Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[Darthjake]

I like most of what I saw, I'm really looking forward to the new POI's and the new tiles.

 

I like that the spear is stronger,  and I'm eager to see how the learn by reading will be, but I'll still miss being able to throw my spear, since they fixed losing it by making it trackable, but I'm guessing that will be one less thing the game has to track.  I'm absolutely amazed and blown away by the amount of doors, I'll have to really try not to go overboard on making doors in my base, lol.

 

I'm not to happy about glass jars, but I'm willing to try it out and see how it works, although I would like to know how much of a chance there will be for dysentery to occur while drinking murky water.  But as long as we can still get other drinks from the soda dispensers, coffee makers and vending machines, I don't see much of an issue, all you'll need to do is get a forge running to make a cooking pot if you're unlucky with looting, and bang, you can turn murky to clean.

 

On that note, will making glue require murky or clean water?  And what will the ratio be for making it?

 

If anyone can answer that right now.

Edited April 14, 2023 by Darthjake
derp spelling (see edit history)

[Deadfordays]

2 hours ago, Mumpfy said:

well as i said.... its just my little conspiracy theory for now. maybe some pimp wants to confirm or deny that. we'll see.

 

Also i had the advantage that i didnt watched that live, i saw the video this morning, so i checked that a couple of times after i noticed it.

 

I also think... and i may be pushing my imagination here... that prime intentionally avoided that radio station near the helipad. my though is that maybe if you aim at it you could read something like when you aim to a storage thing or bench.

 

idk.

 

Noticed the same thing.. Saw the Helipad and then the radio station... He walked to it but not near enough to "tag" it then walked away. But the "teleport" mention came up and quickly changed topic... 🤔

[Riamus]

Yeah, it seems we'll have a fast travel between traders.  That's going to be useful.  It would be great if it showed you in a helicopter that traveled the distance between the traders rather than just instantly teleporting so it's at least realistic, but I'm fine with it either way.  Definitely looking forward to A21!  May can't get here fast enough.

[RipClaw]

4 hours ago, khzmusik said:

Does the "learn by looting" mechanic also affect food recipes? I didn't see this mentioned in the first post or in the stream.

Yes it does. When Lathan read some magazine bundles, you could see recipes being unlocked like red tea or grilled meat.

 

2 hours ago, Darthjake said:

On that note, will making glue require murky or clean water?  And what will the ratio be for making it?

Glue requires clean water and the ratio has not changed as far as I know. 

[bdubyah]

3 hours ago, Ayrton said:

I really waited a lot to see Alpha 21, and I am really disappointed, after more than 4,000 hours of offline play and 2100 hours on Steam, can I say that I expected more from this Alpha 21 more than 15 months to just add aesthetic parts? (we appreciate it very much) and to add a water collection system that nobody asked for?
Each Alpha was exciting when the release date arrived, what happened to the bandits? they are late from alpha 15! 6 alpha and several years have passed and we still don't have it, I don't know if the community is enthusiastic, but I'm not, I expected much more, apart from the double doors, the fire and missions we don't have anything new

You people have to realize the new features list is pretty small now. They are only a few things away from being able to call the game complete. Bandits, the new character armors/models, and a few other things is all that is really left. Console is under way which they always said wouldn't happen till after gold, but still likely means the game is getting pretty close to feature complete. First people complain that the game "isn't done after 10 years" and then when the updates get smaller due to the game being almost done, they complain about that. Come on now...

 

And also, it seems optimization has been a focus as they mentioned more than once that the game should be smoother now. Again, not new features but signs of a game being close to finished. So just because there isn't a long list of new things doesn't mean they haven't been working.

[Jost Amman]

1 hour ago, bdubyah said:

And also, it seems optimization has been a focus as they mentioned more than once that the game should be smoother now. Again, not new features but signs of a game being close to finished. So just because there isn't a long list of new things doesn't mean they haven't been working.

Actually, there are around 48 pages of changes for A21.

 

But more than that... players only look at what's "apparent": it's like they're looking at a car, and they only see the color of the paint and the interiors... but the car has been improved on the engine, suspensions, fuel efficiency, and so on... For example, they don't consider all the changes and improvements to the Random World Generation, or the optimizations to the AI, or simply even cleaning up the code to be more maintainable in the future. That's all mostly irrelevant to them.

 

Most of them want new guns, new vehicles, new zombies. That's all they want and look for.

[MichaelL.]

As a prefabber, I'm wondering if the devs would be willing to talk about these:  what appears to be a set of 4:1 sloped 'double' pipes, but most interestingly,  the sagging rope.  Is this all just one large object, or is this something that prefabbers are going to be able to use in our custom POI's as usable blocks.   I've been a long time proponent for having 'decorative' sagging electrical wires to include in POI's.  Is the sagging rope an example of this capability in the prefab editor?  

[DuHast_Play]

I have a question about doors. Will we be able to craft more types of doors in the new alpha? I think there are a lot of fans to make shelters in a form that is pleasing to the eye, and I would like more doors available for crafting)

[Blake_]

Hi there !

 

To those of you that didn't have the time to watch the full dev stream this past Wednesday at 9PM CST, here's a "brief" summary.

 

The Stream started almost in time, with Lathan, Rick and Joel in the house.

 

Features shown/talked about:

Spoiler

-Tons of new environment assets, improved old ones and shapes (over 250 new shapes, including new farm plot shapes). Those assets were added to ALL the old POI as they got an art pass, and there are dozens of new POI (inconclusive, but we might be talking about more than 200 new POI from tiny random road encounters like an ambulance and a few supplies to Tier 5+ POIs).

 

-Hundreds of new doors (we might be talking about close to 1000, including hatches, drawer doors, tiny doors, medium doors, garage doors....etc) all of them can be destroyed in various stages and the player can attack through "all of the holes" in all of those stages of damage. Sounds very pornographic.

 

-POI difficulty marker, a big introductory label will show the difficulty of the POI you are in upon entrance (it disappears shortly after and goes to the top right of the screen, in the form of a tiny label) , with a system of skulls. So a tier 1 will show 1 skull in the forest, a tier 2 will show 2 skulls, etc. The biome difficulty bonus will add to those skulls, so the same tier one that has 1 skull in the forest will show almost 4 skulls in the wasteland, so better be careful then.

 

-Tier 6 POI confirmed.

 

-New Infestation quest, exactly like "Clear " but only dedicated to Zombies, so you have to clear a nest of Zombies. There are many more zombies than in an average "Clear" quest.

 

-Console news: We are getting 7dtd on Consoles within the next 2 years. They are working hard on finishing the game and optimizing the heck out of it. Be aware, optimizations are strong in this alpha, specially water, trees and Zombie pathing with the new AI throttling code that allows for less data being sent from entities the further away they are. There are also a lot of network optimizations, which will affect multiplayer directly. All of those optimizations have the direct goal of making 7dtd playable in consoles, while increasing the performance on PC by leaps and bounds (expect less bumps in PC experience).

 

-New trader compounds (all are redone) and trader item balance: Removed Secret stash and balanced all the items of each trader to increase a bit over your gamestage, so no more quality 6 Anti-Air tanks on day 1. For example, you have gamestage 40 and you have a quality 1 iron pickaxe: the trader will then show you quality 2 or 3 iron tools if any. 

 

-Trader items are not independent from each player, to avoid extreme unbalanced multiplayer gameplay (more than 3 veteran players fully equiped would break through even the most difficult POI without a sweat). Player Gamestage will show more and more items from the trader the higher it is, so a player with lesser gamestage will only see a fraction of what a player with higher gamestage would see, but from the same general storage.

 

Trader "Tier completed" rewards now show 5 choices instead of 4. Alrighty.

 

-This is a big one, smaller loot containers will dissappear once you've looted them. That includes garbage bags, purses, bird nests, small and medium medical and bullet supplies, etc. Now, stop crying about the bird nests already and hear me out: Medium sized crates, cabinets and drawers will switch to their "open" form once looted. If you don't take all the items from inside, then they will never switch to the empty/open form. They will also never respawn if you put or leave something (anything) inside.

 

Vehicle damage: They now do higher damage to entities, but take more damage across the board, no more hitting a cement wall and expect 1% damage. You will now take more like a 15-25% damage with a full speed motocycle collision against a hard cement wall. Still very lenient, but playable.

Bring repair kits.

 

Better water: Faster flowing, waay more performant (one surface mesh equals less CPU calculations). It looks good. The single-block water dropped on a flat surface looks weird though, but it might get some "smoothing love" in the future. Beaches and rivers look way better.

 

On that note, the Dew collector workstation has 3 water dropplets that gradually transform into 3 water units with about 3 per 60 minutes (default day) with some speed variation. You can take them and they function like normal clean water in recipes, they just don't drop any jars once consumed.

Glue recipes are taken into consideration, unknown if they use murky water (found in loot) or normal water (dew collector, trader and rare special loot).

 

Spears are not throwable, but they are STRONG (power attack hits very hard), thick and with BIG reach. They also have piercings? . Straight from Brazzers that one. They are more like lances now.

 

They showed the Learn by looting system, which is explained  on the OP, so I won't say any new stuff about it. It sounds very cool and seems to play better. We just have to try it.

 

They showed the new rebalanced perks. They are concentrated and beefier when stricktly talking about weapons, also with the former flurry of blows from agility fragmentated into each attribute (with other names) combat builds seem more balanced. Other perks, like Master Chef were rebalanced to make default cooking slower but the perk investments way better. Overall they didn't show nearly enough about perks, but be aware that investing just one point in Pummel Pete will give you such an amount of club bonuses that you will forever be set apart from your peers, in addition to a fleeting tiny bonus to "skill book finds" of that type, tiny bonus that goes back to normal once the perk is maxed out. It doesn't really affect the other magazine findings. Not too much anyway. If the final chest gives you 100 different magazines, the you will probably get 5 of clubs because of the bonuses from the perk you chose. So it's not much.

 

Fire hazards shown: You move a valve or switch off a button and they stop. Still a bit sudden and rough in their "switching off" visuals, but they look cool . Players will get stuck and slow and will burn if they go through them while they are still emitting flames.

 

Quality of life features: 

 

Status effects will show a tiny word next to the status icon so you can guess where your ailment/buff comes from without having to go to your character window in search of a description.

 

Tutorials are more detailed, short of having a Fun Pimp popping out of the screen and moving your mouse to the correct action. Detailed tutorial descriptions now show on the top left until hidden/completed.

 

A22 features confirmed and well under way:

 

Character Creation System: About 75% done, they decided to push it back to a22 because they want a good amount of customizable options to offer the player.

 

Bandits: Well under way, including models, bandit-controlled POIs and random encounters. They are confirmed for a22, this time not on paper. Really. For sure this time. Surely. Certainly. They even deleted the random ones from a21 in wait for a better "ducking and surrounding" AI. Be patient they say. Stop with that bloody axe they say. What are you doing so close to me with those bloodshot eyes, step bro.

 

Armours are confirmed for a22. For sure this time. For God's sake, for family.

 

Rick said a date, around first half of May. That, in my biased and evil opinion, can't be further from the truth and it's wishful thinking, but we love him for that. The statistical rate of TFP Bug fixing is 1 tough bug every 1.5 days, that means we will ge a21 EXPERIMENTAL in the first half of June, even later if things go wrong, That is if there really are just half of the 63 MF bugs left for experimental and no more pop up (unlikely in a huge game like this).

 

They hope to achieve a22 in a shorter timespan. Still 8 to 10 months, but that's short and great to get us to enjoy a21.

 

I hope this summary helped ! have a great day!

 

Edited April 14, 2023 by Blake_ (see edit history)

[Doomofman]

5 hours ago, Deadfordays said:

Noticed the same thing.. Saw the Helipad and then the radio station... He walked to it but not near enough to "tag" it then walked away. But the "teleport" mention came up and quickly changed topic... 🤔

 

I'm guessing you go to the radio, select which trader you want to go to, a helicopter lands and you get in and fast travel to that trader. Kinda like the Horse and Cart in Skyrim

[Guppycur]

10 hours ago, Mumpfy said:

well.... he first called the helipad a "teleport" and thats when prime made that face that to me realy translated to "damn he @%$#ed up" then he corrected himself and called an helipad but again he said that it had some feature involving alpha 22 and they werent going to talk about that quite yet.

 

Also i noticed the helipad has a nice little "station" near it which would make sense if that is some sort of teleport thing.

 

I could be wrong tho, but i guess that helipad is a teleport station somehow. maybe even thats why i saw some trader POIs having a T flag on them and some others dont and just had a white flag.

 

again.... just my thoughts from what i saw.... i could be wrong. lol

As a person with a portal mod I'm very excited to see an official TFP implementation, but as a player, fast travel is just another way to appease casuals and lessen the game difficulty, and I'm hopeful they're easy to mod out.

[Mumpfy]

well i would wait to check if this is actually the case or im just been delusional. its not like i havent been wrong before. 😆

[Blake_]

44 minutes ago, Guppycur said:

As a person with a portal mod I'm very excited to see an official TFP implementation, but as a player, fast travel is just another way to appease casuals and lessen the game difficulty, and I'm hopeful they're easy to mod out.

Not so subtle advertising. Cool mod, though. What's next? 70s-style suppository ads?

 

I'm ok with limited paid fast travel, but not so much with invulnerable traders and trader POI. I hope that changes in the future to a more organic "respawning" way. Maybe a simple option, or chunk reset with a warning after 24 hours.

[Uncle Al]

Very enjoyable stream. I was most intrigued by the stuff I had no inkling was going to be in A21: the changes to difficulty scaling that I think are going to be hugely impactful. Having effectively POIs up to tier 8, Tier 5 + Infestation mission + biome dependant spawn scaling in POIs, gives more end game activity options and fixes one of the current major problems with biome scaling.

 

The current issue is that sure, the wasteland makes POIs harder because of streams of enemies attacking you from outside while you're clearing, but the enemies within the POI aren't really more dangerous even though you're in the wasteland.  That means once you have a vehicle the snow biome, especially, is pretty much a free massive loot increase, as you can drive past the dangers and clear POIs with a vastly increased loot stage. Better POI danger biome scaling should make the risk/reward equation much more balanced.

 

Infestation missions being considered an additional tier is really smart. POIs bigger than existing 5s would probably be unwieldy, but making the existing POIs harder for an extra level of rewards I can totally see working. I'm assuming there will be a tier 6 of trader rewards, which will be entirely tier 5 POI infestation missions, and a tier 6 completion bonus. That also (hopefully) allows moving true end-game stuff (quality 6, top tier gear) into a really hard to obtain category of rewards.

 

Great job!

[Fanatical_Meat]

Hmmm, I wonder if this “teleport” idea could lead to POI’s or let’s say “Dungeon” instances like there’s an elevator on the surface and it brings you to a bunker that is huge and at least it’s walls are indestructible that needs to be cleared or a subway system that is mostly indestructible blocks that has tons of zombies in it and multiple elevators that open at different areas of the map.

Seems like having these places be their own POIs and structures that cannot be destroyed would use less resources to run thus allow more zombies while inside.

[zztong]

I had a question about how things like trash and bird nests disappear after they are looted. Do those things refresh and reappear, or are they gone forever?

 

I get that a cupboard block will change from closed (when it has an inventory) to open when it is empty. Do those also still refresh after so many days, or are they looted forever?

[meganoth]

1 hour ago, Blake_ said:

Not so subtle advertising. Cool mod, though. What's next? 70s-style suppository ads?

 

I'm ok with limited paid fast travel, but not so much with invulnerable traders and trader POI. I hope that changes in the future to a more organic "respawning" way. Maybe a simple option, or chunk reset with a warning after 24 hours.

 

When a trader gets killed an exclamation mark should appear in his place that can reset the trader POI just like quest POIs. That way a trader + compound could be vulnerable.

 

And the tech to do this is already in the game.

 

Edited April 14, 2023 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Guppycur]

22 minutes ago, zztong said:

I had a question about how things like trash and bird nests disappear after they are looted. Do those things refresh and reappear, or are they gone forever?

 

I get that a cupboard block will change from closed (when it has an inventory) to open when it is empty. Do those also still refresh after so many days, or are they looted forever?

Are you talking about with the chunk reset? If so then that stuff should reappear.

[zztong]

31 minutes ago, Guppycur said:

Are you talking about with the chunk reset? If so then that stuff should reappear.

 

I was thinking of when they were showing harvesting nests and trash and how those objects disappeared from the world. Then they talked about cabinets changing from a closed block to an open block. I could see how a chunk reset would make things reappear. I was also thinking there are currently game options that control the frequency of loot respawn.

 

I guess I was left thinking it might be possible loot might no longer respawn in nests and trash, but I wasn't sure that's what they were suggesting. You know English and human communication ... a seemingly obvious thing can lead to lots of follow-up.

[unholyjoe]

1 hour ago, zztong said:

I had a question about how things like trash and bird nests disappear after they are looted. Do those things refresh and reappear, or are they gone forever?

 

I get that a cupboard block will change from closed (when it has an inventory) to open when it is empty. Do those also still refresh after so many days, or are they looted forever?

if you have the chunk reset timer on (default is OFF) default days are (10,20,30,40,50,75 and 100) days via game options before starting the map seed, then yes the looted (destroyed containers) will be respawned. providing you are not in that chunk and that there is no player bedrolls placed or land claims down.

 

 

 

Edited April 14, 2023 by unholyjoe (see edit history)

[zztong]

7 minutes ago, unholyjoe said:

if you have the chunk reset timer on (default is OFF) default days are (10,20,30,40,50,75 and 100) days, then yes the looted (destroyed containers) will be respawned. providing you are not in that chunk and that there is no player bedrolls placed or land claims down.

 

 

 

 

Okay, and the chunk timer is a new feature, right? If so, what was the feature present in A20 and before that would refill loot containers periodically and is that still part of the game? I see "Loot Respawn Time" on the New Game menu. Is that still present or is Chunk Reset Timer replacing that?

Edited April 14, 2023 by zztong (see edit history)

[unholyjoe]

9 minutes ago, zztong said:

 

Okay, and the chunk timer is a new feature, right? If so, what was the feature that would refill loot containers periodically and is that still part of the game?

the old feature setting is still in game and affects relootable containers (it does not reset chunk to bring back destroyed containers).

 

[Laz Man]

6 hours ago, MichaelL. said:

As a prefabber, I'm wondering if the devs would be willing to talk about these:  what appears to be a set of 4:1 sloped 'double' pipes, but most interestingly,  the sagging rope.  Is this all just one large object, or is this something that prefabbers are going to be able to use in our custom POI's as usable blocks.   I've been a long time proponent for having 'decorative' sagging electrical wires to include in POI's.  Is the sagging rope an example of this capability in the prefab editor?  

 

Nice catch.  Although there are definitely a ton of new assets and shapes for prefab creators to build with in A21, the intricate pipes/ropes/wires seen on top of trader rekts building is a custom asset specifically created for that roof.

[Gamida]

13 minutes ago, unholyjoe said:

the old feature setting is still in game and affects relootable containers (it does not reset chunk to bring back destroyed containers).

 

 

How do you set up the Blood Moon Count now?

[zztong]

17 minutes ago, unholyjoe said:

the old feature setting is still in game and affects relootable containers (it does not reset chunk to bring back destroyed containers).

 

Ah, so I guess my original question is are nests and trash piles relootable containers?

 

If you loot a nest, grab the 4 feathers and 1 egg, and the nest disappears as shown in the first Dev Stream, when the Loot Respawn Time passes, does the nest reappear? Or, will the only method of regenerating the nest be the new Chunk Reload feature?

 

Oh, something that just occurred to me, in A20 if you destroyed a nest, you got more feathers. I guess that option is gone, right?