Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[BFT2020]

3 minutes ago, Moldy Bread said:

Oh, so it's a stupid change? got ya.

 

Hopefully fixed by modders.

I removed glass jars in Alpha 20 and didn’t miss them at all.

[JebacPis]

Awsome job FP team love you

[Roland]

6 hours ago, Neminsis said:

And yet the looters are incentivized to do just that by the sheer number of books, the overall generous amounts of loot, and the limits of inventory and encumbrance. 

Not so. When you play in a group it becomes obvious very quickly that it is monumentally stupid for everyone to read every book they find without coordination. 
 

6 hours ago, Neminsis said:

We've been testing this dynamic specifically, and yes the stay at homes can keep up levels wise for a time, but once the looters have a bicycle their exp gain takes off. If you do not do those quests at the same rate as the looters you're left behind. The looters are incentivized to progress through the quest tiers as quickly as possible, which only widens the gap in exp gain and equipment levels. 

yeah but if your looters are just reading everything then you’re shooting yourselves in the foot as a group. I agree quests are problematic. They are the last vestige of LBD that exists in the game and need to be limited to prevent the unnatural spamming that occurs. 
 

6 hours ago, Neminsis said:

Part of the problem is that looters need the same tools as the stay at homes, which sets up competition for the tool crafting books.

See? Your group doesn’t get it yet that you want one person to read all of one type of mag and then craft for the group. If you and I are competing in any way as a cooperative team then we are dooming ourselves. Neither of us are winning if you find and read 12 forge ahead books and I find and read 10 forge ahead books because we could have had you or me read 22 forge ahead books and be further along together. It is stupid to compete over the same books but it usually clicks at some point. 

 

6 hours ago, Neminsis said:

It really doesn't matter how altruistic your teammates are, you have to quest.

Feeding books to the right people isn’t altruism. It is self interest strategy. It’s completely different than how books were handled in the past and in any of the overhaul mods and so it makes sense that it will take a change in mindset. 
 

6 hours ago, Neminsis said:

...then your opinion about playing as a builder would have more weight in consideration? I have actually been playing a21 as a builder and solo player...

Then your opinion about playing in a group would have more weight in consideration?

 

You talked as though you were playing as a team of players at first but maybe that was all speculation based on your solo play?  
 

It is true that as a solo player you must play as a well-rounded survivor and loot and read everything you find. You can’t extrapolate from that to true team play because for best results you must coordinate the reading of books — not out of altruism but out of common sense and good strategy.  

Edited June 11, 2023 by Roland (see edit history)

[Roland]

6 hours ago, Archer said:

I think much of this just boils down to we aren't a group that really enjoys scavenging or questing or any of that stuff at all. I literally haven't gone on a quest in probably 3 years, it's not because the quests needed to be 'cooler' or have better loot, or just needed a better mechanic to force/incentivize me to do them, I just don't care about them. The game could literally take quests and traders completely out and it would barely affect how I play at all except sometimes when it comes to getting an auger. That's about it. 

Then your group should probably enable the creative menu and just play the sandbox aspect of the game or find a mod that allows you to ignore the parts of the game you don’t like. Looting and scavenging are major fundamental aspects of the game. 
 

You began by saying there are 10-30 of you who play together and that some like to loot but most like to do base activities. With just three looters out of thirty you should be able to progress along all the magazine trees pretty well. But now you’re changing the goalposts by saying that nobody in your group likes to loot and you all just enjoy building.  That’s great and there is a setting for that available to your group. 
 

The fact that you could play before by ignoring one of the major pillars of the game was simply due to the unfinished nature of a game still in active development. Thankfully there will be mods that will allow your group to play the game with your extreme play style of thirty people who only ever build. 

Edited June 11, 2023 by Roland (see edit history)

[Ricowan]

7 hours ago, khzmusik said:

Well, that's a step in the right direction. I'm still hoping it's relatively trivial to mod this out (like, just remove their "looted block" reference in XML or something). I guess we'll find out on Monday.

 

I've been running a self-written modlet since A17, maybe earlier can't remember, that made "junk" containers and birds nests poof after looting.  I play with loot respawn set to never...

The XML attribute is called "destroy_on_close" and I added that attribute, with its value set to "true", to those two lootcontainers in the loot.xml config file.  Even if the attribute name has been changed, I'm pretty sure TFP wouldn't move this out of the config xml files so it will be trivial to find this attribute and change the value to "false" if you want to.

 

[LostBoy]

Any major bugs showing up in the streamer feeds?

 

From what I'm picking up here it seems things are going well but since I'm not watching any streams I don't know for sure.

 

 

 

I'm wondering a bit about the "Chunk reset" option.

 

As a SP person, does this mean I won't be able to have multiple Bases, that they'll be wiped on "reset" ?

 

I pretty much explore the whole map and will spend several days in different locations, and as such, it can be quite some time before I get back to my home Base and start the process (Base to Base to Base etc.) again.

 

 

Not a complaint, it sounds interesting, just wondering how it works.

 

 

 

[YourMirror]

6 minutes ago, LostBoy said:

Any major bugs showing up in the streamer feeds?

 

From what I'm picking up here it seems things are going well but since I'm not watching any streams I don't know for sure.

 

 

 

I'm wondering a bit about the "Chunk reset" option.

 

As a SP person, does this mean I won't be able to have multiple Bases, that they'll be wiped on "reset" ?

 

I pretty much explore the whole map and will spend several days in different locations, and as such, it can be quite some time before I get back to my home Base and start the process (Base to Base to Base etc.) again.

 

 

Not a complaint, it sounds interesting, just wondering how it works.

 

 

 

You can configure the days that it takes for the reset. And landclaims and beds areas are safe from resetting so as long as you have those down neither base will reset.

[Mister Forgash]

13 minutes ago, LostBoy said:

As a SP person, does this mean I won't be able to have multiple Bases, that they'll be wiped on "reset" ?

From what I've seen, Chunk reset is defaulted to off. If you turn it on, you have a choice on how many days you must be away from the chunk before it resets.
Pretty sure you can use 1 land claim block to protect 1 base [In this case, probably your main base], 1 bed roll for another- everything else you would have to visit before the chunk reset is scheduled to trigger- if you're turning it on.

[Roland]

15 minutes ago, LostBoy said:

Any major bugs showing up in the streamer feeds?

 

From what I'm picking up here it seems things are going well but since I'm not watching any streams I don't know for sure.

There have been some tickets created which will most likely result in some fixes Monday morning. 
 

16 minutes ago, LostBoy said:

I'm wondering a bit about the "Chunk reset" option.

 

As a SP person, does this mean I won't be able to have multiple Bases, that they'll be wiped on "reset" ?

It’s off by default and not really necessary for solo players—especially if you move around the map a lot. You’ll always have plenty to find without the world becoming empty. 
 

If you like creating multiple bases all over then leave it off. 

[NekoPawtato]

For chunk reset system, it says

 

"Land claims, bedrolls, and other important player-owned objects such as backpacks and vehicles will prevent nearby chunks from being reset"

 

Are there others not listed here or is it just the four items: land claim, bed roll, backpack, and vehicles? 

 

Would inactive bed roll count? 

[Riamus]

12 hours ago, Archer said:

Edit: Thank you for the reply, by the way!

I'm just wondering if over time, the people who go out to loot all the time will be many levels ahead of the other people who stay behind to work just based solely on the notion that specing into something is supposed to increase the odds that you find it around in the world.

So if looter A is going out to find books for Builder B, whatever Looter A is spec'd into will be what they are more likely to find books/mags for when looting. So as looter A goes around looting all the piles and shelves and so forth, most of the stuff they find, not all, but most, will be primarily *for* them, and not for whatever builder B is spec'd into. 
Thus, over time, builder B, will fall behind the rate of progression of his friend who prefers to loot a lot in the game, since Builder B doesn't loot very often not wanting to put valuable construction perk points into looting, and not wanting to burn valuable time either by going out and looting, when building a base large enough and strong enough to accommodate their group before the next blood moon is obviously a critical thing, and time is of the essence. 

The same would apply for the guys making bullets, running forges, managing the workbench, the chemistry set, upgrading sections of wall, installing spike traps, setting land mines, etc. all back at the base. 

I've genuinely never had a single complaint against a single thing the Fun Pimps have iterated, I don't even care that it's still in early access or any of that it's fun the way it is, but why on Earth is this whole thing being added in I wonder? I'm new on the forums, so I don't know the history here at all but is this a thing people have been asking for? 

 

From what I've seen in streams, you have nothing to worry about.  They are finding tons of magazines of all types.  In fact, there may be far too many in loot right now.  Yes, they'll find more of what they spec into but it won't be so significant.  Besides, unless I'm mistaken, my understanding is that the increased chance of finding the magazines doesn't reduce the chance of finding the other magazines.  Now, yes, they are going to level up their crafting skills more than you will yours - even 1 more magazine than you is more than you.  But it isn't really such a big deal.  You aren't going to be worse off.  Your crafting and their crafting are two entirely different things as you've said.  Just because you have 60/100 magazines in crafting hammers and they have 80/100 in crafting pistols, it really doesn't matter.  There isn't really a comparison between the two.  Besides, in A20, you'd have to find the schematics to unlock the recipes and sometimes that could take a very long time.  This guarantees you'll get them based on where they are in the unlocks.  In the end, it'll probably be better than it was in A20 as you're not tied to RNG anymore.  The magazine RNG isn't really going to be a big deal since, as I said, they are found very easily.

 

As for why it's being added, it reduces the RNG issue - you aren't getting the best thing by luck on day 1 and you're not stuck waiting until day 100 to finally find out how to make something either.  Both of which happen in A20.  It also balances out the crafting skills for weapons and tools so you aren't jumping ahead to the best quality 6, tier 3 weapons and tools within the first week and will need to work your way up, providing actual progression.  Granted, you can still luck into a good drop.  But at least with crafting, you won't just level up a crafting skill to quality 5 within a day or two and then be able to make quality 5, tier 3 gear already.  This will upset speed runners probably but for most people, having actual progression will be better.  Right now, once you get the best stuff, you don't have a lot left to do without it just feeling like you're wasting your time since you can't really gain anything anymore.  By extending that time to get to that point, the game will last longer before you're starting a new one.

[RipClaw]

From what I've seen in the streams so far, the trader rebalancing hasn't really worked out that well.

 

As far as I know, the idea was that the trader would only offer items that were only a little better than what you could find or craft. But if you do enough quests and put points into Daring Adventurer, you can buy items that are far better than what you can find or craft. Grand Spartan bought a Q5 M60 on day 10 and WaywardEko bought a Q3 Steel Spear on day 8.

 

By the way. Grand Spartan had a Q5 Pipe Machine Gun before and WaywardEko a Q5 Stone Spear. So much to "No skipping technology tiers anymore".

 

Edited June 11, 2023 by RipClaw (see edit history)

[RipClaw]

14 minutes ago, Riamus said:

Besides, unless I'm mistaken, my understanding is that the increased chance of finding the magazines doesn't reduce the chance of finding the other magazines.

This is actually not possible. As I understand it, the combined probability for the contents of a loot container is always 100%. So if you assign a slightly higher probability to one item to appear then the probability of the others is automatically reduced. I would compare this to a 16 sided dice with the same number on two sides.

 

[Riamus]

8 hours ago, Neminsis said:

No, but they do have to carry them in the same slots as other resources and at the same encumbrance as those other resources...and that's where the problem lies.

 

True, but we are removing 3 brass items, 2 lead items, glass jars, and empty cans.  So there are 7 spots you might have been using in the past that are no longer being used.  Not enough for every magazine but it will certainly reduce that impact.

[PoloPoPo]

1 minute ago, Riamus said:

True, but we are removing 3 brass items, 2 lead items, glass jars, and empty cans.  So there are 7 spots you might have been using in the past that are no longer being used.  Not enough for every magazine but it will certainly reduce that impact.

Which items, apart from the emtpy jars, have been removed from the game with A21?

[Roland]

28 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

From what I've seen in the streams so far, the trader rebalancing hasn't really worked out that well.

 

As far as I know, the idea was that the trader would only offer items that were only a little better than what you could find or craft. But if you do enough quests and put points into Daring Adventurer, you can buy items that are far better than what you can find or craft. Grand Spartan bought a Q5 M60 on day 10 and WaywardEko bought a Q3 Steel Spear on day 8.

 

By the way. Grand Spartan had a Q5 Pipe Machine Gun before and WaywardEko a Q5 Stone Spear. So much to "No skipping technology tiers anymore".

 

But if you don’t take daring adventurer and don’t spam quests then the trader is much better balanced compared to A20. So now it’s a choice for how you want to play. If you want to skip to higher tier gear you can take those skills to reflect your desires and awesome stuff will be for sale and rewards. But if you want to craft most of your own gear then do a quest per day and don’t take the perk that increases quest rewards and you can have that kind of fun. In A20 the trader outpaced crafting no matter what you did. 
 

It is interesting to me that questing is modeled right now after LBD. As you quest you get better at questing and the only way to get better at questing and get better quests is to quest. So it is no surprise that questing is spammed in such a way that it creates imbalances. That’s the flaw of LBD unless it is limited somehow. Hopefully, the devs will put some limits on questing to help it come into balance with the rest of the game. You can do that voluntarily very easily which I’m fine with but I feel bad for those with no impulse control who wreck their own fun but can’t help wrecking their own fun…

Edited June 11, 2023 by Roland (see edit history)

[Riamus]

2 hours ago, LostBoy said:

Any major bugs showing up in the streamer feeds?

 

From what I'm picking up here it seems things are going well but since I'm not watching any streams I don't know for sure.

 

 

 

I'm wondering a bit about the "Chunk reset" option.

 

As a SP person, does this mean I won't be able to have multiple Bases, that they'll be wiped on "reset" ?

 

I pretty much explore the whole map and will spend several days in different locations, and as such, it can be quite some time before I get back to my home Base and start the process (Base to Base to Base etc.) again.

 

 

Not a complaint, it sounds interesting, just wondering how it works.

 

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Mister Forgash said:

From what I've seen, Chunk reset is defaulted to off. If you turn it on, you have a choice on how many days you must be away from the chunk before it resets.
Pretty sure you can use 1 land claim block to protect 1 base [In this case, probably your main base], 1 bed roll for another- everything else you would have to visit before the chunk reset is scheduled to trigger- if you're turning it on.

 

1 hour ago, NekoPawtato said:

For chunk reset system, it says

 

"Land claims, bedrolls, and other important player-owned objects such as backpacks and vehicles will prevent nearby chunks from being reset"

 

Are there others not listed here or is it just the four items: land claim, bed roll, backpack, and vehicles? 

 

Would inactive bed roll count? 

Just a note... we are supposedly allowed multiple land claims in A21 rather than only 1, so this shouldn't be an issue.  I don't know how many we're allowed to have but even 3 would cover most people's needs.

8 minutes ago, PoloPoPo said:

Which items, apart from the emtpy jars, have been removed from the game with A21?

Door knobs, trophies, candlesticks and fishing weights for brass and lead are gone.  You will instead just get the equivalent amount of brass or lead.  Personally, I like this as the individual items usually just sat around forever in storage because it wasn't worth the time to stick 20 or 30 into a forge and then go do something because they wouldn't last long before being gone and then the forge isn't doing anything anymore.  Empty cans are also gone.

[Riamus]

3 minutes ago, Roland said:

In A20 the trader outpaced crafting no matter what you did. 

This was true in the lower quality items but once you got up to over quality 3, you could have difficulty finding anything from the trader.  Even on day 100 or 200, traders often have a bunch of quality 3-4 stuff and you often have to run to multiple traders to find any quality 5 or 6 stuff even with better barter maxed out.  It is all RNG and that result can vary but I never found the trader to really be of much use after quality 3 or 4 except when you had no choice like with solar or when you get lucky.  I really don't buy much from traders after the first couple of days (that's usually food/water if my luck finding it is bad) and then solar stuff at end game.  They just really don't match your player level in what they offer.

 

In A21, I think this will change.  I think they are supposed to better match your player level and hopefully this continues up into the higher quality stuff and not die off around quality 3 or 4 like it does now.

 

I also found crafting in A21 to be mostly useless for weapons, tools and armor (and clothing, which is pointless to craft).  Ammo, gas, paint, food and water are the things where crafting was needed (I might be missing a couple) but not for anything else if you quest and scavenge regularly.  You simply find stuff far more quickly than you can craft it.  We'll see how the rebalance of loot affects this in A21.  I'm fine with the crafting magazine changes.  I think that's a good thing.  But I still question whether or not crafting will be much use as I have a feeling I'll find stuff faster in loot.  I watched one stream where they found a tier 4 bone knife and a tier 1 hunting knife way before they'd be able to craft either.

[Gamida]

9 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

Also, I don't think it's fair, both in real life and in a game, to get rewards for things you don't do yourself (e.g.: if you stay home, fine, but why should you get the loot bonus??).

 

 

I am going to use an example where in this day and age might get me flamed but here goes

The above example (and am pretty sure it is not how you meant it but it may sound like it to some) is like a husband and wife where the husband works outside the house and the wife takes care of the home and kids.

The earlier example of a typical family. It would mean that because the wife stays home she doesn't get any say on how the family income is spent as she didn't actually make the money.

 

As for magazines in game, I am expecting there to be a lot of activity in the forum a day or so after the experimental version is released. When you get a larger pool of players.

Because of so many different playstyles I am sure there will be many, , many different suggestions on how things should work either with them being too OP or nerfed too much.

Even though lot of players will only play vanilla I suspect some servers will only hit the sweet spot for their players by some tweaking.

 

[Roland]

So the husband is supposed to get some say?  What’s that like?

[Kosmic Kerman]

1 hour ago, RipClaw said:

From what I've seen in the streams so far, the trader rebalancing hasn't really worked out that well.

 

As far as I know, the idea was that the trader would only offer items that were only a little better than what you could find or craft. But if you do enough quests and put points into Daring Adventurer, you can buy items that are far better than what you can find or craft. Grand Spartan bought a Q5 M60 on day 10 and WaywardEko bought a Q3 Steel Spear on day 8.

 

By the way. Grand Spartan had a Q5 Pipe Machine Gun before and WaywardEko a Q5 Stone Spear. So much to "No skipping technology tiers anymore".

 

Grand Spartan plays with experience gain at 300%. His game is not representative of where you will be on Day 10 on default settings. I don't know what his other settings are but he typically plays with very generous loot settings as well. His goal is to get to end game and a high game stage as quickly as possible to get more intense blood moon hordes. 

Edited June 11, 2023 by Kosmic Kerman (see edit history)

[RipClaw]

17 minutes ago, Roland said:

In A20 the trader outpaced crafting no matter what you did. 

I never paid much attention to this because I never bought weapons or tools from the trader unless I was scraping them for parts. I got my gear either through crafting, looting, or quest rewards.

 

43 minutes ago, Roland said:

You can do that voluntarily very easily which I’m fine with but I feel bad for those with no impulse control who wreck their own fun but can’t help wrecking their own fun…

I do a maximum of 2 quests a day because I don't have time for more. In fact, many days I don't do any quests at all because I'm either in the mine or working on my base. 

 

But I have to say I'm pretty disappointed. First the developers say that the Learn by Reading system and the removal of the secret stash is meant to strengthen crafting and that they don't want you to skip technology tiers, and then they add a mechanic to the game that allows you to bypass all of that very easily.

[Roland]

10 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

But I have to say I'm pretty disappointed. First the developers say that the Learn by Reading system and the removal of the secret stash is meant to strengthen crafting and that they don't want you to skip technology tiers, and then they add a mechanic to the game that allows you to bypass all of that very easily.

What mechanic did they add? Quests and daring adventurer have been in the game for years. If you don’t want to skip tiers then don’t. I agree that there could be more down to balance things towards crafting even more but I still do craft a lot more in A21

[Archer]

10 hours ago, PoloPoPo said:

Just play A21 and see how it turns out 😃

Maybe your group has to tweak things a little bit but that should be expected when participating in an Alpha. If you can't find more people being happy with looting and exploring the map you guys could do burried supply quests to get the magazines as quest rewards from time to time. Or buy more magazines. Or just be happy with slower progression because who cares?

 

If A21 is not for your group (which I doubt) you could always go back to A20 and play another 1000 hours there.

  

So what? Who says players that stay at a single spot all the time on a huge open world map should keep up with levels of players that explore the map, loot and kill thousands of zombies? If I was a builder I'd be happy to craft and build and certainly wouldn't be bothered with my team mates' levels.

The "So what? Who says players that stay at a single spot all the time on a huge open world map should keep up with levels of players that explore the map, loot and kill thousands of zombies?" part would be me and basically my whole community. You're just rewarding a *playstyle* more than a different one with this new system which is *bad* I can't stress enough *most* people (and I realize I'm drawing from personal experience, so it's anecdotal) that I've ever played this game with in over 900 *do not play to loot, explore the map, and kill thousands of zombies*. That's kinda the core of the complaint in the new system, the way the game was shaped before people could play how they *wanted* and everyone sort of broke even in the long run, at least we progressed at similar rates as a group. 
If I wanted to wander around a map, explore, do missions, etc. I'd play one of the other dozen or so games in my steam library that accommodate that, the reason we log into 7 Days is we enjoy its base building / horde aspect. 
The rest of this stuff looks good for streamers and I understand it's important for the success of their game to have streamers and YouTubers making entertaining videos and watching videos of people just building bases all day is boring - so I get the logic behind the change itself. 
I just don't like it because it's not what the game (I thought) was going to be centered on when it first started developing ten years ago. 

[RipClaw]

10 minutes ago, Kosmic Kerman said:

Grand Spartan plays with experience gain at 300%.

But WaywardEko only plays on default settings.

 

The formula for the trader stage is "player level * (1+trader quest level) + (Daring Adventurer level * 10)". In the formula, Daring Adventurer has the highest weight. If you put most of your points into Daring Adventurer, the trader stage will rise very quickly.
 

2 minutes ago, Roland said:

What mechanic did they add? Quests and daring adventurer have been in the game for years. If you don’t want to skip tiers then don’t. I agree that there could be more down to balance things towards crafting even more but I still do craft a lot more in A21

They added the trader stage. Daring adventurer only gave you more options you could choose from but now it pretty much determines the trader stage.