PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Crater Creator]

It would require a UI change to make it clear, especially if you want to be able to specify how many of which alternate items you want to use in a recipe. For the vanilla game, there are only a couple of places where it would really help - like glue for instance. Right now, we can only make glue with murky water. We could have a second recipe to make glue with clean water but then there are two "identical" recipes in the list and you have to make sure you get the right one. It's not a big deal but it would be a nice QoL improvement as well as giving the game a bit of polish.
Where it would really change the game is in modders' hands because new items and recipes are a huge part of what modders bring to the table. Creating a more powerful framework for them to work with would open up a lot of possibilities for mods.

Okay, but I still don't know what you're visualizing that would improve the experience over what we have now. I hear you saying it could be better, but what UI change do you have in mind, that isn't multiple entries in a list but still lets the player see all the alternatives?

 

[madmole]

There is one problem: so we will get a huge amount of meat for 100,500 hours of play before, and just forget about the garden)

OR... you join a crowded server and can't find a rabbit to save your life.

 

[Damocles]

I don't think creating more output than can be consumed is a problem. I think the exponential growth is the problem.
You can produce more iron and stone than you use, too. But when you're mining, you improve your yield through perks and mods, and then you top out and are constrained by external factors, like the irregular placement of ore blocks. In contrast, farming you can do where you want, and your farm can grow from 1 to 2, 4, 8, 16,... plants each cycle (faster with more perks, but still expoential). Your yield never tops out, at least until you're hitting how many times you can swing your fist in a day. A 'progressive tax' mechanic, for lack of a better analogy, would be needed to keep the yield in check, where higher yields incur proportionally higher risks. Spoilage, hungry animals, and I'm sure other ideas could accomplish that.

Maybe a "bug infestation" statistic could be employed, that makes larger mono-type cropfields have plants dying off ("bug infested - too many crops nearby")

The player must spread the crops out further apart, else the chance to have bugs taking over the plants increases.

Could be solved by some kind of distance-heatmap, thus spreading out the farming area.

And in turn making the farms harder to defend from other foes.

 

[madmole]

The battery can be installed on the ground and disassembled with wrench, as we do now with office chairs :smile-new: )

The battery is an item, not a block. And that would be a weird one off clunky design. We like consistency. Its fine as it is, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Go find acid instead of asking to make everything remotely challenging convenient.

 

[Odetta]

Regarding farming, we're doing this for A18. Baby steps and balance.
Living off the land

T1: Harvest 2

T2: Can craft flowers - Aloe, goldenrod chrysanthemum, yucca

T3: Can craft berry and veggie seeds

T4: Harvest 3 crops

T5: Can craft mutant seeds

Add 50 nitrate to seed recipe. Change to 5 crops.

add wild crops to biome spawning

Add seed schematics to allow non farmers to craft seeds.

Add zombie and stag trampling but not players trampling.

Trampling might not make it in, need programmers for that.

:fat:

 

[Aerial]

Ummm ok. In A17. Lets talk about the future, not the past.

We regularly find 3 or 4 guns per day starting around day 6 or so. Very early days not so many, but it's pretty easy to find guns in the first day or two. Usually we dump them into a gun box until that overflows and then we go through and aggressively scrap all of the lower level ones because the mechanical parts sell for more than the guns.

 

[madmole]

Not if the animals that attack the crops are rabbits and if the meat from them is further reduced. If you made rabbit hordes that spawned from the "garden heat map" but each rabbit only yielded 1 meat resource then it would take killing 5 rabbits to get even one charred meat meal. Plus rabbits are harder to kill than deer.

LOL Garden heat map. You guys can mod it in. Honestly you just make the rabbit/stag AI target a block with keyword crop. Done.

 

[madmole]

There is also an excellent modlet for this - JaxTeller718's Tools and Weapons Now Break on Degradation

Mods are off topic here.

 

[Thecolours]

Ummm ok. In A17. Lets talk about the future, not the past.

Sounds like you want gun drops to be much rarer in A18?

 

[SnowDog1942]

Stags and zombies ruining your farms is a very interesting mechanic. What sucked is when you yourself accidentally knocked one down. IF we can bring it back it would only be larger animals and zeds. A little random natural disaster like that is good for game play. Forces you to rethink, build a fence or above fort smaller farm.

Would walling im crops protect them or will stuff magically spawn inside and destroy them?

 

[madmole]

We regularly find 3 or 4 guns per day starting around day 6 or so. Very early days not so many, but it's pretty easy to find guns in the first day or two. Usually we dump them into a gun box until that overflows and then we go through and aggressively scrap all of the lower level ones because the mechanical parts sell for more than the guns.

Yes some balance and we'll be in a good spot. We'll make sure you aren't swimming in firearms especially the top tier ones and I think it will play sweet.

 

[Odetta]

Honestly you just make the rabbit/stag AI target a block with keyword crop. Done.

This will inadvertently let us create animal traps, which is awesome. All you got to do is make it so they can go into a space but can't get out (with blocks) . Which is simple.

Killing two birds with one stone here.

 

[Haidrgna]

LOL Garden heat map. You guys can mod it in. Honestly you just make the rabbit/stag AI target a block with keyword crop. Done.

I would like to see the xml rule for entities that allows them to target specific blocks. Would make modding so much easier (or is that something that is coming in A18?) I hope this means the event system is being extended upon to blocks in A18, where a block can have tags just like items and entities can have now.

 

[madmole]

Would walling im crops protect them or will stuff magically spawn inside and destroy them?

Good question. I think animals can spawn on terrain but not within land claim so you might be ok.

 

[madmole]

I would like to see the xml rule for entities that allows them to target specific blocks. Would make modding so much easier (or is that something that is coming in A18?) I hope this means the event system is being extended upon to blocks in A18, where a block can have tags just like items and entities can have now.

I think its coming to A18, we need block tags.

 

[RipClaw]

Regarding Farming.What i expierienced, in almost every playthrough:

You plant your first Seed, that you really really had to find.

you yield from the harvest and turn them into Seeds.

Plant 2 Seeds

Plant 4/8/16/32... Rich as Hell.

You forgot that you need 4 items to make a seed. To get exponential growth you would have to get 4 items from each plant. But you have to be at level 4 in "Living of the Land" and you have to be at level 7 in Fortitude. In total you have to invest 14 points to reach this level.

You have to invest 4 points in Intellect + Master Chef if you want to make vegetable stew.

Meanwhile the hunter is laughing because he finds meat and eggs everywhere and he only has to invest one point to make bacon and eggs.

In addition, the farmer first has to make a hoe or find one and then can start building a garden.

If you are not lucky enough to find a hoe, you can only make one yourself at level 20. And to do that you have to invest a total of 7 points in Intellect + Hammer and Forge if you don't find a hoe somewhere.

So the hunter gets along with one point and needs only a bone knife which he can make in the first 5 minutes of the game while the farmer has to invest up to 21 points to get an garden up and running and another 4 points to make vegetable stew.

And with the announced changes in A18, a seed needs as many as 5 items and 50 nitrate for production. Do you want to punish farmers even more or is that enough?

 

[Crater Creator]

My only concern with having animals eat crops is that it could turn a garden into a meat delivery service rather than a control on farming output.

A valid concern, which I think is addressable. Balance it so the game only spawns a 'screamer animal' like a rabbit once the theoretical vegetable yield of the farm is well above the theoretical meat yield from the animal(s). In other words, they can do more damage than you can recover through their meat. Also, don't keep animal corpses around for too long, so that if the player wants the meat, they have to be nearby and grab it quick (as it is with loot bags). They can't come home after a day out and pick the meat off of the spikes. Or, use an 'infected animal' that doesn't yield fresh meat, as someone suggested.

Lastly, if someone gets a little extra meat as a result of their garden, that'd feel cool. If I could make meat stew sometimes instead of vegetable stew by catching the animals attracted to my garden, I'd feel like a pretty shrewd survivalist. It would even scratch that itch for animal husbandry, without needing to explicitly code a new system for it.

Seasons sound sensible, but I think Madmole's concern about players joining a server at the wrong time is valid. Just because the timing of the Blood Moon is bad that way, doesn't mean they should add more systems that work against game balance.

 

[Tin]

A valid concern, which I think is addressable. Balance it so the game only spawns a 'screamer animal' like a rabbit once the theoretical vegetable yield of the farm is well above the theoretical meat yield from the animal(s). In other words, they can do more damage than you can recover through their meat. Also, don't keep animal corpses around for too long, so that if the player wants the meat, they have to be nearby and grab it quick (as it is with loot bags). They can't come home after a day out and pick the meat off of the spikes. Or, use an 'infected animal' that doesn't yield fresh meat, as someone suggested.
Lastly, if someone gets a little extra meat as a result of their garden, that'd feel cool. If I could make meat stew sometimes instead of vegetable stew by catching the animals attracted to my garden, I'd feel like a pretty shrewd survivalist. It would even scratch that itch for animal husbandry, without needing to explicitly code a new system for it.

Seasons sound sensible, but I think Madmole's concern about players joining a server at the wrong time is valid. Just because the timing of the Blood Moon is bad that way, doesn't mean they should add more systems that work against game balance.

How is it valid, when new players gets buffed with the newbie coat that protects you from temperature?

edit: About the seasons..

 

[Odetta]

A valid concern, which I think is addressable. Balance it so the game only spawns a 'screamer animal' like a rabbit once the theoretical vegetable yield of the farm is well above the theoretical meat yield from the animal(s). In other words, they can do more damage than you can recover through their meat. Also, don't keep animal corpses around for too long, so that if the player wants the meat, they have to be nearby and grab it quick (as it is with loot bags). They can't come home after a day out and pick the meat off of the spikes. Or, use an 'infected animal' that doesn't yield fresh meat, as someone suggested.
Lastly, if someone gets a little extra meat as a result of their garden, that'd feel cool. If I could make meat stew sometimes instead of vegetable stew by catching the animals attracted to my garden, I'd feel like a pretty shrewd survivalist. It would even scratch that itch for animal husbandry, without needing to explicitly code a new system for it.

Seasons sound sensible, but I think Madmole's concern about players joining a server at the wrong time is valid. Just because the timing of the Blood Moon is bad that way, doesn't mean they should add more systems that work against game balance.

I'm pretty sure they'll balance it so it isn't OP. Also, one rabbit can destroy your entire farm. You don't need a swarm of them, they are not locust.

 

[meganoth]

Regarding farming, we're doing this for A18. Baby steps and balance.
Living off the land

T1: Harvest 2

T2: Can craft flowers - Aloe, goldenrod chrysanthemum, yucca

T3: Can craft berry and veggie seeds

T4: Harvest 3 crops

T5: Can craft mutant seeds

Add 50 nitrate to seed recipe. Change to 5 crops.

add wild crops to biome spawning

Add seed schematics to allow non farmers to craft seeds.

Add zombie and stag trampling but not players trampling.

Trampling might not make it in, need programmers for that.

Sounds good. We'll see how it plays out in A18.