PC Alpha 21 Discussion Overflow
- Thread starter meilodasreh
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Xeraphim
New member
in real life, getting water is super easy: dig a well.
we have augers. There are underground rivers in the real world. Finding water below ground should be easy. It rains enough, there should be a "water table" and a "dry line".
As for transporting it, so long as anything is watertight it should be fine, whether it is a bucket, a barrel, a truck bed, or whatever. Making water hard to get by making the player character a blithering idiot does not help things.
furthermore: our PCs are smart enough to make robotic turrets and complex circuits. Surely we can figure out a simple water pump. Pumping systems are a "duh" thing. TFP making it nearly impossible to lug around water will just result in the mod community flipping them the bird and modding their way back into sanity and a player character with an IQ over 3.
Thus, going the way of Khaine (Darkness Falls overhaul mod) and making a Working Sink is far more reasonable and "post-apocalypse probable" (because we already know how they work, there is no rocket science involved, and you can trial-and-error your way to the perfect plumbing without having to read a book on it) than being unable to even carry a canteen or three with distilled water (https://www.waterwise.com/water/ - you just boil the steam into a catch and then drip it into a container, can be done with a campfire) simply because someone intentionally forgot how to make things to carry other things with.
even the guy that does Undead Legacy mod figured out that a well can be dug and so added that as a low-tech option for the PC to obtain water at a low rate, and permitted that the PC can go around lugging plastic water barrels from POIs back to home base to fill with said water.
Water should not be an issue, but water that is not irradiated or contaminated should be hard to find at first as all above ground still waters should be polluted in a post-nuclear scenario. Wells should give access to clean water and rivers tend to come from underground fresh spring water from magmatic sources so they run clean.
For the truly industrious survivor: making a 5,000 gallon water bladder for a "water truck" out of polymers and a few other things that can be filled through a hose dropped into a well or lake is totally a thing that can be done in real life, but in the game the PC simply can't figure it out.
we have augers. There are underground rivers in the real world. Finding water below ground should be easy. It rains enough, there should be a "water table" and a "dry line".
As for transporting it, so long as anything is watertight it should be fine, whether it is a bucket, a barrel, a truck bed, or whatever. Making water hard to get by making the player character a blithering idiot does not help things.
furthermore: our PCs are smart enough to make robotic turrets and complex circuits. Surely we can figure out a simple water pump. Pumping systems are a "duh" thing. TFP making it nearly impossible to lug around water will just result in the mod community flipping them the bird and modding their way back into sanity and a player character with an IQ over 3.
Thus, going the way of Khaine (Darkness Falls overhaul mod) and making a Working Sink is far more reasonable and "post-apocalypse probable" (because we already know how they work, there is no rocket science involved, and you can trial-and-error your way to the perfect plumbing without having to read a book on it) than being unable to even carry a canteen or three with distilled water (https://www.waterwise.com/water/ - you just boil the steam into a catch and then drip it into a container, can be done with a campfire) simply because someone intentionally forgot how to make things to carry other things with.
even the guy that does Undead Legacy mod figured out that a well can be dug and so added that as a low-tech option for the PC to obtain water at a low rate, and permitted that the PC can go around lugging plastic water barrels from POIs back to home base to fill with said water.
Water should not be an issue, but water that is not irradiated or contaminated should be hard to find at first as all above ground still waters should be polluted in a post-nuclear scenario. Wells should give access to clean water and rivers tend to come from underground fresh spring water from magmatic sources so they run clean.
For the truly industrious survivor: making a 5,000 gallon water bladder for a "water truck" out of polymers and a few other things that can be filled through a hose dropped into a well or lake is totally a thing that can be done in real life, but in the game the PC simply can't figure it out.
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Roland
Moderator
What if it results in the mod community giving them a friendly wave since most of the mod authors, themselves, usually express gratitude for the abilities TFP have made open and easy to access? Its only some players, like you, that imagine some kind of adversarial relationship between modders and the devs like they are at war or something or like TFP wishes the modders would stop modifying the vanilla game.
smh...
Roland
Moderator
Here you seem to get it. I totally agree with this statement. Mods are further chapters in a great book series. I like that. You should stick with this.
zztong
Well-known member
Unless you're in a desert, it's even easier -- walk to the river around which your town was probably built, collect rain, or find a farm pond. As you go on to discuss, purifying water is the real trick. You have to deal with both organic and inorganic issues. The SW USA is facing water scarcity issues. Maybe the game is taking those to heart, but the Forest biome is pretty green and it does rain a lot. Then there's all that snow, too.
Oddly enough, places like POIs seem to me to become less and less likely to be places to find water. First, survivors will consume it, as they clearly have all the food. Second, as we saw during the pandemic with mothballed buildings, water in toilets and drain traps evaporates. Once a city's water storage is exhausted or otherwise loses pressure there's nothing to get from faucets. I'm foggy on what happens to water in a water heater. Could that be a source of water for _years_? A 40-gallon tank would be what... 320 jars?
Alas, I'm game to try the new approach and I can recognize they're trying for an improvement.
Riamus
Well-known member
Ok, that sure make sense, though personally, I stick to level or near level terrain most of the time if I can. The vertical distance adds to your drive time so if there is easier terrain close, I'll use that instead of a lot of rough terrain. I also get tired of the motorcycle changing directions when it hits terrain wrong. But at least this makes sense. Though spoilage would also make sense. Considering a fridge is in the game, we could use that to prolong food life easily enough.
Roland
Moderator
I would love spoilage but it is a divisive feature with lots of hate as well as love-- even on the dev team... Not going to happen at this point for this game.
Uncle Al
Active member
I don't think risk of exploit is really a concern. Maximum spawn distance is at least 100 blocks so to pave an area enough to block horde spawns you'd need 40,000 blocks. You're probably not doing that without using the creative menu, and if you have access to creative you can just turn off horde night in the game settings.
Or were you proposing horde zombies should only spawn in the player's active chunk? I thought a chunk is 16x16 so doing that will prevent horde spawns if you sit in the middle of a medium size base. Even if you don't block spawns, zombies would all appear magically at point blank range. That seems exactly what you don't want.
TFP, rightly, seem a lot more concerned about people accidentally doing stuff that breaks their game, like digging a basement and being totally safe by accident back when zombies couldn't dig, than preventing someone who is setting out to game the system with foreknowledge.
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Roland
Moderator
The issue here is that there are tech limitations for horde night spawning that people are exceeding by building such large bases. If there is a flaw, here, it is that the game allows players to build bases with a footprint larger than can be supported.
The fix would be to force a limit to how large of a base players can be built.
or….people can just self limit themselves so that the game works properly for horde night and then people who want to build epic large scale bases but not use them for horde nights (or accept that some spawns will happen in their interiors) can still do so.
My vote is that you’ll downscale your base to the point that it fits the parameters of horde night if you plan to use it for horde night. It’s not like it is critical for gameplay that you’ve overbuilt to the point that your base perimeter extends past the point where zombies spawn in.
Let’s say for a moment the devs are able to solve the tech limits that would allow your size of base to work. Tomorrow there would be the next guy who wants to build even bigger and would be on here complaining that zombies are spawning inside his base.
The spawn distances aren’t arbitrary. They are at the limits of what can be done. Therefore if players find zombies spawning inside it is their responsibility to reduce the footprint of their base until it works or not use the epic base for horde nights.
The fix would be to force a limit to how large of a base players can be built.
or….people can just self limit themselves so that the game works properly for horde night and then people who want to build epic large scale bases but not use them for horde nights (or accept that some spawns will happen in their interiors) can still do so.
My vote is that you’ll downscale your base to the point that it fits the parameters of horde night if you plan to use it for horde night. It’s not like it is critical for gameplay that you’ve overbuilt to the point that your base perimeter extends past the point where zombies spawn in.
Let’s say for a moment the devs are able to solve the tech limits that would allow your size of base to work. Tomorrow there would be the next guy who wants to build even bigger and would be on here complaining that zombies are spawning inside his base.
The spawn distances aren’t arbitrary. They are at the limits of what can be done. Therefore if players find zombies spawning inside it is their responsibility to reduce the footprint of their base until it works or not use the epic base for horde nights.
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D
doughphunghus
Guest
I think if this exploit were detected, 50% of new spawns should be done underground as bears/screamers/wolves and "distance away from player" would not be a consideration... so they will dig up to get you and burst through the floors, also possibly compromising your base supports. If you have a basement, they would get a "digging head start" by spawning underground close to you. The underground screamers would be to bring more on the surface.
Falcon197
New member
Treating a bug like it's a feature or limitation doesn't negate the root issue here, which is that there is a viable fix that doesn't require an extension of the tech to support bigger bases so that people like me just raise the ante by building to the new max limit and then complaining it isn't enough. I'm not in that camp.
My base design happens to be aligned to the rough dimensions of a real structure and therefore doesn't offer much flexibility to downscale. Further, this issue also limits the types of POIs players can occupy based on size (and there are more POIs now that are far larger than bases like mine which would make for viable spots to set up, but for this issue). I made my base fit within the limits of a max radius land claim (71 blocks), and yet I am still penalized for compliance with this limit by having to deal with spawns inside my perimeter.
I see nothing unreasonable about adding a simple logic check for land claims to the existing setup, since the worst it would do is force spawns to drop along the same edge of an active land claim (if all players are clustered to where it can't drop spawns behind them without landing inside the land claim). But if the players are spread out along different edges, spawns would function quite normally sans the issue of the occasional spawn inside the land claim or base.
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Roland
Moderator
You may be right. I don't know whether that is possible or not. I tend to think that if it was possible then it would have been implemented but it is possible that they may not have tried your suggestion and that if they did it would be an easy fix for your base.
That doesn't negate the fact that there will always be a base size that is just too big to prevent spawns from occurring inside. Even if you are correct and they run your fix we will eventually get someone else who wants their base to work and at some point that is going to be impossible given the current tech.
So, I'm not treating a bug like it's a feature. I'm saying that there might not be a fix if what you are trying to do is beyond the limit of the tech. You say the fix is simple and reasonable. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. I'll make sure they hear about it if they don't come on and read it first and I hope it is simple and reasonable and just something that was missed. If so, we should be fine until the next guy with a base several meters larger than yours comes wondering why he gets spawns inside...
Falcon197
New member
Fair enough - I get that there's a legitimate dev perspective and grounded reasons for the spawns being setup as they currently are.
The concern about the next guy, though, waters down a bit if this issue is treated within the limitations of land claims as they are today. The max radius of 71 blocks would have to be expanded, which isn't what I'm asking for. Let the hypothetical next guy wrestle with that and be told he needs to scale within the maximum. I'm limiting my ask to ensuring that bases built within that established radius don't suffer from buggy spawns on horde night.
Fanatical_Meat
Well-known member
Dammit time to talk about when we will be able to play A21.
Don't be a @%$# and say “When it’s done/ready”
Don't be a @%$# and say “When it’s done/ready”
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G
Guest
Guest
I'm struggling a bit here.
If we're saying the LCB is too big and that causes issues with zombie spawns, isn't the problem that the LCB is too big? Not that players need to try and fix zombie spawns which they don't have agency over surely.
Roland
Moderator
The LCB doesn't prevent Horde Night spawns so whatever the size of the LCB protection field it has nothing to do with this issue.
The agency that players have is to build a base that works. You can test the limits of how spread out your base is and not get any spawns inside. You can then resolve to build smaller than that and now the issue is completely fixed. For example, me: I have never had a single zombie spawn inside my horde night base during horde night. The size of my base is completely the reason and I chose to keep my base within the parameters that prevent that from happening. Could someone still build a 1:1 Enterprise? Sure, but don't sit in the captain's chair during horde night or expect Klingons to be beaming on board...
If you want to do a large epic build, that's fine. Either don't use it for Horde Night Defense or use it with the knowledge that you will get zombies spawning inside.
If the proposed fix works in the current case then that's great. But in general, there is going to be a limit of how big you can make a base if you don't want zombies spawning inside during Horde Night.
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Roland
Moderator
I can give some additional details.
It will be on a Monday... but not on an October Monday.
Also fair enough. I guess what my point is that what you are calling an established radius with buggy spawns might just actually be a case where you have built beyond the maximum radius the game can handle and the spawns are working properly. But I will slip a note to faatal and ask him to look at it if he has the time.
G
Guest
Guest
Ah I misunderstood how the LCB worked sorry. I thought it was supposed to prevent spawns inside its perimeter.
If it's not a bug and intended then really game systems should support that in an ideal world. Leaving players to guess when a base may or may not be an appropriate size isn't particularly great game design.
Maybe something that could be looked at before Gold (e.g. a blue line within the LCB which shows those limits)
