PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

  • A18 Stable is Out!

    Votes: 2 66.7%

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    Votes: 1 33.3%
  • Total voters
    3
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I wouldn''t swear by it, but I do not believe so. But if she did, it wouldn't be more than 1 point. She was going Int and Str.I am married after all... so Ive been wrong way more than once.

I will double check with her though.

Thanks for the response
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Obviously you haven’t been married long enough otherwise you’d know that you’re ALWAYS wrong! ;)

 
Is there a way to mute some people in this thread? Or just view Fun Pimp employees?

Unless your complaining improves everyone's experience I'm not sure what purpose it has here. We're all in this together.

 
Guppy, why do you even complain about balance (difficulty, ammo, loot etc)? Obviously a sandbox game cannot be balanced for everyone, especially in early access. You can mod, there are new mods every day, let's be happy we have this opportunity. When I whine, I whine about things we cannot change in XML.

 
We could always call it "food contamination" but that seems less intuitive to a new player and to common sense.
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Well could always add the contamination bit to the journal entry that comes up describing Dysenterry. TBH I have a few thousand hours in 7dtd and until you said contamination I thought it didn't make much sense myself.

After hearing you call it contamination and thinking of it in terms of that it does make more sense

 
Obviously you haven’t been married long enough otherwise you’d know that you’re ALWAYS wrong! ;)
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ROFL, valid point.

22 years, and yeah your mostly right. "I run my house...." She tells me I can say that..... and on occasion she tells me I am right... I think its more to keep me guessing.

 
We could always call it "food contamination" but that seems less intuitive to a new player and to common sense.
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Quite the opposite in my opinion, at least when thinking it over. Contamination sounds more like it is made by either dirty matter or in a crude place. Both which is possibly true in the setting we play 7d2d.

Still, i am not a native english speaker, so the words could have different "weight" for all that i do not know.

 
Guppy, why do you even complain about balance (difficulty, ammo, loot etc)? Obviously a sandbox game cannot be balanced for everyone, especially in early access. You can mod, there are new mods every day, let's be happy we have this opportunity. When I whine, I whine about things we cannot change in XML.
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Well just because you can modify it yourself doesn't mean it shouldn't be changed.

That being said balance is hard and subjective. I've also noticed what seems to be an overabundance of weapons/ammo/tools, but thats my taste. I don't think I should be able to consistently be finding steel tools before level 10 without some form of degradation like we used to have.

I'm still playing though and haven't reached end game and formed any final opinions.

 
@MadMole, really enjoying the new Alpha (just like I said before), a few small suggestions:The "Craft wood frames with wood" loading tip is super useless. It should be removed and changed with something more useful like "Right click to power attack"

Also, trader doors should be automatically closed when the trader closes (or any time traders are loaded after unload). It's kind of weird to open the doors to the traders, leave them open, then come back after a few days and still see them open.
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Noted.

I think it might be fairly easy to make them auto close after a bit, but not until the next alpha.

 
Is there a way to mute some people in this thread? Or just view Fun Pimp employees?
Unless your complaining improves everyone's experience I'm not sure what purpose it has here. We're all in this together.
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view profile, add to ignore list. Worked like a charm to hide all the crying. :courage:

 
Madmole,
You stated to not mess with the settings of loot and what not so as not to mess with the game stage, got it. Would lengthening the days be detrimental to how you level in the game and how you balanced it, or is designed all around a 60 minute day.
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You can change whatever settings you like. Longer days means more time to do things between the next horde, but every time you level that horde will get nastier, so it depends if you want to get some easier hordes under your belt early game, or level a lot and deal with a nastier horde.

I only suggest playing vanilla settings until you know what you are doing and see what happens by default. I feel that default settings are balanced pretty well.

 
If we've thousands of rounds and concrete before we see glowies, are glowies even going to be an issue? Sure, the first day is tough, but that can be attributed to a18 learning curve (i.e. bows/arrows are useless, and clubs hit distance is well within zombie reach distance), but you find items pretty quickly to bring you to mid-game well before you face mid-game threats. I think that's the overall point. I've zero interest in playing a threatless mid-game for real time hours and hours just to get to late game to even find out the answer to your question, but I suspect the answer is "I'll feel the same way".
- - - Updated - - -

Bottom line are that all of these are balance issues and of course due to the streamlining to cater to newbies. A18 is a solid, solid alpha in terms of performance (for me, sorry guys!), quality (looks and sounds great) and mod-ability (for the most part, but I know it's going to come full circle). It's 10x better than a17 and is what a17 should have been.
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Fair enough. There is plenty of balancing to be done. I think they are headed in the right direction though.

 
Thanks. I appreciate the time you took for all this information, but that information is useless for me as I have played this game solo for enough years.What about the information I was looking for?

I am hoping to see settings (number of hordes, number alive, day length, difficulty, loot chance), day #, gamestage, and how much ammo you have in storage at the moment.
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Yeah as I said the only thing I did different from box settings was put the game difficulty on one notch above default. When I set up a server and play 'for real' and not just experimenting I play with different settings depending on the number of people playing and the server's performance.

You're focusing a bit more on horde night more than I am as far as my issue with ammo quantity. My issue stems from how quickly you even start to get ammo accumulated. How fast that primitive part of the game is gone, how fast the part to where you're charring meat, drinking piss water, thinking a moldy sandwhich looks appetizing, happy to have 5 bullets with a rusty almost broke gun for a just incase situation, etc - just disappears. It's but a blip (if at all) in the game now. - Been a few alphas, but that was a thrilling part of the game.

But, no I have not made it to a couple months in the game to see if the dynamic changes on later gamestages to where ammo is becoming a problem. It very well might...But I would probably lose interest before then is all I'm saying. In A17 I played for about 300 game days before I put the game down in Feb, and the start (as far as the accumulation) was very similar to this.

Again, My primary point arises from the fact that even before a month in the game I'm exclusively using ammo and don't fear losing it or attracting attention. Using the ammo is the most viably efficient way to play--even so early. At least for me it is, I can loot faster and accumulate other things faster when I expend ammo than I can when I use melee. I clear more buildings per hour while using a gun..so while I use more ammo per day - I also get more per day. Which means, I don't even get to play the primitive part - unless I just force myself too for role-playing.

I concede that on Day 63 I might get a horde night that might require me to spit out all my ammo all in one go to avoid tower collapse. I doubt it - because you can constantly increase ammo supply relatively easily. Once established, making ammo is one of the things I do the most. Possibly even more now in A18..Because, from what I can see so far, crafting most other things is not a priority. But, I don't know that yet. We shall see. That has just been my experience and impression so far.

There's lots of great things about this Alpha..I REALLY don't want to step all over it with negativity. But, the abundance of loot, reduction of meaningful crafting, and lack of outside zeds to threaten the towns are concerns for me.

The game could very well change like MadMole said a few days ago to where there's periods of where you're OP and periods to where you're struggling again and it cycles. If so - hey great. I just haven't got there yet. Either way though - I don't like how fast mid-game starts..is all i'm saying.

 
Here is my opinion regarding some changes.
Food poisoning:

I neither like it nor hate it. It's just here. However... I have some issues with this mechanic early in the game as it prevents me from playing the way I would prefer. If you are a player who interact with trader this mechanic becomes meaningless since the day one. Start buried treasure quests or just go for fetch/clean missions and get more than enough food to ignore poison mechanic.

For me playing with trader is like using easy mode that comes with a cost of tedious "go 2km one way to clear house in no time, get back and grab another travel 2km quest".

If you are a player like me who prefer to ignore trader, poison mechanic is an overkill early in the game. I had whole 35 pieces of grilled meat in a day 1 and you know what happened once i decided to eat some food to fill my hunger? I ate everything but in the end i dropped from something about 70 hunger to 60. Even if i don't like it i had to a trader and start questing. From this point i never had any problems related to "food poison" anymore.

Hunting perks

Personally it feels strange that perks related to "hunting" are in different categories. "Animal tracker" in perception, "Huntsman" in fortitude and "Archery" in Agility.

I believe all this 3 should be merged together under "Archery" category. Why i think like that? First of all because combination of bow and hunting animals feels good, at least better than hunting deer with a machine gun. Secondly because "Archery" feels whatever in general. Bow/Crossbow isn't as powerfull as firearms, they are much slower, more risky and it takes much more time to gather bow/crossbow ammunition materials (im talking about feathers) compared to firearms ammo. Little buff wouldnt hurt.

Flurry of blows

Should be moved (back?) to strenght category. While it affects speed of your melee attacks (and every category offers some melee combat weapon) it also affects your mining speed (and harvesting speed but i believe it's a bug just like "salvage operations" not affecting wrench harvesting speed at all).
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I occasionally think flurry of blows should be merged with every perk or deleted and books/drugs give you that effect.

 
It's one of my favorite choices in the game too. In this game I find brass to be the most valuable. If I ever scrap brass it's because it's day one and I have a couple other more pressing issues to deal with. It gives me a reason to put stashes in the world and come back later. Sure, more work, but it feels rewarding... kinda like knowing you got all the treasure possible.
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I put boxes all over the map until I get a vehicle with all the things I won't need until later game, like brass, parts, resources etc.

 
Anyone have the bug where when crouched you cannot jump 1 cube high, but someone else on your server crouched can jump one cube with no issues. Happening to my wife and me. Of course its me who cant jump high.
Visually it looks like she is jumping the full height of uncrouched.

I guess its sort of another question.

Crouched, how high should you be able to jump? One cube or not?

Standing how high can you jump? 2 Cubes I think?
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Maybe they bought parkour perks.

 
Maybe they bought parkour perks.
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Yeah, others suggested that, and I am sure she didn't do over 1 point, but others suggested she may of gotten perk mags that upgraded ti as well.

So, if I have no perks, and am crouched.... should I be able to hop onto a woodframe? or no?

Thanks.

 
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