Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[Laz Man]

1 hour ago, Telly G said:

I'm not sure how to feel about the fifth total revamp of gear progression. What was wrong with the current system? 

 

See Mega's response below.

 

 

[Blake_]

@faatal, I have a bunch of questions.

 

1.Are there any new vehicle mods planned, like bigger storage, mounted weapons, solar pannels with batteries for ditching fuel  or cool stuff like that?

 

2. Is there anything you can tell us about POI triggers like trap doors or things that might be relevant when bandits are in?

 

3.Any word on expanded New Game options like 5%-10% loot ranges, or 240/480 min days and the like? What I mean to ask is if we can expect some love there in the future.

 

4. Do you know if hostile npcs will protect air drops in the first iteration?

 

5. What are you working on at the moment?

 

6. May I ask you to consider a short video of the naked White Afro guy someday? I found the character quite deep and engaging in all his gameplay appearances. He needn't be revealing any feature. His presence is enough to shine upon us the light of the Jiggling Hair church.

 

Thanks in advance !

Edited May 23, 2022 by Blake_ (see edit history)

[Gamida]

21 hours ago, Blake_ said:

I remember getting a purple stone axe, a purple pipe shotgun and a purple wooden club on day one with just a twist of the wrist. Not only that, the trader sold me a used cigar to boost my amazon store chances.  I did 6 POI that day and I had 1 point in Lucky Looter, but still, never again did I encounter such  odds in a game. I spent all the good karma in a playthrough. Lately, I find paper. Lots. 25% loot is an amazing experience. I wish there was a lesser loot chance option, like 5%. That's true survival struggling.

 

Have you ever thought of going into the xml file and adding the 5% loot option yourself? I pop in there and "tweak" a few of them myself Nothing like it lol

[Roland]

1 hour ago, Gamida said:

I wish there was a lesser loot chance option, like 5%. That's true survival struggling.

 

I believe the number is rounded down to the nearest whole number after the modifier is applied so at 5% every container would be empty. Just simulate the setting by never opening anything.  

[Latheos]

One change I'd really like to see come down the pike (especially with the revamping of the crafting tree altogether) is for the way materials are required. It makes very little sense to me for a low tier item to use *less* materials than a high-tier one. I would expect (based on IRL experiences) that as a crafter gets better at making things, they would require fewer resources to make items, not more. The system as it exists now seems quite backwards, and I'd really like to see this addressed at some point. For the record, modding it to work the opposite of the current system is not really an option. I've spent more than a little time trying to do just that.

[Dimpy]

Just coming here to say I'm very happy with the crafting skill revamp. There was always something that felt off in A17-20 about directly spending perk points to unlock semi-essential recipes, and this revamp also solves the problem of learning-by-spam-crafting and the out-of-order random nature of pre-A17 schematics. I'm sure there are going to a few kinks in the initial implementation, which might take another alpha to sort out, but this system feels like it has really good potential.

 

Is there going to be a loot container representing those tables full of magazines you see in dentists or doctor's offices?

[Blake_]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

 

I believe the number is rounded down to the nearest whole number after the modifier is applied so at 5% every container would be empty. Just simulate the setting by never opening anything.  

Yeah, unfortunately. I'm hopeful though. I love to mod in challenges, but having a wider range for the existing options would be an awesome way to tailor the game with 1-click ease . Modding is cool and all, but having it in game would be even better. And modding an alpha is a bit of a bother right now as it is in constant flux.

[P3rf3ctVZer0]

Someone attacked my computer through open ports luckily I have my network compartmentalized. Is there a focus on server security anytime soon @schwanz9000 I have to ask because this is the second time in my life something like this happened. (EAC IS USELESS) we need masked addresses or dns masking. No real damage was done and they were attempting to tap into pc and set it up to bitmine. Luckily I noticed within about 3 mins. Let me specify - they find my through 7 days to die. First time I kicked a hacker second time I drew attention from the wrong people online in 7 days.

Let me add that a user named Smegzor has made a tool for ip masking through encryption but why is that not just ingame? Why is it so easy to just target server owners? Why isn't there some kind of protection when hosting servers through browser?

I direct this at @Roland too.

To be clear - Many games can leave you vulnerable. Its just this one specifically makes it very very easy. The reason being is unlike Terraria Starbound and Ark it leaves certain parts of your pc vunerable. All someone needs to do is a port scan and ip sign. Windows unfortunately is rather easy to mess with and having a port open ever is usually a death sentence. ( I will personally be experimenting with forms of protection. )

Edited May 23, 2022 by P3rf3ctVZer0 (see edit history)

[KhaineGB]

Here's an easy question.

Planning to update the unity version again? I noticed 2021.3 is LTS now, so are you folks planning to update to that, or a 2022.x version?

[Diragor]

Really Love the idea with Learning by Looting, but one thing bothers me that I want to adress.

I played this game on PC since A17 and got 1300 Hours so far.

And NEVER in my whole playtime in 7dtd was I crafting a single weapon (only Stone/Wood weapons).

Weapons in loot are so common that you never have to craft them.

I wish you would make them WAY more rare so crafting will be more improtant.

Higher the chance for parts and lower it for finished weapons. Otherwise this wouldn't change my playstyle at all. Just loot a bit and get easy access to weapons. Sure it would change some things like forge, workstations, cooking and stuff like that. But the rest is too common in loot

 

[RipClaw]

6 hours ago, meganoth said:

How much gun crafting are you all doing in A20? Just imagine A20, but without a way to craft guns. Would they even notice?

Have you ever wondered when the players stopped crafting guns and why?

 

Up to A16 it was common to assemble guns and constantly improve them.

This had two reasons. First, at that time firearms were assembled from weapon parts that could be swapped for better ones. And secondly, the guns lost quality with each repair. Moreover, a weapon with better quality meant more damage per hit.

 

Then came A17 and the Fun Pimps got rid of weapon parts. You also no longer had to craft guns as they were plentiful in loot.

Weapon parts came back later in a different form but you could still can find, buy or get fully assembled weapons as a quest reward. Also, the random stats and the fact that you can only craft items up to Q5 isn't really helpful in motivating players to craft something.

 

[Jugom]

On 5/18/2022 at 6:55 PM, madmole said:

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.

 

[meganoth]

22 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

Have you ever wondered when the players stopped crafting guns and why?

 

Up to A16 it was common to assemble guns and constantly improve them.

This had two reasons. First, at that time firearms were assembled from weapon parts that could be swapped for better ones. And secondly, the guns lost quality with each repair. Moreover, a weapon with better quality meant more damage per hit.

 

Then came A17 and the Fun Pimps got rid of weapon parts. You also no longer had to craft guns as they were plentiful in loot.

Weapon parts came back later in a different form but you could still can find, buy or get fully assembled weapons as a quest reward. Also, the random stats and the fact that you can only craft items up to Q5 isn't really helpful in motivating players to craft something.

 

 

I would like A16-type weapon parts only with an UI upgrade to make swapping/upgrading easier. But I fully agree that weapons should degrade and should I ever create another mod this probably will be part of it.

 

One important detail: We don't craft guns now because we consistently find better guns earlier. It is not really the number of them we find that is the problem, it is the quality.

2 hours ago, P3rf3ctVZer0 said:

Why isn't there some kind of protection when hosting servers through browser?

 

Are you saying they hacked the server browser inside 7day2die? Did they brute force your password or does it look like they found an exploitable bug? 

 

Edited May 23, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Jugom]

10 minutes ago, meganoth said:

But I fully agree that weapons should degrade

I've always thought the same. And the way I've always imagined it, is through repair kits.
-If the weapon is repaired before it reaches 0 durability, it counts as maintenance and nothing happens as it is know.
-If the weapon is repaired after it reaches 0 durability, it goes down to the previous quality level.
-If the weapon was already quality 1 and reaches  0, it is completely obsolete now.

force you to a new level of awareness during combat not letting your gun break in the middle of it and a sense of I better make sure to maintain all my tools and weapons before a big fight. 

[meganoth]

6 hours ago, Latheos said:

One change I'd really like to see come down the pike (especially with the revamping of the crafting tree altogether) is for the way materials are required. It makes very little sense to me for a low tier item to use *less* materials than a high-tier one. I would expect (based on IRL experiences) that as a crafter gets better at making things, they would require fewer resources to make items, not more. The system as it exists now seems quite backwards, and I'd really like to see this addressed at some point. For the record, modding it to work the opposite of the current system is not really an option. I've spent more than a little time trying to do just that.

 

That is a great idea. because it corrects something which the user interface can't at the moment.

Right now the UI can prevent you building a weapon at all simply because you increased the perk and have too few parts suddenly to craft the better weapon.

 

That is the biggest fault of the current crafting system IMO. And I think the new crafting system makes it possible now that crafting a weapon of any quality has the same cost or even less without breaking the balance. And that removes the fault.

 

Edited May 23, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[P3rf3ctVZer0]

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

 

Are you saying they hacked the server browser inside 7day2die? Did they brute force your password or does it look like they found an exploitable bug? 

 

@meganoth I mean because they can easily see Ip and port basically hackers can exploit that. Something got control of my server tower which I only used to host 7 days to die because 7 days to die does nothing to protect the host on ports visibility and ip. I managed at one point to anger a full hacker group who joined the public server I was hosting. At the time I never considered losing my entire network to cheaters.

They used two major points of attack

- Cable haunt : previously may 2019 an exploit which allowed bad actors to overwrite modem bios in this case linksys xfinity variants.

- Powershell Backdoor : Hacker Group Used Kilara Linux to absorb access to all pcs on network. PS they used the handle 3y3 at the end of their names; mind you this info is probably useless now. 

How they found me specifically; 7 Days to die. I only had things opened for 7 days to die. The bigger issue is because the game at the time had 0 end to end encryption and basically blasted my ip the individuals had sniffers and attacked the network the game was hosted on. At this point honestly my game play will never be public on my home network because it is too risky.

Damage they did

- Dropped Payloads on all electronics. (Yes I mean that litterally aside from switch all phones pc and tablets had been poisoned by a remote control hacker payload.)

- The original tower that was hosting the game got bios firmware hacked. Hackers even mocked me by spoofing a drive and making so board had a false ameritrends bios version. 

 

- The Final Nail was even after I got rid of all malicious code flash and flushed all electronics (1 Week of Work) I was ddosd.

In summation - the server hosting software as is as actually very prone to being dangerous.

Solution - If you have the people set of the server like normal but you encrypt ip info and ports but you assign a hash to each server and keep what the hash points to encrypted then as long users all use the server browser then people should be able to safely host servers with no possibility of a hacker being able to know what ave the server is set up as.
 

This is all you need to attack an every day user.
 

I hope this helps illuminate how dangerous hosting this game is. I am going to bed. Do what you will with my nightmare I lived. I just know that this game has security flaws on top of the other stuff.

Edited May 23, 2022 by P3rf3ctVZer0 (see edit history)

[PoloPoPo]

Guess I am late to the party but I have only just read madmole's post about change of skill / crafting tree.

 

A few thoughts:

 

- I count around 2000 different crafting levels which equal nearly 2000 magazines a player has to read to max out all those skills. Hope it won't be a reading simulator with magazines everywhere?

 

- 1000+ hours in the game and I always end up with storage boxes full of parts I don't need since I hardly craft anything but rather find my stuff in loot containers. In my opinion no matter how the crafting system is designed, it will always be kind of irrelevant in huge parts if looting all the good stuff is so easy. And especially when finding a Q6 item makes crafting completely obsolete. Stuff should degrade with each repair, repairing should require parts and not just a single repair kit (way too easy) and with the new system it could be like "you can only repair a Q3 shotgun if you have at least level 50/100 for shotgun crafting". This way leveling up would actually be important. Right now I'd never craft a shotgun since I find them all over the places and therefore those shotgun magazines are worthless for me (and lots of other magazines equally). Connecting the ability to repair stuff with the crafting level would add importance to finding magazines.

[Telly G]

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

 

I would like A16-type weapon parts only with an UI upgrade to make swapping/upgrading easier. But I fully agree that weapons should degrade and should I ever create another mod this probably will be part of it.

 

One important detail: We don't craft guns now because we consistently find better guns earlier. It is not really the number of them we find that is the problem, it is the quality.

 

Are you saying they hacked the server browser inside 7day2die? Did they brute force your password or does it look like they found an exploitable bug? 

 

The winchester mini-overhaul has quality degredation. It's in the modding forum. 

[Gamida]

7 hours ago, Roland said:

 

I believe the number is rounded down to the nearest whole number after the modifier is applied so at 5% every container would be empty. Just simulate the setting by never opening anything.  

Pssst, that wasn't my quote...

[Laz Man]

5 hours ago, Diragor said:

Really Love the idea with Learning by Looting, but one thing bothers me that I want to adress.

I played this game on PC since A17 and got 1300 Hours so far.

And NEVER in my whole playtime in 7dtd was I crafting a single weapon (only Stone/Wood weapons).

Weapons in loot are so common that you never have to craft them.

I wish you would make them WAY more rare so crafting will be more improtant.

Higher the chance for parts and lower it for finished weapons. Otherwise this wouldn't change my playstyle at all. Just loot a bit and get easy access to weapons. Sure it would change some things like forge, workstations, cooking and stuff like that. But the rest is too common in loot

 

 

Last time I played, I found myself actually crafting some weapons of better quality than I currently had.  So, things seem positive in that area.

10 hours ago, Dimpy said:

Just coming here to say I'm very happy with the crafting skill revamp. There was always something that felt off in A17-20 about directly spending perk points to unlock semi-essential recipes, and this revamp also solves the problem of learning-by-spam-crafting and the out-of-order random nature of pre-A17 schematics. I'm sure there are going to a few kinks in the initial implementation, which might take another alpha to sort out, but this system feels like it has really good potential.

 

Is there going to be a loot container representing those tables full of magazines you see in dentists or doctor's offices?

 

We already have them in A20.  Bookcase/magazine rack looking container.

[Roland]

4 minutes ago, Laz Man said:

We already have them in A20.  Bookcase/magazine rack looking container.

They’re more like paper racks in A20 but they’ll be much cooler in A21

[JamesKirk]

On 5/18/2022 at 6:55 PM, madmole said:

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.

 

I dont't know if my question was answered yet.

What about Multiplayer Team games? Will one party member still be able to find magazines that another member lacks?

[Hazitru]

I'm not sure how we feel about the learn by looting. That would just be weird in a game like this where there's so many things you'd want to be good at instead of just for example be one thing like bows and have to find magazines. 75% of the player base loves the learn by doing, many people are playing darkness falls mod just for this feature alone. It's realistic and immersive. I think you guys should bring it back and also throw magazines in the mix as well. But just learning strictly from magazines I don't think will be well liked, too much RNG where there doesn't need to be. And I could see many issues with multiplayer.

[Roland]

2 hours ago, JamesKirk said:

I dont't know if my question was answered yet.

What about Multiplayer Team games? Will one party member still be able to find magazines that another member lacks?

 

Yes. All magazines drop randomly for every player. When you take a perk that corresponds to a particular magazine then you will tend to find more of that magazine but you still find a wide variety. It is a subtle change. A lot of people fearing that people who hate to loot will have a huge disadvantage but I think their teammates will still be bringing home magazines they can use-- especially if they go to a location known to have those types of magazines.

[Roland]

2 hours ago, Hazitru said:

That would just be weird in a game like this where there's so many things you'd want to be good at instead of just for example be one thing like bows and have to find magazines.

 

You still get good at using bows (and other weapons) by spending skill points for perks. The magazines only determine what you can personally craft but what you can be good at is not controlled by rng at all.