19 hours ago, Soulbreeze said:I take that magazine book box quest reward every time it's offered; it's not enough and often books I don't need. That's part of why I'm saying perking into some things doesn't increase chances of certain books enough. OR we just need a way to offset the RNG. I'm sure a big part if it is single player vs. multiplayer server play. You don't get to loot mailboxes, traders, bookstores or any other high value POI very often on Multi, but it's all options in Single.
Correct, though that can't explain it completely. I didn't go for extra rounds to loot mailboxes so it is only the mailboxes on the way to quests and most of that was just a few routes. Maybe those were 10-20 mailboxes on top, nice to have on top but not a game changer.
Can't vouch for co-op, it is different there, one of my co-players could have made the rounds, and naturally I would profit from finds and quest bundles of my co-op players.
In my starting town and the other forest town I visited I did not see a bookshop and I don't think the 1-2 from the trader make a difference.
I eventually went to other biomes and (not sure) might have loot a bookstore there, I am only sure that I did that in co-op, not in the SP game. But even if I did, my crafting progression did not lag before going to that biome, it was always in front.
Kosmic Kerman has a valid point here, multiplayer servers with already looted worlds are a special case and server operators have to do additional work to recreate the balance of sp and co-op. There are console commands to help them (for example to refresh whole areas) but also there have been mods (AFAIK) specifically created for servers.