PrivateRiem
New member
Me, my girlfriend and a mutual friend had been waiting a long time for alpha 17, and boy was it worth the wait.
We've been playing almost non-stop since 197 was released.
On our first 4 games, one ended because the old base setup I made simply didn't work anymore for BMs, and the others we died of starvation and thirst within the first week.
No easy access to a forge meant we scrounged everything and everywhere desperately trying to find a cooking pot and cooking grill. We also couldn't find any animals for meat whatsoever, so we starved.
Eventually we understood that we needed a forge on day one either from a trader or a nearby house to make those cooking items otherwise it simply wasn't playable.
We were used to playing Warrior + difficulty levels, but we were getting 2-shotted early game so we had to drop it to nomad.
So we started a new game, and ahoy trader had a forge. Grabbed raw iron, made pots and grills, and we finally started our game.
We are now almost level 100, and we built a jeep a few levels ago. I had to mod files to enable table saw and chemistry station because those weren't working.
I also had to disable irradiated vultures because those ruined two BMs by themselves due to errors.
Our leveling progress went along something like this.
First week: level 20 by BM.
Second week: level 50 by BM.
Third week: Level 70 by BM.
Fourth week: Level 85 by BM.
(1 hour days, nomad difficulty, almost 40 hours of play since we noticed the release monday night)
We are now early in week 5 and I'm 94, with ~1800 zombie kills. I also reduced the neardeathtrauma to 20 minutes (Which is a bit low, I will increase it back to 30 minutes) because 60 minutes was WAY too damn long and me and (especially) my girlfriend were getting really angry at how useless we became for an entire ingame day because of it. No crafting, no fighting, can't do anything for an hour is absurd. Early game the debuff is far, far worse, and probably shouldn't affect the intellect perks, so at least you have something to do while you rest.
By now I am unstoppable, and my girlfriend isn't far from that either. Irradiated zombie cops and other big threats are almost a joke at this point because of how tanky we got. There isn't that much of a challenge anymore, and I've been nearly unkillable since BM two. Our gamestage is above 150 now, and ferals are a-plenty when we're looting stuff.
We will increase the difficulty to Warrior soon.
We have maybe done 3-4 quests at trader each in those 31 days. The rewards aren't worth it most of the time and we got rich selling the temporary magazines buffs which are mostly useless, so we don't need the coins either, or the XP. Our trader was only offering quests in the 2, 2.5km+ range so doing that trek for so little reward, no thanks.
I don't really mind the level gating at 20 for the forge, except that cooking tools are a MUST HAVE in the first few days and they are rare enough as to make the game a nightmare if you don't find or craft them early. Additionally, even if you can use a forge before level 20, there isn't much else you can make in it, except for forged iron to repair tools and weapons.
Speaking of weapons, pickaxes and fireaxes suck. Collecting rock and wood with those seem to take forever even with the powermove and it's painful to do. We're lucky we found a somewhat early auger, it helped collect all the rock and sand we needed for concrete, otherwise I would have killed myself if I had been forced to keep slowly hitting rocks for ore with a pickaxe. Iron or steel, doesn't make a big difference really, both are awful. The exception is the shovel which isn't that bad and almost as fast as an auger for sand and clay. I never leave base without a sledgehammer because blowing up crates, doors, walls or ANYTHING really (Especially gun safes) is only viably done with a sledgehammer.
Digging an underground mine is unreasonable, and I have not found any ore while digging, and boy did I try.
Our first base was a small wooden cube and we knew it wouldn't stand a BM, so we built a bunker of upgraded flagstone, walls 3 blocks thick. We put way too many spikes in the entrance and around the base and we got our asses kicked when we got stuck outside the base having to fight off the horde.
I noticed that zombies ALWAYS seek and attack the weakest point of your base, regardless of where it is. We had a vault door, but instead of attacking it, they'd break the nearby wall instead as it was much faster to do so. They do a LOT of block damage, 8000hp is really not that much. Also steel blocks need a different item than regular steel, for QoL purposes. Upgrading blocks to steel accidentally while trying to repair concrete really gets on my nerves.
Second bloodmoon was a mess because of vultures throwing errors, same with third.
Third BM night, almost every block in the base had been upgraded to reinforced concrete, except for two blocks under the workbench I couldn't reach and all zombies tunneled through the walls and got inside the base from there, blowing up the workbench in the process. The base held well for the most part.
Now that everything was reinforced, I added a third layer of concrete (So it was 3 blocks high) and we moved everything from the first floor to the floor above for safety.
On the fourth BM, finally, zombies started going for the door instead of the walls. We had installed blade traps which proved incredibly lethal and essentially killed most of the horde by themselves. No xp from the traps is a damn shame and they should give a least a little, like 1/4.
My girlfriend went for the intellect-bow-user build and I went for the melee-tank build, and it's been working well.
The size of zombie hordes during the first week was a little intense when you don't have a lot to defend yourself or your base. 20+ zombies heat-seeking your guts on day 2-3 is way overtuned.
The progression of the intellect perks is incredibly off. At level 30, when we just unlocked bicycles, we had no wheels or way to make them. By the time we did, we had long ago unlocked the minibike, so we just built that instead. We leveled way faster than we could make use of the intellect perks we unlocked, and so we always overleveled their usefulness.
Cans of acid are way too damn rare. Over 31 days we found a total of 6, and we searched for them specifically.
Bicycles should be much easier to craft compared to the minibike (Including easier wheel crafting for them).
Heavy armor slows you down a whole lot more than light for how little the difference in damage resist is between the two. It's easier to build and repair, sure, and maybe it's meant for light armor to be better by endgame with military gear, I just wish I had known and went for light instead, but whatever, I'll just save my megacrush for horde night, not that I need it anymore anyway.
We REALLY need a perk to reduce bleeding chance because in the first two weeks it was bleed-city for me in my armor. I had to carry 20+ bandage permanently because almost every other hit would cause a bleed. Also, vultures are REALLY annoying for their bleed, and crawlers have an auto-leg-sprain on hit regardless of worn armor which is really annoying.
Crafting time bonus from the intellect perk only works while you're in the station/forge you started the crafting in. As soon as you leave, it reverts back to non-buffed crafting time, which sometimes means going from 5 minutes to 30 minutes crafting.
Iron clubs are far better than sledgehammers right now because Sledges have barely any working mods, and even modded to reduce stamina usage still consume an excessive amount of stamina, along with being way too slow. I haven't tried knives. Early game bows are awful for damage and killing purposes but endgame bows are absolute powerhouses with all that extra bonus damage stacked on top.
Flurry of blows bonus damage doesn't seem to be working at all with my club or my fists. Mods specifically mentioning hammers don't work for any of the hammers.
By now, we're finding an absurd amount of pistols, shotguns and hunting rifles that we simply do not use, and it's taking a lot of fun out of the exploring and scavenging part of the game. We have so many we bored two traders off buying our guns and we spent 2 ingame days in our jeep looking for more traders to sell our junk. Finding 20 pistols, or rocket launchers or what have you isn't exciting anymore, and we're not really finding anything else. I recently found the torch mod for my club and I've hardly had more fun since, it's absolutely amazing.
Damn shame none of the mods recipes are currently functioning, as we have found a lot of those that we'd love to use, especially for the bows.
For the first time we simply have not been using guns much or at all in our game. The AK-47 we had did come in handy defending the door during a BM but wasn't used after that. My club is far too powerful and my girlfriend's bow does more damage than my club, so why bother with guns when crafting munitions is so time consuming? We have tons of feathers and steel arrowheads are easy to make. Shotgun turrets are great however.
The lights on the jeep don't work, which is a shame because we can't see rocks that well at night. Additionally, the jeep seems incredibly weak. It will almost always break before running out of gas, which is really odd.
For bugs / suggestions,
flying minibike (Something we've seen in alpha 16)
(Might be related to chunk updates from 197 to 199) We had trees that couldn't be hit, and a tree that gave infinite XP (Was stuck at 0 hp)
Zombies bears can go through vault doors without being stopped, as if the door isn't there.
Zombie have no footstep sounds.
Bones are slightly too rare.
We're obviously loving this update, even if a lot of stuff is broken. Alpha 17 is far from ready for stable, but we look forward to it.
More feedback may be added as we keep playing.
We've been playing almost non-stop since 197 was released.
On our first 4 games, one ended because the old base setup I made simply didn't work anymore for BMs, and the others we died of starvation and thirst within the first week.
No easy access to a forge meant we scrounged everything and everywhere desperately trying to find a cooking pot and cooking grill. We also couldn't find any animals for meat whatsoever, so we starved.
Eventually we understood that we needed a forge on day one either from a trader or a nearby house to make those cooking items otherwise it simply wasn't playable.
We were used to playing Warrior + difficulty levels, but we were getting 2-shotted early game so we had to drop it to nomad.
So we started a new game, and ahoy trader had a forge. Grabbed raw iron, made pots and grills, and we finally started our game.
We are now almost level 100, and we built a jeep a few levels ago. I had to mod files to enable table saw and chemistry station because those weren't working.
I also had to disable irradiated vultures because those ruined two BMs by themselves due to errors.
Our leveling progress went along something like this.
First week: level 20 by BM.
Second week: level 50 by BM.
Third week: Level 70 by BM.
Fourth week: Level 85 by BM.
(1 hour days, nomad difficulty, almost 40 hours of play since we noticed the release monday night)
We are now early in week 5 and I'm 94, with ~1800 zombie kills. I also reduced the neardeathtrauma to 20 minutes (Which is a bit low, I will increase it back to 30 minutes) because 60 minutes was WAY too damn long and me and (especially) my girlfriend were getting really angry at how useless we became for an entire ingame day because of it. No crafting, no fighting, can't do anything for an hour is absurd. Early game the debuff is far, far worse, and probably shouldn't affect the intellect perks, so at least you have something to do while you rest.
By now I am unstoppable, and my girlfriend isn't far from that either. Irradiated zombie cops and other big threats are almost a joke at this point because of how tanky we got. There isn't that much of a challenge anymore, and I've been nearly unkillable since BM two. Our gamestage is above 150 now, and ferals are a-plenty when we're looting stuff.
We will increase the difficulty to Warrior soon.
We have maybe done 3-4 quests at trader each in those 31 days. The rewards aren't worth it most of the time and we got rich selling the temporary magazines buffs which are mostly useless, so we don't need the coins either, or the XP. Our trader was only offering quests in the 2, 2.5km+ range so doing that trek for so little reward, no thanks.
I don't really mind the level gating at 20 for the forge, except that cooking tools are a MUST HAVE in the first few days and they are rare enough as to make the game a nightmare if you don't find or craft them early. Additionally, even if you can use a forge before level 20, there isn't much else you can make in it, except for forged iron to repair tools and weapons.
Speaking of weapons, pickaxes and fireaxes suck. Collecting rock and wood with those seem to take forever even with the powermove and it's painful to do. We're lucky we found a somewhat early auger, it helped collect all the rock and sand we needed for concrete, otherwise I would have killed myself if I had been forced to keep slowly hitting rocks for ore with a pickaxe. Iron or steel, doesn't make a big difference really, both are awful. The exception is the shovel which isn't that bad and almost as fast as an auger for sand and clay. I never leave base without a sledgehammer because blowing up crates, doors, walls or ANYTHING really (Especially gun safes) is only viably done with a sledgehammer.
Digging an underground mine is unreasonable, and I have not found any ore while digging, and boy did I try.
Our first base was a small wooden cube and we knew it wouldn't stand a BM, so we built a bunker of upgraded flagstone, walls 3 blocks thick. We put way too many spikes in the entrance and around the base and we got our asses kicked when we got stuck outside the base having to fight off the horde.
I noticed that zombies ALWAYS seek and attack the weakest point of your base, regardless of where it is. We had a vault door, but instead of attacking it, they'd break the nearby wall instead as it was much faster to do so. They do a LOT of block damage, 8000hp is really not that much. Also steel blocks need a different item than regular steel, for QoL purposes. Upgrading blocks to steel accidentally while trying to repair concrete really gets on my nerves.
Second bloodmoon was a mess because of vultures throwing errors, same with third.
Third BM night, almost every block in the base had been upgraded to reinforced concrete, except for two blocks under the workbench I couldn't reach and all zombies tunneled through the walls and got inside the base from there, blowing up the workbench in the process. The base held well for the most part.
Now that everything was reinforced, I added a third layer of concrete (So it was 3 blocks high) and we moved everything from the first floor to the floor above for safety.
On the fourth BM, finally, zombies started going for the door instead of the walls. We had installed blade traps which proved incredibly lethal and essentially killed most of the horde by themselves. No xp from the traps is a damn shame and they should give a least a little, like 1/4.
My girlfriend went for the intellect-bow-user build and I went for the melee-tank build, and it's been working well.
The size of zombie hordes during the first week was a little intense when you don't have a lot to defend yourself or your base. 20+ zombies heat-seeking your guts on day 2-3 is way overtuned.
The progression of the intellect perks is incredibly off. At level 30, when we just unlocked bicycles, we had no wheels or way to make them. By the time we did, we had long ago unlocked the minibike, so we just built that instead. We leveled way faster than we could make use of the intellect perks we unlocked, and so we always overleveled their usefulness.
Cans of acid are way too damn rare. Over 31 days we found a total of 6, and we searched for them specifically.
Bicycles should be much easier to craft compared to the minibike (Including easier wheel crafting for them).
Heavy armor slows you down a whole lot more than light for how little the difference in damage resist is between the two. It's easier to build and repair, sure, and maybe it's meant for light armor to be better by endgame with military gear, I just wish I had known and went for light instead, but whatever, I'll just save my megacrush for horde night, not that I need it anymore anyway.
We REALLY need a perk to reduce bleeding chance because in the first two weeks it was bleed-city for me in my armor. I had to carry 20+ bandage permanently because almost every other hit would cause a bleed. Also, vultures are REALLY annoying for their bleed, and crawlers have an auto-leg-sprain on hit regardless of worn armor which is really annoying.
Crafting time bonus from the intellect perk only works while you're in the station/forge you started the crafting in. As soon as you leave, it reverts back to non-buffed crafting time, which sometimes means going from 5 minutes to 30 minutes crafting.
Iron clubs are far better than sledgehammers right now because Sledges have barely any working mods, and even modded to reduce stamina usage still consume an excessive amount of stamina, along with being way too slow. I haven't tried knives. Early game bows are awful for damage and killing purposes but endgame bows are absolute powerhouses with all that extra bonus damage stacked on top.
Flurry of blows bonus damage doesn't seem to be working at all with my club or my fists. Mods specifically mentioning hammers don't work for any of the hammers.
By now, we're finding an absurd amount of pistols, shotguns and hunting rifles that we simply do not use, and it's taking a lot of fun out of the exploring and scavenging part of the game. We have so many we bored two traders off buying our guns and we spent 2 ingame days in our jeep looking for more traders to sell our junk. Finding 20 pistols, or rocket launchers or what have you isn't exciting anymore, and we're not really finding anything else. I recently found the torch mod for my club and I've hardly had more fun since, it's absolutely amazing.
Damn shame none of the mods recipes are currently functioning, as we have found a lot of those that we'd love to use, especially for the bows.
For the first time we simply have not been using guns much or at all in our game. The AK-47 we had did come in handy defending the door during a BM but wasn't used after that. My club is far too powerful and my girlfriend's bow does more damage than my club, so why bother with guns when crafting munitions is so time consuming? We have tons of feathers and steel arrowheads are easy to make. Shotgun turrets are great however.
The lights on the jeep don't work, which is a shame because we can't see rocks that well at night. Additionally, the jeep seems incredibly weak. It will almost always break before running out of gas, which is really odd.
For bugs / suggestions,
flying minibike (Something we've seen in alpha 16)
(Might be related to chunk updates from 197 to 199) We had trees that couldn't be hit, and a tree that gave infinite XP (Was stuck at 0 hp)
Zombies bears can go through vault doors without being stopped, as if the door isn't there.
Zombie have no footstep sounds.
Bones are slightly too rare.
We're obviously loving this update, even if a lot of stuff is broken. Alpha 17 is far from ready for stable, but we look forward to it.
More feedback may be added as we keep playing.
So far, I've only died once, and it wasn't even on a Blood Moon (got swarmed in some dusty attic).
