PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

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Roland said:
Someone who holds a fully modded tier 5 weapon they've fully perked into is not someone I would describe as "screwed over"....
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Compared to someone who just found a tier 6 weapon and mods without having to to invest in all the crucible and forge etc perks? Gun perks at least are decent on their own, the bigger issue is the rest of the crafting ones are not. The armor, vehicle, crafting bench etc perks are all bad because you can just buy / find those items or find schematics.

To make steel armor and mods and stuff you have to invest like 20 points+ into all the int stuff to even make the required benches and forges and crucibles, then invest like 20+ points into each tree for what you wanted to actually craft. Then you have to actually, y'know, find parts. Which in A18 at least, are way more uncommon than just getting the armor itself

In past alphas I was basically the den mother that stayed at home mining and crafting everything for everyone while others were out looting PoI and doing quests. In A18 you just play a looter character and do quests and essentially do minimal crafting besides just spending 1 or 2 days a week at most mining for materials, if even that.

Honestly, I usually end up just doing quests day and night in A18 and just stop by the house between quests to drop stuff off and throw crap into the forges, and just buy concrete mix  and bullets etc from the trader and only do a gunpowder or shale run every rare once in a while. The main thing I'll mine is just hit up an iron mine for 10 minutes to get another few thousand  junk turret ammo before a horde night, and usually just do that *on* the horde night in the time leading up to the horde spawn

Tools are hit way harder by the Tier 6 thing than guns though, besides the Junk Turret. The Junk Turret and tools are a pretty drastic difference between tier 5 and tier 6

 
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Matt 1977 said:
Yea compared to someone who perks into lucky looter with daily respawn ....
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Agreed here. My latest game I did 3 levels of LL and put the rest of my skill points into things other than crafting armor and weapons. By day 80 or so, I had pretty much all blue or purple gear. I was scraping anything below blue just so it would not take up as much inventory space.

I do hope the adjustments to the looting system will help here. If complete items become very rare and you mostly find parts and mods I think that would be a much better way.

 
Jarod_Silverstar said:
Agreed here. My latest game I did 3 levels of LL and put the rest of my skill points into things other than crafting armor and weapons. By day 80 or so, I had pretty much all blue or purple gear. I was scraping anything below blue just so it would not take up as much inventory space.

I do hope the adjustments to the looting system will help here. If complete items become very rare and you mostly find parts and mods I think that would be a much better way.
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By day 80 everyone has all blue and purple gear in A18, with or without points in lucky looter.

 
MechanicalLens said:
Typically I loot during the day and harvest stone and iron underground at nighttime. I might switch things up and loot some days, resource grind during some others, and just cower away at night.
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Even at night, to me there's no point in not just doing quests. The zombies basically always run anyway since nearly everything is a feral or irradiated at higher game stages, even non ferals do the little enraged sprint, so I barely even mine even at night anymore. The only real difference between night and day is whether the trader is open to turn in your quest, so you may have to load up on a few traders worth of quests for your night raids

Jarod_Silverstar said:
Agreed here. My latest game I did 3 levels of LL and put the rest of my skill points into things other than crafting armor and weapons. By day 80 or so, I had pretty much all blue or purple gear.
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IMO this is why I say the quest reward perk is objectively better than Lucky Looter. If you look at the way lucky looter works in the game files, it is really only good REALLY early game. It does not age very well into mid and especially late game, where as the quest reward perk only gets better the higher your quest tier is.

I always put 2 points into the Quest Reward perk with my first 5 points from the tutorial, and it's usually one of my first skills I max just because it's so freaking strong, miner 69 is only one I even consider maxing before it. With the quest reward perk you'll be decked out in Iron / Steel / Military gear mixture that's level 2-4 and have a full set of steel tools and decent guns by like day 7 in A18, and possibly A19 since traders aren't getting reworked to match loot ages yet.  

Lucky Looter is way too much RNG for an RNG challenged person like me, and IIRC it starts falling off by like level 10 and by level 20-30 it's not very noticeable at all. It basically just slightly increases your gamestage as far as loot is concerned, but that goes up on it's own anyway

 
Adam the Waster said:
What in gods green earth would be living in a Drain hole?
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iu


-Morloc

 
Matt 1977 said:
Well whats the point of perk points
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If you have no use for them, give them to me. 😉

A little more seriously, I take LL mostly for the looting speed increase. Can't stand waiting a full second for every measly cupboard to open. The loot bonus is hard to evaluate, except in the first few days I never could make out any difference with or without. In A18 that is, for example in A16 the LL-skill had a different name and was indispensable, in A17 it also seemed overpowered. Not anymore.

 
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Matt 1977 said:
Yea compared to someone who perks into lucky looter with daily respawn ....
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That's an apple to oranges comparison.  I would suggest default  game settings as the baseline for balance discussions.  1 day loot respawn is an extreme balance swing.

A good time to continue discussing the balance of crafting vs looting is when A19 arrives.  I trust there will be an A19 balance and feedback thread to do so.

 
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Tahaan said:
Vultures attack vehicles so you cannot ride out the horde in a vehicle any longer.
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Vultures also attack blocks/bars.

We have a new MacBook Pro with AMD GPU for testing, so fixed two Mac bugs today.

Fixed SDTD-11222 Mac with AMD GPU has a chaotic screen blur effect (replaced blur shader .002 with texel sized uv offset).

Reduced Blur shader samples by half.
Fixed SDTD-11066 Reflections on Mac cause wild issues (Unity does not support copy texture on OpenGL 4.1 and Metal. Added check and fallback to a single reflection probe without blending).

 
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Jost Amman said:
Bummer! I thought the problem was that in 7DTD using 3p you could glitch through the ground and find out where everyone's underground base was, no matter how well concealed it is. I think this is because 7DTD is a voxel game so  only the voxels you can actually see are drawn by the game... if that was fixed then it's great you can add 3p back in as an option.
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There are those bugs too.

 
Laz Man said:
That's an apple to oranges comparison.  I would suggest default  game settings as the baseline for balance discussions.  1 day loot respawn is an extreme balance swing.

A good time to continue discussing the balance of crafting vs looting is when A19 arrives.  I trust there will be an A19 balance and feedback thread to do so.
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Ok default. Trader quest daily, spawn reset. All im saying

 
MechanicalLens said:
Right, of course, of course.

But to anyone who has come to the conclusion that by questing you're still technically playing with loot respawn on, and you still wish to quest, there is a way you can crudely counteract this: mark each POI you've looted on the map with a symbol, and any quests that send you to a POI that you've already raided, simply cancel them.
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Try playing a no trader, no loot respawn, no air drops, no vending game. It's a very lonely game, but very immersive.

 
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