Alpha 21 Dev Diary

[Roland]

2 hours ago, BenZ0 said:

Oh yes baby thanks for that answer, in that case I really like this change with the dew collectors. I was worried that they would be "just" a water source but since they also have other uses like for glue this makes the new workingstation fit really well into the game. Such a big brain move from the fun pimps there.

the dew collectors only produce water. You would then use that water at a campfire or chemistry station to make glue like normal. Glue isn’t going to spurt out of the dew collector. The apocalypse is bad but not THAT bad. 

[BenZ0]

7 minutes ago, Roland said:

the dew collectors only produce water. You would then use that water at a campfire or chemistry station to make glue like normal. Glue isn’t going to spurt out of the dew collector. The apocalypse is bad but not THAT bad. 

Ye I got that, thats also how I undetsood that.

[Roland]

2 hours ago, POCKET951 said:

how will this new system work with things like buckets? why cant we take a cooking pot to the lake, carry it back full of water and then cook it to get a few bottles of mukry water? 

It just doesn't make sense that we cant turn snow into water though.

why can't we fill a cooking pot with snow, put it over the fire and get water?

Shouldn't we be able to bring back buckets of water to a fire to make water? 

it would be weird if things that worked in real life didn't work in a gamified way in a game.

I like the idea of making water more challenging, but  then doing it by  not allowing sensical ways to get water in a video game seems like nonsense.

I like the idea of water being a challenge after day 3, but the solution doesn't make sense based on the info we have been provided so far

Will there be a late-game way to automate water supply so that it becomes trivial other than building a farm of low tier dew collectors? or will there be a lategame version thats more expensive but also easier to manage?
 

do vending machines have Beverages in A21?

Buckets carry water to transport water voxels from one place to another. If you pour out water from a bucket you’ll get a water voxel. I believe that you could probably drink directly from that water voxel but you can’t change it to bottled murky water or get it into a pot. 
 

The reason likely has to do with how having easy to access infinite water destroys any chance of “the struggle”. @madmole would have to describe his thought process or maybe @schwanz9000 who worked on it with him could give more insight. 
 

I completely understand what you are saying about this being a weird limitation that runs contrary to reality. I can get water into a bucket and carry it with me. I have a pot on my campfire but I’m not allowed to pour the water in my bucket into the pot on my campfire. It’s just another strange concession of reality to gameplay. 
 

vending machines have beverages and they are considerably more expensive in A21. 

[POCKET951]

2 minutes ago, Roland said:

Buckets carry water to transport water voxels from one place to another. If you pour out water from a bucket you’ll get a water voxel. I believe that you could probably drink directly from that water voxel but you can’t change it to bottled murky water or get it into a pot. 
 

 

would the water voxel dissapear if I drank it or would it always stay there? currently in Alpha 20 if you use a Jar to scoop up water some of it disappears.

[zztong]

8 hours ago, Roland said:

The nice thing is you can find a nearby water source and drink directly from that to save your bottled murk to take back to your base and boil it.

 

THE GOOD: I understand the scarcity of boiled water. That makes perfect sense and I like where that's going. This is cool.

 

THE WEIRD: I'm kind of confused about what seems to be a lack of a method to carry water away from a water source, which is pretty fundamental to all of humanity's existence. I can drink from a lake or river, but I can't carry water away with me because there are no jars. Are there buckets? Can I fill a cooking pot? Can I eventually find or craft a canteen, a leather water skin, something? I'm equally confused about not being able to transfer lake/river water from a bucket into a cooking pot to be boiled.

 

SUGGESTION 1: We should be able to carry water away from a water source using stuff in basically any house and most POIs. A kiln and clay would make pots if stone-age crafting is desired.

 

THE INACCURATE: A dew/rain collector should not give fresh water. It should give murky water. Real life rain/dew is not potable water.

 

SUGGESTION 2: The trick with water survival is purification, not availability. Instead of a dew collector for gathering potable water, how about a Solar Still? That makes much more sense, works slowly, requires uncommon knowledge, and ultimately achieves your goal. They're also kind of fragile, so zombie's stomping around your farm would ruin them.

 

SUGGESTION 3: You could add water purification tablets to the game and let some skill craft them, kind of like medicine. It could turn murky water into boiled water. You could start the game with one instead of a bottle of boiled water.

 

NOTE: Boiling water does not always purify water. It kills things that live in the water (like bacteria) but does nothing to harmful minerals (like lead), radioactive particles, or dirt/debris. You also need a filter. If you want to go further into survival, maybe mix in multiple levels of murky water or even radioactive water. Then add in crafting filters with cloth and charcoal, or something. I don't get the sense you're trying to go that deep.

Edited July 23, 2022 by zztong (see edit history)

[MisutoM]

1 hour ago, Guppycur said:

I've been watching a lot of "alone".  A full pot of snow melts down to less than a cup of water so I get that.  

 

This is not how snow works. How much water you get from snow depends entirely on how compressed it is. For freshly dropped snow, sure, if you scoop up a handful you'll only get a few droplets of water out of that because you mostly scooped up air. However, even just compressing the snow by hand will remove a huge amount of air to the rate of about 50% water to air. This means that if you filled a pot and packed it down just with a normal human amount of effort and your bare (mitten'd?) hands (no fancy tools required), you could reliably boil that to about half a pot of water. With multiple pots and campfires this would be easily viable as a way to collect murky water.

 

2 hours ago, faatal said:

I know how to make the dew collector, but don't have the filter. Hopefully I can find a filter at a trader.

 

What kind of complicated filter do we need? Water can be cleaned incredibly simply in real life, why would it be so difficult for our survivors? You literally just need wood, stone, sand, charcoal, and something to catch the filtered water in - all things that we have readably available to us on day 1 in the game. This isn't a complicated trade skill that only select people would actually be able to do (unlike glass blowing, it was always pretty unrealistic the survivors could just pop out 100s of perfect jars with a forge and no training lol), this is an incredibly basic knowledge that requires no skill to execute. Literal children can make and use these kinds of filters. 

 

And if we already need a filter for the dew collector, why can't we scoop up lake water with a pot and filter then boil that?

 

I get wanting to make the survival elements a bit harder, but trying to make water harder to manage than it would be in real life is really immersion breaking. (Even more immersion breaking than super fast growing crops, only getting enough meat for a single day off a whole buck, or zombies existing lol). 

 

Speaking of immersion breaking. The new system means that we have an infinite number of bottles when it comes to collecting clean water from dew collectors and presumably their higher tier versions that'll be revealed later, but we aren't allowed to use that infinite number of bottles to collect murky water to filter and boil at home. Why do we sometimes have infinite bottles and other times have 0? Also, it's just really weird to be drinking from some form of functioning container that I can see, only to then have that magically gone. It's been weird for stews and boiled meat that the jars randomly vanish, but at least you don't actually see the jar full of stew that you eat, where as we will actually see us chug from a jar of water and then it's just gone. I guess we just pull a Thor move and slam them on the ground after? 

 

 

 

For a system like this to work, wouldn't it be better to do something like giving the player just 1 canteen that doesn't take an inventory slot and can only hold a finite amount of drink? We could then fill that canteen up from dew collectors without magically creating bottles. Said canteen could only be filled up with a new liquid once it was emptied and vending machines could act as if they were a drink machine and simply fill up the canteen with certain drinks (for a price, or we could use the drink machine asset that we already have and add that into each trader). With this style of canteen system, we could then gameify the system like maybe we unlock a one time upgrade recipe at certain level/day/quest milestones allowing us the make the canteen bigger, or maybe tack on like a flask for a smaller amount of a second/third liquid. A lot of ways to gameify this to make thirst less annoying as you progress, while keeping it harder in the early game. This would also give a lot of levers with which to balance; how much liquid can the canteen hold at the start? How late are the upgrades? How much is it to fill up? How filling is each type of liquid now that we have a new smaller maximum that can be carried (limited by the one canteen)? Etc. 

 

Also, how is water being addressed for multiplayer? Are the amount of purchasable liquids going to scale per player now? Because if it stays the same as now, but drinks are harder to come by outside of traders and vending machines then how do we hydrate 2 or more people when the balance is making it hard for one person to quench their thirst without having to drink murky water? Will we gameify vending machines and traders to have separate inventory for each player so teammates won't fight over who can be first to buy the available drinks each reset? 

[zztong]

10 minutes ago, MisutoM said:

What kind of complicated filter do we need? Water can be cleaned incredibly simply in real life, why would it be so difficult for our survivors? You literally just need wood, stone, sand, charcoal, and something to catch the filtered water in - all things that we have readably available to us on day 1 in the game. This isn't a complicated trade skill that only select people would actually be able to do

 

I agree with everything you said, but will quibble with this part a little... Anyone can learn to do this, but few people know how to do it because they haven't needed to do it. If everyone had advanced notice of the apocalypse, it would be common knowledge. Otherwise, finding the knowledge via scavenging survival books and magazines would be how folks learn it. But yes, exactly, the materials to filter are all around us.

[MisutoM]

3 minutes ago, zztong said:

 

I agree with everything you said, but will quibble with this part a little... Anyone can learn to do this, but few people know how to do it because they haven't needed to do it. If everyone had advanced notice of the apocalypse, it would be common knowledge. Otherwise, finding the knowledge via scavenging survival books and magazines would be how folks learn it. But yes, exactly, the materials to filter are all around us.

 

I can't argue since I don't know what everyone learns in Arizona. That was something I was taught when I was maybe 7 or 8 in South Carolina though (granted, I grew up in an extremely poor and rural area so it's entirely probable that middle class and up people don't learn those kinds essential life skills). 

 

This is the perfect thing to learn from a magazine though. It's so easy to execute and requires no special skills or training. Heck, even just a picture is good enough to teach a typical adult how to do it. For instance,

boom, now everyone here knows one basic design for this type of filter (this was just the first one on google). We're all slightly more prepared for an apocalypse, but don't forget to boil after filtering! 

[zztong]

34 minutes ago, MisutoM said:

I can't argue since I don't know what everyone learns in Arizona.

 

Yeh, everyone in AZ might be experts for all I know, but those around me (and including me) are largely ignorant of such things. Folks just know potable water comes out of the tap and think boiling solves all problems. When the conflict in Ukraine got started I thought to do some prepping, and this was a topic in things I read. That's the only way I knew what you were saying was correct. That's also how I knew rain water wasn't potable, as I had assumed it was prior.

[Roland]

I think the footprint is 3x3 and the height is possibly 3 or 4 blocks?  Can’t confirm right now but maybe someone else can. 
 

There is not a more advanced version of the dew collector.   It is not hard to build but it does take a lot of resources and a part( the filter) that can’t be crafted.  In the beginning it will be tough to get multiple made but later it will get easier. 
 

As for MP there is no need to modify vending machines or traders. Crafting teas will just be even more important. I am crafting more teas than I ever did before. You have less water now so you really want what you have to go farther and the teas really do help. Plus having a goldenrod tea on hand makes drinking murk less risky. 
 

I know that there is going to be a lot of debate over the next while over realism and gameplay and why jars have been removed except as a visual unit of drinkable liquid. I can’t fault anyone for thinking it is weird. This game has always been quirky and weird with the bottles. 
 

But it does play fun. It is fun getting the water part of survival managed and it does eventually reach a point where water survival is a breeze and doesn’t matter but the journey is much better……if you can forgive the oddities. 

[zztong]

1 hour ago, zztong said:

THE INACCURATE: A dew/rain collector should not give fresh water.

 

I'd like to correct a mistake I made. A dew collector can be like a solar still and deliver potable water. A rain collector, on the other hand, does not deliver potable water.

[Roland]

The dew collectors should be pretty easy to mod to deliver murk instead of pure water for those that want to test that.  Murk is everywhere and it does feel nice to have something you crafted produce something that is +1. It does utilize a filter. 

[zztong]

One last thought before heading off to bed...

 

Water is heavy. A 1-gallon milk jug would be 8 lbs. If the design eventually comes around and lets us carry water from a lake back to base, you could make it so that it doesn't stack very well in inventory. Maybe the virtual "quart" jars only stack to 8 instead of 125, one bucket per slot, etc.

[Laz Man]

Apart from the realism concerns.  I think the changes are an improvement over the previous trivial water survival setup.

 

I personally like some of the suggestions.  Hopefully there is time to vet them out and further improve the system.

[Arma Rex]

I think a lot of these issues could be solved with a reworking of the inventory system, to restrict how much a player can carry (via a weight system, and or having items take up a different amount of slots). Like Zztong mentioned above, water is heavy, and having a restriction on how much you can carry especially early game can make things a lot more realistic and immersive. However, an inventory rework is far-off (if even in the realm of possibility) and doesn't necessarily pertain to the discussion at hand, so I digress.

[vergilsparda]

Are there any plans to improve road generation in A21 or beyond?

[Blake_]

About the prices of beberages :

 

I personally find the trader a walk in the park with prices. But regarding food and water, they are quite ok vs the cheap vending machine (too cheap). So a jar of drink or a can of sham costs over 100? Good balance there, but then there are loopholes like the snow biome being a supermarket for many builds, and meat is in abundance there. Not enough danger, predators are usually alone and not in packs and the hunt gets old pretty quick and chests fill up with meaty dead survival expectations.

 

The water changes sound awesome, and while odd, they are tingling in all the right places.

[meilodasreh]

12 hours ago, Fanatical_Meat said:

expect to be disappointed.

I work for SETI, so I'm totally ready for those A21 bandits

Edited July 23, 2022 by meilodasreh (see edit history)

[Callum123456789]

I personally like this change because weve all gotta agree water is way too easy to come by and now especially (a20) you can boil water without a cooking pot just defeats the whole survival purpose these new rain collrctor things will definitely make you work for the water you get rather than it being oh look heres my forge and 1k crushed sand  and 2k clay time to make about 2k glass jars! Then you've basically beat the game water wise by having an infinite amount to drink and for glue I also know there will be a small percentage that won't like this change and for that I can guarantee there will be a mod on nexus mods or a related site that reverts the changes.

[v3tro]

I am looking forward to this new water change. Sounds interesting and gives us "experienced" players more challenges which is nice. 

 

Seems like some of you are blowing this thing out of proportion just like it was with farm plots, candy ,LBD etc.. water was never an issue before and they are removing easy access to water to make it more challenging/interesting. Some of the proposed ideas are good, but do not fit into vanilla game, would be too much or too clunky for such a trivial thing as water. No need to overcomplicate. 

 

When you guys think that making <name anything> is easy.. just think about 100,000+ people who do not know how to boil an egg without looking it up on i-net. Not everyone is intellectually smart. 

[FranticDan]

13 hours ago, Roland said:

When your hydration slips below 50%, suddenly you start considering slurping on some murk to trade a bit of health to avoid stamina loss.  
 

So they changed that for A21?
Currently in A20, you start losing stamina regen at 75% hydration


Also, this change means we can no longer use snow to melt and boil? Or we simply can melt and boil snow and doesn't need a jar?

EDIT: Ok, so we can't melt/boil snow. I agree that currently snow is mega OP for water. But a strong nerf should happen instead of complete removal. Here's my suggestion:
-Lower the snowballs per block from 11 to 5.
-Increase the snowball cost to make water from 1 to 20.

This is a ~98% nerf and would take 4 blocks of snow to make 1 water (without motherlode)

Edited July 23, 2022 by FranticDan (see edit history)

[Matt115]

13 hours ago, faatal said:

 

6 Feet.

 

@SnowDog1942 good news for you!

10 hours ago, Laz Man said:

 

How people drink in the apocalypse... 😅

So... my city is post apo.... 

[doughphunghus]

9 hours ago, MisutoM said:

I guess we just pull a Thor move and slam them on the ground after? 

Omg this is actually an interesting idea and something I’ve never seen in a game: forced character immersion

 

So: some items you really really could actually use in real life (like glass jars as an example) but make the game a bit weird (making water too easy, or an item devs don’t want you to have) the character immediately after use, destroys them in some character specific way. Like (glub glug glug) then they speak “Nobody needs this useless jar!” And smash it on the ground. Oh, they are just ignorant or have a big ego. 

 

then, other items they just seem to hate but it’s random or when they’re near water or a ledge they sometimes get triggered Like, you’re walking and see some water and stop for a drink. Suddenly “I hate this stupid (item)” and you throw your gun into the water (and it deepens immediately).

 

Blood moon in full swing and you shoot your AK and miss too much? A random “Stupid gun, the aim is off!” And it auto throws it and immediately Despawns. Or you miss with a knife 2 times and , whelp, your character got mad and blamed the knife and now it’s gone. 

 

In this way you would be punished with never knowing what is going to be auto trashed out of the characters core stats/frustration/ego. Additionally, maybe the more of x gets thrown away, a counter maxes out (maybe like 3-5 auto junk/throws in a row) and after that you can’t use that weapon/item anymore (no seriously your character just can’t use a bow because you can’t shoot with a bow either, or they literally random stat rolled and they hate bows.

 

It would also be a fun? Way to punish someone with too many resources in their backpack. Got 24k of rocks? “Damn that’s heavy!” Poof , a stack is thrown away now you have 18k rocks. Better start using or storing them!

[doughphunghus]

 

8 hours ago, zztong said:

One last thought before heading off to bed...

 

Water is heavy. A 1-gallon milk jug would be 8 lbs. If the design eventually comes around and lets us carry water from a lake back to base, you could make it so that it doesn't stack very well in inventory. Maybe the virtual "quart" jars only stack to 8 instead of 125, one bucket per slot, etc.

Yeah, some of the stacking for “survival” items is really high and odd. I get wanting to have big stacks for the blocks/building items (and I think the stacks for building resources like rocks are a bit high as-is, but not a big deal except maybe wood/coal because it’s fuel for fires. Maybe just a reduced stack size for workstation fuel would be nice so the “burn time” of items would matter more?) but food/water feels better having low stack amounts. All/most? Of the medical items are low stack and it feels good (for survival).The ammo stack sizes are pretty perfect imho. 

[zztong]

8 hours ago, zztong said:

Maybe the virtual "quart" jars only stack to 8 instead of 125, one bucket per slot, etc.

 

Erg, 8 "pints" in a gallon. I'm a walking mistake. Boiled water stacks to 10, so maybe Murky water should too?

 

7 hours ago, Laz Man said:

I think the changes are an improvement over the previous trivial water survival setup.

 

Yeh, I'm not complaining about the direction. I have been guilty of calling the early game stage "7 Days to Find a Cooking Pot" as I find it absurd (in an entertaining way) all of the pots and pans have disappeared from the world, but I cannot deny it is a fun challenge.

 

8 hours ago, Roland said:

I know that there is going to be a lot of debate over the next while over realism and gameplay and why jars have been removed except as a visual unit of drinkable liquid. I can’t fault anyone for thinking it is weird. This game has always been quirky and weird with the bottles.

 

Heh, true. My favorite has been being unable to empty a jar of Murky Water without drinking it. (LOL) Still, it seems like a counter-intuitive hole in the game not to be able to carry water from a lake (or any source). Consider:

 

• You walk to a lake, build a campfire, pull out your newly found cooking pot, and ... you cannot get water from the lake into the cooking pot.
• You pull out a bucket, fill it with water ... and you cannot pour your bucket into the cooking pot.

 

It is so fundamental that I suspect not having it will lead to new players being lost or thinking it is broken. I can envision forum topics and bug reports from new players ... "I can't figure out how to get water from a lake."

 

Thanks for listening.