PC my A21 suggestions/feedback

[MiTHMoN]

Foreword: I'm a long time on-and-off player. I generally play in co-op non-dedicated with a few friends when we pick it up. I love the effort being put into the updates. I don't agree with every change, but we're still in alpha so it's all good. Overall, I do like the A21 changes. But I'd like to just get to it and start listing my suggested changes to the game. 

1. Delete paper.

So, I love the choice to remove glass jars and empty cans. They really weren't enjoyable. It's kind of lowkey anxiety inducing to decide between keeping glass jars / empty cans, or dropping them to free up inventory space. So I appreciate that they were straight-up removed. I no longer put glass/sand into the forge to endlessly make glass jars. 

So my first suggestion, is to just remove paper. In-game there are only 3 recipes that use paper, and the primary one is shotgun shells. I've always seen shotgun shells as what you hypothetically craft if you somehow run out of brass... but I've never reached that stage. Honestly, if shotgun shells just cost buckshot and gunpowder with no third ingredient, I'd be totally fine with it. I'd even be fine with shells only costing lead + gunpowder. That's right, you might as well remove buckshot as well if you want. Robotic turret ammo uses lead now already.

2. Clean up the loot tables by removing stuff line bones and basic bandages.

I don't know all of the bone recipes off the top of my head, but the only 2 I actually use bones for are: Making/repairing bone knife, and making glue. 

If I want bones, I get them from chopping up corpses. I don't want to find bones in kitchen cabinets and stuff. I already get way too many bones, and getting them as loot isn't necessary. 

A similar thing is basic bandages. If I need them, I will make them out of cloth. I don't want to find them in loot. (First Aid Bandages are fine.)

3. Delete the Southern Farming skill book tree. 

I don't want to collect 19 Southern Farming books to be able to craft potato seeds. It's the shortest skill book progression, and entirely the worst. Just let us craft all the seeds by default, or put it in the perk Living Off The Land. Maybe "Living Off The Land 4/4" could be "unlock all seed crafting". 

4. Further clean up loot tables by removing nitrate, oil shale, coal, rotten flesh. 

These are things that have other main sources of gathering. You can get nitrate from shoveling bags of fertilizer or mining nitrate veins. Oil shale can be mined in the desert. Rotten flesh comes from static corpses or zombie animal corpses. Coal comes from burned trees or coal veins. 

I just don't see the benefit of having them in loot in small amounts. 

These are resources that players want in decent amounts if they use them, or they drop them and never want them. Looting in small amounts isn't enjoyable. 

5. Make dye stackable. 

I think the dyes need a lot of changing. On some items the dye looks awful, and on others it looks passable, but either way they take lots of storage if you decide to keep them, and if you don't keep them there's no way to craft them? 

Ok, so let's further talk about this. 7 Days To Die is one of those inventory management games. When you're out looting, you either try to loot every container and salvage every appliance, or you just target specific things. Your inventory fills up really fast if you want to grab everything. With A21's new crafting skill book system, this is even more true, since I personally play with friends and we share the crafting books with each other and try to feed certain crafting books to one person or another. There are how many types of new books to fill up inventory slots? 

If The Fun Pimps were to "just increase inventory size", it'd kind of be a band-aid solution to the problem. The problem, as I see it, is that looting offers you too many item types. 

If I see a static corpse, or an animal (alive or undead), it is my choice to go and harvest it for resources (probably using a bone knife). I know that if I do this, I'll get certain guaranteed resources depending on the corpse (bone, meat, rotten flesh, animal fat, leather, nitrate, testosterone extract). I as a player can make an informed decision on trading inventory slots and harvesting time to get those specific resources. 

Same thing for using the salvaging tools, or breaking blocks. I know what I'm getting by breaking down cars or couches. 

But looting kind of has this feel of "we might give you loot-exclusive items, or we might give you corpse items, or we might give you salvage items, or we might give you mining items", etc. Yes, obviously you can just choose not to pick up certain items, or drop them on the ground right away, but is this fun? Does anyone actually enjoy opening up a loot container and finding paper, or rotten flesh, or bones when they're not using those resources?

This isn't about realism or immersion to me, but about quality-of-life for the game. 

I think some items should be "only obtainable from looting", some should be "only obtainable from harvesting / mining / salvaging / gathering", and some should be "only obtainable from traders". Most canned food is only obtainable by looting. Raw meat and rotten flesh and bone should only be obtainable from gathering. 

In the game's current state, I'm pretty sure you could obtain basically everything by only looting and dealing with the trader. I want to see that change. Harvesting / Farming (Fortitude), Mining / Chopping (Strength), Salvaging (Perception), are each their own activities and they each give their own resources with only some overlap. Looting should stick to its lane, and not try to give access to so many resources.

 

[khzmusik]

5. Make dye stackable. 

I tried this, it doesn't work and there are reasons. Dye is a mod, and mods in general aren't stackable. It leads to too many issues, most of which are things you wouldn't even think about normally. (Like putting a stack on a weapon and only getting 1 when removing it; or problems with shift-clicking or drag-and-drop stacks; that sort of thing.)

I would rather have dyes be craftable so you can scrap them to paint then re-craft the dyes later, but that leads to balancing issues which are not trivial and therefore would be controversial.

If you think of a solution let me know, because it's something I wanted to mod into the game but never figured out how most players would want it done.

As for the other suggestions - I'm totally against them because they remove things from the game, and I already don't like how much TFP have removed.

 

[Khalagar]

Great suggestions and I agree with basically all of them.

 

[Old Crow]

Foreword: I'm a long time on-and-off player. I generally play in co-op non-dedicated with a few friends when we pick it up. I love the effort being put into the updates. I don't agree with every change, but we're still in alpha so it's all good. Overall, I do like the A21 changes. But I'd like to just get to it and start listing my suggested changes to the game. 

1. Delete paper.

So, I love the choice to remove glass jars and empty cans. They really weren't enjoyable. It's kind of lowkey anxiety inducing to decide between keeping glass jars / empty cans, or dropping them to free up inventory space. So I appreciate that they were straight-up removed. I no longer put glass/sand into the forge to endlessly make glass jars. 

So my first suggestion, is to just remove paper. In-game there are only 3 recipes that use paper, and the primary one is shotgun shells. I've always seen shotgun shells as what you hypothetically craft if you somehow run out of brass... but I've never reached that stage. Honestly, if shotgun shells just cost buckshot and gunpowder with no third ingredient, I'd be totally fine with it. I'd even be fine with shells only costing lead + gunpowder. That's right, you might as well remove buckshot as well if you want. Robotic turret ammo uses lead now already.

3. Delete the Southern Farming skill book tree. 

I don't want to collect 19 Southern Farming books to be able to craft potato seeds. It's the shortest skill book progression, and entirely the worst. Just let us craft all the seeds by default, or put it in the perk Living Off The Land. Maybe "Living Off The Land 4/4" could be "unlock all seed crafting". 

1. Paper is meant to represent wadding in the shell, though that brings up the question... where's the shell coming from? Kind of surprised shotgun shells don't require brass or scrap polymers. It'd make sense.

3. One of the points of the magazine thing was to get recipes OUT of perks. I think a better thing to do perhaps would be to change Southern Farming into a book series rather than a set of magazines, that way there could be additional perks gained.

 

[BFT2020]

1. Paper is meant to represent wadding in the shell, though that brings up the question... where's the shell coming from? Kind of surprised shotgun shells don't require brass or scrap polymers. It'd make sense.

3. One of the points of the magazine thing was to get recipes OUT of perks. I think a better thing to do perhaps would be to change Southern Farming into a book series rather than a set of magazines, that way there could be additional perks gained.

I can’t verify, but I thought shotgun shell crafting required scrap polymers

 

[theFlu]

I can’t verify, but I thought shotgun shell crafting required scrap polymers

Slugs do, the basic shell uses paper.

where's the shell coming from?

The basic shell is a little like a firecracker, powder wrapped in paper, capped with buckshot. The barrel contains the explosion, the package can just as well be paper.. might get messy when hand-crafted from your neighbour's electric bill, but it would do the trick...

 

[MiTHMoN]

1. Paper is meant to represent wadding in the shell, though that brings up the question... where's the shell coming from? Kind of surprised shotgun shells don't require brass or scrap polymers. It'd make sense.

3. One of the points of the magazine thing was to get recipes OUT of perks. I think a better thing to do perhaps would be to change Southern Farming into a book series rather than a set of magazines, that way there could be additional perks gained.

I'm aware that paper likely represents wadding, but 7DTD is a video game. It's not the peak of realism. 

I think it would make sense for shells and slugs to cost scrap polymer, but that's a hard nerf to shotgun ammo crafting. And as far as I'm aware, shotgun ammo already isn't the most popular ammo to craft. 

And yes, I like that they chose to separate recipes from perks. It was a good change. But farming is an exception to the rule. 

Honestly, who is out there spending their time collecting Clay, Wood, Rotting Flesh, Nitrate Powder, and then spending it to make farm plots, all without putting points into Living Off The Land? "Farm plots cost 50% less to craft". 

Farming and seed crafting are entirely thematically and gameplay-wise connected. 

On my current playthrough, I maxed out Southern Farming, so I can craft seeds, and my partner put points into Living Off The Land, and so one of us (me) crafts seeds and plants the crops, and the other (them) harvests the crops. It's only cute in very specific circumstances. 

I don't think anyone is out here honestly crafting seeds from crops without also using Living Off The Land. There is no reason to have these things separated. 

 

[hiemfire]

I can’t verify, but I thought shotgun shell crafting required scrap polymers

Slugs do, the basic shell uses paper.

The basic shell is a little like a firecracker, powder wrapped in paper, capped with buckshot. The barrel contains the explosion, the package can just as well be paper.. might get messy when hand-crafted from your neighbour's electric bill, but it would do the trick...

1. Paper is meant to represent wadding in the shell, though that brings up the question... where's the shell coming from? Kind of surprised shotgun shells don't require brass or scrap polymers. It'd make sense.

Before plastic was widely used, shotgun cartridges, even ones with brass bases, used paper hulls. So paper for shogun shells makes sense for both the wadding and the body of the cartridge. The jump from paper to plastic feels like an attempt to simulate "tiers" of ammo since slugs also used paper hulled cartridges after the jump from percussion cap to cartridge weapons.

 

[MiTHMoN]

I tried this, it doesn't work and there are reasons. Dye is a mod, and mods in general aren't stackable. It leads to too many issues, most of which are things you wouldn't even think about normally. (Like putting a stack on a weapon and only getting 1 when removing it; or problems with shift-clicking or drag-and-drop stacks; that sort of thing.)

I would rather have dyes be craftable so you can scrap them to paint then re-craft the dyes later, but that leads to balancing issues which are not trivial and therefore would be controversial.

If you think of a solution let me know, because it's something I wanted to mod into the game but never figured out how most players would want it done.

As for the other suggestions - I'm totally against them because they remove things from the game, and I already don't like how much TFP have removed.

Here are my thoughts: There are multiple items/blocks in the game that use the "hold R to change shape" system. Most relevant being Pictures and Paintings. You choose which painting you want, which are primarily an aesthetics item for decoration, and the item stacks to 500. 

Further, one of the first "mods" players encounter in the game is stackable: The Cooking Pot. (and Cooking Grill (stacks to 3), Beaker (stacks to 10). 

I think it would be really cool if the dyes stacked, like any other variable item (example; Building Block). This could also open up the possibility for multiple dyes slotted into an item = higher colour intensity (to a threshhold). For example, 1 blue, 2 blue, 3+ blue for 3 shades/intensities of blue on an item. 

I think dyes stacking to 50 would be most appropriate, putting them in line with "parts", candles, and torches. 

As an addition, yes, I'd also like dyes to be craftable. 

 

[Old Crow]

Before plastic was widely used, shotgun cartridges, even ones with brass bases, used paper hulls. So paper for shogun shells makes sense for both the wadding and the body of the cartridge. The jump from paper to plastic feels like an attempt to simulate "tiers" of ammo since slugs also used paper hulled cartridges after the jump from percussion cap to cartridge weapons.

This has been "Learning with hiemfire"

I don't think anyone is out here honestly crafting seeds from crops without also using Living Off The Land. There is no reason to have these things separated. 

Exactly. Combine them into a new series of books. Call it Southern Farming and make it a series of perk books.

 

[Vaeliorin]

Exactly. Combine them into a new series of books. Call it Southern Farming and make it a series of perk books.

If we're talking like the Art of Mining, etc. book, no way.  I don't want to rely that much on RNG to get my seed recipes.

As for the OP, other than stackable dye (or just make dye craftable with 15 paint, since 1 dye scraps to 15 paint...also, give us the paint automatically when scrapping a dyed item) I pretty much disagree with everything you suggest.  You may not take that stuff along, but I do, and while I'm not certain the percentage of the items I have that comes from random cabinets versus other sources, it's still enough that I don't want it removed.  Particularly the oil shale, since I never mine that, and it's nice to have some around to make oil.

 

[AtomicUs5000]

I no longer put glass/sand into the forge to endlessly make glass jars. 

I could be wrong, but I think this is the first time I have ever heard of someone actually crafting a jar, let alone endlessly.

 

[Fenris]

I could be wrong, but I think this is the first time I have ever heard of someone actually crafting a jar, let alone endlessly.

I used to make hundreds when I could. Just so I'd have so many I could save one more inventory spot and feel ok not looting jars or murky water, since I'd also have more snow then I'd ever use, just sitting in a warm box. Basically, it was just do it once and be done with it for the rest of the playthrough.

 

[MiTHMoN]

This has been "Learning with hiemfire"

Exactly. Combine them into a new series of books. Call it Southern Farming and make it a series of perk books.

I don't like this idea. Farming shouldn't be locked behind looting at all. You get Nitrate Powder from mining, Wood from chopping trees, Clay from digging, Rotting Flesh from harvesting corpses, and crops from punching/stabbing plants. Then you get the perk Living Off The Land for better crop gathering and lower crafting cost. 

For farming, looting should only provide the occasional seed. That's all. 

I could be wrong, but I think this is the first time I have ever heard of someone actually crafting a jar, let alone endlessly.

Back then, I'd put all broken glass and sand into the forge, and craft it into glass jars. Glass Jars didn't cost Clay, as far as I remember. So you'd have stacks of 125 glass jars, right click on water sources, and suddenly you'd have so much water that you could make into whatever you wanted. As much Glue as you wanted, or Red Tea, or whatever. 

 

[MiTHMoN]

If we're talking like the Art of Mining, etc. book, no way.  I don't want to rely that much on RNG to get my seed recipes.

As for the OP, other than stackable dye (or just make dye craftable with 15 paint, since 1 dye scraps to 15 paint...also, give us the paint automatically when scrapping a dyed item) I pretty much disagree with everything you suggest.  You may not take that stuff along, but I do, and while I'm not certain the percentage of the items I have that comes from random cabinets versus other sources, it's still enough that I don't want it removed.  Particularly the oil shale, since I never mine that, and it's nice to have some around to make oil.

The reason I am suggesting these things, is because I am the type of player that wants to loot-hoard everything (sometimes). I chop up static corpses, break noisy trash, collect chairs, collect potplants, wrench lights, all of that. Not always, but I do do it. 

The thing is, if I'm playing with friends who each play differently (one friend might only loot, one friend might only wrench, one might chop corpses and break couches), it ends up that items that "belong in the harvester's inventory" (like bone or raw meat or rotting flesh or nitrate) are in the looter's inventory, because loot tables. 

If your gripe with my suggestion is that you won't "get as many resources", the simple answer would be: Remove some of the items from loot tables, and slightly increase the harvesting amount to compensate. 

What's more, if you actually gut a POI like I do, you can't carry everything you obtain. It takes multiple inventory loads. So if your first run through is "just looting", it might take 1.5 inventory loads to just take the loot from searching containers, another 1.5 for wrenchables, 0.5 for harvesting corpses and chopping blocks like couches. That's just an estimate of a 1-skull POI of a house. (And yes, my numbers might be off, but it takes multiple inventory loads, I know from experience.)

I have friends who, while looting, run out of inventory space and just drop the Rotting Flesh, Bone, Seeds, all of that "farming" type stuff. And it's fine if we're near each other so I can pick it up, but in 5-skull POIs it isn't always the case. My "loot only" friend shouldn't have to deal with Rotting Flesh and Nitrate Powder in their inventory, that's for my "harvesting" friend to deal with. 

None of this matters if all you ever do is play solo. But not everyone plays like you. My suggestions are specifically Quality-Of-Life changes for co-op play. That's why I mention it in my foreword. 

 

[Vaeliorin]

The reason I am suggesting these things, is because I am the type of player that wants to loot-hoard everything (sometimes). I chop up static corpses, break noisy trash, collect chairs, collect potplants, wrench lights, all of that. Not always, but I do do it. 

The thing is, if I'm playing with friends who each play differently (one friend might only loot, one friend might only wrench, one might chop corpses and break couches), it ends up that items that "belong in the harvester's inventory" (like bone or raw meat or rotting flesh or nitrate) are in the looter's inventory, because loot tables. 

If your gripe with my suggestion is that you won't "get as many resources", the simple answer would be: Remove some of the items from loot tables, and slightly increase the harvesting amount to compensate. 

What's more, if you actually gut a POI like I do, you can't carry everything you obtain. It takes multiple inventory loads. So if your first run through is "just looting", it might take 1.5 inventory loads to just take the loot from searching containers, another 1.5 for wrenchables, 0.5 for harvesting corpses and chopping blocks like couches. That's just an estimate of a 1-skull POI of a house. (And yes, my numbers might be off, but it takes multiple inventory loads, I know from experience.)

I have friends who, while looting, run out of inventory space and just drop the Rotting Flesh, Bone, Seeds, all of that "farming" type stuff. And it's fine if we're near each other so I can pick it up, but in 5-skull POIs it isn't always the case. My "loot only" friend shouldn't have to deal with Rotting Flesh and Nitrate Powder in their inventory, that's for my "harvesting" friend to deal with. 

None of this matters if all you ever do is play solo. But not everyone plays like you. My suggestions are specifically Quality-Of-Life changes for co-op play. That's why I mention it in my foreword. 

I do loot/salvage just about everything.  Heck, I once looted the Water Works so hard that I ended up with an endless string of screamers and zombies raining through the ceiling (not digging, there were just so many of them they were teleporting through the ground.)  But I also always play with increased backpack size, because I know I'm a hoarder and hate to leave anything behind. 

They've already gotten rid of a lot of things from loot, if I remember correctly starting in A21 (fishing lures, various trophies, candlestick etc.)  If they got rid of even more stuff from loot, you'd either have to have lots of empty containers, or you'd get a bunch more of the stuff that people consider valuable, which would break the game economy.  I already hate how few lootable containers so many POIs have, I wouldn't want them to get rid of even more lootable containers (well...maybe they could remove cornmeal from the loot tables...)

Anyway, if you're so worried about losing stuff your co-op friends toss, have them drop a chest besides the staircase on every floor of a POI and dump stuff they don't want into that.

But hey, if they want to make changes to loot simply for co-op (which I find highly unlikely), more power to them.

 

[Scyris]

I tried this, it doesn't work and there are reasons. Dye is a mod, and mods in general aren't stackable. It leads to too many issues, most of which are things you wouldn't even think about normally. (Like putting a stack on a weapon and only getting 1 when removing it; or problems with shift-clicking or drag-and-drop stacks; that sort of thing.)

I would rather have dyes be craftable so you can scrap them to paint then re-craft the dyes later, but that leads to balancing issues which are not trivial and therefore would be controversial.

If you think of a solution let me know, because it's something I wanted to mod into the game but never figured out how most players would want it done.

As for the other suggestions - I'm totally against them because they remove things from the game, and I already don't like how much TFP have removed.

Actually dye stacking can be done you just need to go about it in a diff way, Basically you make a item that lets you turn a single dye into a Boxed up stack, like the mining book that lets you compress 6000 iron into a boxed stackable item that stacks up to 5 or 10. Same deal with the dye, you make a item that takes 1 dye to make, and you craft it, it gets the little boxicon like the mining resource stacks do, when you open the box you get the 1 dye back as a useable mod. Darkness falls does this with dyes as they are pretty vital to the class system (need black dyes to make ink, and black dye can be made from multiple different combos of other colors). That said why do you horde dyes? I basically just toss them when I find em in loot on the floor like I do anything I don't want. Really wish there was a hotkey to drop a item right out of a loot container so I don't have to click and drag and drop it out.

As for inventory size, I personally feel upping the inv size to 60 would help a ton with loot clutter issue. Basically its adding 1 more row at the bottom and extending the colum by 1. so its 6 rows of 10 spaces. I sometimes use a 60 slot backpack mod in a21 vanilla, and its such a improvement to QoL that its mindblowing, while at the same time not being OP like using the 96 slot would be. With a size of 60 you still need to do some inv management, but you can usually locust a poi for stuff and have a bit of space for actual loot when you have 60 slots.

As for your making shotgun shells with no casing or bullets with no casing this makes no sense. You need something to hold the gunpowder in one spot as its a powder it'll literally fly everywhere with a slight breeze. Also if they don't use paper they make use polymers instead which is a bigger issue. I do kinda agree that some things should just removed from loot like bones etc, and many up how many you get from normal sources to compensate. 7dtd has a real issue with loot clutter and not nearly enough space.

 

[khzmusik]

Here are my thoughts: There are multiple items/blocks in the game that use the "hold R to change shape" system. Most relevant being Pictures and Paintings. You choose which painting you want, which are primarily an aesthetics item for decoration, and the item stacks to 500. 

Further, one of the first "mods" players encounter in the game is stackable: The Cooking Pot. (and Cooking Grill (stacks to 3), Beaker (stacks to 10). 

I think it would be really cool if the dyes stacked, like any other variable item (example; Building Block). This could also open up the possibility for multiple dyes slotted into an item = higher colour intensity (to a threshhold). For example, 1 blue, 2 blue, 3+ blue for 3 shades/intensities of blue on an item. 

I think dyes stacking to 50 would be most appropriate, putting them in line with "parts", candles, and torches. 

As an addition, yes, I'd also like dyes to be craftable. 

Item modifiers and workstation tools aren't the same thing to the game. Dyes are mods in the same sense that weapon scopes are mods, and cooking pots aren't.

I like the idea of variant helpers for dyes, like you have for appliances, but those are blocks. They turn into other blocks when placed, and obviously that wouldn't work for dyes (or for items/item modifiers in general) since they're not placed in the world.

Actually dye stacking can be done you just need to go about it in a diff way, Basically you make a item that lets you turn a single dye into a Boxed up stack, like the mining book that lets you compress 6000 iron into a boxed stackable item that stacks up to 5 or 10. Same deal with the dye, you make a item that takes 1 dye to make, and you craft it, it gets the little boxicon like the mining resource stacks do, when you open the box you get the 1 dye back as a useable mod. Darkness falls does this with dyes as they are pretty vital to the class system (need black dyes to make ink, and black dye can be made from multiple different combos of other colors).

Someone else suggested this to me, but it seemed way too complicated. You're making a specific colored dye into a different item called "stackable colored dye" just so  you can have them stacked - they literally serve no other purpose. I think that crafting dye, even if it's somewhat controversial, is a better idea.

I didn't know Darkness Falls did that though. It makes sense since dyes in DF are not merely cosmetic, e.g. the black dye is used to craft skill notes. So I'm sure he doesn't want players to be able to scrap them to paint and then craft them into whatever color they want.

But, that's DF, I'm not sure it's the best approach for vanilla.

 

[Greymantle]

I would make magazines count as 2 skill ups and cut the magazines loot drops in half. Make the magazines a bit more uncommon because of this. The magazines/books dominating my loot is immersion breaking. If it was my choice, I would scrap the whole system and move back to what we had in 16.4. I would take even version 17 over this with the gate locks to slow things down.

 

[raketemensch]

A big part of looting games is the reward that you feel when you open a box. A great example of this in a21 is checking a toilet — water is everything, paper is mostly useless, so you have a 50/50 shot. That little dopamine hit is what makes people keep playing.

If you remove the less-useful things from the loot tables and it’s all-bonanza-all-the-time then the game will lose some of its luster and one of its main reward systems. As it is right now I feel like the magazine system is a little too highly-tuned and I’m finding what I’m looking for too easily.