PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[madmole]

Yeah - and that rope is way too good looking for having been made out of plant fibres.And the spear wood tip frame doesn't look like it was carved at all.

Almost enough to make me wanna quit after 5000+ hours in.

Those fibers aren't immersive enough. ♥♥♥♥ this game. Put back the old low res skins so I can believe again.

 

[madmole]

Other wise the Basement or foundation of the building for elec room, etc, parking access
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We have been wanting more early game weapons for a long time now, Thanks, now more types of Blunderbuss ammo, please

Na, I don't really agree with that. Its a crutch until you can walk. Get the double barrel if you want to shoot higher technology ammo.

 

[RevenantWit]

LOL, we'll just mod it out.. ok thats like .001% of players that use mods. Everyone plays vanilla except the rare few that get hooked and think they need mods. Preparation is important, right now its no thought at all, just take 50 veg stew and you can heal forever and not starve or get thirsty. Bleeding is probably too frequent and wasn't even working with armor. Armor is supposed to reduce and nearly block completely at some point.
How is forced thought into preparation annoying? Your just used to the stupid large stack numbers that have had zero thought put into them. A design is coming though. People might actually want higher tier foods if they can't take 5000 corn bread with them in one slot.

I like the sound of this the stack sizes are currently way to high and do not require thought or preparation just 1 empty slot in your inventory

 

[madmole]

ahhhh… 17.0.. otherwise known as the Alpha that made noobs cry to the devs -- and the devs catered to them.

And people don't think we listen.

 

[madmole]

For spear throw, perhaps make it high damage and automatically retrieves into your inventory after 5 seconds. That leaves you weaponless for 5 seconds so it should be used selectively

What? LOL. No you go find it and pull it out of where it struck like an arrow. You don't auto get it back, that is ridiculous. Go pull it out of the zombie's head or jump off the cliff and get it.

 

[madmole]

I'd go with the same mechanics as arrows but with far less chance of breaking, it's not hard to pull arrows out a zombie's head and a spear should be significantly easier to grab.

It will have 100% retrieval rate, you put mods into it, it is an investment. Random breakage would kill the entire system and people would rage.

 

[madmole]

What happens when you clear miss a spear throw?
Retrieve from zombie aka arrows or auto retrieve after 5 seconds. Whichever comes first

You get off your ass and go find it. Press E to take.

 

[madmole]

17.0 was OUTSTANDING. It made the game worth playing again between level gates and the struggle for food/water/stamina. The game also lasted much longer. But alas they decided to "fix" it. Hopefully we can return to what made A17 great at some point.

It also made hundreds or thousands of players with hundreds to thousands of hours switch their steam reviews to negative. 17 was too grindy. Stamina shouldn't be a concern when doing mundane tasks like farming, mining. Only when sprinting and using power attacks should stamina be noticed, or when ill or starving, etc.

 

[madmole]

If I was smart and kept up with my Unity projects I totally coulda been on the Dallas team (I was born and raised in Granbury) but, nooooo, I had to be lazy lmao.
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You are one of the few who had no problem with Level gating and stamina "Problems". I never saw anything wrong with them either to be honest. I do understand the need to cater to a larger audience though. This isn't the Dark Souls of its own genre, oh wait, it totally is. The game is made to punish you for making mistakes and forcing you to learn.

Its never too late to start learning. Don't be a would have, could have, should have guy. Change your future by changing today's must do list. Being lazy doesn't have anything to do with it. Find your why, and make it a must do, not should do and then commit to x hours a week. You'll be amazed at what you can do if you put time into it.

 

[madmole]

Good Morning
I would like to make a suggestion to the developers, the game A 17.3 is very good in almost everything, for me the only thing that is missing is to remove the elaboration of weapons is very boring, loses the emotion of going to look in the Pois

In conclusion, it would be excellent if the manufacture of weapons were removed (except for homemade weapons)

please return the arms and parts of weapons was more fun

If you add Lanzas please add the throwing axes too

Keep up the excellent work guys

There are significant changes to gun crafting in A18 I think you will find the urge to go looting again for sure. More so than any build ever.

 

[RipClaw]

level gates didn't originally affect only INT and they were an excellent way to extend the early game and I know many players and streamers that would agree.

I know that Level Gates affected everything at first. Then there was a version completely without level gates and finally they were reintroduced but only for INT.

As for the streamers, you and I seem to be following different streamers. No streamer I follow is particularly attached to the early game.

Due to the levelgates the streamers are also much more focused on grinding XP and levels than it was the case in previous alphas. A streamer I follow wanted to get from level 80 to level 100 as quickly as possible to finally build an auger. He even started to farm screamer hordes although this is not his way otherwise.

If not level gating something still needs to be done to extend the game more.

That would be to provide more content for the late game and not to extend the early game.

 

[Guppycur]

You get off your ass and go find it. Press E to take.

I kinda love this answer.

 

[madmole]

I thought it was supposed to be but anymore I guess not.

18 will be challenging in the right ways, not the wrong ways.

 

[RevenantWit]

18 will be challenging in the right ways, not the wrong ways.

Sweet looking forward to it. And great job with the spear it looks amazing

 

[AtomicUs5000]

So for balancing I would like to see canned food slowly disappear from the loot lists simulating that all the pre-apocalyptic canned food sources are getting found and eaten so that you can only count on canned food for the first week or two and then they become rare and then they are gone altogether. For farms I would like to see one more phase added to the cycle which is dead so that if the plant isn't harvested during the right window you miss out.
For one more 4 million dollar idea maybe instead of food spoilage that causes food to disappear there could be a daily 5% increase to the chance of food poisoning applied to all food already existing in inventories and containers that aren't working fridges and vending machines. So the food never disappears and can always be eaten but it will eventually be guaranteed to make the player sick.

+3

Liking the idea of all 3 concepts and how they will work together for a simple, cost-effective implementation.

 

[Hek Harris]

For one more 4 million dollar idea maybe instead of food spoilage that causes food to disappear there could be a daily 5% increase to the chance of food poisoning applied to all food already existing in inventories and containers that aren't working fridges and vending machines. So the food never disappears and can always be eaten but it will eventually be guaranteed to make the player sick.

Love it.

 

[madmole]

Block tags would be great! With such tags, would it be possible to make blocks with effects, like radiation, that targets players but not Zombies?
It might be interesting to see blocks return damage to players when they attack unarmed. No punching down buildings and trees.

I'm not sure about that, but block tags are in, and you can increase damage with a perk or buff to a specific block containing a tag. This is my placeholder code to test it:

<passive_effect name="BlockDamage" operation="perc_add" value="200" tags="ironore,stoneore,nitrateore,leadore,shaleore"/>

Then on the blocks I add the <property name="Tags" value="stoneore"/>

It should be really awesome.

 

[madmole]

Hunting could also do with balancing but that's largely a different mechanic. Failing to balance one because you haven't balanced the other gets you nowhere.
Hunting would be a lot harder if the animals weren't so suicidally aggressive. Not many animals will fight to death so readily.

Making deer faster and more cowardly would also go a long way to making them harder to kill. Last I checked you could kill a deer on day one with a single stone arrow if you're hidden which does seem a little OP.

Zombie dogs would. We could probably add a flee option for heavily injured wolves and stuff, we're planning it for bandits.

 

[maleitch]

+3Liking the idea of all 3 concepts and how they will work together for a simple, cost-effective implementation.

As someone who has never farmed because it was not needed I 100% love the daily increase in chance of food poisoning. Maybe instead of canned food disappearing we follow this same logic and it could get a random food poisoning on discovery. That would provide a range of values giving the chance to find some good (low %) or some gas station sushi (high %)

This is a fantastic idea and I hope TFP will consider it. I am too ignorant to know, but hopefully this would not bust up food balance too much or the development budget.

 

[madmole]

Madmole have you guys ever thought about giving the "interaction point" (i don't know how is it called) a bigger size, less precision and close range? (Polish it)
Let me explain in my poor and primitive english:

When you are trying to open a door, you have to aim directly to it, if your crosshair is 1mm off the door, you can't open it.

Another example: If you stand beside a wall, like 3 meters away from a door, you can open it as long as 1 pixel of the door is in your crosshair

And another one(dj khaled reference): When someone drops a tiny item on the floor, you can pick it up only if your crosshair is exactly aiming to that said item. (I think holding E doesn't add it to your inventory no more, it only gets it closer to you)

I don't know if I explained myself correctly, but I think that little change could enhance interactions in-game.

Trankitas.

Yeah this would be nice. In skyrim you can pick up the nearest gold coin on the table to your cursor, as long as you are semi close to it.