PC Alpha 18 feedback and balancing thread

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Lets talk about BRASS...

yes Brass is easier to find and with the wasteland mod its pretty good. now...

put yourself on a server running for 100s of days and 10-40 players who have looted all the doors/sinks, etc. so now you have no more brass to find.

option 1- introduce Copper and Zinc and a skill to make brass that requires some advance T6 questing or

option 2 - some sort of metallurgy feature of the chem station like Merlin and allow me to have a chance to get brass from maybe smelting Lead (lead to brass instead of lead to gold as per Merlin)

Option 3 - Brass Balls quest you get from the Trader :)

 
I edit destroyed stone to yield 0-2 scrap brass when destroyed. So if I want brass I go to the wasteland and strip mine. Maybe that could be a solution.
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I'm pretty fine with being not able to loot brass in lategame, but only get it by trader quests via dukes, but it would be nicer, if you can trade in brass additionally. On a server with some players it still takes a long time to loot ALL brass and with the fetch quest you have an additional source of respawning brass.

But the trading values of items is bad, at least if it comes to brass.

 
It means only a 10 year old would want that fast of XP gain. Most players want to slow things down. What use case do you need to be level 20 on day 1?
Lets not use words like "everyone" to add false weight to your statements. Clubs are OP, what are you talking about? Spears have so much range you would have to go AFK to actually take damage.

No need to level past 70, but you want to get there in 2 hours with 1200% xp?

Armor works fantastic without any perks at all, and since it contains crafting tiers at most we could reduce it to 4.
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How did you come into that assumption that only 10 year old want that amount of xp?

Actually how did you come into the conclusion that Clubs are OP and spears have a huge range? It's 18 range and iirc they have a little less gravity to travel further but they are still mediocre. Why would you want to toss your level 6 fully modded spear 18 meters away?

I need to level up because the perks of those weapons are almost useless and require a lot more levels to get the 25% attack speed. Do you know that the perk of the club which activates every 4th hit is basically a 25% flat damage increase on average?

How is that comparable to the godlike sledge hammer splash-aoe-crowd control-roundhouse kick hit? I just want to play with something other than sledgehammer e.g. an axe. I don't recall the axe dealing 100% knockback on every unit around me.

Hell I might even be able to use a stone sledgehammer with 2 turrets perma stunning the enemies with ultra cheap power attacks while my turrets pulverize the horde. You can't do that with any other melee weapon except maybe the knuckles.

 
How much have you invested in electric fences and traps? Slowing them down on the way to your walls should save lots of ammo. At least it seems to do that at the much lower gamestage we are at the moment.
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I probably just got to adapt and change some base design aspects. I could use a lot more spikes and barb wire since I'm swimming in iron. I love the Electric fence but with the design I have now it would be inefficient. So I could make some adjustments to include them. If blade traps got a durability buff I wouldn't mind :)

 
Aka bring a trader 5 tools, 20 cooked food, 50 distilled water, etc. Offer a quest and let people pick a category aka cooking, mining, weapons, tools, gathering. Then you need to go out and bring a trader 1k cement for instance and he gives you a reward based on that.
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I like this idea. Anything that shakes up the current quests.

 
New menus are being worked on, and load screens will have random text generated user tips displayed each time instead of part of the background image.
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Thank you very much for the answer.

 
Is the plan to change the model of the legendary items to make them look unique, rather than just like a recolor or something?
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I hope so. I was pretty stoked when I got a Level 6 Steel Spear and the model was different from the ones I was used to, but that may just be "the" model for Steel speers, not sure.

 
Animal tracker needs some work - I tried it at 3/5 and well it tells me I have an animal around for 20s (green) I can't find it. and once you are high enough level food is not a problem.
I would like to see animal tracker be more like putting down a feeder/blind so animals show up. and I can see them on the map.
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If you have nerdy goggles, cigar, or any other attribute-changing wearable, take it off. Animals do not show reliably on compass otherwise.

 
We're adding sprite markers like fallout/skyrim so finding stuff will be easier, we could maybe use them on the animals if you have that perk.
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One modlet I used on alpha 17 added a yellow/red "aura"-like particle to animals within range. It was interesting. I like the compass (I do perk up on Animal Tracker), but, yeah, sometimes it's hard to spot the animal, particularly rabbits on the grass. The main issue with the compass is that it doesn't work with Lucky Goggles/Cigar on, at least reliably. Sometimes I do see the animal on the compass, sometimes I do not until I take them off.

And speaking of Animal Tracker balance, I guess I'm the only person using it to complete challenge quests? I do find it very useful -- that I had a modlet doing something similar back in alpha 17 goes to show it.

BUT, I don't perk above level 3. I don't need to find dangerous animals, they can find me just fine. And if I have enough points to go above level 3, then I'm no longer worried about animals. It should probably be combined with Huntsman.

 
Is yukka smoothies supposed to warm you up? They are made with snowballs. There's no drink currently (that I'm aware of) that cools you down. Shouldn't there be at least 1 drink that cools you down for desert excursions?

Are trip wires working as intended? I can't seem to series them together. I can, they just don't seem to trigger properly. I wouldn't care but, 5x1 pressure plates lag me out so bad it's hard to decide between lag or low probability of triggering.

On the resource front: I only spend 1-2 game hours repairing after a night 7 even at level 50+. Design is everything. After that I spend 1 game day mining for gunpowder and 2 game days getting enough brass. After that it's a 200 hour wait to replenish my ammo which is mostly automatic in the sense I don't have to sit there watching it dink along. So roughly I end up with 4 days to piddle around waiting for the next night 7.

I don't think it's unreasonable where it is now on resources. I'll just up the bloodmoon rate (although I don't really understand the new BM system). If I do +3 does that mean I get 3 BM's a week w/ 2 that are back to back?

Anyway, I think if entire POI's respawned after 30 days of looting/damage it would solve many online play issues. Although, It may be a bit lag heavy for the current build. It's just the whole single player vs multiplayer: too many resources vs nowhere near enough.

 
Actually how did you come into the conclusion that Clubs are OP and spears have a huge range? It's 18 range and iirc they have a little less gravity to travel further but they are still mediocre. Why would you want to toss your level 6 fully modded spear 18 meters away?
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I'm pretty sure it was about the melee range of the spear: 3.4m. A sledgehammer "only" has 2.6m range. I love the spear because of the added range, which is why I used to love the sledgehammer as well in past alphas. But the club is powerful enough to one-shot most zombies early on with the perks. It is fast, so you attack more, so you get more chances at dismemberment. It uses less stamina. Add a weighted head and a spiked mod, and you can quickly handle zombie hordes. Late game, the club is the baseball bat with a full set of magazines, and it is quite impressive indeed.

Which is not to say the sledgehammer doesn't have its advantages, as you pointed out.

I haven't used knuckles, but they do seem quite weak. The machete hit box seems off somehow, as I keep missing in situations I just don't miss with other weapons. The smaller range, 2.3m, might be the culprit, but... it seems off. Deep Cuts looks impressive, though I haven't used it.

I love the spear. I hit the zombies far away from me, and I don't throw the spear 10, 20m away (particularly after two spears fell through the world). I hit the zombies in the head, and then power attack when they are on the ground. Click on E right after attacking, and the spear is back in your hand before you even see it flying. I don't understand what people see wrong with it.

The only melee weapon I used which disappointed me was the stun baton. I had even perked up on it, and on "paper" it seemed fine, but it was totally ineffective.

 
Is the plan to change the model of the legendary items to make them look unique, rather than just like a recolor or something?
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No it will look just like a normal pickaxe. We will have a LOT of legendary items we can't justify new meshes for all this stuff. Think Diablo, a cool name and attribute, but still the same look so we can get really creative and add a lot of content without feeling art bound.

 
Lets talk about BRASS...
yes Brass is easier to find and with the wasteland mod its pretty good. now...

put yourself on a server running for 100s of days and 10-40 players who have looted all the doors/sinks, etc. so now you have no more brass to find.

option 1- introduce Copper and Zinc and a skill to make brass that requires some advance T6 questing or

option 2 - some sort of metallurgy feature of the chem station like Merlin and allow me to have a chance to get brass from maybe smelting Lead (lead to brass instead of lead to gold as per Merlin)

Option 3 - Brass Balls quest you get from the Trader :)
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Madmole has stated repeatedly that your option 1 is not happening. The horse is dead.

Adding brass to trader quest rewards, scaled to tier, sounds like a good idea. But, then, we already have that in the form of dukes rewards. There's just the interim smelting step.

Besides, servers with 100s of days and 10-40 players are the 1% case. TFP has made it pretty clear they're not concerned about that segment until/unless they get the vast majority's experience well balanced. PoI reset via quests and brass from dukes smelting give a never-ending trickle of brass even when all the easier sources are depleted. This situation is also pretty much why loot respawn options are a thing.

I'm wondering how many late game busy server types still check the trash piles. I'm guessing not many. They're another often-overlooked source of brass. Not a lot, and not guaranteed, but it's out there.

 
Lets talk about BRASS...
yes Brass is easier to find and with the wasteland mod its pretty good. now...

put yourself on a server running for 100s of days and 10-40 players who have looted all the doors/sinks, etc. so now you have no more brass to find.

option 1- introduce Copper and Zinc and a skill to make brass that requires some advance T6 questing or

option 2 - some sort of metallurgy feature of the chem station like Merlin and allow me to have a chance to get brass from maybe smelting Lead (lead to brass instead of lead to gold as per Merlin)

Option 3 - Brass Balls quest you get from the Trader :)
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With trader quests there is an infinite supply of sinks/doors/radiators.

 
Is yukka smoothies supposed to warm you up? They are made with snowballs. There's no drink currently (that I'm aware of) that cools you down. Shouldn't there be at least 1 drink that cools you down for desert excursions?
Are trip wires working as intended? I can't seem to series them together. I can, they just don't seem to trigger properly. I wouldn't care but, 5x1 pressure plates lag me out so bad it's hard to decide between lag or low probability of triggering.
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I was under the impression ALL drinks cool you down, but I haven't actually checked so...

And tripwires work as of a18 stable. Used them to good effect for alarm systems. I'm pretty sure if you're a good distance away from them (like 200m maybe?), any "wandering" zombies actually either will spawn inside the tripwire line of your system, or the game just doesn't take into account anything happening that far from the player, it's outside of the "reality bubble". Please correct me if I'm wrong but that's how it seems.

I had a town block with a tripwire fence running along the outskirts, our main base was a church in the center, then on the outside of the buildings surrounding it, I put tripwires with alarms. They were iffy, to say the least.

You have to set each individual tripwire post's duration too, so if you have them all at the default you might just be not hearing the alarms, or seeing the lights flick on and off or whatever you have set up because they're only triggering for the duration that a zombie is actually crossing them.

 
I'm wondering how many late game busy server types still check the trash piles. I'm guessing not many. They're another often-overlooked source of brass. Not a lot, and not guaranteed, but it's out there.
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I stop checking cabinets and trash after like day 5, unless I'm starving or need lockpicks.

 
No it will look just like a normal pickaxe. We will have a LOT of legendary items we can't justify new meshes for all this stuff. Think Diablo, a cool name and attribute, but still the same look so we can get really creative and add a lot of content without feeling art bound.
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What about pimp items: hats, coats, shoes, pants, and cane?

 
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