Hi,
Playing solo in a RWG, as I used to do in previous builds, without any trader on the map, no airdrops and ignoring working vending machine has become nearly impossible with A21. It's mainly because of the water situation (but I could work around that by allowing a single water filter in my backpack after spawning) which impact also cooking, healing, fighting and crafting -then surviving. But still, instead of fine tuning how critical items might drop during the early game, it's way easier for you (designer) to simply put them on sale at the trader and offered as a reward for (pointlessly) questing.
Ie. while testing A21 no-trader, I've looted several times the POI "store_hardware_02" (T3 Stiff and Tools) on day 1 and get mostly... a very few books/magazines, A LOT of nails plus 3-4 murky water jars (out of 10 toilets ~ 33% water 66% paper) and barely no critical items, like forged Iron (0-2 bars), mechanical parts (same) or repair kits (same) as I was used to find some at this place. What is also feelling very wrong is that I'm constantly getting some late game steel tool parts -motor tools and steel sledge are very common from day 1 in Stiff and Tools boxes- while we can't even recycle those items for something more useful that is actually needed (same issue with all the higher tier parts). Even a full bike -once obsolete- is not recyclable, which is lame. At some point during testing, I had many times more Steel bars (which I had absolutely no use for) than forged Iron bars that I was looking for for crafting my first wrench.
Now, the game without trader feels very umbalanced in the "too tedious" direction to be still enjoyable for me. All I had to do previously was a very little moding (just switching any trader building for something else in the new RWG world files), but now, it feels like a major overhaul to rebalance looting and crafting issues (that I wont even try to mod). It's a pitty as I think that it should be the core game to be well balanced first, with all Trader stuff as an addon to it.
My motive, in short, is that I can't actually play the game when already looted POIs will be magically reseted by questing or some supply will be magically falling from the sky or replenished in vending machines. In fact, I've got the same issue with a resucited survivor after dying: all immersion will be gone; then I start a whole new world. Moreover, all this trader stuff -including small talk- is very very repetitive and still not well implemented in game. I've already got a real life day job and I'm not going to be Rekts @%$#.
First playthrough to test A21, I get ALL my tier 1 missions sent at Pass & Gas POIs... (then I could craft a complete bike before the end of day 2 while still having some spare wheels and handelbars to sell them back). I ditched this game and started a new world, picked the closer first quest, which sent me again to another "Pass & Gas" POI...
RWG: as I've died a lot, I've made plenty of new worlds, all with different seed names: my main issue is that streets and blocks all look the same once in game (tiles and building settings are exactly the same from one world to another) and I wonder if the code for the percentage of each biome is actually working fine: ie. I get 40% of Snow instead of 20%, or 50% of Forest and 50% Desert instead of 25% of each four biome chosen in settings. There is, now obviously, a deficit in low tier buildings (T1-T2) as we can check that when runing accross the map.
Default settings: each time I'm doing a new game, I'll have the game to revert to default settings and not to my personal ones -while there is also a "default" settings button with no use now
This wasn't the case previously and it's quite annoying to be honest!
Also, there is a bug with user settings when several games are saved for the same world. At some point (when the list is 4-5 games long), the last one, when logging off, will lose its user "general" settings (but keep the right user settings on the other tabs!). Hence, during a test, my game number 4 or 5, that was set as "not listed", "1 player", "Warrior", reseted all this tab fields to general default each time I logged off. The first time, I didn't notice it and relaunched my game which was then a "Public" server in "North-America", with "Adventurer" difficulty...
Fighting: it's much harder at the Warrior settings than I can remember (I didn't play much since A20 early releases - but still logged several thousands hrs since A15). Zombies are cheating like hell when stamina is low with melee weapons and there is ghost spawnings all over the place, including in low tier POIs. Silent zombie attacks seems to happen frequently now... including from dogs! But this, I can learn from my mistakes (being too reckless) how to deal with it.
