-Tons of new environment assets, improved old ones and shapes (over 250 new shapes, including new farm plot shapes). Those assets were added to ALL the old POI as they got an art pass, and there are dozens of new POI (inconclusive, but we might be talking about more than 200 new POI from tiny random road encounters like an ambulance and a few supplies to Tier 5+ POIs).
-Hundreds of new doors (we might be talking about close to 1000, including hatches, drawer doors, tiny doors, medium doors, garage doors....etc) all of them can be destroyed in various stages and the player can attack through "all of the holes" in all of those stages of damage. Sounds very pornographic.
-POI difficulty marker, a big introductory label will show the difficulty of the POI you are in upon entrance (it disappears shortly after and goes to the top right of the screen, in the form of a tiny label) , with a system of skulls. So a tier 1 will show 1 skull in the forest, a tier 2 will show 2 skulls, etc. The biome difficulty bonus will add to those skulls, so the same tier one that has 1 skull in the forest will show almost 4 skulls in the wasteland, so better be careful then.
-Tier 6 POI confirmed.
-New Infestation quest, exactly like "Clear " but only dedicated to Zombies, so you have to clear a nest of Zombies. There are many more zombies than in an average "Clear" quest.
-Console news: We are getting 7dtd on Consoles within the next 2 years. They are working hard on finishing the game and optimizing the heck out of it. Be aware, optimizations are strong in this alpha, specially water, trees and Zombie pathing with the new AI throttling code that allows for less data being sent from entities the further away they are. There are also a lot of network optimizations, which will affect multiplayer directly. All of those optimizations have the direct goal of making 7dtd playable in consoles, while increasing the performance on PC by leaps and bounds (expect less bumps in PC experience).
-New trader compounds (all are redone) and trader item balance: Removed Secret stash and balanced all the items of each trader to increase a bit over your gamestage, so no more quality 6 Anti-Air tanks on day 1. For example, you have gamestage 40 and you have a quality 1 iron pickaxe: the trader will then show you quality 2 or 3 iron tools if any.
-Trader items are not independent from each player, to avoid extreme unbalanced multiplayer gameplay (more than 3 veteran players fully equiped would break through even the most difficult POI without a sweat). Player Gamestage will show more and more items from the trader the higher it is, so a player with lesser gamestage will only see a fraction of what a player with higher gamestage would see, but from the same general storage.
Trader "Tier completed" rewards now show 5 choices instead of 4. Alrighty.
-This is a big one, smaller loot containers will dissappear once you've looted them. That includes garbage bags, purses, bird nests, small and medium medical and bullet supplies, etc. Now, stop crying about the bird nests already and hear me out: Medium sized crates, cabinets and drawers will switch to their "open" form once looted. If you don't take all the items from inside, then they will never switch to the empty/open form. They will also never respawn if you put or leave something (anything) inside.
Vehicle damage: They now do higher damage to entities, but take more damage across the board, no more hitting a cement wall and expect 1% damage. You will now take more like a 15-25% damage with a full speed motocycle collision against a hard cement wall. Still very lenient, but playable.
Bring repair kits.
Better water: Faster flowing, waay more performant (one surface mesh equals less CPU calculations). It looks good. The single-block water dropped on a flat surface looks weird though, but it might get some "smoothing love" in the future. Beaches and rivers look way better.
On that note, the Dew collector workstation has 3 water dropplets that gradually transform into 3 water units with about 3 per 60 minutes (default day) with some speed variation. You can take them and they function like normal clean water in recipes, they just don't drop any jars once consumed.
Glue recipes are taken into consideration, unknown if they use murky water (found in loot) or normal water (dew collector, trader and rare special loot).
Spears are not throwable, but they are STRONG (power attack hits very hard), thick and with BIG reach. They also have piercings? . Straight from Brazzers that one. They are more like lances now.
They showed the Learn by looting system, which is explained on the OP, so I won't say any new stuff about it. It sounds very cool and seems to play better. We just have to try it.
They showed the new rebalanced perks. They are concentrated and beefier when stricktly talking about weapons, also with the former flurry of blows from agility fragmentated into each attribute (with other names) combat builds seem more balanced. Other perks, like Master Chef were rebalanced to make default cooking slower but the perk investments way better. Overall they didn't show nearly enough about perks, but be aware that investing just one point in Pummel Pete will give you such an amount of club bonuses that you will forever be set apart from your peers, in addition to a fleeting tiny bonus to "skill book finds" of that type, tiny bonus that goes back to normal once the perk is maxed out. It doesn't really affect the other magazine findings. Not too much anyway. If the final chest gives you 100 different magazines, the you will probably get 5 of clubs because of the bonuses from the perk you chose. So it's not much.
Fire hazards shown: You move a valve or switch off a button and they stop. Still a bit sudden and rough in their "switching off" visuals, but they look cool . Players will get stuck and slow and will burn if they go through them while they are still emitting flames.
Quality of life features:
Status effects will show a tiny word next to the status icon so you can guess where your ailment/buff comes from without having to go to your character window in search of a description.
Tutorials are more detailed, short of having a Fun Pimp popping out of the screen and moving your mouse to the correct action. Detailed tutorial descriptions now show on the top left until hidden/completed.
A22 features confirmed and well under way:
Character Creation System: About 75% done, they decided to push it back to a22 because they want a good amount of customizable options to offer the player.
Bandits: Well under way, including models, bandit-controlled POIs and random encounters. They are confirmed for a22, this time not on paper. Really. For sure this time. Surely. Certainly. They even deleted the random ones from a21 in wait for a better "ducking and surrounding" AI. Be patient they say. Stop with that bloody axe they say. What are you doing so close to me with those bloodshot eyes, step bro.
Armours are confirmed for a22. For sure this time. For God's sake, for family.
Rick said a date, around first half of May. That, in my biased and evil opinion, can't be further from the truth and it's wishful thinking, but we love him for that. The statistical rate of TFP Bug fixing is 1 tough bug every 1.5 days, that means we will ge a21 EXPERIMENTAL in the first half of June, even later if things go wrong, That is if there really are just half of the 63 MF bugs left for experimental and no more pop up (unlikely in a huge game like this).
They hope to achieve a22 in a shorter timespan. Still 8 to 10 months, but that's short and great to get us to enjoy a21.