Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[Callum123456789]

13 hours ago, madmole said:

Hi all!
We're very busy on Alpha 21 but I thought I would share the new crafting system and looting changes with you.

There are now tons of new skills that govern unlocking and the quality of items in the game.

A few examples of crafting skills are shotguns, pistols, cooking, armorer, medical, etc.

Perks no longer unlock recipes or govern crafting skills. Many perks are being reworked to add value where before the main value was a recipe unlock.

Books no longer unlock recipes. The ones that did unlock items are being reworked to do something else.

 

Crafting skill is improved by finding magazines in the game. Mailboxes, file cabinets, book shelves etc can all contain various magazines that improve your skill.

Perking into shotguns for example, increases the odds of finding shotgun magazines, shotgun parts, and shotguns in loot. This makes early specialization work, and you are no longer at the will of the random numbers to find what you are looking for. There is still a chance to find other stuff, but you won't be level 100 and still using a brown double barrel because of random drops. Everything is weighted that you perk into. Once you find all 100 shotgun magazines, you will stop finding shotgun magazines so stuff that is still valuable to you will be found instead.

 

Skill ranges represent their unlocks. Some skills go to 100, others stop at 50, so they require less magazines read to max out.

All crafting ranges now do not overlap. For example with shotguns, skill 0 to 20 allows you to craft a brown to a blue pipe shotgun. Skill level 21-40 unlocks brown to blue double barrels. Skill level 41-75 unlocks brown to blue pump shotguns. 76-100 unlocks brown to blue auto shotguns. These numbers are just examples, I don't know the actual ranges, but now you don't just craft blue everything.

There is a new skill menu that has a few pages of skills that tracks what skill level you are at and shows what the skill unlocks.

How does it play?
Everyone on the team loves it. The search for technology is fun and you are always finding magazines and unlocking stuff every day. The magazines are useful for a very long time too, where before once you read a single schematic finding another was a disappointment. Now you always find useful magazines.

I found myself crafting nearly every range of pipe shotgun, stone axes etc. Even iron I would craft through most of the range. I would find some stuff and skip crafting for a bit, then when my skill superseded my item,  I'd be crafting again. I've never crafted so much stuff in years and it felt really great. You can no longer just sit around in your cave mining and level up and be crafting the best mining tools. You'll need to get out of the cave and search. However teams can still cooperate and share magazines with a dedicated crafter.

Traders sell magazines and offer magazines as rewards. I find myself taking those rewards quite often because it feels very rewarding to unlock things and level up your crafting skills.

Personally I love the new system. I've never seen a crafting system quite like this before, nor an intelligent loot system with deterministic random. It is playing very nice, and I'm really enjoying a long game. I like it because it feels realistic to read something and learn from it and the player can move through all the ranges of crafting and be making that choice... should I use my parts and craft a new gun, or wait another level? Personally I've always had enough parts to craft what I want because I find the parts for what I'm looking for instead of spear parts or whatever. So the new system weights the loot to what the player needs and it feels very rewarding and enjoyable to me and the testers.





 

madmole......this is f'ing fantastic! i think this is a huge change and one that will be very welcomed this is definitely something we will all get to enjoy! cant wait to play with this myself when it drops🤣

10 hours ago, Roland said:

My take on it is that Q6 gear is too frequently and easily given out as quest rewards...

+1 to this out of 5 tier 4 poi's i usually get 1 or 2 tier 6 items which could be a lvl 6 comp crossbow or military leg armour as an example

[KhaineGB]

At first glance, I would lower those numbers and allow the player to purchase levels with points (and make it progressively more expensive).

That way, you don't get screwed by RNG, so you CAN Spend points if you're just getting frustrated.

[Jost Amman]

1 hour ago, KhaineGB said:

At first glance, I would lower those numbers and allow the player to purchase levels with points (and make it progressively more expensive).

That way, you don't get screwed by RNG, so you CAN Spend points if you're just getting frustrated.

I understand where you (we) are coming from, but by doing that we would be back to points "magically teaching you new recipes" (which from what I understand is the opposite of what they intend to do here). When you put points into perks, instead, you can at least pretend you learned that stuff while fighting, looting and doing "stuff".

[KhaineGB]

Given that  you also earn XP from crafting, it's not that unreasonable

[Jost Amman]

1 minute ago, KhaineGB said:

Given that  you also earn XP from crafting, it's not that unreasonable

You just made me think about an idea... it would be really cool to have some kind of "inventor" skill, where the higher the level, the higher the possibility to "invent" a new recipe while crafting something. Of course, you'd need to invent something in the "category" of what you're crafting, or it would be silly. So, for example, if you're crafting guns, you may have the chance to figure out the recipe for a gun you don't know how to craft yet. 

[Blake_]

1 hour ago, KhaineGB said:

At first glance, I would lower those numbers and allow the player to purchase levels with points (and make it progressively more expensive).

That way, you don't get screwed by RNG, so you CAN Spend points if you're just getting frustrated.

Well, the beauty of it is that now they can tweak it to any amount depending on what kind of balance they want for any craftable item. Still, 100 magazines is not that much. We might be finding 10-15 a day with active looting, we don't know yet ...

( @Roland can you enlighten us with your early experience on how many magazines you usually find per day?)

 

And you won't get screwed by RNG if you perk in what you want, as the things you perk into grant more chances at the magazines you want, so it's always a win win.

Edited May 19, 2022 by Blake_ (see edit history)

[Survager]

Quote

• Perks now govern the probability of finding like-themed magazines and parts for those recipes. Perk into shotguns and you will notice more shotgun magazines and shotgun parts appearing in the world

 

So the chance to find certain magazines will depend on the level of thematic perks, and not on the intensity of the use of some weapons or tools? 😒

 

It turns out that perks still affect the quality of crafted items and the opening of recipes, at least indirectly? 😏

Edited May 19, 2022 by Survager (see edit history)

[meganoth]

58 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

You just made me think about an idea... it would be really cool to have some kind of "inventor" skill, where the higher the level, the higher the possibility to "invent" a new recipe while crafting something. Of course, you'd need to invent something in the "category" of what you're crafting, or it would be silly. So, for example, if you're crafting guns, you may have the chance to figure out the recipe for a gun you don't know how to craft yet. 

 

I'll bet that won't be possible. Internally they will just store the number of magazines you read and compare that to fixed numbers to know what you can craft.

 

So they won't be able to let you craft something out of the order, it can't be represented internally.

 

And that means the inventor skill would just add a random number of points to some magazine skill. I.e. it would be equivalent to a general bonus of magazine finding, much less cool.

 

 

 

15 minutes ago, Survager said:

 

So the chance to find certain magazines will depend on the level of thematic perks, and not on the intensity of the use of some weapons or tools? 😒

 

Yes. No LBD through the backdoor. 😃

 

Edited May 19, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Survager]

@madmole @Roland

 

Will the level of the perk affect the type of items that the player can find in the loot? If I level up the shotgun perk, will shotguns drop more often in loot? Or does the perk level only affect the chance of finding shotgun tech magazines and shotgun parts?

[meganoth]

 

21 minutes ago, Survager said:

 

So the chance to find certain magazines will depend on the level of thematic perks, and not on the intensity of the use of some weapons or tools? 😒

 

To add to that, everyone should be pleased: Haters of LBD have vanilla and mods, lovers of LBD as well have multiple excellent mods to play.

 

21 minutes ago, Survager said:

 

It turns out that perks still affect the quality of crafted items and the opening of recipes, at least indirectly? 😏

 

Yes. Since you get xp for many activities and can get better with xp LBD was never gone in the strict sense.

 

 

[Roland]

38 minutes ago, Survager said:

@madmole @Roland

 

Will the level of the perk affect the type of items that the player can find in the loot? If I level up the shotgun perk, will shotguns drop more often in loot? Or does the perk level only affect the chance of finding shotgun tech magazines and shotgun parts?

No. The perk level only affects what we said it affects: parts and magazines. 

Edited May 19, 2022 by Roland (see edit history)

[KhaineGB]

1 hour ago, Blake_ said:

Well, the beauty of it is that now they can tweak it to any amount depending on what kind of balance they want for any craftable item. Still, 100 magazines is not that much. We might be finding 10-15 a day with active looting, we don't know yet ...

( @Roland can you enlighten us with your early experience on how many magazines you usually find per day?)

 

And you won't get screwed by RNG if you perk in what you want, as the things you perk into grant more chances at the magazines you want, so it's always a win win.

Even with perks, it's still very much at the whim of the RNG gods. That's why having an OPTION to spend points isn't a bad thing.

[Roland]

1 hour ago, Blake_ said:

( @Roland can you enlighten us with your early experience on how many magazines you usually find per day?)

You can find a lot of magazines. 10-12 of one type per day?  Maybe. I’m sure the amounts in loot will change several times before A21 comes out. It’s still a WIP. 
 

 

[RipClaw]

Interesting new crafting system.

 

If I understand it correctly, it determines the order in which you unlock new tiers of weapons and tools. Such a system has advantages and disadvantages.

 

Edited May 19, 2022 by RipClaw (see edit history)

[SnowDog1942]

1 hour ago, KhaineGB said:

Even with perks, it's still very much at the whim of the RNG gods. That's why having an OPTION to spend points isn't a bad thing.

 

Some RNG is a good thing unless you want everything to be perfectly predictable -- which to me is boring.

[POCKET951]

6 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

Interesting new crafting system.

 

If I understand it correctly, it determines the order in which you unlock new tiers of weapons and tools. Such a system has advantages and disadvantages.

 

absolutley

out of the 23 trees I have seen so far I don't see a crafting skill tree for weapon attatchments. I can see armor mods being tied to armor.

 

so will Weapon/tool attatchments be found under Repairing/harvesting/salavge tools and split up among the weapons?

I.e ( drum mag, exteneded mag in machine guns, scopes and silencers in sniper skills)

 

what crafting skill tree would have rad removal mods? or weapon lasers/dot sights?

[Jost Amman]

29 minutes ago, POCKET951 said:

I.e ( drum mag, exteneded mag in machine guns, scopes and silencers in sniper skills)

I know nothing... but I guess they're using this crafting system only for items that have a quality level maybe?

Mods don't have one (at least not in A20). 

[Roland]

1 hour ago, Jost Amman said:

I know nothing... but I guess they're using this crafting system only for items that have a quality level maybe?

Mods don't have one (at least not in A20). 

 

No, it's all crafting recipes. Seeds don't have quality levels either. I'm not sure where mods can be found. I'll look into after work today.

1 hour ago, RipClaw said:

If I understand it correctly, it determines the order in which you unlock new tiers of weapons and tools. Such a system has advantages and disadvantages.

 

Well it depends on what you mean by "unlock". You can still find and purchase and use weapons and tools "out of order" and skip from owning a yellow wooden club to owning a yellow iron club. But if you only want to craft what you use you would have to learn to craft green wood club, then blue wood club, then brown iron club, then orange iron club, then yellow iron club in that order every playthrough. 

Edited May 19, 2022 by Roland (see edit history)

[schwanz9000]

Mods are still using schematics that are found in loot or purchased from the trader.

 

[schwanz9000]

Another benefit of the new crafting system and the quantity of magazines you need to read per skill is that you will find A LOT LESS paper in book shelves and mailboxes.
They still have paper from time to time, but there are plenty of other places to find it.

[POCKET951]

6 minutes ago, schwanz9000 said:

Another benefit of the new crafting system and the quantity of magazines you need to read per skill is that you will find A LOT LESS paper in book shelves and mailboxes.
They still have paper from time to time, but there are plenty of other places to find it.

speaking of paper, the only POI that I know of with paper rolls is the crack a book Skyscraper, any chance we could find big rolls of paper in other tier 4 or 5 Poi's where it seems appropriate?

[Jost Amman]

Just now, POCKET951 said:

speaking of paper, the only POI that I know of with paper rolls is the crack a book Skyscraper, any chance we could find big rolls of paper in other tier 4 or 5 Poi's where it seems appropriate?

What about the paper factory?

That POI was introduced back in A19 IIRC.

[BFT2020]

9 minutes ago, schwanz9000 said:

Another benefit of the new crafting system and the quantity of magazines you need to read per skill is that you will find A LOT LESS paper in book shelves and mailboxes.

WHAT?????

 

Worse Alpha Ever  🤬

 

/s

[Roland]

25 minutes ago, schwanz9000 said:

Mods are still using schematics that are found in loot or purchased from the trader.

 

Do you know whether it will stay like that or have they just not been migrated over?

[RipClaw]

53 minutes ago, Roland said:

Well it depends on what you mean by "unlock". You can still find and purchase and use weapons and tools "out of order" and skip from owning a yellow wooden club to owning a yellow iron mace. But if you only want to craft what you use you would have to learn to craft green wood club, then blue wood club, then brown iron mace, then orange iron mace, then yellow iron mace in that order every playthrough. 

By unlock I actually mean that I can craft it.

 

I don't like to buy weapons and tools from the trader and T3 weapons and tools require a high lootstage in A20. But the schematics can sometimes be found early in the game if you are lucky.

 

In one of my last games in A20, I found the auger schematic and the crucible in the second week of in-game play. This allowed me to skip the steel tools. In the current game, however, I found the steel tool schematics very early but the crucible and auger schematics very late. As a result, I used steel tools instead of the auger, and instead of making steel, I bought it from the trader.
 

Because you find some schematics early and others late or not at all, the gameplay often changes significantly.