An in depth discussion on zombie loot in alpha 17

[SylenThunder]

Oh, we didn't have carcasses before, right? So there is a new loot container in A17, with bones in it.

 

For bones it is conclusive evidence that they amended drops

No, we have them now. They appear in a couple of the POI's.

[Qyzer]

Well from what I've seen the recipes that required duct tape still all require duct tape (for example) but I can also say that despite not getting a single roll of duct tape off of any zombie I killed I have more duct tape than I remember ever having before. The trash heaps and cars and backpacks seem to me to have better loot in them and I have felt zero lack. Two poi's I visited had carcasses that I harvested for a ton of bones.

 

Seems fine to me.

 

No, we have them now. They appear in a couple of the POI's.

 

What exactly do each of you mean by a "carcass"? I haven't seen anything in the game that I would call a "carcass" that wasn't originally moving since A15. Do you mean sleepers that never wake up? I'd like to see a lot more non-sleeper dead bodies in the game. They add a lot of atmosphere to the world and I think would make actual sleepers more dangerous.

[Xtrakicking]

It will be a visual bummer to not see the remains of my slaughter. It was one cool thing about the end of a horde night. All the... whatever the meat piles were called... Dead zombies littered about the place. It was kinda cool. I get that there are trade offs. I just hope we don't keep trading off character elements of the game until it's just another COD zombie map. :-/ Watching Madmole play, seemed like zombies poofed away pretty quick after they were killed.

 

This.

 

Luckily, even if they remove the gore block entirely there's still the dead torso loot block. With a couple tweaks in the xml, you can make those spawn and be the new corpse blocks after zombies disappear.

 

What exactly do each of you mean by a "carcass"? I haven't seen anything in the game that I would call a "carcass" that wasn't originally moving since A15. Do you mean sleepers that never wake up? I'd like to see a lot more non-sleeper dead bodies in the game. They add a lot of atmosphere to the world and I think would make actual sleepers more dangerous.

 

The dead carcass and the torso carcass loot blocks, I pressume. You should still be able to harvest those.

[fishjie]

It seems like a really bad idea to lower zombie loot. Horde nights are already not worth it - they consume a ton of resources. I typically use a regular bow and sledgehammer during the week, so as to minimize needed repairs on weapons that I can't craft trivially - aka weps that require gathering parts. On horde night then I switch to my compound bow, snipe rifle, shotgun, explosives, rocket launcher, and so on. After the horde night I have to repair my spikes with steel and fix my fortifications with concrete and moar steel. It usually takes a day to repair, then I need a day to restock up on supplies. During this time, looting from the zombie corpses gives me stuff I can sell to the various traders that I can then use to repurchase ammo and other goodies and parts. Looting from zombies helped off set the horde night. Without it, there is no point to horde night and it makes way more sense to log out on multiplayer and let someone else deal with it, or dig all the way down to bedrock in single player.

[SickPuppy]

I like how they're streamlining the loot time wasting, only closed cupboards/boxes have items in them? But I'm a blade guy and I enjoyed carving dead zombies for fat, bones n blade xp.

 

- no dead zombies to carve is gonna eat into blade xp

- a stack of animal fat makes u decent money

- bones to make glue give u decent money and paper for shotgun shells

- like posts above u won't get to see yr good nights work at the end of horde night

[JCrook1028]

If I'm understanding the new system correctly there is no more "blade xp". You don't level individual skills like blade/mining tools etc by using them anymore. You still gain overall xp from doing the activities that you use to buy perks.

[Agronox]

Moderator note: as an aid to those digging into this thread later, everything posted above is speculation before Alpha 17 entered experimental, and everything posted below is direct observation after experimental came out.

 

I like the idea.. however the rate at which a bag drops is waaaaaaay too low. I got my first bag after 136 zombie kills, and I am at 397 kills right now and have gotten a total of 3 bags. I am trying to figure out how to change the probability in the config files, but I am still searching.

[Feycat]

I've been playing computer games for 30+ years now. Dead enemies always drop loot. That's the main reason to kill them. That's the whole risk vs reward process.

 

Yes, I have seen a few games where dead enemies didn't drop loot or only dropped some junk loot with real loot reserved for raid/group/solo bosses. I'm sure the developers of those games had meetings where they discussed pros and cons. All of those games failed, with lack of loot being one of the reasons.

 

Whoever came up with this idea should really stop reinventing the wheel. There is a really good reason why dead enemies drop loot. BECAUSE PEOPLE LIKE TO LOOT.

 

Dang. It's a shame that World of Warcraft, where 90% of enemies drop sheer garbage and only rarely drop a half-worthwhile green once in a blue moon, unless they are a specific boss, has failed!

 

I guess I've imagined the last 14 years.

 

Personally, even though I didn't think I like it, I'm really liking lootless zombies, and despawning zombies instead of leaving a sticky corpse.

[R0bb0b]

I'm kind of tired of people saying that zombies only had moldy bread and sham sandwiches because that is incorrect. The nurses had a higher drop rate of health and beakers, loggers had coats and axes, cops always had a gun or ammo, the feral usually had something good enough to justify being a bullet sponge, and so on. The truth is that they have in fact removed a major part of the game play from the game. They've also completely removed books as well, which was a major looting motivator. A17 IS a major transformation from what the game use to be. Whether this is a good or bad thing is yet to be determined.

[OzHawkeye]

Well, I for one, would change my answer from reserving judgment to it being a good decision.

[R0bb0b]

I'm kind of tired of people saying that zombies only had moldy bread and sham sandwiches because that is incorrect. The nurses had a higher drop rate of health and beakers, loggers had coats and axes, cops always had a gun or ammo, the feral usually had something good enough to justify being a bullet sponge, and so on. The truth is that they have in fact removed a major part of the game play from the game. They've also completely removed books as well, which was a major looting motivator. A17 IS a major transformation from what the game use to be. Whether this is a good or bad thing is yet to be determined.

 

Oh, and let me not forget to mention military zombies.

[iejen]

Did not read the whole topic.

Current loot system = good but needs tweaking.

 

I would be in favor for a system like below

 

Regular wandering zombies (Nurse, joe etc.) = ultra rare loot drop (1%)

Strong wandering zombies (Moma, hawaii etc.) = rare loot drop (2%)

Wandering horde = As above + 2% extra chance because horde bonus

Feral zombie = common drop (5%)

Boss = common drop (10%)

Horde night = As above + 5% extra chance because horde night bonus

[SickPuppy]

It's definitely a big change that will take time to adapt. I do miss bones n fat from zombies and military zombies could drop some good weapons. I also tried a 25% loot drop map and didn't find a single egg coming to day 14 and only a dozen feathers, all trash and containers where mostly empty.

 

Not sure if this is by design, some might see it as a grind but on the plus side the survival aspect has been greatly upped. Literally forced to eat old sham sandwiches and counting coins to buy something from the trader. It really felt like on the absolute line of survival.

[WereWOLFius]

Strange reasoning about whether zombies should be dangerous or should not. They are almost no danger from 7-10 days. Enough good cudgel and / or crossbow. I used to hunt and kill them sometimes hundreds per day ... and dragged loot from them home. Now I will also kill them on exp, and I still have room in the backpack for another loot.

For the bones, it is still a little insulting, but if something happens we will genocide animals.

 

I apologize for my crappy English =)

[wacojitsu]

what about others, how are you feeling about this change? do you agree with madmole and its all just useless junk all going away? or is it something you personaly enjoyed doing alot?

 

il end this post with one simple question, aimed towards the devs. how easy would it be to implement there drop tables again? the gore blocks i am ok with going. but just haveing there bodys be searchable.

 

Madmole :it's worthless loot and no one wants it:

Everyone that plays 7dtd : i can't wait to build a zombie slaunter base. with traps and holes and omg i'm gonna farm zombies so much!!!

Madmole: let's just take zombie loot out of the game. but make zombie killing the ONLY WAY TO LEVEL!! The fans will love this. also let's continue to nerf stamina to the point where everyone has to walk for 40 mins to get to the nearest city!! OMG i'm so smart!!!

[kryzzk]

Right, the "zombies aren't a resource" argument. Please explain to me the point of defending a base against a zombie horde when you could just ride a minibike instead.

 

That's all I want to know.

 

I really loved the tower defense aspect of the game and now unless TFP has a trick up their sleeves, I don't see the point in even bothering with it.

 

have to agree with you, I built underground bunkers for crop production and towers for hoard night. but that's kind of pointless now.

 

But zombies would have been people going about their daily lives when they died, how many people do you know who never have something in their pockets? But the new Creatures aren't zombies anymore so they might have emptied their pockets for what ever reason.

 

As for A16 Zombies not being a threat, you never played with the right XML changes. I had no runners at all but TONS of walkers, they were absolutely a threat.

[ricp]

I am going to jump in here without reading 20 odd pages of previous comments so I apologise if I repeat the same thing as others.

 

From what I believe it is for performance that the zombies no longer drop loot in the way A16 did, and let's face it if there is one game that could benefit from performance buffs it's this one. If this is the case then I would imagine we'd all support this change.

 

In terms of gameplay, I'm not sure about the rest of you, but mid to late game gore block "containers" are just a pain in the ass. You aren't going to get much from them and they just clutter the place up (and, if as postulated, slow the game down). I understand why people are so emotionally tied to every zombie being a "container" due to impact that had on people's early game but later on that's not really an issue.

 

I was unsure about the change before the game dropped but now since using it, I actually prefer it. Sure I'm not getting loot from nearly every zombie, but what am I missing out on? Paper? Tin cans? Now, when a zombie drops something, I know it's going to be something of worth.

 

You could perhaps make an argument about the zombie flesh being useful for fertiliser (and used in quite a lot of mods) but I'm sure as that's mid to end game content there will be other methods to get around that. Vultures still provide rotting flesh though, so there's that.

 

 

TL;DR?

 

.. in short? Initially I wasn't keen, but once you remember just how bloody long it took to clear up after a horde and for the very slim pickings it provided then I am not sad to see the loot zombies go. In their place you have much rarer but much better loot drops. Plus the change was to help performance, another plus point to changing the way it was.

[OzHawkeye]

Madmole :it's worthless loot and no one wants it:

Everyone that plays 7dtd : i can't wait to build a zombie slaunter base. with traps and holes and omg i'm gonna farm zombies so much!!!

Madmole: let's just take zombie loot out of the game. but make zombie killing the ONLY WAY TO LEVEL!! The fans will love this. also let's continue to nerf stamina to the point where everyone has to walk for 40 mins to get to the nearest city!! OMG i'm so smart!!!

 

Hyperbole much. Sheshhh.

[DiscoHeavy]

For me, Scavenging Skill + "Luck" by looting was realy a pain. No one can be unluckier then me by looting. Take years for 1 single nice found (something like a flawless weapon....) and mostly 80% every container empty.

only better way for brass was zombie. near 70% was brass dropping from zombies.

maybe its better if zombie do not drop loot and regular loot container give some more things, or higher chance for no empty container. next thing from zombie, the gore block (loot container) on a 7 day hord are mostly destroyed, because zombie die on zombies and the spawning gore block drop down and breake.

idk if zombie atm drop something or not, but yet its a bit easier life. kill em and no loot / farming anymore is needed.

 

i'll wait which changes are made in / after the experimental. like this perks, no leveling skills anymore is good.

[Jan2607]

I don't miss looting zombies.

There are lots of points A17 could have done better, but zombie loot isn't one of them (in my opinion).

Always had hundreds of corpses around my base after horde night. Took me one day to clean it up and to loot them. Just in case some zombie would've some good loot.

It really wasn't worth it.

The advantage of not having zombie loot anymore is better performance. That is more important than zombie loot. And well, we still have zombie loot. Only a few drops in hundred kills, but you can be sure that this is good loot.

[KillRKit]

Zombies not having loot has totally put me off this game. (Among other things) Watching 103 zombies go down to get one loot bag...that shatters as it falls upon a nest, is disheartening to say the least.

Zombies cannot both be considered "loot pinatas" as well as stating that "they never had anything and it's better now, because now you WILL get something good."

There was just something special to looking outside your horde base at the bodies piled as far as the eyes could see. Yep I loved spending the day harvesting the corpses for materials to expand my empire. All that beautiful sellable fat, all the necessary bones for glue.

So thanks but no thanks fun pimps, I'm just going to go back to being a console peasant, and hope you don't get the rights back for a long time.

[Typhon13]

Sorry, but L O L.

 

No need to apologize. We are who we are.

 

I like seeing the bodies after the horde. I like to search them. I like to harvest them.

 

You like laughing at people for giving their opinion in a topic that asked for it.

 

Neither of us needs to be sorry about it.

[secateurs]

Don't really miss it TBH.

[hotpoon]

My husband and I are both super disappointed at Zombies not dropping loot anymore. It makes killing them less enjoyable. This isn't a shooter. If I kill something I want to loot it afterwards too.

[Kevin1000]

From my experience on A17, you get one loot bag in 50 kills roughly which is really bad. I think the horde nights should have a boss every horde night. Standard zombies give junk loot with the odd one with no loot. The harder the zombie is the better the loot should be. The boss should be hard as ♥♥♥♥ and give at least one rare item. This balances it much better