Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[POCKET951]

3 minutes ago, Gazz said:

 

That's the problem right there. It is complex, yes, but it has zero depth.

You have a forge so you can craft forged iron and other things as long as you have the iron.

 

The extra step of smelting adds nothing but more clicking. The time spent can just as easily be rolled into the crafting time.

Features that add complexity but no depth are nothing but bloat.

it may be bloat...but it adds friction and makes deciding to craft require a bit more investment and patience. idk this sounds silly but I like the nuance of having to smelt things in the forge before I can use it, as annoying and pointless as it is, it feels good to do, and it also frees up some storage space

[dcsobral]

Were the PREGEN maps updated?

[gpcstargate]

43 minutes ago, Forgotten Memes said:

Is there a way to disable weather effects? They nuke my framerate into the ground and I have to restart the game to fix.

 

Tilda Key ~ If you must ...... " 7 Days to Die Console Commands " ....... "Edit _ use .. F1"

• weather = Control weather settings
• weathersurvival = Enables/disables weather survival

[faatal]

8 hours ago, MuffinMan said:

Just my own, basic XML edits. When your rig takes 2 seconds does that feel good to you? Would more regular calls of that "unload unused resources" be better maybe? I don't know but it doesn't seem good to me how it is performing right now. The game is otherwise smooth and over 100fps in most cases and then you push E and get lagged out. Or talk to a shop owner and get lagged out.

 

I've noticed in other Unity games due to my 64GB ram it has higher RAM usage than most people. Do you have 64GB of RAM?

 

I'll also add that I did add 4 other traders to the same trader just so I have some variety at the one trader I typically visit (f6 -> static spawn). Maybe that is causing an issue not sure. My base is somewhat close to them. Also most of the hitches are like .5 to 1 second like you mention. It is just every 30-60 minutes I get one of the long ones like the game is about to crash.

Many things don't feel good but are not fixable in practical terms. Sometimes things can be changed, but they are not worth the investment. Redoing resource management would be nice, but would take months of time and then may only get little to no gain.

 

There is a fixed cost, since it has to scan all loaded resources, so doing it say every minute would be more annoying to only save .1 secs. Games typically hide this stuff with loading screens between levels/stages/whatever, which we don't have. Maybe someday Unity will have an incremental way of doing that.

 

Being Unity (or really any engine), there are often uncontrollable things we have to live with. Code can only be improved so much before you hit a performance wall.

 

I have 32GB, so maybe, but I've never heard of Unity doing anything different with 64GB.

1 minute ago, gpcstargate said:

 

Tilda Key ~ If you must.

• weather = Control weather settings
• weathersurvival = Enables/disables weather survival

F1 key opens the console.

[Forgotten Memes]

11 hours ago, POCKET951 said:

So... what is everyone's thoughts on the super scarcity of acid? I'm on day 36 and I've only found 6 acid so far.5 of it went to a Chem bench and I have hardly seen any. Has anyone had any luck with acid? Also what type of medical containers yield acid when wrenched?

I havn't had any trouble, I find around 1 per day.  Focus tool stores, auto stores and gas stations.  Check janitor carts and sinks.

 

A nice solution to keeping them rare, but not too rare would be if  you got 1 from wrenching a chem station.

[meganoth]

3 hours ago, Gazz said:

 

That's the problem right there. It is complex, yes, but it has zero depth.

You have a forge so you can craft forged iron and other things as long as you have the iron.

 

The extra step of smelting adds nothing but more clicking. The time spent can just as easily be rolled into the crafting time.

Features that add complexity but no depth are nothing but bloat.

 

Weeell, did you developers think of that when you changed farming in A20 so you need to replant even the harvested seeds ? 😉

 

One positive about the smelting is that it is a unique mechanic (someone correct me if I'm wrong here and other survival games do something similar). 

 

Another positive, you actually need to plan ahead what you want to smelt. I often have the situation that I smelt X but then really needed a lot of Y smelted and have to wait longer for my mistake. I don't see how this can be simulated with longer crafting times.

 

[dcsobral]

4 minutes ago, meganoth said:

One positive about the smelting is that it is a unique mechanic (someone correct me if I'm wrong here and other survival games do something similar). 

Journey of Life also has smelting. And, separately, forging. Or at least that was the case last time I played it, but they literally rewrote the game since.

6 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Another positive, you actually need to plan ahead what you want to smelt. I often have the situation that I smelt X but then really needed a lot of Y smelted and have to wait longer for my mistake. I don't see how this can be simulated with longer crafting times.

Clay: you need it for crops and cobblestone.

Iron: repair material and hatches.

Brass: no use outside forges.

Lead: no use outside forges.

Stone: various uses.

Sand: cement.

 

For the most part if something can go in the forge there's little incentive to not doing so. The only exceptions are ingredients used exclusively for glass. Yeah, sure, it's perfectly possible to screw it up, but it's not really a "I might need this" matter, particularly since you can take the material out of the forge as needed rather quickly.

 

[Kosmic Kerman]

2 hours ago, Gazz said:

 

That's the problem right there. It is complex, yes, but it has zero depth.

You have a forge so you can craft forged iron and other things as long as you have the iron.

 

The extra step of smelting adds nothing but more clicking. The time spent can just as easily be rolled into the crafting time.

Features that add complexity but no depth are nothing but bloat.

Having to smelt does, to a limited extent, factor into time management. If you haven't smelted anything, you can't craft anything. And so you do need to make sure you have items smelted before you can craft something.  It also allows some time shifting since you can smelt resources as you get them to be ready for the final crafted product. If you made the forges work like the workbenches, this would further reduce the need to mine since your crafting would always be perfectly efficient. There would be no resources idling in the forge. 

[dcsobral]

Alpha 20 Stable is out? Come on, guys, it's still months until April 1st!

[meganoth]

1 hour ago, dcsobral said:

Journey of Life also has smelting. And, separately, forging. Or at least that was the case last time I played it, but they literally rewrote the game since.

Clay: you need it for crops and cobblestone.

Iron: repair material and hatches.

Brass: no use outside forges.

Lead: no use outside forges.

Stone: various uses.

Sand: cement.

 

For the most part if something can go in the forge there's little incentive to not doing so. The only exceptions are ingredients used exclusively for glass. Yeah, sure, it's perfectly possible to screw it up, but it's not really a "I might need this" matter, particularly since you can take the material out of the forge as needed rather quickly.

 

 

The situation I was describing was that you have some time available and you use it to smelt 10000 scrap iron (which you could have used to smelt 10000 brass instead) and suddenly need lots of bullets. Too bad, only 200 brass in the forge, now do some smelting.

 

[Khalagar]

I can definitely confirm that new players / casual players do not understand the current forge at all. My friend with 600+ hours still never touches the forge beyond knowing not to destroy mine or I'll screech at him

 

If he needs forged iron or steel for a weapon or mod and there's not any in the box, he just walks to the trader to buy some or asks me to make some, and wouldn't understand the crucible / clay / iron stats in the forge. There's a basically zero chance he'd sit in a mineshaft for 20 minutes IRL mining iron and stone and clay etc either. I'm not going to outright say that run and gun players  have severe ADHD but I'm going to imply it

[khzmusik]

3 hours ago, Gazz said:

The extra step of smelting adds nothing but more clicking.

 

I disagree. Since scrapping items (made out of brass or lead) always leads to fewer materials, it adds a trade-off between inventory space and the need for more resources.

 

Not much of an issue with lead (since it's 100x easier to mine than to loot) but is kind of a big deal with brass.

 

The scrap time for brass, on the other hand...

[Burrfly]

OMG STABLE IS OUT!!! I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS FOR SO LONG THANK YOU TFP NOW WE ARE GONNA PLAY FOR REAL :DDDDDDDD

[Gazz]

8 minutes ago, khzmusik said:

I disagree. Since scrapping items (made out of brass or lead) always leads to fewer materials, it adds a trade-off between inventory space and the need for more resources.

 

Only if you don't put down a forge in the area you're looting.

 

The argument of having to have the right material smelted falls apart as soon as you build more forges. Whether you have materials idling in the forge or idling in the chest next to it makes no practical difference.

 

Sure, many games have both smelting and smithing but the smelting is typically for crafting raw materials into ingots and nothing else so there is no choice involved in that. You always have to smelt the ore anyway...

[hiemfire]

38 minutes ago, Gazz said:

 

Only if you don't put down a forge in the area you're looting.

 

The argument of having to have the right material smelted falls apart as soon as you build more forges. Whether you have materials idling in the forge or idling in the chest next to it makes no practical difference.

 

Sure, many games have both smelting and smithing but the smelting is typically for crafting raw materials into ingots and nothing else so there is no choice involved in that. You always have to smelt the ore anyway...

 

So semi implying, if taken in concert with what madmole mentioned a few months back involving smelting, that the point of pulling smelting as exists currently is to remove the molten reservoir portion of the forge but still have to craft the lower grade components together using the forge to get the old products?

 

Iirc isn't/wasn't there a nasty bug involved with having the amount of material stored in a forge too high causing game save corruption? If so changing out the reservoir system for direct crafting with a bit of crafting time increase is a decent way to nip that one.

[Grenin]

42 minutes ago, Gazz said:

 

Only if you don't put down a forge in the area you're looting.

 

The argument of having to have the right material smelted falls apart as soon as you build more forges. Whether you have materials idling in the forge or idling in the chest next to it makes no practical difference.

 

Sure, many games have both smelting and smithing but the smelting is typically for crafting raw materials into ingots and nothing else so there is no choice involved in that. You always have to smelt the ore anyway...

It certainly made a lot more sense when 7DTD had raw ore.  Now it seems not to make as much sense.  The cement especially seems like it doesn't really fit.  

[Firecat]

7 hours ago, dcsobral said:

 

But after you have your vehicles and chem station there isn't a lot more you can do with acid. The only recurring resources that use it as Learning Elixir, Moonshine, Recog and Sham, none of which seems worth spending acid on.

 

In your opinion. Some of us like and want to use most of those consumables. Obviously you shouldn't be able to craft them in bulk (the acid was a good gate for that even back in a19) but it's nice to be able to make the choice to use a few acid to make one or two of those when you want them later game. Right now you can't, because by horde 3 you'll still need a chemstation and be looking for wheels, especially if you don't abuse the trader. Learning Elixir and Recog are great on horde nights, and Sham Chowder is wonderful for allowing the saving of a few skill points for farming, even more crucial now that farming has been changed to really need LOTL 3. I would be okay with the current acid scarcity if it was JUST used for vehicles and chem stations, but nothing that is used to make anything consumable should be SO rare you can consistently only find like average 5 in 25 days, like I have every game a20 so far. Especially when it is also used to craft game essentials like vehicles and workstations. (Yes, you can get these from traders too, but I thought they were moving away from having the trader be the most OP thing in the game, not trying to make it worse?) Now it is easier to actually find all these consumables precrafted in loot (especially recog, for some reason) than it is to find their ingredient, which doesn't make much sense to me.

[doughphunghus]

2 hours ago, Kosmic Kerman said:

Having to smelt does, to a limited extent, factor into time management.

I concur. It also adds heat and can call screamers, which is also a time management issue (save time but smelt less by trying not to get them called, or have to spend time dealing with them).  I think the mechanic of "time management" is good when you have 7 day (or whatever) hordes turned on as it makes you make decisions vs just grinding and having to make mini sacrifices ("do I craft or do some looting/selling... or reinforce the base. I only have a few hours!"). Insta crafting (or just faster crafting) takes away that mini panic feeling of having to hurry which, I believe, makes the game/zeds a bit "scarier" because you're already amped up (even if a little bit) rushing around.

[hiemfire]

4 minutes ago, doughphunghus said:

I concur. It also adds heat and can call screamers, which is also a time management issue (save time but smelt less by trying not to get them called, or have to spend time dealing with them).  I think the mechanic of "time management" is good when you have 7 day (or whatever) hordes turned on as it makes you make decisions vs just grinding and having to make mini sacrifices ("do I craft or do some looting/selling... or reinforce the base. I only have a few hours!"). Insta crafting (or just faster crafting) takes away that mini panic feeling of having to hurry which, I believe, makes the game/zeds a bit "scarier" because you're already amped up (even if a little bit) rushing around.

 

Time is the core resource of the game, especially with Bloodmoon Horde turned on. Everything you do, you trade time for. Everything.

[Khalagar]

2 hours ago, hiemfire said:

the point of pulling smelting as exists currently is to remove the molten reservoir portion of the forge but still have to craft the lower grade components together using the forge to get the old products?

 

Sounds like they just want the Forge to be another workbench like the workbench / chemstation / fire etc

 

Which would make more sense than it currently being a weird outlier / relic of an old game design that doesn't really make sense / add anything of use

 

Heat management and time management etc can all be easily applied to any new form of forge without much issue, all while being less clunky and confusing to people who have the attention span of a dead gnat

[SnowDog1942]

8 hours ago, faatal said:

 Size does not matter. 

Thats what she tells you but then behind your back she complains to her best friends and when they meet you they give you funny looks and you feel embarased and it makes me want to cry and never come outside and meet chicks again. /cry  

 

So ive heard

[faatal]

51 minutes ago, SnowDog1942 said:

Thats what she tells you but then behind your back she complains to her best friends and when they meet you they give you funny looks and you feel embarased and it makes me want to cry and never come outside and meet chicks again. /cry  

 

So ive heard

When I wrote those words, I figured I would be hearing from you. 🎄

[meganoth]

4 hours ago, Gazz said:

 

Only if you don't put down a forge in the area you're looting.

 

The argument of having to have the right material smelted falls apart as soon as you build more forges. Whether you have materials idling in the forge or idling in the chest next to it makes no practical difference.

 

Sure, many games have both smelting and smithing but the smelting is typically for crafting raw materials into ingots and nothing else so there is no choice involved in that. You always have to smelt the ore anyway...

 

Ah yes, multiple forges destroy my argument. Which leaves ambience as an argument to keep the current forge.

 

 

1 hour ago, Khalagar said:

 

Sounds like they just want the Forge to be another workbench like the workbench / chemstation / fire etc

 

Which would make more sense than it currently being a weird outlier / relic of an old game design that doesn't really make sense / add anything of use

 

Heat management and time management etc can all be easily applied to any new form of forge without much issue, all while being less clunky and confusing to people who have the attention span of a dead gnat

 

If someone like the friend you talked about has no interest in learning the game but just wants to tag along or shoot at anything moving or do other things in the game, that is totally fine. But the game doesn't need to be dumbed down for people who don't want to learn it anyway.

 

Because forges are not so complicated that someone interested couldn't learn it, even with a low IQ. This is just indifference that keeps him from understanding it.

 

 

[Darklegend222]

Are the settings on the test world PvP enabled? I'm all for playing on it and doing what I normally do if it's disabled. Otherwise I'll just head back to singleplayer. Edit: it is set to PvP enabled so I'm gonna head on out, props to everyone in PvP for sticking with it! I wish all of you the best of luck.

[bdubyah]

9 hours ago, Gazz said:

 

That's the problem right there. It is complex, yes, but it has zero depth.

You have a forge so you can craft forged iron and other things as long as you have the iron.

 

The extra step of smelting adds nothing but more clicking. The time spent can just as easily be rolled into the crafting time.

Features that add complexity but no depth are nothing but bloat.

I have to disagree with that. It's part of the game. Anyone who has any time in this game knows that. It lacks depth because that depth has been removed over the years. As stated, it made much more sense when you mined raw iron and other raw resources instead of the same resource you get from scrapping something. I just don't see that being an improvement. The only reason the forge seems to be an outlier is because it was made that way with all the other bits around it being stripped out. There's nothing wrong with it.

 

If a new player cannot figure it out without flashing signs and excessive hand-holding, then that should be on them to put the effort in to learn it. It's not on the game to dumb itself down until the slowest player can do it with ease. Some hover tooltips wouldn't be the worst thing, and I would much rather see that than have the forge basically removed from the game. But constantly changing things because 'iz 2 hrd" isn't good because it just makes people that aren't new to the game confused as well because @%$# keeps changing. This game really just needs to be pushed to gold before it's a completely different game. Take all these ideas and use them for the sequel.