PC Alpha 19 Dev Diary

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katarynna said:
lol not trying to chase you away.

when someone proposes an idea i find interesting, i just naturally think about whether it would really work and what would it break. like i said, i think your idea would work fine for single player and coop. but i think it would break the quest system on multiplayer.

anything that breaks of course has possible fixes. i just don't think there would be a simple fix for your idea for multiplayer, and i'm not sure tfp want to "reinvent the wheel" to fix something that is really only a small issue affecting a small number of people.
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I agree that it is a tiny "nice to have if done right but tons of work" matter. But goddamn, it all started as a simple filthy question. Y'all just had to clean it up like a "bullet type" question. #bringpoopback

 
beHypE said:
Since the nerdpoling discussion seems to run dry, what do you guys think about the stone/iron/steel tool balance ? General Discussion has several topics on the subject, consensus being the transition from stone to iron and from iron to steel is a difficult one. 

Honestly I feel it comes down to the difficulty of balancing TxQ6 vs T(x+)Q1. If you have a Q6 stone axe, the switch to a Q1 iron pickaxe is just bad for many reasons :

- stamina-drain / food usage (yes, I know, ergonomic grip + mods + coffee, point being it's a hassle and quite an investment for a very meager return)

- repair cost (1 stone vs 1 repair kit)

- number of mod slots

- the stone axe actually merges the use cases of an iron pickaxe and an iron fireaxe in one tool. And inventory/toolbet space is precious...

One possible solution could be to tie the maximum quality to the tier of the tool. Especially for stone tools, the transition to iron would be smoother if you couldn't ever find a stone axe higher than Q3 or Q4. It would both cap the number of mod slots on the item, while also directly reducing the maximum block damage you can find, thus making iron Q1 de facto more attractive in comparison. Same argument can be made for steel.

I know you don't have to switch from your Q6 stone axe to a Q1 iron pickaxe. But how fun is it when you finally unlock the iron age and realise there's another soft gate - basically one that forces you to wait until those iron tools become an undisputable upgrade ? I know @madmole likes consistency, but this is one of those edge cases where it actually is detrimental to meaningful and enjoyable progression.
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No it is intentionally designed to *possibly* be better in some use cases so there is some decision making for the player to do. Why should a FAULTY iron tool always be better than the best quality stone axe in every situation/stat? If sex rex/stews isn't your investment than clearly the stone axe is for you, but to an aspiring miner who's getting cooking and mining/sex rex then for him the iron could be better. Then counter balance with number of mod slots makes the decision even more interesting. I'm still wearing my purple cloth hood at level 50 something because I have 4 mods installed and I don't want to give one up.

Krows said:
Loving these new super foods; I can focus on feeding my character for most of the day with one meal. Keeping my eyes open for the components is well worth it for these items. However, 3 out of 4 of these meals require a Can of Peas. Whether this was an intentional bottle neck or not, I'm finding in the current A19 playthrough the contributing factor to crafting any of these is if I've found any Peas; I'm stocked on all the other components for Gumbo Stew, Shepard's Pie and Tuna Fish Gravy on Toast.

If this was meant to be the case, carry on; but, if you're looking for input, maybe increasing the chance for Peas at Vending Stations / Food Drops for higher-level GS would put more super foods on the table.
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I went with realism on the recipe, but I think that it helps to have some bottlenecks to the amount of super foods you can craft.

 
As opposed to trying to code all those edge cases, and as opposed to just letting POIs reset, I think it might be worth revisiting once bandits are in the game.
You could have it so that all POIs that are mission-capable, are also inhabitable by bandits. You do a mission, potentially destroying the entire POI if you want, it gets removed from mission possibilities by the trader and gets added to the list of POIs that can be taken over by bandits. Once taken over, that POI gets rebuilt by the bandits. At that point, either bandits eventually move out and it becomes a missionable again, or if they are still there, it could be a Raid Bandit Camp mission.

 
Onarr said:
@madmole  , is there any plan on making spikes, barbed wire and mines give XP for kills? Perhaps locked behind perk like INT does? I have some ideas for defence maximizing the effect of mines and pitfall traps.
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Just mines, spikes are too easy and can create 1000's of kills for every little effort.

Roland said:
Making nerdpoling only possible with wood frame blocks and also allowing zombies to climb up them would be a win in my book. :)
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How else is it possible?

MechanicalLens said:
I personally see no issues with adding some SI limits to all types of frames, including wood frames of course. Maybe 10-15 blocks or so. This would still allow the convenience of building with nerdpoles while hopefully limiting the amount of POI's that players can scale up to. Adding some sort of lip or overhang (such as with poles) against any lower POI's could fix this though, if it suits the POI in question. 

It sounds interesting, but I'd have to see [the junk drone performing this task] in person before I make a final opinion on this one. :)
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Type in DM, press G, enjoy. Same thing.

 
morggin said:
or give us a way to construct a Can of Peas.
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You can. You put money in the traders palm, vending machine slot, or press e to activate loot containers. Boom construction complete. Sorry no crafting of canned pre war foods except sham. because sham isn't really food now is it?

 
Blake_ said:
Yeah. I know all the edge cases and also the " self control speech". It's worth to do it as a lowest priority thing because the benefits are neat. The event system can respawn anything that is lost in a gamey way, satchel courrier, new entities for an empty place, even detect a looted quest POI and restock just the boss loot. Endless stuff.

Seems to be a delicate subject, so I'd prefer to ask again in a few months.
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We're still haggling about it from time to time, nobody has a 100% perfect solution. At the end of the day it doesn't matter, you can do 5 pois a day if you want, all the exploit does is let you farm the same house twice, where like someone said, you could farm the house next door. I think most players would rather see optimizations, pipe guns, special infected and bandits, so we can't cater to the 5000 hour strategy guy woes that self control solves 100% something that really just isn't a huge problem.

MechanicalLens said:
I'm curious... Regarding the new bookshelves, is the plan to replace all the old A18 ones with these new models, or will they be reserved for specific POI's only?
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I don't know, there are no level designers in this thread AFAIK.

 
madmole said:
Just mines, spikes are too easy and can create 1000's of kills for every little effort.
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I dont know, for one iron spike I can kill a one or two ferals, it costs 4 forged iron and takes about 2 minutes to craft. It also has this ugly habit of exploding cops. 

With single pipe bomb I can kill 16 zeds.

I would live spikes to work, so I can use that iron that mostly just lies in my chest.

 
MechanicalLens said:
Nerdpoling is a term that originated in Minecraft. It describes a person looking downwards, jumping, and placing a block directly beneath them, rinse and repeat.
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Few days ago I played with a friend that nerdpolled to this factory`s best loot location (he is pretty new in 7dtd, like 200hrs), I waited till he got almost up there and broke the base frame slowly with a tier 3 stone axe, causing his spirit to fall off.

He heard the clunk sound of a stone axe on his base frame, he understood the lesson. 🤠

 
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madmole said:
My reply does not dictate the future.

I disagree, Fallout's building system can make super awesome bases that are 500x better looking than what we have. 1 meter thick walls are pretty horrible to look at and the restriction of 1 model per meter kills immersion.

No Voxels doesn't mean no random gen.

Switching to Unreal doesn't mean no voxels. You can get voxel farm for unreal or we could port our code.

We can probably fix the limit of only one block per meter, then we could make thin walls and more realistic looking POis, bases, clutter, etc.

Anyhow at our current pace, (one game in 8 years) 7 days 2 is at least 18 years away. We're committed to two other games first, 8 years per game plus two year of dev for 7d2d2 alpha 1 puts that 18 years away. SO whatever we say now isn't reliable :)

BTW, It won't take that long I don't think, but 7 days 2 isn't even a design document yet. We have 1 to finish, and 2 other games that at least need to be in alpha and one done probably before any movement on a sequel can happen.

I know some people think 7 days has "must have" features. What those are, is very subjective. I know that my vote would probably be RWG with fully destroyable world and tower defense, and RPG. Those are my must haves. That doesn't mean voxels though. It could just be models with physics by then. The need for voxels is diminishing as draw calls get cheaper and hardware improves. At the end of the day a voxel is just a mesh on a grid sharing a texture atlas. We area already only a partial voxel game anyway. Remove the limits and have all the fun part I say.
 

He probably has forum PTSD.
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Though 7 days to die is pretty immersive, sometimes the miscellaneous blocks are so characteristic and well placed, that i forget it's block based. Indeed Fallout 4's building system is an absolute beauty (I spent most of my time preparing realistic settlements for raids :D),  the problem is that it lacks destruction or AI interaction with what you have built.

But to be honest 7 days to die just needs more characteristic and big decoration blocks to make certain PoIs much better (it's a hassle having like 5 metal poles just to make a door frame and not allow players to place a block there for example). One thing that would help is more crouchable areas (half life peeking in the corner) with actual hollow blocks specific for that. Just a thought. Still 7 days to die currently gets the visuals job done very well.

 
madmole said:
All you need is pea seeds. Too bad they are so rare!
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It's fine where it is, at least in SP. I began collecting canned foods since day 1 like usual, and by around day 30 I had 20-40 of each. 20 Gumbo Stews last a lot longer than most people give them credit for from the get-go.

 
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