PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Roland]

Do you want to kiss me? You're always creepily on my back. Off you go now.
Shoo

So...you got nothing, as I thought. In that case, I'm taking further doom and gloom posts about "the end of farming" as an intentional troll and will deal with you accordingly.

Hint: It won't be kisses.

 

[madmole]

no no no. dont go that way.
Most of new players in MP are not even knowing what to do with it, but its so important even on PVE Servers.

( You can forbid and punish Baseraiders, but not prevent it ) unless with an LCB

Yeah but you can craft one in 5 seconds. Its probably fine as is, throw it away if you know what you are doing, craft one when you are ready to settle.

 

[Survager]

Joel, do you think I can survive at the Insane level + Always Run in Alpha 18. Will it be harder or easier?

 

[Locusta]

I just don't understand. Food has never been an issue except on day 1 if you know how to play the game. So farming is optional role playing thing to me. Its a convenience feature, not mandatory. I like it, I do it, but I don't need to.

That’s the gripe! After day 1, food is not an issue! In a survival game, food should be an issue!

Loc

 

[madmole]

@MadMole Just curious what exactly is more difficult in A18 aside from rage zombies and one new zombie? From everything I've read so far I didn't see where anything was made more difficult in any way I'm sure I could have missed some stuff though. Everything I've seen so far though seems to be drastically simplifying things and making them easier but again I could have missed a lot.
I'm sorry but I still think that this game needed more zombies not less and now there is less in poi's and in the wild that kind of saddens me quite a bit. I also still think this game would really benefit from tying food, thirst and stamina drain to difficulty and would help solve a lot of complaints in that department.

Anywho just my two cents not that it's worth anything I was more just curious what was actually made more difficult.

There are more zombies than 17 because the AI is better at tracking you (speculating).

What is harder? Well you aren't power leveling 12 levels a day now, one level a day roughly. So you aren't buying perks every 3 minutes. Early game is a good 20 hours now but looting is great, so before you say "grind" remember a new very rewarding loot system is in place.

All I know is a lot of guys were complaining about endless biome zombies harrassing everyone. I removed some, made more in the wasteland, but the AI is better so IMO, it will kind of balance out, but run better.

 

[Dimpy]

My favorite alphas were the ones that had "annoying" wilderness zombies. It gave me a reason to loot for better weapons and a reason to build a base on the first day.

When you're a noob, even fighting a single zombie is potentially dangerous.

So yeah, bring on those breadcrumb terminator zombies :smile-new: !

However, while single-minded rage works fine for zombies, it feels out of place with wildlife. I don't want to have a pack of wolves run at me full speed just because they heard me hit a zombie.

 

[Roland]

I was referring to Madmole stating that he gets boxed in when entering a POI. I never said anything about being in the wild.

Loc

Fair enough. But there have been plenty of other posts bemoaning the loss of challenge in the wilderness so I used your post.

To be clear, I am not for reduction of zombies in the least. I want the bug that makes them suddenly aware of you if you step inside a building to get fixed. I just can't abide the rhetoric that somehow random wilderness zombies represent a threat out in the wilderness. The planned random encounters sound like they could be a lot more interesting.

 

[Zombie_Jam]

You dont answer the man after doing a decent analisys. After raging on "farming is dead".
Your response is equal to "Haha, you're just nitpicking and biased. I win, bye bye".

Thats how i read it.

You're welcome.

Cheers

Ohhh, you mean his comment was actually serious?

So, 'since nothing has changed we needed to change things.'

Nah, sorry but it's a useless conversation. Farm boxes are in which I like the look of. Farming as we knew it is gone in the sense of tilling the land.

That's enough for myself (and others from what I can see reading the forums) to dislike the change. It's cheap, and avoids doing something cool with the system like adding small tutorials or, as I suggested above, a rudimentary hoe with mention of the recipe for the one with forged iron when it becomes available.

Not forgetting, they could have kept the old farming style and also had the new pretty boxes.

I'm sick and tired of entertaining demanding and disrespectful people who hold contempt for simple options. Have both, or the option to choose to have it one way or another, what's with this 'my way or the highway' crap.

This forum is almost one huge black and white fallacy.

 

[madmole]

Long time lurker.Can "farmers" and avid gardeners please stop spouting off. This game doesn't have farming, at best it is allotmenteering. You don't "farm" hectares/acres of land, that is farming. You may garden a 10x10 plot. I AM a professional gardener, and have been planting vegetable crops by hand for years. Must have been doing it wrong all this time! As for hoeing, that is for weeding, not tilling the earth. MM has done the right thing, always drove me nuts you need a hoe to plant!

Please remember this game doesn't have "farming", and try the damn thing before you go all radio rental about it.

Love this guy already!

 

[madmole]

Yeah because the advent of walls and fences aren't a thing, right.
Also people like making big farms, whose going to make a 100 x 100 'greenhouse.'

Maybe you missed my comment to Sage (MechanicalLens) - tilling hundreds of blocks isn't anywhere near as tedious as making hundreds of planters to go in hundreds of holes, or hundreds of placements for an obscenely large supergreenhouse to encase everything.

Hoe + land = beautiful.

Planters + base buildinf = beautiful.

Farming gone + crafting/ potted plant fettish = a nightmare.

So how about a plate block planter?

 

[Aldranon]

No we didn't do it for performance, we did it for gameplay and it is a performance bonus. We have rage zombies now, they get mad when hit and basically sprint in your face. This is overwhelming to new players and with bread crumbs it felt like the whole city came to my poi and sandwiched me in there. There are still plenty of zombies in the wild, the number and what it does is deceiving. Last night I had 5 snow zombies from across the lake raid my dig quest and I got rekt, no way out. I was in that hole for under a minute and they broke out my frame box and dropped in the hole and I was toast.
Putting it simple, A18 is much harder than 17 "in the wild". There are cougars that pounce on you, coyotes that are fast, vultures etc. Its nasty. So nasty we set the default difficulty to adventurer and the team was still getting raped and it just felt like the biome zombies were this annoying pest that hunted you and there were way too many of them, maybe Shawns voodooo ai code is so nice now that there were always a LOT more zombies than we ever knew there were.

So we turned it down, there are still a lot, and they are pain in the ass, combined with rage speeds and animals, you will thank me for this change. The AI is so much better they hear and investigate to a new player with a fresh look at 18, I should have kept my mouth shut, nobody would have noticed, but instead it would be oh wow I'm surrounded and this is scary af.

So yeah the idea of less zombies sounds bad on the surface. Put simply there are less stupid zombies that can't find you or hear you idling around wasting cpu, but now more zombies (than 17) trying to eat you in your face. How does that sound?

OK OK already! I'll play A18 right now! Oh just send it to me and I'll do it.

 

[madmole]

MM, do you plan to do something with the crosshairs when using an optical sight? Now the movements are very sharp. Can you add some kind of smoothness or inertia when moving the crosshairs in aiming mode?

It needs some polish.

 

[Zombie_Jam]

So...you got nothing, as I thought. In that case, I'm taking further doom and gloom posts about "the end of farming" as an intentional troll and will deal with you accordingly.
Hint: It won't be kisses.

Aww.. you're so cute. Threatening to abuse your privilege on the forum just because someone won't reply to you directly. Temper temper

And the irony of thinking I'm the one causing trouble. Read my most recent post.

If nothings changed, why are there changes? Boxes can be added without removing hoes.

- - - Updated - - -

So how about a plate block planter?

Why not just have both boxes and the old farming style, MadMole?

You had a great system, and now you have a new great asset in the planter boxes. Why must one require an alteration of the other?

 

[Gamida]

i was on the ground and had to read comic books and field and stream or readers digest for entertainment... we didnt have pc's and computer games back then.... close but wasnt there in the 60s into 70s.

Same here, and same magazines. If you were lucky when you were outside you might find a nice stick or rock to keep you occupied for a while. If you were really lucky and you had some string that you could make a bow to shoot those little sticks with bottle caps that you nip onto the ends. Me and little one-eyed Frankie use to love playing with those.

 

[Guppycur]

Using the "boxes" as a higher tier method of farming, w/o having removed the old farming system, would have been a value add. The new proposed system adds ZERO value and sounds like it is more work to remove the old system than the worth of the zero gain. It is also one step closer to a static terrain, which I'm fearful of.

Every "problem" mentioned about the hoe-farming system had a simpler and better solution... stone hoe's, increased loot counts for hoe's, better tutorials, but the truth is, NONE of those were "problems" because 1) Hoe's weren't very hard to find, 2) Food is ridiculously easy so farming was never /necessary/ anyway, and 3) EVERYONE has played minecraft, so that method of farming wasn't exactly rocket science.

So all you've done is taken a system that worked and made sense, one that many people enjoyed, and removed it in favor of... what's the value add again? Not needing a wiki to farm (which was a fallacy laden argument to begin with)?

That's it for me on farming, but I've a lot left to say on wilderness spawns.

 

[madmole]

So let me get this straight...you removed zombies only to add the rage mechanic to HELP newbs? Don’t you think the rage mechanic will end up being the rage-quit mechanic for newbs?
A17 - get boxed in by 10 zombies, you have a slim chance of surviving

A18 - get boxed in by 5 zombies with rage mechanic, get rekt

Is this accurate?

Loc

This is getting old, no amount of words is going to explain a year of hard work. Play it, give us feedback then.

 

[CannedSmeef]

Aww.. you're so cute. Threatening to abuse your privilege on the forum just because someone won't reply to you directly. Temper temper
And the irony of thinking I'm the one causing trouble. Read my most recent post.

If nothings changed, why are there changes? Boxes can be added without removing hoes.

- - - Updated - - -

Why not just have both boxes and the old farming style, MadMole?

You had a great system, and now you have a new great asset in the planter boxes. Why must one require an alteration of the other?

Dude I'd stop sticking your foot into your own bear trap

What are you doing my man? I mean, I guess I can admire this level of arrogance, taunting a moderator for being upset at you ignoring his perspective in favor of insulting him

You are playing with fire

 

[rdunham3]

There's no good reason to require nitrate for farm plots. Any halfway decent composting produces soil so rich in nutrients already that you wouldn't want to be adding anything else. Plant fiber and soil are all you really ought to need.

Source: Growing up, my mom always had a large garden behind the house. She still does. Routinely winds up with so many veggies she has to give some away because her extra large freezer and whole room of canning jar shelves get filled up. Seriously...you think the highest a17 tier of living off the land was over the top? Not even close. That's with a garden the size of two Ford trucks, fueled by compost that was mostly lawn clippings, with leaves and plant bits from the veggie garden and flower gardens.

 

[Roland]

Aww.. you're so cute. Threatening to abuse your privilege on the forum just because someone won't reply to you directly. Temper temper
And the irony of thinking I'm the one causing trouble. Read my most recent post.

If nothings changed, why are there changes? Boxes can be added without removing hoes.

I'm in good temper. But if you continue to troll then it won't be an abuse of privilege.

Besides, you are replying to me directly. You just have no rational argument so you think you can goad me somehow. I'm only interested in the topic, my friend. And... I'm not the only one who notices it.

You need to start reading my posts past the first line. I never said nothing has changed. In fact I outlined the changes very succinctly for you. I said farming as a whole is not dead nor is it gone. You have yet to give anything close to a coherent counterpoint.

 

[Aldranon]

So how about a plate block planter?

Hmmm, can we have both? The plate would be better for me if we can only have one.