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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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.
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I get where your coming from. Its a very tough line to balance, but I think part of the problem is since that items never decay getting a high quality item lasts forever. That combined with the trader or getting lucky with loot makes it so its far faster to buy/find high tier items then it would be to get the levels to craft them yourself.

If there was some form of decay in place that would alleviate alot of the issues i think since even if you get a good item its not gonna last forevor and you need backups. Crafting then becomes an always useful skill as your guaranteed to always have a top tier item available.

I just don't see any reason why i'd ever invest in 15 different crafting skills versus just leveling up my trader skills and doing some quests and getting them for a fraction of the cost via looting/questing.

 
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.
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Whats the difference waiting until 4am to fix things up? If there is no zombies by 2am then guess what, no difference. Exit and log back in? Super lame and try getting everyone of the server to do that at the same time. Horde night only comes once a week and should be climactic, not some limp ♥♥♥♥ event that people see as just a little time waster.

 
I feel like heavy armor and cooking should be swapped in their skill trees.

Heavy armor slows you down, and doing fist fighting makes you have to get a bit closer than club or sledge to connect, so going heavy armor really just seems to make you get hit more because you cant get in/out as needed and you take more damage than running around neked with a sledge. I think its a bit better suited for the slower attacks of the strength melee weapons where if you end up in a bad position it buys you some time for your slower attacks to decapitate everything.

With fists you want booze, to make that booze is a pretty deep trip into strength. You also get stuff like extra meat from harvesting, and the farming perks in fortitude, so having cooking in there as well just seems like a better flow than to have to dip into strength to actually turn those resources into something that has less of a chance to kill you from eating it.

Being a big strong person running around in cloth armor to avoid penalties, with a frying pan in hand (add this weapon please?) just doesn't feel as good as being a big strong person running around instead big tin can armor. And the fortitude tree really seems about natural healing and and natural damage resistance and...living off the land, where the big heavy armor on top of your naturally healthy and resilient self to also keep you safe seems out of place.

 
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.
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Exactly. That's exactly where I am at. My thoughts where what's the point of having a primitive bow or spear if you only need them for just a few moments? We have all this primitive tech and mechanics in the game, but we don't utilize it for gameplay purposes.

In my own personal opinion, the game works best when there are tiers or ages (if you will) that you play through. It's for me, the best way a survival game to progress. You start with very primitive gear and struggle, and progress from there. But, that has been a common complaint from everyone I play with. The first few moments are scary like you said..OMG this is awesome! You struggle for a bit and then you get a gun..and it just cascades from there.

I know it's hard to balance all that out...to where you don't have new players complaining about how tedious the early game is..and you don't have long-time players complaining how short it is.

To be frank, this is the best the game has ever been for NEW players who just bought the game. By far. They nailed it when it comes to getting a new player introduced to the game and hooking them for a bit. But, I think it went slightly too far in the direction and it hurt the early game.

I know a goal was to make sure they don't make the early game so difficult and tedious as to run off people that play it. And, that's a good goal. There's got to be a way to make the primitive age of the game like that instead of just making progression into mid-game so fast. A better utilization of gamestage could help make primitive weapons a bit more effective and early shelters like wood more effective against weaker zombies - so that it all plays out a lot longer.

Most people I know go straight to cobble and defend with guns. If early gamestage zombies had much lower damage to wood and died easier to wood and stone weapons..there could be some fun progression there. The potential is there for expanding the early game without making it tedious or just expediting it.

 
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.
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@MADMOLE

Crafting seems more a mid to end game thing now. That might not be bad to hook new players and ease them in.

I got the rtx 2060s in today and updated. I can play on ultra now and get 60 fps, but like others I'm getting that oddball fps drop at times.

One thing we DO need now is a toggle on the map screen to turn off specific waypoints. Marking a bunch of loot drops gets very cluttered on the compass.

(More icons would be good as well...maybe there are some already in the game that could be made available?)

Something else I thought of... Players are still the old Uma code, and everything they are wearing is displayed when driving, other than the 4x4.

If 1st person driving mode could be added, the player textures could be unloaded, and the overlay of handlebars or the truck interior would reduce the screen real estate being updated.

That would be a win win offering another immersion option, and a performance boost as well.

Now I need to dig up that post about where to find steel...I can't make the motorcycle without it, and I've only found one trader so far.

I'm trying to resist red eagles mod with trader adverts in mailboxes to the closest one.

Still haven't seen snow or dessert biomes on day 36, but minibike travel is slow.

 
Could airdrops have their smoke take longer? It's almost impossible to find the airdrops when in the desert without airdrop markers because of the new RWG having huge mountains in the desert.

 
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.
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This right here is reasonable and very likely for an experienced player. This indicates to me though, that there isn't too much ammo spawning... because you are making it.

 
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.
Click to expand...
Is there a way to scale looting with what day in game it is? As exciting as it is to find a level 5 AK on day 1, that excitement only lasts for the moment and then its kinda just meh moving forwards. It feels like you can get incredibly good things too early which does kinda take away from the quality level that crafting can give you. If you could craft fairly decent stuff early if you pour points into it, and have to survive the earlier game on that, THEN start to find really high quality things after you've put in the effort to survive it would be great :D

 
Is there a way to scale looting with what day in game it is? As exciting as it is to find a level 5 AK on day 1, that excitement only lasts for the moment and then its kinda just meh moving forwards. It feels like you can get incredibly good things too early which does kinda take away from the quality level that crafting can give you. If you could craft fairly decent stuff early if you pour points into it, and have to survive the earlier game on that, THEN start to find really high quality things after you've put in the effort to survive it would be great :D
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The problem is that's tricky. What happens when a level 1 guy joins a server on Day 500?

Although it might make more sense to scale loot to a degree based on your gamestage.

Perhaps lower the base drop of ammo/weapons and apply a multiplier based on your gamestage?

 
There are now more than enough sources for brass in the game. Wrench every air conditioner, every car and every heater you find and you'll never have a lack of brass. If you're lucky and find the right book you can even get brass if you destroy a door or wrench kitchen sinks.
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Early game, yes. Late game every second of every day is scavenging brass and earning money for more brass and mining for ammo resources, base repairs, etc.

 
There's an ancient bug that happens from time to time in which you read the schematic/book from the backpack and you don't learn the recipe. It also happens with food, drink and medicines. You consume the item from the backpack but you don't get the benefits.
I just bought the recipe for Grandpa's learning elixir and used it from the backpack (1700 dukes with my 3 barter) and bam! consumed it and didn't learn the recipe. Sucks because I did 3 quests in order to save for it.

Sounds like a fixable thing related to the ancient item consumption mechanic and it is very noticable and game breaking at times.
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Post a repro video.

 
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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Nice, thanks pal.

 
Is there a way to scale looting with what day in game it is? As exciting as it is to find a level 5 AK on day 1, that excitement only lasts for the moment and then its kinda just meh moving forwards. It feels like you can get incredibly good things too early which does kinda take away from the quality level that crafting can give you. If you could craft fairly decent stuff early if you pour points into it, and have to survive the earlier game on that, THEN start to find really high quality things after you've put in the effort to survive it would be great :D
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Ya it seems to be raining AKs all around. Not just in my game but other videos I've seen. I have far more AKs and their parts then any other weapon. Might be a bug.

 
That noise you heard was me cackling. My wife was moaning about farming (shes the farmer of our group) and she found out she could go dig those plots up watching a streamer. So today shes planning to go out and dig some up.
You know what you have to do Joel right? We cant have her digging those plots up so the patch has to come soon. I need to see the look on her face when she goes to dig them up and gets nothing. 14 years sir. 14 years of my life with her will have been worth it to see her disappointment :D
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We're trying :)

 
I'm loving the new food system. As a matter of principle (cos I can't be bothered modding them out yet) I don't use traders or vending machines, so my food situation is pretty rng reliant and at the moment I'm low on supplies. I'm looking forward to getting a farm going.

Just found an iron spear. Score! Need to check stats against the stone I can make before deciding to swap out my mods.

 
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