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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Nah, that's not why. I just like crafting stuff and throwing it in boxes just in case I need it to keep busy at night at a base when I'm established. I haven't crafted much ammo yet. But, it seems like the primary things I will be crafting are going to be ammo and medical. In past alphas, i'd be doing a lot more different types of crafting, upgrading, combining, etc..But, we don't have to do near as much of that stuff anymore, unfortunately. I've been looting day and night on A18. Like I said, for me anyway, once i'm inside a POI - I can't distinguish any difference in danger between daytime or nighttime..Most all zeds I encounter in a POI are feral or special infected anyway - day or night. Might as well just loot. But after awhile, I'll probably start staying in the base more and more and at that point i'll probably take all the brass i've stacked and end up crafting ammo and medical supplies to keep busy while waiting for horde nights and stuff. Who knows..still too early for me to tell how it will all play out in the end. It's the beginning i'm concerned about.
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As I've said we want to give players a chance to succeed. To spread their wings and try things to play how they want to play. But eventually impending doom is coming and all those things you saved up will have meaning, and then you will start mining, and buying ammo etc etc... and you will run out and be looking at traps and any better base designs, etc etc. Just give it time, you guys wanted a late game, I gave it to you.

 
That's a gem of an idea. I take the time to pack them home, but then again I haven't felt the need to go far from home yet.
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No way will I move encumbered. I even take off my armor to run, its worth it if its more than 300 meters away.

 
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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Gotcha. Will we still be able to shovel up our crafted and placed boxes to get a full planter box in order to relocate? I definitely don't want to experiment right now with it.

 
oooooooooo idea: Make m60s be mountable on blocks etc.
This way, in big multilayer settings or something you can just make a but load and set them up wherever and have bunkers!
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This this this love the idea

 
There is no difference. If there is no threat then you can loot and such starting right when the horde ends, 12am, 2am, no difference. I do play with 64 and sometimes edit the xml to 100 but if you kill them fast enough they always stop coming. If it takes you all night to kill 8 zombies that's fine, but for people that are efficient and kill them fast they should keep coming. Then again I've been playing for a while and they used to have it where hordes just keep coming and not stop.
Agree to disagree on this.
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We're probably going to add an option like "Blood moon size", 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, 150%, 200%, 250%, etc.

 
We could allow t6 crafting but we'd enable random stats. Imagine rolling the dice of 18 parts to see what you got?
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I'd like random stats for crafting but not allow t6 crafting. That level should remain loot only. But just like random stats have juiced up exploration, static mid-range stats for crafting have killed that part of the game or at least made it unexciting.

Another thought would be to allow for some limited LBD crafting on increasing the stats slightly on weapons and tools you've already crafted. The loot only parts help gate the frequency of crafting the same thing so nobody is going to be spam crafting compound bows. You are limited to the parts you've been able to find. But it might give crafting some juice if the player knows that the second or third compound bow he crafts will be slightly better.

First crafted bow: Midrange stats

Second crafted bow: Midrange stats +1

Third crafted bow: Midrange stats +2

etc. up to a ceiling.

Then crafters can become expert craftsmen in the things they perk into and it isn't general LBD and spam crafting on everything.

 
RIP Gun parts!Why does the SMG use pistol parts now? doesn't make sense to me, tho id like to know why you fellas did this
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It doesn't. It uses handgun parts.

Gun crafting pretty much did not exist and this is a much healthier approach to an economy that includes auto and shotgun turrets as well.

Now it will also be easier to find "desired" parts in loot instead of just vendor trash.

 
Well I get catering towards the more casual player, because it's still a business and sales rule and I have zero problem with that, my concern is that a casual won't even reach day 35 because they're only playing 2 hours a week.
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Its note even casuals, its new players. Our game is not for casuals. But even good fps guys from rust, ark, whatever need to come in and learn the game and that takes time. Those first 28 or 35 hours will be very fast for a new player and they will feel overwhelmed. The blood moon size option should help you out.

All I've read is forum guys loving it. It took you 28 hours to "think" it might be a snore fest? If you were ill prepared and died a few times, was learning this and that you would not be bored at all. Anyhow I insist you keep playing, IMO you'll think it gets crazy after a while, we have to give players time to prepare. You might be wasting that time being bored lol, it gets nasty.

Now if it gets nasty too slow? Then maybe that is something we need to tweak. I don't think so, but I've been through enough A18 blood moons to respect them.

 
Aside from MMs ability to kill zeds, keep in mind he plays solo. In a group setting, especially a seasoned group, the night will end quicker. Not sure what the solution to this aside from increasing the zombie count variable that touches gamestage and/or number of players online.
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Blood moon count should fix him up.

 
Hello!

I get great performance so far on GTX 1660 (50+FPS). However - I am curious - this patch so to speak - will it change the performance and has any items/features been added? Where can I view patch changelogs?

Great update btw :strawberry:

 
Fingers crossed. :)
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Yes playing in a group is ridiculously easy. I play solo because I don't want others helping me, its like oh here's this steel pick I don't need, here a spare crucible schematic etc... I want to be omega man and do it solo.

I think the blood moon count option will help with groups of guys. I insisted on nerfing group xp too but it hasn't happened yet.

 
Ok, just had a very annoying bug: before starting a POI fetch quest, I put down a storage chest to store additional loot I was carrying.Well, starting the quest, the POI got reset, including deleting my chest (and all its contents).

Maybe you can scan for player placed chests, and keep them in the reset POI, when not colliding with a POI placed block.

Or show some warning message
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haha yeah I unloaded some amazing gear into a car at the POI I did, what a dumbass I was. Poof gone. Make your chests in the middle of the road at least. test it out with just a box first to get an idea of the range.

Future versions should reset the POI when the chunk first loads before you arrive, we have some improvement ideas.

 
A few thoughts from last night's session:
Vultures happily attack people at 100% health now. I miss the old (and wrong, btw) theory that they only attack the injured.

The new small piles of canned food on tabletops in POI's are great, they're keeping me going in our 3-player game, and I think it's absolutely hilarious my kids walk right past them all the time. Since they're usually ahead of me that means I get the free food without having to fight every zombie for every can. Win!

The metallic clunk when that pack of wolves jumped me last night (I was wearing metal armor) threw me off for a couple seconds but after the fight was over I thought it was rather cool. Too metal-door sounding though, need one that's more muffled since the armor is on a fleshy thing. Shouldn't ring like scrap if the body is dampening the vibration.

Whoever was saying anvils are hard to get a few pages back, we had two on/by day 2. Working Stiff boxes in so many POI's really changes the balance of things like that. Loot more craft less. We also found the bellows and a forge book, right AFTER I took that skill point, I might add...RNG has a wicked sense of humor that way.
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No they don't attack 100% health players. Maybe the poi ones don't care, but the wild ones I know won't attack you.

Anvils: random is random. One game you might swim in them, the next you won't.

 
oooooooooo idea: Make m60s be mountable on blocks etc.
This way, in big multilayer settings or something you can just make a but load and set them up wherever and have bunkers!
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I'd appreciate it if you didn't use any part of my avatar for your avatar.

 
A lot of people said "POIS aren't worth the ammo". Kage was one if I recall. So we added more ammo to POIs, and we improved the loot at the end. Here is the thing, with the massive hordes late game and ability to mine all you want, people could still have all the ammo they wanted by mining, but we don't want to force everyone into mining to get ammo. Now some people are saying its too much ammo blah blah blah, well I say you aren't using the right settings. Lower your loot and raise your difficulty, problem will be solved on day 100 I assure you. So all that ammo people are talking about will dry up faster than piss in the desert once people put in 100 hours and find out what Alpha 18 really is.
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Yep he was, among many people though. I thought so too, though my concerns about it were always more tied to the horde nights where it wasn't so much that the POIs were not being worth it, but that you had to loot everything in sight to keep up with late game horde.

The way it is now is a huge improvement for me. I do like the idea of somehow slowing down the progression from primitives to firearms, but if I had to choose between having that progression early game and having no ammo late game, I choose late game ammo.

 
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That is what one tester with a large group of guys said.
Here's my late game experience:

12am to 4am 3 days a week: Mine coal, nitrate and lead.

Prior to crafting gas I'll spend a few full evenings from 12 am to dawn salvaging cars for fuel and parts, or I will deliberately take some long quests and harvest every vehicle on the roads there. Take a different way home and expose new map space.

4am to 8pm 6 days a week: Loot and visit traders on restock day.

Get home at 8 to 9 (next door to trader) and sell everything I don't want. Take a new quest if I turn one in so I can get cracking at 4am or go car harvesting all the way there from 12 am to 4 am.

10 to midnight: Unload vehicle and backpack into storage crates, restock forges, cook if needed, harvest crops if they are ready, make a few base upgrades and get spikes crafting etc.

I basically focus around one trader until I get a vehicle, then I start doing gas runs 3-4 nights a week while exploring for new traders at night. This way I don't waste daylight looking for new traders. I want all the traders exposed so I can get all the books and not miss any great deals, buy up all the ammo (of my specialized weapon) concrete, etc. I can never get enough concrete but I build my own bases as you've seen and rarely stay at a POI because IMO its more work than building a base and I like a few setups.
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Ohhh. Today, for 24 in-game hours, I mined up 36,000 coal. Maybe that was a bit excessive, no? :p (I tend to spend entire days mining. As in, the whole day, night included.)

Also, on a side note, you know the air conditioners? (Pictured below.) You mentioned how they are supposed to drop brass radiators. Well, I can confirm that after wrenching over a dozen of them... I got no radiators. Loot table bug?

6OIxF0c.jpg


 
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