PC Alpha 21 Dev Diary

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I just did my first lvl 5 building (prison) with the new alpha. Sadly it really sucked. There are a hell lot of zombies in the prison (which is okay) but it became unplayable after like 10 screamers started piling up outside over and over again, breaking through and joining the quest. Its a chain reaction, that cant be avoided, since i cant be silent while fighting against 25 zombies in the prison. And the loot in these lvl 5 buildings is often really disappointing to me in comparison to lvl 3 and 4 ones. These packages (cameras / dart traps etc.) contain items you can craft or buy very easily after some days. So right now i will not do a lvl 5 building again until i have the screamers removed by a mod again..

Other than that i really like the new alpha --> very good cosmetic improvements

 
saltychipmunk said:
But I think that is the whole point. before alpha 21 you could very easily sustain your fuel almost exclusively on salvaging cars and raiding gas stations  which kinda made making your own at scale in the chem station a bit redundant unless you wanted to make some crazy power heavy base which also meant going to the desert biome for shale was also a bit unnecessary. 

And that last point i feel is particularly important because I feel the various biomes need to have more stuff that is unique about them. we only have a handle of them in a universe where most other survival games will come with a dozen or so distinct biomes. 
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If the intention is that they want players to craft their own gas because salvaging is not sustainable I'm all for it, it just feels like a very high progression wall to pass due to the chemistry station needing 50 books in workstations but the recipe for gas only needs 20 books for vehicles. 

Maybe if trader occasionally offers gas as a quest reward that might work too? They already occasionally offer steel.

 
Hoard night day 28.  I was fighting them off but got bored repelling them so decided to jump down. 

Holy crap! That was fun. Kept shooting them with my pistol till it was toast, then switched from my pipe machinegun to my bone knife.

The zombies fly at you and I do mean fly. Even after you kill them. Fly right into me.lol 

Always got to look around because they can still get up behind me. 

It kept getting harder to fight them after piling up all my injury's but I was still kicking ass. The dogs are the hardiest, small fast little @%$#s that home-in on you like a heatsinking missile. 

Finished early and had a list of injury's  a mile long. lol 

Well that was fun, now it's off to the desert. :)  

 
saltychipmunk said:
But I think that is the whole point. before alpha 21 you could very easily sustain your fuel almost exclusively on salvaging cars and raiding gas stations  which kinda made making your own at scale in the chem station a bit redundant unless you wanted to make some crazy power heavy base which also meant going to the desert biome for shale was also a bit unnecessary. 

And that last point i feel is particularly important because I feel the various biomes need to have more stuff that is unique about them. we only have a handle of them in a universe where most other survival games will come with a dozen or so distinct biomes. 
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Yes, that's likely why the reduced it.  However, I think it's been reduced too far.  Right now, it can be barely possible to scavenge enough gas to stay mobile just from cars and the occasional gas pump or barrel.  It takes so long to get a chem station that making your own gas is not an option for quite a while and leaves you short on gas even if you are only using gas for vehicles.  Right now, until you finally unlock the chem station, you aren't going to find enough gas to sustain a vehicle as well as any powered base defenses or lighting or anything else.  And without the fuel saver mod, just sustaining a vehicle is very difficult unless you do nothing bug scrap cars.

By the time I could make gas, I had half a box of engines, half of batteries, a couple hundred lights, a few hundred oil, etc. because I had to scrap so many just to have gas to drive around.  I think that's pushed gas to the extreme other end of the spectrum and somewhere between A20 and (current) A21 would be best.  I'm fine with needing to craft our own gas.  I like that we'd need to do so.  But the chem station just takes way too long to reach right now.  If you had an option to make gas (even at a lower efficiency) from the same time you can unlock crafting gas cans, then it wouldn't be a problem.

 
Lostyouthkhat said:
like 10 screamers started piling up outside over and over again, breaking through and joining the quest. Its a chain reaction, that cant be avoided, since i cant be silent while fighting against 25 zombies in the prison.
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Yes, screamer cycles do go pretty bad sometimes (well almost every time to be honest 😄)

But as far as I know there were no changes on how "heat generation" works in A21 compared to A20.

So this could have happened to you in A20 in the exact same way more or less.

What might be different is:

Was it an infestation quest? Having 25 zombies spawned in and being after you at the same time seems a lot,

and maybe it wasn't really the normal amount for a "dev intended way" to clear a poi. 🤔

Did you run through a whole area and set off several spawn points at the same time? I mean of course if you go bright and loud you draw lots of unwanted attention.

And in addition to this, with the new magazine system, you might not have been that well eqipped considering your weaponry as you are used to from former alphas.

Which means you have to fire more rounds per kill, meaning generating even more heat.

One has to be careful in A21 not to fall for the fact: you still reach higher tier quests pretty fast, just by doing a certain number of quests, like in a20,

but your progression in armament/equipment is dampened by the new system. So you are not as prepared for the higher tier stuff as you might remember and expect from A20.

Well that's part of how they increased difficulty.

So what I mean in short: Ask yourself if you really were well prepared for what you started.

And then again, screamer cycles suck big time.

 
Animal Hospital, Clear and Fetch.

Garage area, very odd approach.



I had entered the outer building first from the roof (originally the main shutter was closed) , shutter door open on the other side - NO ZOMBIES .. and CLEAR inside. At first I thought the zombies were under the building.

YELLOW Marker was on the first shutter door you see, and this is the odd thing I had to press button to open the door for zombies to then spawn in from thin air where there was literally nothing seen in the building previously.

Just an very odd un-immersive way to bring in zombies.

 
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Jay_ombie said:
Animal Hospital, Clear and Fetch.

Garage area, very odd approach.



I had entered the outer building first from the roof (originally the main shutter was closed) , shutter door open on the other side - NO ZOMBIES .. and CLEAR inside. At first I thought the zombies were under the building.

YELLOW Marker was on the first shutter door you see, and this is the odd thing I had to press button to open the door for zombies to then spawn in from thin air where there was literally nothing seen in the building previously.

Just an very odd un-immersive way to bring in zombies.
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Sounds like a bug which should be reported. This POI has been in the game since A20 and used to work perfectly well (haven't been there yet in A21)

 
Jay_ombie said:
Animal Hospital, Clear and Fetch.

Garage area, very odd approach.



I had entered the outer building first from the roof (originally the main shutter was closed) , shutter door open on the other side - NO ZOMBIES .. and CLEAR inside. At first I thought the zombies were under the building.

YELLOW Marker was on the first shutter door you see, and this is the odd thing I had to press button to open the door for zombies to then spawn in from thin air where there was literally nothing seen in the building previously.

Just an very odd un-immersive way to bring in zombies.
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I haven't done that yet in A21 but this sounds like the new trigger spawn method they seem to be using everywhere.  It is a very poor method as you can see zombies spawn in rather than them already being there and they can get bugged if you don't find or use the trigger or if the trigger gets broken so that you can no longer complete the quest.  All in all, it's a very poor design choice.

 
nickasaurus rex said:
Are you still supposed to take damage from murky water when you have a water purifier mod installed in a helmet? I'm still taking damage with the mod installed in my helmet. 

Seems kind of pointless to have a purifier mod that claims to allow the player to "safely drink water" but you still take 5 damage per sip. Unless this is a minor bug (doubt it) I'm guessing the mods only purpose is to prevent dysentery. 
 

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That is not supposed to happen. The water-purifying attachment in my own headgear is working as intended, but if this a repeatable bug for you, please report it. Either click on the "Report an Alpha 21 Bug" red banner at the top of the forums or go to:

https://community.7daystodie.com/announcement/11-report-an-alpha-21-bug/

 
sillls said:
Hoard night day 28.  I was fighting them off but got bored repelling them so decided to jump down. 

Holy crap! That was fun. Kept shooting them with my pistol till it was toast, then switched from my pipe machinegun to my bone knife.

The zombies fly at you and I do mean fly. Even after you kill them. Fly right into me.lol 

Always got to look around because they can still get up behind me. 

It kept getting harder to fight them after piling up all my injury's but I was still kicking ass. The dogs are the hardiest, small fast little @%$#s that home-in on you like a heatsinking missile. 

Finished early and had a list of injury's  a mile long. lol 

Well that was fun, now it's off to the desert. :)  
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Yes! I like hordes in the open. Try it with a bow. It's pretty cool. Run-n-Gun, baby. Run-n-Gun.

 
So is there going to be a rework for magazines? So far it seems if we focus on a build we can get really OP really fast.  Having steel tools and high tier weapons by day 7 seems ridiculous. No this isn't Meta book store looting or other ridiculous nonsense. This is just focusing on a build and doing trade quests as this whole thing intends players to do and at warrior difficulty so it's not like steam rolling the zombies on whatever the easier settings are.

I'm just curious as to where this whole thing with balance is going because so far all this experimental has shown me is that the game is more out of balance now than before. Is this game SP or MP focused? Because trying to balance both is impossible. 

Like is the focus on just early game to the start of mid game with no focus on end game? It's just a bit silly that after so many alphas we have no clear picture on a progression system much less a story or even what the end game content might even look like. 

 
Riamus said:
But the chem station just takes way too long to reach right now.
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I kind of concur. I'm not sure what's intended or what the root causes are, but I was awarded a Workbench and Chem Station by Traders for moving from tier 2 to 3 quests and then tier 3 to 4 quests. I still can't make gas, but I can't yet make a vehicle to use gas. IIRC I'm level 31. I'm kind of okay with the slower progression, but I'm also ready to pull up stakes and move to a city in the Snow biome. I'm used to being mobile with a motorcycle, not a bicycle, but maybe this is an acceptable new reality?

 
I am on Day 28 and I have had the chem station now for maybe 3-4 days (not sure when I unlocked it).  On the minibike though so I haven't moved up to the motorcycle yet or able to make gas in stacks.

 
NekoPawtato said:
Is anyone else swimming in old sham sandwiches? I always end up having stacks and stacks of them now in A21 :D to the point that I could live off of them for quite some time with enough vitamins.
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Yes! It's gotten ridiculous. I'm thinking they just want our characters to be constantly malnourished and ill. "Survival" indeed.

 
Old Crow said:
Yes! It's gotten ridiculous. I'm thinking they just want our characters to be constantly malnourished and ill. "Survival" indeed.
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What is more probable during an apocalypse? That you find fresh food? ... No. You find either mostly canned food (if they didn't loot it already, or old, unsafe food.

 
NekoPawtato said:
Is anyone else swimming in old sham sandwiches? I always end up having stacks and stacks of them now in A21 :D to the point that I could live off of them for quite some time with enough vitamins.
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Yeah, I would never need to make so many antibiotics for the entire game from the number of sham sandwiches I've found.  The loot rate needs a severe reduction for these.

 
Old Crow said:
Oh, I get that. Realism, but only if it's detrimental to the player!
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There are two groups of players I've identified : one that doesn't want game mechanics to go against the player unless they're "fun", and the other that accepts the "unfun" part as in line with the survival game genre. I'm part of the latter. I'm not searching for realism, though... it's a game about zombies, what the heck!

I like, however, when you're challenged with worse odds, and you have to adapt to specific rules (or game features) that are there to hamper you on your survival.

 
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