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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Madmole or other Pimps - What is the latest word on the FPS patch? Are we still looking good for an update soon? Or should we be expecting to wait until after the weekend at this point?
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QA is testing an RC. If that goes well then tonight. If not Monday. We haven't solved main problem with performance but have a lot of good bug fixes and my texture streaming fixes will help with vram issues and maybe give some people a boost. More of those coming in the next patch, today I've found a bunch more.

 
I live for 6 days. And all I do is run, look for animals for hunting, and make tea. The character is constantly hungry. I play with 25% loot and it is really difficult.
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Self imposed challenges can be fun or a nightmare. You can always change the settings or stick it out :)

 
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.
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Yeah that's kinda where I am too. When I first start its like OMG every fight scares me. Then I get a gun and a few bullets, and break into next POI that gives me another gun and more bullets, then the game starts throwing guns and bullets everywhere and next thing I know im swimming in them and just clearing POI's super fast and accumulating even more.

I haven't gotten far enough to see how much the hordes will counteract that, but its my biggest concern atm that the powercreep is more of a powersprint.

 
So can u stack 3 black coffee ( w.e the miner book one is) and get i think it was 15-16 minutes total? (6m per stack @ 3 stacks)
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Talking about regular coffee, I don't know about black strap yet.

 
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.
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I feel like the hordes I saw in your A18 videos were much nastier than the ones I've experienced, same day, no deaths, etc. Too be perfectly honest the hordes end way to early.

I know the hordes have a set amount of zombies because why would you continue killing them fast if they just keep re-spawning? But they should keep coming until 4am. Just have a system of reward for killing zombies after your set zombie count.

Example: You just killed 64 zombies super fast, which would end the horde night. Instead keep the zombies coming and add a buff on the side that grants zombie exp and loot drop chance an increase of say, 5%.

I don't know, just seems so lame that a horde ends so quick because you're efficient at killing them. That should be rewarded durning horde night and not a be a "this is it?" type thing.

TLDR: Make hordes last until 4am

 
To clarify, oh Moliest of Madmoles... farm plots will no longer exist in the next Experimental update?
I'm a tad ambivalent about that personally. It does make food too easy... on single player. On multi-player with 5-7 folks doing co-op, it's about the only thing keeping us from being stuck at Level 10 from starvation. Even then it's been pushing our luck.
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They will exist, you just won't be able to shovel them up from POIS any more, you can get some clay soil out of them not a full grown ready to plant fertile box.

 
Not a big fan of horde night lasting until 4 AM. Lasting until 2 AM is good. Gives me a couple hours to fix things up. If you want more horde just exit and log back in. There ya go. Another horde.

 
They will exist, you just won't be able to shovel them up from POIS any more, you can get some clay soil out of them not a full grown ready to plant fertile box.
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So does that mean then that we won't be able to pick back up our plots if we decide to move or want to re-locate them?

 
In fallout most food gives you rads. For every point of rads you have you lose a point of max health. You take meds to get rid of it. Ours is more forgiving and restores lost health with a small risk of food poisoning, not an impending doom of low health bar if you get too much rads.
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Day 20 and I've only had food poisoning once, in the beginning when I had to eat 12 charred meats. I save all my canned food and just make blueberry pies, hot dogs, meat stew, etc. High tier food is the way to do it. I'm swimming in food so if I do get sick it's no biggie. People are overly paranoid about this. 4% change! You still have a 96% chance nothing will happen.

 
Everything was actually balanced for "Nomad" difficulty.
Changing the label on the difficulty selection was done pretty close before release. =P

(it really changes nothing and if players feel better about playing above-default difficulty, win-win!)
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So Guppycur is essentially playing on the former "normal" setting. Maybe he should scale up difficulty, or adjust loot levels ? Or maybe both ?

@Guppycur: If it is too easy for you, then it will be a challenge for less experienced or new players :smile-new:

 
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I'm enjoying it, but some play mechanics are really changed. Because of all the loot drops and plentiful ammo, stealth is out the window. I go in guns blazing and clear out a poi in minutes. I know I'll find a crap load of ammo, so thats no issue. Why bother with stealth when you have every gun under the sun and hundreds of bullets and your trust junk turret by your side? I don;t even stop at night.... they simply don;t have a chance.
While we can craft, crafting is such later game now I use it very infrequently. I've already found a ton of ammo, so I don;t need to make that. I've looted tons of clothing and armor, so I don't need to make that.

The only crafting up to day 35 so far is vehicles, base blocks, and eggs and bacon... any other food crafting just gives me food poisoning anyway.

I could turn down loot abundance, but thats how you get all the best stuff now.

I'm enjoying the game, but I think the loot balance went a bit overboard, nerfing the need to craft almost anything.

The loot reward for all those schematics is kind of nerfed because you've already fund 5 or 6 of everything by day 30, and you KNOW you can't craft better than what you can find. All my tools were loot, so there was no need to craft any of them.

Something I thought of.. could mods also have random stats on them as well? That would make finding duplicates more rewarding, because you might have better stat improvements on mods. (brighter or dimmer helmet light, better or worst chance of catching fire with burning shaft, that sort of thing.)

Crafting is what I used to do overnight for the coming day. Now I just mine or organize storage.

Looting is attractive and big with the casual gamers, but I think a better balance needs to be struck between what we can find, and what we need to craft. If you hand us everything in loot, then we don't even need crafting in the game, which removes a LOT of playability and diversity to the gameplay.
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Once the hordes get big your ammo will diminish and all you will be doing is crafting ammo, so I use melee to clear pois out and only waste bullets in emergencies.
Crafting is not as prevalent but that is a good thing IMO. We could smash loot quality down forcing you to craft blues at best, and make it so you aren't getting even a glimpse of a pink until level 60+. Then all those tools and weapons are crafted into better weapons and tools.

 
Madmole, I've got to say, you got me so hooked to new A18. Drug dealer much?
Yesterday I manage to play a couple of hours with a friend and it was really great! I love the recipes/perks being great again.

#ReleaseTheOptimizedKraken
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Glad you like it. You should have said "me and my group" though, to counter weight guppy's army of fictional arm chair designers that hate 18 :)

 
Can I ask why horde night is based on total numbers of zombies versus just having zombies come until 4am? I’m not complaining, just curious about it. I assume there must be a reason. I’d love to see them come all night but not if there’s a performance issue or something similar. Thanks in advance.

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Can I ask why horde night is based on total numbers of zombies versus just having zombies come until 4am? I’m not complaining, just curious about it. I assume there must be a reason. I’d love to see them come all night but not if there’s a performance issue or something similar. Thanks in advance.

 
Madmole, I have a small suggestion for the perk descriptions to help new players. Currently, descriptions of crafting quality are labeled as poor, fair, and good...etc. But, in game quality of items is shown by color. I could see this being confusing for new players. How about coloring the quality descriptions (poor, fair, good...etc) in the color of the corresponding tier?

 
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