Alpha 20 Dev Diary

[Kalex]

7 hours ago, Khalagar said:

 

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

 

Not a bug, just the way rng works sometimes.

[bachgaman]

Well, how many bugs did streamers find?🤣

[Roland]

20 minutes ago, Kalex said:

What do you mean it was wrong on drones? The drone was listed in the patch notes, and the drone is in the game. Just because you didn't read the patch notes carefully enough, doesn't mean it wasn't there.

The patch notes state that the drone improves as the player progresses in intellect but it seems at first glance that it does not. That is what they meant about the patch notes being wrong about the drone. They know the drone is in the game. 

5 minutes ago, bachgaman said:

Well, how many bugs did streamers find?🤣

Now here is an example of someone sticking doggedly to an inaccurate self-constructed narrative despite thousands of words over the course of four years explaining otherwise by one who is an authoritative source on the subject. 
 

And we’re accused of silencing people?

[bachgaman]

15 minutes ago, Roland said:

Now here is an example of someone sticking doggedly to an inaccurate self-constructed narrative despite thousands of words over the course of four years explaining otherwise by one who is an authoritative source on the subject. 
 

And we’re accused of silencing people?

 

I hope they will publicly sum up the results of this streamer event 

[madmole]

Farming:
My experience with it was the best one ever. Prior to the change I would use zero perks and have a chest super stacked full of food by day 30-35. I could make pretty much unlimited stews and forget about food.

With the change I found myself looking at a frugal little farm that sometimes felt like I had something going on, then all my seeds would die and I only had a couple of plants growing. I often found myself rummaging the cupboards for something I could make. It felt like I was a starving trade school student with limited resources/food and you make whatever you can scrounge up. And to me, that felt right in an apocalypse.

Late game I could make maybe 3-4 tacos, or 5 stews once. I made some sham chowder here and there. You make whatever you can cook up. I like to save a dish until I have at least 3-4 of them then that is my food I take with me for the day or a few days until it is gone. That way I only use one slot for food when I'm adventuring.

At the end of my play through sure I could cook all the meat I wanted, but who wants to eat meat? It doesn't have any good bonuses. So I had fun mix and matching whatever I had to get decent bonuses but I wasn't OP with unlimited best foods. I bought 1 rank of living off the land, where normally I never get those perks and have TONS of food.

 

[Matt115]

52 minutes ago, Roland said:

 

For my gameplay preferences and what I expect from life after a zombie and nuclear apocalypse the new farming does not feel like bad design to me. But I knew it wasn’t going to be liked by people who loathe negative results on dice rolls and believe that design should never ever ever punish the player but only ever reward the player. 

Omg 7DTD spinoff idea. You are farmer and need to keep your family alive. pay coin for protection  to Duke.  complain about new weather. Try to keep you teenagers kids away from Snowdog.  make a good fertilizer using zombie bodies. Try to be "civilised" as long as your can- well your grandkids will live in neo medival period and work with scythe but you still can use your tractor. Remeber moonshine is the best cure!

[bachgaman]

7 minutes ago, madmole said:

Farming:
My experience with it was the best one ever. Prior to the change I would use zero perks and have a chest super stacked full of food by day 30-35. I could make pretty much unlimited stews and forget about food.

With the change I found myself looking at a frugal little farm that sometimes felt like I had something going on, then all my seeds would die and I only had a couple of plants growing. I often found myself rummaging the cupboards for something I could make. It felt like I was a starving trade school student with limited resources/food and you make whatever you can scrounge up. And to me, that felt right in an apocalypse.

Late game I could make maybe 3-4 tacos, or 5 stews once. I made some sham chowder here and there. You make whatever you can cook up. I like to save a dish until I have at least 3-4 of them then that is my food I take with me for the day or a few days until it is gone. That way I only use one slot for food when I'm adventuring.

At the end of my play through sure I could cook all the meat I wanted, but who wants to eat meat? It doesn't have any good bonuses. So I had fun mix and matching whatever I had to get decent bonuses but I wasn't OP with unlimited best foods. I bought 1 rank of living off the land, where normally I never get those perks and have TONS of food.

 

Cool. It remains to add a penalty for hunger so that there is some sense in doing this.

[MechanicalLens]

The farming changes sound excellent. However, the snow biome are full of walking mountains of meat (mountain lions, dire wolves, and bears). Hopefully this will be addressed in the future and all the predatory animals wandering the snow biome will only provide the player with rotten flesh instead of red meat.

[bachgaman]

3 minutes ago, MechanicalLens said:

The farming changes sound excellent. However, the snow biome are full of walking mountains of meat (mountain lions, dire wolves, and bears). Hopefully this will be addressed in the future and all the predatory animals wandering the snow biome will only provide the player with rotten flesh instead of red meat.

It is enough just to reduce the amount of meat from them. And to reduce the number of wild animals, it is really strange sometimes to observe a couple of bears and three pumas in one place.

[Matt115]

17 minutes ago, madmole said:

Farming:
My experience with it was the best one ever. Prior to the change I would use zero perks and have a chest super stacked full of food by day 30-35. I could make pretty much unlimited stews and forget about food.

With the change I found myself looking at a frugal little farm that sometimes felt like I had something going on, then all my seeds would die and I only had a couple of plants growing. I often found myself rummaging the cupboards for something I could make. It felt like I was a starving trade school student with limited resources/food and you make whatever you can scrounge up. And to me, that felt right in an apocalypse.

Late game I could make maybe 3-4 tacos, or 5 stews once. I made some sham chowder here and there. You make whatever you can cook up. I like to save a dish until I have at least 3-4 of them then that is my food I take with me for the day or a few days until it is gone. That way I only use one slot for food when I'm adventuring.

At the end of my play through sure I could cook all the meat I wanted, but who wants to eat meat? It doesn't have any good bonuses. So I had fun mix and matching whatever I had to get decent bonuses but I wasn't OP with unlimited best foods. I bought 1 rank of living off the land, where normally I never get those perks and have TONS of food.

 

Hey @madmole 7DTD spinoff idea. You are farmer and need to keep your family alive. pay coin for protection  to Duke.  complain about new weather. Try to keep you teenagers kids away from Snowdog.  make a good fertilizer using zombie bodies. Try to be "civilised" as long as your can- well your grandkids will live in neo medival period and work with scythe but you still can use your tractor. Remeber moonshine is the best cure! XD

[hotpoon]

1 hour ago, Kalex said:

What do you mean it was wrong on drones? The drone was listed in the patch notes, and the drone is in the game. Just because you didn't read the patch notes carefully enough, doesn't mean it wasn't there.

he/she probably means from before.  The drone was in the A19 patch notes and wasn't in the game.

[BFT2020]

1 hour ago, Games'n'Grumble said:

Sorry, I don't know where else to ask this, but how can old prefabs be converted to new forms? I downloaded the location from A19, and it all consists of "lost blocks" and question marks. The devteam didn't rebuild all the prefabs manually, did they?

Don't quote me on the Alphas, but I think between A16 and A17, there were changes to the blocks.  When that occurred, TFP (with the help of a community member) released a tool that would do the automatically convert blocks over so it wouldn't require manually updating each POI block by block.  They mentioned about trying to do the same thing with A20 if the block changes were going to mess up POIs a lot.

 

At least that is what I believe occurred.  I might be off on the details (or completely wrong)

21 hours ago, KhaineGB said:

Just had a look in progression and can't see the drone hooked up to anything in there.

Including recipe unlocks.

From a recipe standpoint, sounds the same as the T3 items.

 

Quality level of crafting it hopefully is tied to Robotics?  Which on its own doesn't sound much of an unique item for the Robotics Perk 5 player if anyone can find or buy a Q6 drone in the field and use it to its full potential.

[KhaineGB]

10 minutes ago, BFT2020 said:

From a recipe standpoint, sounds the same as the T3 items.

 

Quality level of crafting it hopefully is tied to Robotics?  Which on its own doesn't sound much of an unique item for the Robotics Perk 5 player if anyone can find or buy a Q6 drone in the field and use it to its full potential.

 

Looks like it.
 

<recipe name="gunBotT3JunkDrone" count="1" craft_area="workbench" tags="learnable,perkTurrets">

 

[JCrook1028]

13 hours ago, hiemfire said:

Takes steel to craft.

Steel is everywhere in A20 tho as soon as you find a wrench. Streetlights are covering the roads and they still give steel.

[MechanicalLens]

1 minute ago, JCrook1028 said:

Steel is everywhere in A20 tho as soon as you find a wrench. Streetlights are covering the roads and they still give steel.

 

Then perhaps that should be changed so they only give the player forged iron.

[Jost Amman]

Look at this A20 main feature summary, it's very well done IMO:

Spoiler

 

 

[Naz]

1 hour ago, Games'n'Grumble said:

Sorry, I don't know where else to ask this, but how can old prefabs be converted to new forms? I downloaded the location from A19, and it all consists of "lost blocks" and question marks. The devteam didn't rebuild all the prefabs manually, did they?

They have a block conversion tool included with a20 for converting older prefabs. I can't say exactly the process to use it, but they did something similar in a17 so I'd imagine it would be the same thing. Also no they most certainly did not rebuild every prefab from scratch, if they did a20 wouldn't show up until somthing like 2025😄. 

[JCrook1028]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

Since you admit you can’t think of a reason, let me offer one: Post Apocalyptic  Survival.  
 

A PAS world ought to be a struggle to live in. There is a degree of radiation that could cause a percentage of seeds to not germinate. 
 

The arguments I have read so far against this idea in every case has been from players who hate unlucky random results because it annoys them. They want only positive results and look at setbacks to the player as bad design. 
 

I suggest that PAS games must have chances for failure and setbacks or the world isn’t believable. Sometimes you have to do without and adapt your gameplay because what you planned to happen didn’t work. So, yes, there should be a chance that your farm fails and doesn’t automatically always return enough seeds to sustain it. 
 

I get that not everyone has fun the same way. Some people have fun in steadily and without risk of failure getting stronger and more powerful and eventually completely be 100% safe and secure and successful.  Some people have fun by achieving all that by Day 3. 
 

Other people have fun by overcoming setbacks and recovering when something unlucky destroys their plans and they have to adjust. That’s me. I’m fine with the possibility of getting zero seeds back and having to adjust to this event. I was fine when we had a chance to vomit— maybe 1% instead of 4% and only when infected would have been better but still— I liked how losing all my fullness immediately disrupted my plans and caused me to have to focus on getting food again instead of preparing to be 100% safe on horde night. I hate that the death penalty cures all debuffs because it robs me of the gameplay of working myself out of those conditions. 
 

So everyone is different but occasional negative events that randomly set me back and ruin my plans are not things that annoy me. They are fun to play for me and give me a sense of accomplishment just as completing a quest does if I get a broken arm and have no remedy available. The setback makes that quest memorable to me. 
 

For my gameplay preferences and what I expect from life after a zombie and nuclear apocalypse the new farming does not feel like bad design to me. But I knew it wasn’t going to be liked by people who loathe negative results on dice rolls and believe that design should never ever ever punish the player but only ever reward the player. 

But random negative results are not the only issue. They've re introduced the tedium of replanting the farm every harvest.

[BFT2020]

3 minutes ago, JCrook1028 said:

But random negative results are not the only issue. They've re introduced the tedium of replanting the farm every harvest.

 

Uh welcome to what every farmer has to do in the real world with crops like corn and potatoes  😉

[hiemfire]

9 hours ago, Kalex said:

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.

It hasn't taken roughly 80% of the crop yield dedicated to seed since well before crop rotation was conceptualized. I doubt it was even the case before corn/maize was still a very crunchy form of wheat that the Aztecs were figuring out how to cultivate. Agriculture would have never taken off.

Edited December 4, 2021 by hiemfire (see edit history)

[Orclover]

52 minutes ago, madmole said:

At the end of my play through sure I could cook all the meat I wanted, but who wants to eat meat? It doesn't have any good bonuses. So I had fun mix and matching whatever I had to get decent bonuses but I wasn't OP with unlimited best foods. I bought 1 rank of living off the land, where normally I never get those perks and have TONS of food.

 

I'm going to reserve any judgement on the new system until after I get a few days into actually playing it.  I am of course going to be one of those old alpha players who will lament any loss of some survival elements for easier access for new players and more RPG elements.  But thats because I always really enjoyed the survival aspect of previous alphas in 7d2d, we get nostalgic trying to retrace that high of A15 or A16, it's gone and we have to adapt and not complain about it(and don't worry, we will.....eventually).  There is a reason I have far more hours in your game played than Fallout 4 :D.  In the end I loved the challenge of 7D2D,  It actually took some work to actually get good at, not grinding but learned skill.  And you are right, the farming system did make the survival aspect too easy with not enough effort.  I'm no fan of grinding your food out daily with watering and replanting (as some other games do) but to just plop down 20+ plants and never have to worry about food ever again was making players lazy.  That's ok, I preferred hunting to farming anyways.

[KhaineGB]

17 minutes ago, Naz said:

They have a block conversion tool included with a20 for converting older prefabs. I can't say exactly the process to use it, but they did something similar in a17 so I'd imagine it would be the same thing. Also no they most certainly did not rebuild every prefab from scratch, if they did a20 wouldn't show up until somthing like 2025😄. 

1) Press F1 to open the console.

2) Run this command: prefabupdater loadtable

3) Then run this command: prefabupdater updateblocks

[Jost Amman]

29 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

Look at this A20 main feature summary, it's very well done IMO:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

@bachgaman : was it a "nay" because you don't like the video or just because you think I'm advertising someone?

(which is not the case since I don't even know those guys)

[Matt115]

26 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

Look at this A20 main feature summary, it's very well done IMO:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

rad zombie need unique animations 😕 but rest of zombies Tiles and props looks great - but i suggest " military " district- military base +barricades and checkpoints

[Laz Man]

7 hours ago, Doomofman said:

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

 

The door with buttons are primarily for level design purposes.  Think of them as quick save and/or quick exits for POIs so players don't have to run through an entire POI to get back in if they died or leave when they are done.

 

I believe we have a toggle switch as at our disposal as well for certain use cases.