PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[madmole]

I feel like Glue and Duct tape are nerfed in find. I bones are increased, in finding, but now we need 5/7 to make glue so it virtually kill extra bone benefits. And very basic or advance item need duct tape. Can we increase little percentage of them or we decrease bones needed for glue making from 5/7 to 2/5 maybe ?

Work harder. I had stacks of duct tape by day 50 and I repair everything before selling to the trader. Get the harvest perks to double the amount of bones you gather (which I don't bother with and always have stacks of duct tape and meat)

 

[RipClaw]

finally got the demolisher.. he died easy. barb wire fence made it so easy to head shot him and the rest.
game stage was 157, on day 49 and I was level 67. difficulty nomad with max alive at 32.

I had 9 blade traps and 3 turret's to help out but the stuff that helped the most were barb wire fence. they slow down the horde so much that it makes head shots crazy easy. I barely went through 1500 rounds of AP 7.62 ammo.

I'd say forget spikes and just do a few rows of barb wire fence like 3 or 4 and you are set and can easily put in good head shots to make horde nights very easy.

sadly I can't post pics but I did upload a bunch to steam.

Before you consider yourself invincible, you might want to wait until you have several of them at the same time. Recently I read a post from someone who had 17 of the demolishers in the base at the same time.

A question, how well has the barbed wire actually held up ? In earlier Alphas it was always very quickly broken.

 

[madmole]

Isn't that a little bit of an overreaction?I love A18 so far but I had no reason at all to craft q5 items in the previous builds. I would either be lacking the parts or already got a q5-q6 item from a quest or loot by the time I got high enough level to get a perk to lvl 5.

Crafting finally felt useful in this build as an addition to looting/questing. You still need to loot/buy/quest to get enough parts to craft.

At 14 parts needed to craft a q6 item, it still takes 5 items to scrap before you can build 1 new one.

From a "balance" point of view, I don't understand why crafting purples has to go away again.

I would even dare to suggest that the scrapping for parts and the parts required to craft something need to be re-balanced.

For example: Scrap gives 1 part per quality level and craft cost 3 parts per quality level.

In that case, crafting a q6 item would require the scrapping of 18 q1's or 3 q6's. Either way, there is a lot of looting/questing/buying involved (or a lot of luck). The end result is that after several days ingame with active looting/questing, we would be able to craft a single q6 item with random stats which could be worse than that q4-5 item we already have.

I spent way longer on this post than I care to admit. Hopefully it can spark some thoughts on how to keep q6 crafting in the game in a balanced way as a useful addition to looting/questing.

It was an over reaction to add purple crafting back.

 

[madmole]

Ya know, I made a 4k map with Nirtogen's map generator with no mountains / smooth terrain and I really realized that the jagged / huge mountains were the bane of my fps. I know I'm on a low-end computer, but perhaps that's something to look at for performance gains for everyone else. With no huge/jagged mountains, my FPS rarely dips below 40 at the lowest -- I was even running distant terrain on and on a higher resolution. Note that smooth mountains actually weren't that taxing, but the jagged / bumpy ones were.

The terrain shader is very slow with AF and calculating grazing angles. We're working on it.

 

[Vintorez]

Any thoughts that the trader might be too OP in terms of quests? Whenever me or my friends do a session together or play on a non-pvp server, the gameplay often ends up just being chaining quests for loot and exp gains, even for players who don't take perks around it. That the quests also reset PoIs also makes living in the same spot easy for servers that otherwise have loot respawn disabled, especially on RWG when a trader is near a town and there's almost always at least one quest within half a kilometer. Not sure how it plays out when it comes to pvp oriented servers though.

I'd like to see it so how many quests you have to choose from and how often you can take them are also tied to the related perks, as well as quests being notably more difficult (there's a reason he's paying to send you) as they tend to end up being the same as clearing a PoI but with extra rewards. Server adjustable options would also work if you think the current form suits most games.

 

[Xafius]

It was an over reaction to add purple crafting back.

I agree. I like them being loot only tbh.

I like the game to be hard.

 

[Kalen]

It was an over reaction to add purple crafting back.

Just curious what changed in the couple of days that crafting purples was in to bring you to this decision?

 

[altcon]

Please explain "Pink items"
can they be at all tiers? for example can I find a Pink Tier 4 fireaxe and a pink Tier 6?

and does Pink apply just to tools or weapons, etc. ?

That's probably just a Cosmetic Pink Dye. Click on the item / modify , and then remove the Dye Mod.

 

[RipClaw]

LOLS 1.6g should take what, 10 minutes? at most???? dude you need to get off or dial up or maybe alot more than 15 minutes of game playing time

Not everyone has a good Internet connection. 2 years ago I had to download updates over public WiFi connections because my connection at home was incredibly slow. I now have a 50 Mbit/s connection and am grateful for it every day.

 

[madmole]

Nobody will spend a point anymore in better crafting because its a dead end in early midgame and technically its really just wasted points.Maybe it helps very early on but you will regret every point wasted in crafting at some point.

Thats not the way to go. This is like change the game from a crafting/looting game to a looting only game.

I would suggest to improve and extend the stats system on items and find any advantage/disadvantage between crafting and looting. There are for sure dozens of possible stats on item from the oldworld you can not craft yourself like that.

A enchantment system (mincraft) or a enhance, upgrade, strengthen system couldt give a crafting a stable position in the meta.

Any maybe just take it all for real then. No matter how good my selfbuild workbench is in a zombieapocalypse, i will never be able to create things wich are manufactured before in factorys by accurate machines.

When you wanna go this step like remove top tier from crafting, then add this with some well thought purposes.

LOL what? Nobody buys the perk to craft a better item, they buy it to maximize performance with the items the perk governs. Crafting is 5% of that perks allure. I will certainly buy the last rank to maximize damage.

 

[Xafius]

Don't want to add new shotgun ammo just for primitive shotguns. Would like to salvage/keep the blunderbuss model for early game shotgun guys.

I think making the blunderbuss a companion to the junk turret would be cool. Like make it use the same junk ammo and all that.

maybe make it scaleable in levels and whatnot.

I just envision like a dude living in a scrapyard using pieces of everything to make weapons out of junk lying around. Sounds cool lol

 

[Kalen]

LOL what? Nobody buys the perk to craft a better item, they buy it to maximize performance with the items the perk governs. Crafting is 5% of that perks allure. I will certainly buy the last rank to maximize damage.

Isn't that a bad thing? For a crafting game to have crafting only be 5% of a crafting perk's allure?

 

[Roland]

Just curious what changed in the couple of days that crafting purples was in to bring you to this decision?

Recognition that the original A18 decision to keep highest tier items loot only was the best

 

[madmole]

Madmole, when/if you eventually add a dead is dead option I have a fun idea. Imagine if we had a dead is dead hardcore setting that was hard coded so everyone was on the same playing field? We could have a leaderboard for days survived.

Yeah pvp would be fun if you absorbed xp from the player you killed, like 1/4 of it at least. So killing noobs wouldn't give you hardly any but killing that guy who's level 60 would get you a ton of XP. It would give incentive to kill the top dog on the server.

 

[Kalen]

Recognition that the original A18 decision to keep highest tier items loot only was the best

I would've thought legendary items being loot only fits that model. I guess until legendary items are a thing its a moot point anyway.

 

[madmole]

Wow. The value difference surprises me because there is no actual “polishing of parts”. It’s a simple button click to scrap and a few seconds later your item is significantly more valuable AND stackable....
At least I can save more repair kits now. I was using them to polish up guns before selling them but there is no question now what the right choice should be. Always scrap guns.

A tier 2 gun repaired is worth more than the parts you could scrap it for.

 

[Vintorez]

Speaking of gear, could the stats of gear be made to have a display for what the base stats for that weapon are? A player could easily think a a certain type of gear is crap when really they just got unlucky stat rolls on it.

 

[AtomicUs5000]

When we do dead is dead, I wanted a dead is dead light, where you could earn or buy lives. So you could die permanently but it would be a little more forgiving allowing you to buy a life from the trader or trade 10 levels for another life or something. Death would still be horrible, but if you were invested in the game you could keep going for a massive cost.

I’d play it. I always play dead is dead, but if there is some system that governs when dead truly is, that works for me too.

The concept of having lives in modern games is still kept strong in the Doom series, so I don’t find it odd for 7D2D.

 

[Kalex]

Your poor scheduling doesn't constitute an emergency for us. Sorry for the 37 second wait.

37 seconds for 1.6Gb download? Damn I wish those kind of internet speeds were available in my area.

 

[Roland]

I would've thought legendary items being loot only fits that model. I guess until legendary items are a thing its a moot point anyway.

Exactly. Until actual legendary items are added to the game purple tier items are effectively legendary. Once legendary items are in they might open up purple tier to crafting. The design decision is that the highest tier (whatever it is) isn't craftable. Right now that is purple.

When A18 was first released there was a feeling that looting got so much of a boost that it hurt crafting so changes were made to make crafting more desirable again and one of those changes was opening up purple-- but then after discussion TFP decided that opening the top tier went a little too far in the crafting direction.

It's tough creating a balance where both crafting and looting are desirable and rewarding activities without one eclipsing the other.