Of all things, I can't find vitamins

[ElCabong]

Every time I start a new game it's always something. Every time I take damage I worry about it. So far I've just been abrased and diseased but I found some honey, painkillers, first aid kits, casks. Lots of 9mm. 

 

Seems like the game rolls some dice and decides to keep something at random that I want hidden.

[Rotor]

I can always find vitamins and honey, but antibiotics are almost never for me.

[Boidster]

1 hour ago, ElCabong said:

Seems like the game rolls some dice and decides to keep something at random that I want hidden.

 

If you want to see just how the RNG is abusing you, this mod (plug!) is fun to play with. For certain definitions of "fun".

 

The code behind that mod lays the foundation for a different mod which could take a user-defined list of items and gradually increase the odds of finding them, until one is found. So for example maybe the odds of vitamins are increased 0.001 every time you search a container that might return vitamins. When vitamins finally hits, back to default probability.

 

I like the pure RNG system they have now (maybe with some further balancing of probabilities), but I can see how gently rubber-banding "missing" items could be a positive for a lot of players. I'd call the mod, "It's Always In The Last Place You Look".

[Kyonshi]

Why do people get so concerned with this?

 

Be careful and don't engage anything that would potentially result in such injuries or infections? Or else, raid a Pop N Pills?

 

Now I'd expect someone telling me "But I can't see one nearby!", as usual.

 

Then explore! It's almost like it's a fundamental part of this survival game...

[ElCabong]

59 minutes ago, Kyonshi said:

Why do people get so concerned with this?

 

Be careful and don't engage anything that would potentially result in such injuries or infections? Or else, raid a Pop N Pills?

 

Now I'd expect someone telling me "But I can't see one nearby!", as usual.

 

Then explore! It's almost like it's a fundamental part of this survival game...

To raid a Pop in pills first you must find one. 

[JoeDaFrogman]

1 hour ago, ElCabong said:

To raid a Pop in pills first you must find one. 

True, but a small part of his point is to explore to find one.  But I also undrstand that sometimes the game does not put stuff in at logical places such that you can get a PopNPills in every town/city since it's random.

 

WIth that said, there are a decent number of POI's with a higher than average number of chem sets or popnpills crates to check and they are part of quests was well tah you can keep an eye out for. 

 

House Old Spanish 01 Its the one with the cellar bunker, end loot is mostly medicals and an exit shaft you dig a hole up in the front yard.  I think this is a tier 2 quest but not sure.

 

 

Another is a tier 1 quest where the front left corner of the house is broken and you go in and up to the attic and drop down a double drop into a dug out basement.   Can't quickly find the pic for that one though.  EDIT: im pretty sure this is it, House_old_modular_06:

 

I'm sure there are plenty of others, but those are ones I know off that immediately come to mind and as houses have a much higher chances to spawn vs businesses

Edited March 11, 2022 by JoeDaFrogman (see edit history)

[Ripflex]

It is pure RNG and it's not.  Most things are Gamestaged locked, if you are 1st level or you kept your gamestage low for whatever reason, goooood luck.  By the time you get 20+ Level and killed a lot of zombies, you be "I can't find (Place item here) anywhere" - it's because it's locked out unless you quest in the wastelands or get Lucky looter and looter goggles ...

[Kyonshi]

12 hours ago, JoeDaFrogman said:

True, but a small part of his point is to explore to find one.  But I also undrstand that sometimes the game does not put stuff in at logical places such that you can get a PopNPills in every town/city since it's random.

Just after I said to loot a Pop N Pills, I did mention to explore to find one. I dunno if this guy is trolling or just has trouble reading comments in their entirety.

 

I have played a considerable amounts of RWG maps since A20 came out (because I play perma-death and delete maps when I get killed 😆) and in every city center, there's always a Pop N Pills. Always. Of various sizes, but there's at least one. If not, people can look out in smaller townships with a commercial main street. The probability of finding such store is a bit less than in urban centers but it still is considerable in townships.

[JoeDaFrogman]

1 hour ago, Kyonshi said:

Just after I said to loot a Pop N Pills, I did mention to explore to find one. I dunno if this guy is trolling or just has trouble reading comments in their entirety.

 

Any my reply acknowledged that 

 

Quote

True, but a small part of his point is to explore to find one.

And then I went on and said just exploring is not always that easy.   For example, Here is one of  the maps I have:

 

This is a low res screenshot, but I assure you I have a full 8k version I can zoom in on(here if you want it)

 

Consider if you spawn above the lake and head East to the first trader and set up camp.  Town too small, no pop N pills.  Eventually you find the next town over, likely via a trader quest but again, no Pop n Pills.    So consider a fairly enw player who may be hesitant to leave the forest.   In this case the town to the far East DOES have(two IIRC) pop n pills), but look at the vast sea of forest with nothing in it and then the fact that that far East town is well over 4k from where you would likely set up your base.    Now, you could go into the wasteland city in the center of the map(perhaps via a trader quest or perhaps exploring) and there is likewise a pop n pills there as well.  But I know from experience, a heck of a lot of people don't go into the wasteland until deep into the game after they are geared up and some never do. 

 

I am going on two assumptions here which I guess could be wrong:

1. MOST people generated a random map and play without seeking out a "good" map
2. most people don't have a deep understanding of the game mechanics.  

Just look at the above map, if you were a player who stayed away from other biomes, just how much exploring might you do in that vast sea of green before you found a pop n pills in that far Eastern city?    Outside of what i would consider a fairly small population(but likely the people who tend to come to the forums) more veteran players who might head straight to the wasteland, most will stick to the forest, and perhaps the desert for the first 30+ days.  And in this example map, the desert and snow towns are fairly deep into their biomes.  

 

As an aside, I have generated something on the order of 5000 maps in A19 and somewhere around 2000-2500 in A20 and use some programming tools(someone else wrote and I contributed a bit) to identify higher quality seeds based on objective standards.    Suffice to say, I have visually seen a LOT of maps in great detail.   While I completely agree that pop n pills tend to be found fairly easily in play, an unlucky world gen can completely bone you and especially people who don't like to go outside their comfort zone biome wise(which I assume to be the majority of casual players who don't KNOW that the best loot is in the harder biomes).

[Boidster]

12 hours ago, Ripflex said:

Most things are Gamestaged locked

 

Not by a long shot. Of all the loot groups and loot items (1052 as of A20.3) checked against RNG when a container is opened, 851 of them (80.9%) have a fixed probability not dependent on lootstage.

[JoeDaFrogman]

2 hours ago, Kyonshi said:

I dunno if this guy is trolling or just has trouble reading comments in their entirety.

im 1/16th troll on my fathers side.😁

 

2 hours ago, Kyonshi said:

I have played a considerable amounts of RWG maps since A20 came out (because I play perma-death and delete maps when I get killed 😆) and in every city center, there's always a Pop N Pills. Always. Of various sizes, but there's at least one. If not, people can look out in smaller townships with a commercial main street. The probability of finding such store is a bit less than in urban centers but it still is considerable in townships.

It's not just about finding a pop n pills, it's about what you randomly get out of it.   I have certainly looted 2+ pop n pills recently and not gotten an antibiotic of any kind and im SURE others have experienced that same issue with RNG.   My point was hey, here are some other places to also look to increase your RNG chances of finding the meds you need which is why I posted the pictures of the specific POIs that might spawn in/around them.

[Boidster]

2 hours ago, Kyonshi said:

people can look out in smaller townships with a commercial main street.

 

+1 to this. There are a few POIs which have Pop-N-Pills franchises. And of course "search Pop-N-Pills" maybe isn't general enough for someone looking for vitamins. What you want are medical and pharmacy cases. Which are available in convenience stores, Shamway Foods stores, and home bathrooms. Granted, a full Pop-N-Pills store is the best chance-per-time-spent-looting, but in even in a smaller town there are many opportunities to search for med supplies.

 

Backpacks (the kind you find laying around, not the loot bags) also have medical supplies in their loot list. Pretty diluted with a bunch of other options, though.

 

(Edit: uhh, I guess this could just say, "what Joe said")

Edited March 11, 2022 by Boidster (see edit history)

[ElCabong]

I have looked for a pop and pills and I haven't found one yet. I looted that house that has all the mushrooms in the basement with the chemistry sets and I found one, I repeat one vitamin. When I went back to the trader to get the reward, he gave me a choice between some armor and two antibiotics I took the antibiotics. So I have two antibiotics, two honeys, two herbal antibiotics, nine painkillers, and one vitamin. 

 

I should go spend the night in the wasteland.

Edited March 11, 2022 by ElCabong (see edit history)

[Kyonshi]

2 hours ago, JoeDaFrogman said:

im 1/16th troll on my fathers side.😁

This is a misunderstanding; I was talking about the TC, not you 🙂

[JoeDaFrogman]

1 minute ago, Kyonshi said:

This is a misunderstanding; I was talking about the TC, not you 🙂

heh.. well the fact still remains... I also don't always properly read what people type as well so it's double bad for my responses.😀

[ElCabong]

I looted two, TWO, pop-n-pills and didn't get any vitamins. I shot a random z, it dropped a yellow package and it had one vitamin in it. Now I have two. Lol 

If you want to find something the best way to find it is not to look for it

 

 

 

 

[Roland]

meh...the debuff that a vitamin cures is the mildest and rare to get (at least for me)  It's barely an inconvenience. Two vitamins should last you a long time.

[Maharin]

There should be a tier 1 version of vitamins for the early game.  We'll call them Flintstones Vitamins.

 

 

[Laz Man]

6 hours ago, Maharin said:

There should be a tier 1 version of vitamins for the early game.  We'll call them Flintstones Vitamins.

 

 

Gummy vitamins...😄

[warmer]

the very first thing I do every game after the tutorial is break some stumps until I find honey. That right there has keep me from dying from infection so many times.

[hazymkii]

3 hours ago, warmer said:

the very first thing I do every game after the tutorial is break some stumps until I find honey. That right there has keep me from dying from infection so many times.

Right? I have been doing this since I started playing years ago.

 

Zombie dogs are my biggest threat in the early game, so I am super cautious when exploring until I have a couple of jars of honey and rank 2 of Sexy TRex.

[Ripflex]

You are forgetting, if your level is low, you would most likely not find any other than ingredients to craft them - it's why you find Aloe cream 99& of the time at level one.

 

Your best bet at early levels is to place 1 rank in lucky looter maybe find looter goggles and sneak into the wasteland biome...

 

Specific understanding in game mechanics matter more so than RNG.

[BFT2020]

14 minutes ago, Ripflex said:

You are forgetting, if your level is low, you would most likely not find any other than ingredients to craft them - it's why you find Aloe cream 99& of the time at level one.

 

Your best bet at early levels is to place 1 rank in lucky looter maybe find looter goggles and sneak into the wasteland biome...

 

Specific understanding in game mechanics matter more so than RNG.

 

Not true in this case.  Vitamins are in groupMedicalUncommon just like First Aid bandages, painkillers, Herbal antibiotics, Plaster Cast, Steroids, and blood bags (though the antibiotics and cast probabilities are set to very low and low).  Most of the container groups that I found that have this group in them are set to med or high probability which is not tied at all to lootstage.  So as an example, the small medical piles you find:

 

<lootgroup name="groupMedicalPileSmall" count="all">
    <item group="groupMedicalSmall01" count ="1"/>
    <item group="groupMedicalSmall02" loot_prob_template="med" force_prob="true"/>
    <item group="groupMedicalSmall03" loot_prob_template="low" force_prob="true"/>
</lootgroup>

 

So you will definitely pull something from Small01 which has 3 groups (Common - high, Uncommon - med, Rare - veryLow), 50% chance of pulling something from Small02 group (same groups and probs as Small01), and a 20% chance of pulling something from group Small03 (again same as the other two).

 

You find aloe cream because it is one of 4 items in the CommonMedical group (two of which are set to low probability in the Common group) which has a higher chance (75%) of pulling from in all 3 cases.  Putting the lucky googles on might make you feel like you are more lucky, but the universe is just laughing at you  🙂

 

You have the same chance of finding vitamins in a small medical pile at level 1 with no gear in the pine forest as you do at level 60 with all ranks of lucky looter, goggles, and searching the pile in the Wasteland.

[eXSe]

The trick to finding vitamins is not to search for vitamins... I think it applies to all other ingame things also.

[Boidster]

19 hours ago, Ripflex said:

You are forgetting, if your level is low, you would most likely not find any other than ingredients to craft them - it's why you find Aloe cream 99& of the time at level one.

 

BFT2020 covered this above in detail. I just want to emphasize a general point that players tend to significantly overestimate how much loot is controlled by lootstage. Most stuff is just fixed probabilities (80.9% of loot container RNG checks, in fact, as posted earlier). If'n ya don't believe, try the loot logger mod.

 

The lootstage-scaling is really only used to manage your progression from crap weapons/armor/tools/crafting to xtreem pwnage weapons/armor/tools/crafting.