Alpha 21 Discussion Overflow

[pApA^LeGBa]

I don´t look down on mods. In fact i play modded only for quite a while now. It´s just sad that i need them to enjoy the game. I would like a vanilla game that i can enjoy aswell.

 

And you said it would be a rare loot drop. Wich basically means you will need the trader. This would be horrible in MP Coop, you can´t have someone farming/building/cooking because that person won´t get a lot of water. Another step into forcing everyone into scavenging along with the learning by looting change. 

 

Well let´s see when it drops. But i fear that you are right, as they never liked when someone could stay at home. But they totally oversee the fact that people who do building/mining/farming/cooking exclusivly have no interest in the game anymore if they are forced to go out. And that will stop the whole group from playing in our case.

 

Ah well, ARK 2 is coming, Conan exiles get´s a huge update, Nightingale is coming this year. PZ is constantly updating. I am good with games luckily.

Edited July 28, 2022 by pApA^LeGBa (see edit history)

[zztong]

I feel silly admitting that the notion of being unable to fill a container with water from a lake/river has kind of shaken me.

 

But, rather than spend a bunch of time railing against it on the boards I've mostly just been thinking, "okay, I must play differently than most and differently than TFP imagines." I'm scratching my head as to what the intended play is. My guess, based on A20, is that you do the starter quest, you run quests for the trader, you make a horde base and deal with hordes, slowly grow more powerful, repeat until bored.

 

My style has been, complete the starter quest, focus on food/water/cookpot/padded armor, then I'm in a position to find a higher purpose, like complete quests, explore the world, or work with other players towards some goal. In reflection, I'm basically following Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, though admittedly the game doesn't penalize me for not having shelter, partly because I don't need to sleep and partly because being too hot/cold costs me more food/water.

 

Could it be that when survival is only expressed in terms of food and water, making either more scarce is the only option for tweaking that aspect of the game?

 

(Is it weird to anyone else that a new character without shoes moves so well through the wilderness? Just me? Okay, thought so.)

 

So, while I've always preferred to play with a Vanilla configuration, maybe that's changing. Gadz, this feels like soul-searching in some way.

[pApA^LeGBa]

What i don´t like is the RNG. This shouldn´t be a loot shooter, wich this change and learning by looting definitly will make it feel like even more than already now.  RNG shouldn´t influence how well i am able to survive. Nothing against making food and water scarce, it´s actually welcome.

Edited July 29, 2022 by pApA^LeGBa (see edit history)

[Neminsis]

13 hours ago, meganoth said:

The changes in A21 will not necessarily solve your hydration problems the moment you get a cooking pot. Because you want to use some water you loot for production of food and glue you will have a motive for drinking from sewers and the like.

There's really no need to craft early game or cook anything that requires water. You can go an entire 60 hours without having to do either. 
 

13 hours ago, meganoth said:

In your scheme the only limit is how much inventory management grind the player is prepared to do.

Well sure, except that you're neglecting that there is no incentive for the player to do that before having a cooking pot, and if you're already looting 3 bottles of murky water a day for free, then there's just no point in making that special trip to get those 3 bottles of water. 

But let's say you've collected 2-3 full storage boxes of jars, have the 4x4, and a fully modded Q6 drone to carry them all to the water source. Your combined inventory space is 172 spaces if you leave a space to stack into, that's a hard limit. The soft limits are that even if you drink 3 drinks a day it'll take you 57 days to collect that many, you need to already have the 4x4, a fully modded Q6 drone, and neglecting travel time it'll still take you 3 real time minutes or a full game hour to accomplish. All for approximately half of what you need for those 4 stacks of bolts. And remember, once you convert to glue, the jars vanish, so you'd have to wait another 60 days before repeating it.
 

13 hours ago, meganoth said:

You don't know that yet. You are talking about 2 dew collectors but it is totally unknown how many dew collectors a player can build say on day 20 on average. 

No, but I can estimate given that one source of the required filter coming from traders will most likely be as a quest tier reward that isn't repeatable, it's a "rare drop" and as such will both be cost prohibitive and infrequent in trader inventories. 
 

13 hours ago, meganoth said:

When I was talking about feedback, naturally written feedback from players here in the forum should be taken into account.

No disagreement there.
 

13 hours ago, meganoth said:

The math you do with 2 collectors is unavoidable BUT probably useless.

Sure, they could change trader density or make the filter a common repeatable quest reward, but they're not going to. What they're more likely to do is adjust the output of the dew collectors and/or make them modable and/or drop them into traders inventory more frequently late game and/or make filters craftable and/or add a skill to the intellect tree to allow higher production from them. 

The math isn't useless if we assume that what's been reported so far is true, and there is no reason to believe that it isn't.
 

13 hours ago, meganoth said:

And my group actually buys other stuff from the trader

Craft turret ammo (a little harder now with cans removed), sell polymers, leather and stacks of paper for early cash. 
 

13 hours ago, meganoth said:

Which is why I was asking if anybody was really dismissing them out of hand without bringing arguments. Do you have some examples?

No, and I'd never specifically name any names, but since I do follow those people in other places, I know that it was enough to terminate the conversation for them regardless of whether it was within the forum rules.
 

13 hours ago, meganoth said:

I prefer better commentary to accusations of "making changes without any reason" or wild speculations on what the reasons were (not refering to you here, but a few posters have done this)

I have most certainly speculated on the reasons for these changes, and I'm not really ashamed of doing so either. I have gone as far as to suggest that it was in many ways a solution looking for a problem. 

If we start with the premise that drinks are too easy to come by in the early game a lot of the changes make sense. Remove boiled water from the loot table, now you're stuck drinking murky until you get that cooking pot or buying from the trader. That pretty much solved the whole thing right there for the early game.

But then you get that cooking pot and the jars you collected, so we remove jars from the loot table too and now the player is limited to the jars that have been returned from drinking until they get a forge, and then just make jars uncraftable and the player is still limited to gaining jars at 3 per day and any jars used to create food or glue are not returned and you end up with the exact same water budget as the dew collector is presently advertised. All with a few xml edits and at no point was it necessary to remove water collection or add a new asset.

Someone wanted to add the dew collector, and I suppose it could fairly be argued that it was to introduce scalability, but it wouldn't necessitate removing water collection to achieve that, except that fewer people might opt to test the new gadget if that 3 per day budget was already adequate.

 

Edited July 29, 2022 by Neminsis
OCD (see edit history)

[Jost Amman]

16 minutes ago, Zombiepoptard said:

For the environmental hazards we should be able to interact with these hazards not only as a level obstacle but as a gameplay feature that is more dynamic and manipulatable. You should be able to turn the valve back on if you think that zombies will be running through the doorway that the flames would be blocking off. If you find a red pipe you should be able to shoot it and make a hazard yourself. These are just an example but I think applying intractability to a lot of deco would play to this games sandbox strengths. I mean heck lights can't even be shot out for stealth gameplay. You have to destroy the whole lamp to shut it off. Light switch, one tap and that's all I'm going to say.  

That would be great. But I already see some issues for the devs. To ensure the gas leak is coming from "somewhere" you'd need to be sure that the pipe you're shooting is connected to some source. Otherwise, you can have a single "pipe block" that can become a hazard even without being connected to a source of gas.

 

As you can see, this can easily become a can of worms... how would you solve this issue?

[Zombiepoptard]

41 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

That would be great. But I already see some issues for the devs. To ensure the gas leak is coming from "somewhere" you'd need to be sure that the pipe you're shooting is connected to some source. Otherwise, you can have a single "pipe block" that can become a hazard even without being connected to a source of gas.

 

As you can see, this can easily become a can of worms... how would you solve this issue?

They already deal with that issue when they put the hazard in the game. I think every red pipe would be connected to gas. 

[Jost Amman]

2 hours ago, Zombiepoptard said:

They already deal with that issue when they put the hazard in the game. I think every red pipe would be connected to gas. 

I didn't see that. No one from the dev team said hazards are more than just props which spew out flames.

If you have read something differently, could you link me to the source, please? Thank you

[meganoth]

3 hours ago, Neminsis said:

There's really no need to craft early game or cook anything that requires water. You can go an entire 60 hours without having to do either. 

 

Short answer: pipe machine gun.

 

Long answer: There are people who can survive in 7D2D with a bone knife. Doesn't mean that the average case can or will optimize his game that far.

 

Given a choice of drinking murky water and craft a simple mod for my stone axe or craft a pipe machine gun or a wooden bow or just drink some clean water I probably would do one of the former.

 

And even if someone loots 3 murky water on average means that he can be unlucky and find only 2 per day on the first three days.

 

The question is how much he then would dislike drinking murky water. A strategy someone with cooking pot and the golden rod tea recipe might take would be to produce a stack of golden rod tea, drink from sewers and heal any dysentery with golden rod tea. Will people do that? Will I do that?

I don't know, that is a question we can only answer once experimental drops and we have played one or two worlds already.

 

3 hours ago, Neminsis said:

Well sure, except that you're neglecting that there is no incentive for the player to do that before having a cooking pot, and if you're already looting 3 bottles of murky water a day for free, then there's just no point in making that special trip to get those 3 bottles of water. 

 

The point is that there is no limitation at all. Normally you might not need to make that trip, but then you might get some meat and want to make boiled meat out of it, build a mod, make some coffee or red tea for some early mining or other stamina-heavy activities (i.e. where you don't drink it for hydration but for the buff), ... And there is practically no limit.

 

3 hours ago, Neminsis said:

But let's say you've collected 2-3 full storage boxes of jars, have the 4x4, and a fully modded Q6 drone to carry them all to the water source. Your combined inventory space is 172 spaces if you leave a space to stack into, that's a hard limit. The soft limits are that even if you drink 3 drinks a day it'll take you 57 days to collect that many, you need to already have the 4x4, a fully modded Q6 drone, and neglecting travel time it'll still take you 3 real time minutes or a full game hour to accomplish. All for approximately half of what you need for those 4 stacks of bolts. And remember, once you convert to glue, the jars vanish, so you'd have to wait another 60 days before repeating it.

 

My problem here is that I know pretty well the changes in A21. But I don't know exactly the changes you are proposing. Not only is that knowledge distributed over multiple pages but I also forget details. Did you ever say whether empty jars can still be crafted in the forge with your scheme? I don't remember. What else is changed?

 

Which makes for a lot of guessing how your mod plays out. The changes you initially suggested (as far as I remember) definitely were not enough to make water scarce. Maybe you just forgot mentioning them because the scheme is clearly worked out in your head. Or worse you are adapting the scheme whenever someone brings up a problem.

 

Simply said: First define your mod completely in one post (with all changes you are proposing). Then we have a basis to argue about.

 

3 hours ago, Neminsis said:

No, but I can estimate given that one source of the required filter coming from traders will most likely be as a quest tier reward that isn't repeatable, it's a "rare drop" and as such will both be cost prohibitive and infrequent in trader inventories. 

 

What does rare drop mean? Acid is called a rare drop as far as I know, a tier3 weapon schematic is a rare drop. You'll likely have found say 5 or 10 acid at the end of week 2 but probably not a single tier3 weapon schematic.

 

And I won't even try to guess what the number of filters you find will be in A21.0 experimental, the important thing will be what the number will be in A21.5 stable. We know that TFP often "errs" on the difficult side in their first balance attempts and adapts to make it more newbie-friendly after some balancing steps.

 

3 hours ago, Neminsis said:

Sure, they could change trader density or make the filter a common repeatable quest reward, but they're not going to.

 

I'm talking about making filters being less rare to find than you expect. You bring up far off suggestions I never mentioned and dismiss them. ??

 

3 hours ago, Neminsis said:

 

What they're more likely to do is adjust the output of the dew collectors and/or make them modable and/or drop them into traders inventory more frequently late game and/or make filters craftable and/or add a skill to the intellect tree to allow higher production from them. 

 

Possibly. All of these methods create somewhat different results. At the moment none of these were mentioned and since we don't know what loopholes their scheme will have we can't really predict which correction they'll use.

 

3 hours ago, Neminsis said:

The math isn't useless if we assume that what's been reported so far is true, and there is no reason to believe that it isn't.
 

Craft turret ammo (a little harder now with cans removed), sell polymers, leather and stacks of paper for early cash. 

 

Whatever you do, if you put part of your money into water you have less to spend for books, magazines, weapons, armor, mods ...

 

There are players who carefully have analyzed the game on how to get a lot of money out of selling specific stuff to the trader. And they easily have 10 times the money a newbie has at any day or more. The average player has not minmaxed the game to this degree and won't have money to throw out of the window, at least not in the first 2 to 5 weeks.

 

3 hours ago, Neminsis said:

No, and I'd never specifically name any names, but since I do follow those people in other places, I know that it was enough to terminate the conversation for them regardless of whether it was within the forum rules.

 

Which isn't as it should be. But generalized accusations into the room where anybody could feel addressed/blamed if he so much as posted a reply to those modders do not help as well. Next time either report it or maybe try to calm the waters.

 

3 hours ago, Neminsis said:

I have most certainly speculated on the reasons for these changes, and I'm not really ashamed of doing so either. I have gone as far as to suggest that it was in many ways a solution looking for a problem. 

If we start with the premise that drinks are too easy to come by in the early game a lot of the changes make sense. Remove boiled water from the loot table, now you're stuck drinking murky until you get that cooking pot or buying from the trader. That pretty much solved the whole thing right there for the early game.

But then you get that cooking pot and the jars you collected, so we remove jars from the loot table too and now the player is limited to the jars that have been returned from drinking until they get a forge, and then just make jars uncraftable and the player is still limited to gaining jars at 3 per day and any jars used to create food or glue are not returned and you end up with the exact same water budget as the dew collector is presently advertised. All with a few xml edits and at no point was it necessary to remove water collection or add a new asset.

 

A new scheme? I'm not gonna discuss another one, but notice that the developers probably have no design rule that states: "Make no new assets if possible" or "Don't remove anything". Nobody can say that TFP is averse of changes.

 

Maybe they didn't think of your scheme exactly or maybe their scheme solved another problem they were having. Or there is a problem with your scheme that they did not want to have. Sometimes a problem can be solved many ways and the decision between the best is nearly arbitrary. Even with Rolands detailed description we don't know what alternatives were discussed and why they were rejected.

 

So I don't see any sense into speculating what they were thinking. We can compare schemes theoretically, but will never know if TFP had other criteria we don't know of. And we can only be sure about the results when we actually have played it.

 

3 hours ago, Neminsis said:

Someone wanted to add the dew collector, and I suppose it could fairly be argued that it was to introduce scalability, but it wouldn't necessitate removing water collection to achieve that, except that fewer people might opt to test the new gadget if that 3 per day budget was already adequate.

 

 

Edited July 29, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Gamida]

5 hours ago, Jost Amman said:

I can understand why...

As soon as the cat is out of the bag it'll be prod, poked, dissected, burned, ground and analyzed until they find each and every issue/bug/shortcoming. 

 

Isn't that the point of them testing?

[Jost Amman]

17 minutes ago, Gamida said:

Isn't that the point of them testing?

Yes. I'm just saying I understand why faatal would want to release something at least decent to the testers. Even a bugged alpha version can go from something that needs fixes and changes here and there to a complete utter trash unplayable nightmare.

Edited July 29, 2022 by Jost Amman
proofing (see edit history)

[Zombiepoptard]

1 hour ago, Jost Amman said:

I didn't see that. No one from the dev team said hazards are more than just props which spew out flames.

If you have read something differently, could you link me to the source, please? Thank you

I see where you're confused. "you should be able to shoot it and make a hazard yourself" meaning you should be able to shoot the pipe and activate the fire hazard.

[Neminsis]

10 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Short answer: pipe machine gun.

At what point did anyone say that they'd also removed glue and duct tape from the loot table?
 

11 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Given a choice of drinking murky water and craft a simple mod for my stone axe

Since when have you been able to get mod recipes early game or build them without a workbench?
 

15 minutes ago, meganoth said:

A strategy someone with cooking pot and the golden rod tea recipe might take would be to produce a stack of golden rod tea, drink from sewers and heal any dysentery with golden rod tea.

Why would that even be a thing when golden rod tea hydrates you more than murky water without consequence, and where did this magical stack of murky water come from to make the tea?
 

20 minutes ago, meganoth said:

The point is that there is no limitation at all.

No, in the case of a stack size of one, it's both hard limited by carrying capacity, and soft limited by time. lack of need, and drop rate of consumables.
 

24 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Simply said: First define your mod completely in one post (with all changes you are proposing). Then we have a basis to argue about.

Retain water gathering, remove jars from being craftable, reduce stack size on jars to either 10 or 1, allow jars to only be dropped from drinks, retain all other a21 changes regarding drinkables.
 

30 minutes ago, meganoth said:

We know that TFP often "errs" on the difficult side in their first balance attempts and adapts to make it more newbie-friendly after some balancing steps.

I don't actually remember anything that they've ever done on the first pass that was "difficult" but if we go with that logic then there are going to be a few niche playstyles that will be more difficult on the first pass, right?
 

35 minutes ago, meganoth said:

At the moment none of these were mentioned and since we don't know what loopholes their scheme will have we can't really predict which correction they'll use.

I always love it when people say that you can't predict a thing even when there's always a finite number of variants for any given situation and probabilities associated with each. As a corollary to Occam's razor, the easiest path is the path most likely to be taken.
 

42 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Whatever you do, if you put part of your money into water you have less to spend for books, magazines, weapons, armor, mods ...

And the same is true no matter where you get your 3 waters per day.
 

45 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Next time either report it or maybe try to calm the waters.

No sense in reporting it if it doesn't break the rules, and publicly voicing my disapproval of shutting people down with thought terminating jibes is as far as my responsibility to the community would go. I did that. I'm not the mod around here and those that are didn't see any actionable violations, right?
 

52 minutes ago, meganoth said:

A new scheme?

No, it's literally the same one, water collection is retained, jars are made uncraftable so that they only drop from drinks, and the stack size for jars is reduced to either 10 or 1, and all other changes in a21 concerning drinkables is retained. I'm sorry if you lost track, these threads can be messy.
 

56 minutes ago, meganoth said:

Maybe they didn't think of your scheme exactly or maybe their scheme solved another problem they were having.

I'm pretty sure that they did actually since they're the most obvious solutions requiring the least effort, and I have heard them talked about previously. I didn't invent this 'scheme'. I guarantee you they know the consumption rate and drop frequency of every item in the game. It's not really a coincidence that the dew collectors' output was set at 3/10 hrs and the previous system sans craftable jars also works out to the same frequency, is it? Of course, it's not, when someone set up the drop rate on drinks, they referred back to the consumption rate. and then they probably did it again for murky water which resulted in the present glut.
 

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

So I don't see any sense into speculating what they were thinking. We can compare schemes theoretically, but will never know if TFP had other criteria we don't know of. And we can only be sure about the results when we actually have played it.

What's the point in thinking about anything other than our basic human needs really? Because it's damned fun to do. We really don't need to know what their criteria was but if we speculate, make predictions, and then test those predictions against reality so that we can build a model to make better predictions. 😂
 

[Jost Amman]

18 minutes ago, Zombiepoptard said:

I see where you're confused. "you should be able to shoot it and make a hazard yourself" meaning you should be able to shoot the pipe and activate the fire hazard.

No, I understand, but that still wouldn't make sense if the pipe was not connected to a "pipeline" of sorts connected to a gas tank or something like that.

What I mean is that IMO you should need more than just the "pipe block" alone if you want to shoot it and activate the fire hazard.

Fire should only come out of the pipe if the block is connected to a "gas source" (be it a tank or an underground pipeline").

Edited July 29, 2022 by Jost Amman (see edit history)

[Neminsis]

2 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

Fire should only come out of the pipe if the block is connected to a "gas source" (be it a tank or a land pipeline").

Sure, but then you have to define a source block and check the state of every connected block when the player is in the vicinity. I'll gladly give up that bit of realism to avoid that performance hit.

[Zombiepoptard]

6 minutes ago, Jost Amman said:

No, I understand, but that still wouldn't make sense if the pipe was not connected to a "pipeline" of sorts connected to a gas tank or something like that.

What I mean is that IMO you should need more than just the "pipe block" alone if you want to shoot it and activate the fire hazard.

Fire should only come out of the pipe if the block is connected to a "gas source" (be it a tank or an underground pipeline").

The red pipes would always be the gas pipes in a poi. what else would they be?

[Jost Amman]

9 minutes ago, Zombiepoptard said:

The red pipes would always be the gas pipes in a poi. what else would they be?

I wasn't talking about that. Read what Neminsis said.

[zztong]

30 minutes ago, Neminsis said:

Retain water gathering, remove jars from being craftable, reduce stack size on jars to either 10 or 1, allow jars to only be dropped from drinks, retain all other a21 changes regarding drinkables.

 

I like this.  -- I hate to just make a "me too" post, but y'all are having a discussion with so many points it is hard to smash the like button.

 

This says to me:

• Fresh water is scarce, but water is plentiful. You won't die of thirst but early game you'll probably have to drink some Murky water and take risks.
• Containers are rare at first, but plentiful later if a person makes it a priority to save them.
  • Otherwise, people coming out of POIs will be dropping bottles, both empty and full to make room for more valuable loot.
• Inventory management becomes a more important game mechanic for the entire game.

The folks I think who shrug off this change are those that play with larger backpacks and if they're willing to use mods then they can have pretty much any game.

 

You still end up with "7 Days to Find a Cookpot" which from my experience is around Day 3 on average, or sooner if somebody puts points in INT and they get a Forge going to make one. The INT line is how I see folks rocketing up through the game. I don't invest in it, so I get a nice slow progression... but skill/schematic changes are hard for me to predict what play will be like.

 

But ultimately, I'd like to try out the changes. The water change alone seems... weird... but how it fits with everything is what really matters. I'm just kicking words around until then.

[Ellorra]

I have just heard that The Fun Pimps are removing glass jars from the game and making murky water only available through looting.  You do understand this puts a choke point into our glue production, which effects almost everything, right?  I’m reminded of when you made it so zombies didn’t reduce into gore piles, and then you hastily patched in static gore piles everywhere when you realized this effected our ability to get bones. If you want to remove empty glass jars from the loot table, fine. Make it so they are only craftable.  This is a horrible idea that will significantly negatively effect game play.  Please reconsider.

[Adam the Waster]

On 7/22/2022 at 2:29 PM, Matt115 said:

it looks good except plate

disagree, it looks good

looks like something i can make, im planning on making it IRL, just need to wait to build my shed 

[Roland]

19 minutes ago, Ellorra said:

I have just heard that The Fun Pimps are removing glass jars from the game and making murky water only available through looting.  You do understand this puts a choke point into our glue production, which effects almost everything, right?  I’m reminded of when you made it so zombies didn’t reduce into gore piles, and then you hastily patched in static gore piles everywhere when you realized this effected our ability to get bones. If you want to remove empty glass jars from the loot table, fine. Make it so they are only craftable.  This is a horrible idea that will significantly negatively effect game play.  Please reconsider.

The gore blocks that the zombie bodies morphed into were completely different from the harvestable bodies strewn about the world. The original gore blocks gave no bones and simply needed to be cleaned up after horde nights to avoid piles messing with your defenses. They had nothing to do with glue production. I don’t even think we had glue or duct tape as items in the game back then,tbh. 
 

So the addition of new gore blocks that could be harvested for bones had nothing to do with the removal of the old gore blocks and wasn’t a hastily patched solution. 
 

I look forward to you being able to play with the new water mechanics and seeing how large scale glue production will be handled. Hopefully you will find it entertaining. If you find it unbalanced, let us know. The water changes aren’t going to be reconsidered until after experimental yields some actual test case feedback. 

[zztong]

I don't know if this helps, but I can easily see where water as loot could be rarer, assuming the apocalypse was recent. My sense is that the apocalypse was years ago, but there are lots of conflicting signs. Assuming the apocalypse was years ago, water from drains, traps, toilets in POIs would have evaporated long ago. The water in toilets would quit replenishing after water pressure was lost and the toilet's tank couldn't refill. I think the only source of water in a POI would be from a sealed system. Even then it probably isn't potable water anymore.

 

What I find appealing to revising loot tables is that POIs quit becoming a perfect provider of everything needed for survival. I've had several players who live entirely on the rations and waters found in POI loot and bought from the trader, and thus see no value in cooking, farming or even spending time worrying about fundamental survival.

 

Bandits and the Trader I could see being the only lootable/buyable source of potable water or the various teas.

 

Yes, I know "reality" isn't the highest priority. I enjoy things a little more when it matches up.

[meganoth]

4 hours ago, Neminsis said:

At what point did anyone say that they'd also removed glue and duct tape from the loot table?

 

Correct, but there is no guarantee to find enough for what you want.

 

4 hours ago, Neminsis said:

Since when have you been able to get mod recipes early game or build them without a workbench?

 

Good point. In A20 multiplayer games a workbench is usually availabe almost immediately. The recipe can be had with the 4 perk points for the initial quests, I expect this to take a bit longer in A21 though.

 

I thought there were some mods you could craft initially but I may be wrong.

 

4 hours ago, Neminsis said:

Why would that even be a thing when golden rod tea hydrates you more than murky water without consequence, and where did this magical stack of murky water come from to make the tea?

 

Well, didn't we often assume up to now that on average you would find 3 jars of murky water in loot on day 1 ? Even if it were 2 or 4 instead, that doesn't change much for the calculation.

I also assume that just by looking into a few kitchens you often find a cooking pot. Certainly in multiplayer a pot was never a problem. And the calculation would work for any day where you have that pot anyway.

 

Cooking them to tea and drinking them gives you 75 water. So at the end of this day you have 0 jars of water.

 

Cooking them to tea and drinking from any open water gives you (since the chances are for dysentery to occur on average every 8th jar) 80+25 = 105 water and afterwards you still have 2 of the 3 teas left for the next day.

 

BUT there is also the drawback of 40 hitpoints lost through drinking murky water. It may be a bit too much for murky water drinking to be something you do apart from emergencies. May need further balancing

 

4 hours ago, Neminsis said:

No, in the case of a stack size of one, it's both hard limited by carrying capacity, and soft limited by time. lack of need, and drop rate of consumables.

 

In late game where you have the need to mass produce glue and duct tape the only limit is the players endurance for grind. 

 

4 hours ago, Neminsis said:

Retain water gathering, remove jars from being craftable, reduce stack size on jars to either 10 or 1, allow jars to only be dropped from drinks, retain all other a21 changes regarding drinkables.

 

Thanks. Do you mean empty jars only or filled jars as well at the underlined point?

 

And what now, 10 or 1? That seems quite a big difference.

 

What are those "other a21 changes regarding drinkables" ? The dew collector? Anything else?

 

4 hours ago, Neminsis said:

I don't actually remember anything that they've ever done on the first pass that was "difficult" but if we go with that logic then there are going to be a few niche playstyles that will be more difficult on the first pass, right?
 

I always love it when people say that you can't predict a thing even when there's always a finite number of variants for any given situation and probabilities associated with each. As a corollary to Occam's razor, the easiest path is the path most likely to be taken.

 

Oh right. Would you have been able to predict the dew collector (if someone had told you TFP wants to make water scarce in the beginning) ? I definitely would not. I actually get surprised a lot by the solutions TFP comes up with.

 

If yes, I bow to your superiority 😁

 

But more seriously, the number of solutions may be finite, there are more than you listed. Here are some more:

Remove the water jar from the super corn->glue recipe

Add a recipe to make glue from pine seeds or whatever else seems a possible source

Add resin and recipes for wood -> resin -> glue.

 

But it's not even that, until you exactly know where the new scheme has a problem you can't put any reliable probabilities on what solution is gonna be taken.

 

4 hours ago, Neminsis said:

And the same is true no matter where you get your 3 waters per day.

 

???? Trivially no. Water from dew collector is very cheap in the long run, murky water from sewers is the cheapest if you can afford the hit point loss. Both need no dukes day to day, only the dew collector has a one-time cost for building/buying it.

 

4 hours ago, Neminsis said:

No sense in reporting it if it doesn't break the rules, and publicly voicing my disapproval of shutting people down with thought terminating jibes is as far as my responsibility to the community would go. I did that. I'm not the mod around here and those that are didn't see any actionable violations, right?

 

For many grey-area cases we only act when someone feels disturbed or attacked by an exchange and reports it. Different people have different limits on what they accept. Voicing disapproval is not what I would call calming the waters, so you are absolutely right to not step in 😉

 

4 hours ago, Neminsis said:

No, it's literally the same one, water collection is retained, jars are made uncraftable so that they only drop from drinks, and the stack size for jars is reduced to either 10 or 1, and all other changes in a21 concerning drinkables is retained. I'm sorry if you lost track, these threads can be messy.
 

I'm pretty sure that they did actually since they're the most obvious solutions requiring the least effort, and I have heard them talked about previously. I didn't invent this 'scheme'. I guarantee you they know the consumption rate and drop frequency of every item in the game. It's not really a coincidence that the dew collectors' output was set at 3/10 hrs and the previous system sans craftable jars also works out to the same frequency, is it? Of course, it's not, when someone set up the drop rate on drinks, they referred back to the consumption rate. and then they probably did it again for murky water which resulted in the present glut.
 

What's the point in thinking about anything other than our basic human needs really? Because it's damned fun to do. We really don't need to know what their criteria was but if we speculate, make predictions, and then test those predictions against reality so that we can build a model to make better predictions. 😂
 

 

Fair enough.

Edited July 29, 2022 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Guppycur]

10 hours ago, Zombiepoptard said:

For the environmental hazards we should be able to interact with these hazards not only as a level obstacle but as a gameplay feature that is more dynamic and manipulatable. You should be able to turn the valve back on if you think that zombies will be running through the doorway that the flames would be blocking off. If you find a red pipe you should be able to shoot it and make a hazard yourself. These are just an example but I think applying intractability to a lot of deco would play to this games sandbox strengths. I mean heck lights can't even be shot out for stealth gameplay. You have to destroy the whole lamp to shut it off. Light switch, one tap and that's all I'm going to say.  

 

Fires can get out of hand very quickly.  Something to consider.

 

 

[jorbascrumps]

27 minutes ago, Guppycur said:

 

Fires can get out of hand very quickly.  Something to consider.

 

 

 

I've been enjoying your videos the last few days - very excited for this mod!

[BFT2020]

3 hours ago, meganoth said:

I thought there were some mods you could craft initially but I may be wrong.

 

FYI

 

• Does not require workbench
  • T0/T1 Tools
  • T0/T1 Melee Weapons
  • T0 Firearms
  • T0/T1 Bows (but not crossbow)
  • T0 Armor

 

• Requires workbench
  • T2 and Higher Tools and Melee Weapons
  • T1 and Higher Firearms
  • Iron Crossbow and T2 Higher bows
  • T1 and Higher Armor
  • All mods
  • All robotics