5s

[Beelzebubs Ghost]

14 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

Yeah, even the devs said it, the drone path-finding is not "good as it is" for walking NPCs, but it's definitely a step forward.

The teleporting mechanic was not done because the drone is not able to fly-path-finding, it was done to avoid the drone be left behind if the player is moving very quickly.

You're probably right on that, but hear this: those opposing some ideas don't do that just out of spite for something they don't want.

 

They probably do it because they know that the devs have limited time and resources. If an idea you (them) consider "bad" or useless gets approved, part of the devs time would be focused on developing that idea. That time is lost for them, because they'd rather have the devs focus their efforts on something else.

 

So, in that regard, they are affected by your idea.

 

Sure but then doesn't it beg the question of why people are so quick to silence critics?

 

Some things may be objected to even in principle, and if the devs got feedback and took it seriously, they could add something from votes for example (from the playerbase) and possibly save themselves from wasting time on less desirable features.

 

I am referring of course to things outside of their roadmap which we bought into originally.

 

Ark did the vote thing on giving the players options, for example, on which new dino they would like to see. I think it would be great if the devs did the same sort of thing once in a while with a shortlist of features of varying priority and let us vote on one. What do you think? 🤷🏻‍♂️

[stallionsden]

1 hour ago, Khalagar said:

Another thing I'm confused on as far as the "You already did tons of work so . . . why not make it usable??" line of thought, is why are there no new T5's? 200+ new POI but none are t5's even though some seem as big or hard etc. Seems really weird to me to not just flag a couple as T5 for now to expand the end game more and then work on the "story t5s" later

Is ok I got plenty for you😁

[Khalagar]

10 minutes ago, Burrfly said:

 

This is what the alpha 20 official release notes states, tho:

• Many Tier 3 and 4s have been added with some new and updated tier 5s

 

Hmm, streamers are saying no new t5's, but they might be wrong, or the patch notes might be wrong since it was wrong on drone.

 

I was caught off guard when streamers started saying there are no new t5s, that would be pretty weird for an update that added so many POI

[Jost Amman]

6 minutes ago, Khalagar said:

Hmm, streamers are saying no new t5's, but they might be wrong, or the patch notes might be wrong since it was wrong on drone.

 

I was caught off guard when streamers started saying there are no new t5s, that would be pretty weird for an update that added so many POI

Maybe that's because, IIRC, some T4s have been revised and upgraded to T5s? (could be wrong on this)

[POCKET951]

If I recall there was 7  tier 5's in  A 19
1. Shotgun messiah Factory
2.Shamway foods factory
3. Large apartments
4. Crack a book HQ (skyscraper)

5. Dishong tower (skyscaper)

6. Hisaghi Pharmaceutical Tower (skyscraper)

7. Hospital
 

Am I missing any?

 

So isn't there 8? or did one of the 5's get downgraded to a 4?

 

according to patch notes :   

Factory_03 ( New Tier 5)

 So  Factory_03 is either a T5 and it hasn't been found yet.

Or it is a tier 4 poi and it is a typo, and there are no new tier 5 Pois.

Or did  one of the existing tier 5's  get  downgraded to a tier 4?

Or there are errors in the patch notes?

Could we please get this cleared up?

[Laz Man]

2 hours ago, Khalagar said:

Another thing I'm confused on as far as the "You already did tons of work so . . . why not make it usable??" line of thought, is why are there no new T5's? 200+ new POI but none are t5's even though some seem as big or hard etc. Seems really weird to me to not just flag a couple as T5 for now to expand the end game more and then work on the "story t5s" later

 

The end game has technically been pushed out more with the inclusion of more POIs especially since players can now choose lower tiered POIs even after progressing to the next tier.

 

Labeling some T4s as T5s would only speed up progression since those can be cleared faster and would deincentivize doing the "true" longer T5s.

 

FYI, there is also a new T5 factory.

[POCKET951]

6 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

 

 

FYI, there is also a new T5 factory.

So then there is 8 tier 5 Poi's unless one of the 7 I listed was changed to a T4.

[Laz Man]

12 minutes ago, POCKET951 said:

so then there is 8 tier 5 Poi's unless one of the 7 I listed was changed to a 4

Dishong, Higashi, and the crack a book HQ have been completely overhauled and are essentially new experiences.

 

Shamway (T5), the large apartments (T5), and the JBB skyscraper (T4) also underwent some updates but not as significant as the other 3.

 

Keep in mind T5s take an absorbent amount of time to create.  There will be more in the future but the teams main focus was to make sure there was enough variety in all of the new tile districts.

 

Edit: And....we are not done yet lol.  More will keep being added up until stable since New POIs will not break existing saves.

 

[POCKET951]

15 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

Dishong, Higashi, and the crack a book HQ have been completely overhauled and are essentially new experiences.

 

Shamway (T5) and the JBB skyscraper (T4) also underwent some updates but not as significant as the other 3.

 

Keep in mind T5s take an absorbent amount of time to create.  There will be more in the future but the teams main focus was to make sure there was enough variety in all of the new tile districts.

 

Edit: And....we are not done yet lol.  More will keep being added up until stable since New POIs will not break existing saves.

 

Current tier 5 Pois in Alpha 20:

1. Shotgun messiah Factory
2.Shamway foods factory
3. Apartment_brick_6_flr 
4. Crack a book HQ (skyscraper)

5. Dishong tower (skyscaper)

6. Hisaghi Pharmaceutical Tower (skyscraper)

7. Hospital
8. Factory_03 (new tier 5)

[Doomofman]

From what I've seen of A20 on the streamer weekend so far, it's looking really good.

 

The one gripe I have with any of the new stuff is that the triggers for opening doors at the end of POIs are one and done, so once you open the door you can't close it again. I'd love to see that be an on and off switch, rather than a one use thing. Maybe that's not possible with however it's been done though

[Adam the Waster]

Soon ill boot my PC up and its old AF!


prey for me

[bilibili-wayne]

I think the A20 green snow features different booty quality of the result, be honest, don't go to the early, mid dare not go, too lazy to late. Personally, I must to make the early game base, middle busy mining, upgrade, free access to loot, equipment basic it is late and businessmen to buy 6 quality.
After my personal test, when the player 1, green land, spoils the range is T1 level 1 quality - T1 level 3 quality. Devastation: loot range is T1 level 3 quality - T2 level 1 quality (but during T1 level 6 quality very much). In other words, if the grass is 1 quality goods, so should be 2 quality goods in the desert, in the snow should be 3 quality materials, 4 quality supplies in ruins. Overall, above at 3 o 'clock this quality, individual attractive to me is so small, not enough to let me to risk their lives to get.
我觉得这次A20绿地雪地等地貌不同带来的战利品品质不同这个效果，说真心话，初期不会去，中期不敢去，后期懒得去。我个人游戏初期肯定要造基地，中期忙着挖矿，升级，免费获取战利品，后期装备基本都是和商人买6品质的。
经我个人测试，当玩家1级，绿地，战利品范围是T1级1品质---T1级3品质。废墟地：战利品范围是T1级3品质---T2级1品质（但期间出T1级6品质非常多）。换句话来将，草地如果是1品质物资，那么在沙漠应该就是2品质物资，在雪地应该就是3品质物资，在废墟地就是4品质物资。总体来看，高出的这3点品质，对我个人的吸引力实在是太小，不足以让我冒着生命危险去获取。

The old driver Wayne from China（老司机wayne）

[MechanicalLens]

My only real concern about the farming is super corn. What if you get to the point where you run out of the stuff, seeds included? Therefore I have the following questions:

 

1. Are there more POI's that have naturally growing super corn in A20?

 

2. Do traders sell super corn / seeds?

 

3. Can you find super corn / seeds in loot in the wild?

 

If the answer to all of these questions is "no", then I can easily imagine generating a world with only 1-2 Bob's Boars present, you collect the super corn at max level Living off the Land, do a few harvests, and then by bad RNG you are left with nothing to plant.