A20: Ammo dropping too often. Is this bugged?

MisutoM

MisutoM

Refugee
It seems like there may be some bug in ammo drops in a20.

I thought I was getting a lot of ammo, but I read MadMole's post where he said it was impossible to use only guns as ammo is too rare now and that zombie loot bags drop roughly 1 in 50 enemies. This was very different from what I have seen so far, so on today's stream I decided to track all of my stats and see exactly how much ammo the world was throwing at me. 

For these experiments, I only used guns and put my melee weapon in a box; literally only shooting zombies and using my shotgun to open closets and break glass. Specifically, I used the pump action shotgun and SMG. My world is set to Warrior difficulty, feral sense always on, and exp 150%. Everything else is default settings. I have no mods, nor did I have mods installed for a19. I cleared my save file as recommended and have been playing since the build that came out on Friday for the streamer weekend. There's going to be a lot of numbers below, but they are mostly provided for devs to look in to and see if these are roughly what the drop rates should be in a20 now as this is consistently happening in all POIs I do and hordes I fight. I don't have perfect aim, I miss a lot of shots too, and all POI clears and horde night are recorded and up on my twitch which can be linked to if requested. Oh, and I did find the lucky looter book "find more ammo in loot" fairly early on in the playthrough, but I have not completed the book series, so I do not have an increased drop rate on loot bags. 

I'm mostly just curious how many other people past day 21 are being drown in ammo as it was shocking that the dev said ammo was more rare in this alpha since I thought it was intentionally buffed because they wanted us to shoot more. Basically, my ~45 hours in a20 so far have been radically different and I'm just curious if there may be some kind of bug or if this is intentional and maybe stuff changed since the build the dev played on? 

Here are my hard numbers showing the change in ammo from when I started the POI until when I ended it:

Higashi Pharmaceutical 

9mm + 49

Shotgun shells + 88

.762 + 88

.44 + 164

Total:   389 more ammo than I needed to clear the entire POI GS ~115 day 37

Shamway Factory

9mm + 178

Shotgun Shells + 150

.762 + 667

.44 - 26 (I used a newly crafted desert vulture for fun, .44 ammo seems much more rare than other types)

Total: 969 more ammo than I needed to clear the entire POI on GS ~120 day 40

Crack A Book HQ

9mm + 539

Shotgun Shells + 114

.762 - 600 (My wife joined to play and she just held down the fire button on an M60)

.44 +230

Total: 283 more ammo than we went in with even with my wife in full auto spray and pray mode. Day 44 GS ~130ish

Day 42 Horde night

9mm + 1638

Shotgun Shells + 698

.762 + 1002 (Wife was here again and held down the fire button on the m60 for the entire night again, still earned a net positive on 762 somehow)

.44 + 0

Harder to calculate the value but -60 pipe bombs and -15 grenades. If we go by the trader prices, that is roughly - 300 .762

Total: 3038 more ammo than we began horde night with factoring in grenades based on their trader price.

MadMole also stated that he was experiencing loot bags at roughly a 1 in 50 probability. I killed 628 zombies and got 40 yellow bags, 4 blue bags, and 1 red bag for a total of 45 loot bags dropped. That's roughly a 1 in 15 drop rate. 

So I'm just curious, how are other people doing on ammo? Are you finding less, more, or roughly the same as a20, especially after day 21 as ammo seems to scale, but I feel it might be over-scaling once you get past the midgame. 

 
Just gonna say that you probably just get lucky because I’m not finding much ammo and loot drops are pretty uncommon. That’s the beauty of RNG, you can get lucky or unlucky and everyone will have a different experience.

 
Ammo is a lot more common. Sometimes i find 5 rounds of 7.62 on day 1, sometimes its 80 on day 2. I got default loot multiplier and insane difficulty with pine forest biome and no perks for loot, since i just made a fresh start. Kinda understandable, since u can craft a machinegun from pipe and glue (no mechanical parts, Karl!) on day 1, so u need lots of ammo for it.

 
If there is one thing I've noticed is that the loot tables are sometimes a little off during the first few stages of new alphas.

I assume that any numbers we can generate and report are not going to be the final numbers we see once things go stable more.

For example, I looted a t6 pipe machine gun and a t1 pistol in the same loot at a relatively low gamestage on like day 2 in MP.

You may also want to examine your game world toggles and trim those if you think it's too much.

I think the amount of ammo is just fine.  the new weapons seem a bit powerful, but I'm not getting enough ammo for me to need to use them on every zombo

we come across.  There's still a level of scarcity.  

 
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Ammo drop seems fine, considering you'll be using the ammo much more early on. In our game we get a surplus of ammo, because of me having high values in Lucky Looter and reading that ammo loot magazine early on. Maybe a slight bit too much ammo drops, but... so it's hard to say for us if it's too much, but yes we do end up with a lot and got a lot of ammo rewards from the trader early on too.

Now those endless Q6 Pipe Machine Gun drops though.... What's up with that?

 
I am on day 5 and I have found a total of 25 7.62 rounds.  I used up 20 of them defending myself during a wandering horde that was alerted to my presence at night.  RNG plays favorites it seems  😉

 
MisutoM said:
Those are stated in the original post. Default loot and 150% exp.
Click to expand...


Your XP increase may be contributing to your findings. Obviously if you double loot Quests or cheese loot caches or loot in different biomes early game you will also have higher ammo drops. There will also be some variance based on what Quest POIs you get, what trader rewards you get, and what supply crates you get.  In my solo game at 100% xp, I was super tight on ammo up to the first 7 day horde. Ammo was only used for dogs and wolves.  I'm now on Day 8 or 9 and have a small cushion but I'm still not stockpiling ammo. I have about 300 7.62, 200 9m, and 200 shotgun shells. For reference, I have much less ammo and worse weapons than I had in A19 at the same stage.

I'll also add that ammo was never an issue in A19 as the game progressed, I was always smelting ammo to make AP rounds as the days increased.

 
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I'm on day 18 and have already starting making 7.62 rounds and a few shotgun rounds. For normal looting I use primarily use stealth build with arrows and melee as quite kills, with shotgun as back-up and pipe machine gun for O-@%$#e moments. 

 
If it doesn't drop ammo then what's your alternative for ranged. Bows. I happen to like bows. Not everybody does.

Or you go melee. That would be club or spear or stun baton.  I hate this option. I like counting headshots. 

The game should let you play the character you want to play.

 
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