PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[MechanicalLens]

2x might be insane, and his base is ginormous.

I enjoy the mining, at times. Gives me time to listen to a podcast or two.

 

[Trekkan]

I like the short 60 minute days, but I might try a blood moon every 14 days or something to get more time. Maybe put it back to 7 later game, or random after I get my base done.

This is exactly what I've done (14 day blood moons). With people logging in at different times, its just too hard to get up to speed when the time has gone by a week in game and its been a real time day since you last played.

I'll adjust back when it makes sense to do so.

 

[madmole]

Amen!!! I barely have enough time in 60 minute days. Maybe something complex like this would be good for longer day settings but for the default it doesnt make sense...
Edit: honestly the current mod system already adds enough variation to weapon management PLUS it's fun to look for mods. If mods had random stats, I'd be over the moon. I'd rather be spending my time micro managing my mods then my repair durability which would be boring in comparison...

Exactly I don't buy the "we need perma degradation" just like we never needed food spoilage, both will be solved with proper balance. Mods will get random stats so the search for them will be deep.

 

[Mechanimal]

Yeah I dig out the gravel for much needed concrete mix and enjoy flattening out each layer as I go. I need to put supports in because the ore blobs are huge and you can have a massive avalanche if you don't support it.

Sure can, I learnt that the hard way. Had a coal mine in a previous game that also contained nitrate: A full gunpowder mine! I was SO pumped, I mined the F out of it...



so... there used to be a hill there and now it's a hole. No idea how I survived, but I was learnt good and now reinforce as I go. The wood logs are cheap, work well, and look great, even feel like legit supports in a mine. It really is fast, efficient, and cheap to install the catwalks as you go too, so why not.

 

[madmole]

@MadMole:
This sounds amazing...I'm all about more action! (You could probably mirror the animation for a simple right/left swing change up.)

You probably missed this earlier:

Love the addition of the pumpkins, but two thinks about them:

They seem kind of small....like half the size of normal carving pumpkins, and since you make a jack o lantern combining them with a candle, shouldn't they light up at night?

I was REALLY looking forward to that!

Pumpkins are done, The jack o lantern is a good size isn't it? I'm not going to nitpick the pumpkin model and I can't scale it too big or it will hang off the voxel border.

 

[rdunham3]

Reminds me of a Skyrim mine a bit, or like one of those grottos, all you need is a little water feature

Need to keep this around to remind you there's a good reason for water revamp in 7DtD. :smile-new:

 

[madmole]

Just survived my first A18 day 7 horde (on day 8). Used about two hundred 9mm (pistol), a molotov and about forty shotgun shells (sawn off). I'm at 64 alive on 60 minute days and living in one of the partially built garage prefabs. I'm a wimp (and play dead is dead) so the enemy is on lowest block damage.
Spent most of the night out on the scaffolding tempting zombies to climb the ladder and fight. They came up two at a time so abandoned the sledge early in favour of the pistol. Towards the end of the night the bulk of them came from the opposite direction so had to fight from inside through the wooden bars.

I feel that if I'd fought from inside from the start I wouldn't have survived. Planning a lot of mining/gathering to upgrade the walls from wood to cobble and install bars all the way around for maximum visibility. May do more scaffolding fighting platforms, but longer than the prefab one to make melee more viable.

Must find an m60! Love that thing!

My trader gave me a Q3 one last night, I'm on day 10 I think so I was quite happy.

 

[madmole]

Starting third dead is dead on nightmare for the day..Random gen seeds, nomad of course. Brilliant so far.It is back, the genuine fear of death is back for me. Bring us more Pimps

I haven't seen the forums purring this loud in... forever!

 

[madmole]

Madmole, iron is the most "time consuming ore", so if you do replace the "bundle book" I think the bonus could be "get a little bit of iron from each stone" like it was before: 2 iron from each 500 hp underground stone, so at lvl 5 ML you will get 4 iron.

This is certainly doable. Nobody is going to mind getting some extra iron.

 

[Mechanimal]

My bad I confused you for Mech lens I watched his horde night and my mine entrance looks like his base entrance. I think its great to see people post pics of their hard work and creations. Its like minecraft with purpose.

Ah, yeah I watched that too, was a neat BM base he made, looked fun. Our names are similar in here, surprised you keep up on who is who in general.

I've had so, so, many fun builds converting POIs, and yes is it does have far more sense of purpose than minecraft ever did, true that. But boy oh boy do the little improvements add up in A18, this alpha is a serious upgrade in so many ways, especially for building.

 

[pregnable]

Hey, MM, you need to buff campfires for horde defense... lel.

Seriously though I just did my day 14 horde and was on game stage 61 and I used a line of burning campfires for my defense.

I was going to see if I could keep up with repairs and have the campfires kill them all, but my base design allowed some zombies to glitch through my bars and almost killed me lel. Then the buzzards got me low and I had a blinking red liquid thing and at first I thought it was some kinda bleeding crap.

Then I looked and realized it was because all the fire was powering through my hydration and I was dehydrated.

I plan on testing campfires again with a design I know they should not glitch through.

There was so much fire and fire on the horde that the fire glitched out and half of the fires looked like they were not still burning when they were.

Was funny to see a screamer during the horde, and quite a few showing up in the morning when it was over lel.

Campfires seem to work okay, and the zombies do not really attack them much. In earlier versions they would destroy them all. Figured I would mention it since I do not care if you nerf them and am not sure how much damage they do anyway lel.

 

[Mechanimal]

Reminds me of a Skyrim mine a bit, or like one of those grottos, all you need is a little water feature

Agree, so, about that water feature...

Would love to add such embellishments but I ain't messing with water, not yet.

Seriously though the terrain upgrade alone has massively made the water look better as it is, so much better, hard to believe it's actually the same water as before.

 

[madmole]

...so I'm guessing I'm very much in the minority here in that I find once the game starts throwing irradiated etc. at me in droves in an attempt to be challenging that it feels so cheesy and gamey that I lose interest?
I get the purpose of BM's, and for that matter random POI's developing a case of special-zombie monoculture, I do. I just would rather see the game-stage difficulty scale in quantity more than simply throwing glowy tanky excessive-block-damage types at me in bulk because it's so gamey. As it is there's no way to make the game-stage calculations ratchet up zombie count instead of going all special and/or glowy, is there?

I mean, now you can tell when more POI's than not have more utility workers than not, then all of a sudden it's fat woman zombies everywhere, and the tourist tier, and... any day of the week. Then a BM where you seem to be in a particular zombie type's convention center ffs.

Minor gripe, probably, so don't take this too negatively. Would like it so it was less typed at each tier.

8 players, 8 zombies each. We can't exactly scale the numbers any higher so the zombies have to get more challenging. It wouldn't be a problem for solo players with great computers but we can't really design the game around them. Hopefully we can improve radiated zombies or make special blood moon zombies and get rid of the glowing guys, it was just a quick thing to prototype amped up dudes.

 

[MechanicalLens]

Ah, yeah I watched that too, was a neat BM base he made, looked fun. Our names are similar in here, surprised you keep up on who is who in general.
I've had so, so, many fun builds converting POIs, and yes is it does have far more sense of purpose than minecraft ever did, true that. But boy oh boy do the little improvements add up in A18, this alpha is a serious upgrade in so many ways, especially for building.

If you all be good this year, I might post a video of the next upcoming horde night (day 56).

 

[madmole]

Noticed quite a bit of delay between breaking open a crate and being able to actually open it. Like the game doesn't recognize the block has become clickable for a second or so...?

Playing single player or on a server?

 

[FileMachete]

Not really arguing for a change here, just explaining my thoughts a bit.

Any firearm can fail to fire. Be it a simple failure to feed, a bad round, or actual breakage.

Military stresses maintenance to minimize failures. Nothing can absolutely prevent all failures.

A game mechanic that added in an uncommon but 'possible at anytime' failure would add an, "oh Shxx!" element, and I like those. It tests your calm under stress & how well, or not, you've prepared for it.

Can see how it might not be wanted as a default feature, but I do hope it will be possible to mod it in.

 

[Mechanimal]

If you all be good this year, I might post a video of the next upcoming horde night (day 56).

Your name always reminds me of the Sclerotic Ring, which we monkeys don't have, but tons of other animals do. Like, actual eye bones. Pretty sure most birds, and thus dinosaurs, have them, even thought they are often not in fossil reconstructions. Is one my my fav parts of a fossil reconstruct I have, a dino that ran around North America with T-Rex and Trikes:



You can see them if you look closely, he's next to a bot I worked on where I did make "eye bones" of sorts, custom shaped ones for each prototype.

The most well known example is probably from the Dunkleosteus:



But far more animals have these than people realize, and actual mechanical lens, of sorts. I was, and am still, surprised this neat fact is not more common knowledge.

There, hope that helps you tell us apart Mad Mole I make mechanical animals, and he has bones in his eyes, in a good way.

 

[madmole]

Any love for a "copy shape" radial option to match "copy rotation"?

Copy shape is in the menu, if you aim at the same block type.

 

[madmole]

What if the player doesn’t mind being shafted, in fact what if they enjoy it, a lot, mmmmmm

Who wins Johnny Walker or Cory Anderson?

 

[madmole]

I wonder if there can be anything done on the front of vegetation on slopes.
In A18 the placement of terrain decoration is way more restrictive on hills and other sloped surfaces, making the world look more barren than in A17 in mountainous regions. (The no spawn slope angle sets in earlier)

The vegetation density is in general lower.

Yeah we're going to look at that.