PC Best alpha and launch so far! "Cough" craft vs loot....

A

Amotaraso

New member
Hi Fun Pimps!

I just wanna say a couple of things after I have been playing this patch with my friends. I will also keep it short.

This gotta be the best launch so far. Absolutely wonderful patch. Smooth, close to no bugs, not a single game breaking bug (within my group of 5-6 people).

Game looks wonderful! Fps basically doubled for me. Some of my friends has old crappy comps, and they got quite the surprise with performance as well. So, great job there!

All in all, we have all been so surprised by alpha 18. To us, you killed it! Having a blast here, gaming away many hours every day, since you launched the experimental. And still enjoying every minute of it.

I don't really have any negative things to counter all this positive with. More just a couple of things I would like to see changed, or improved upon. With the vast amounts of improvements and balance changes (which you rocked btw), there gotta be some things you might have missed or overlooked.

By couple of things, I'm basically just talking about َne subject;

Crafting vs Looting

It feels as if this needs a tweak. I love the fact that we can't craft tier 6. Amazing change. It gives a reason to loot, especially with the RNG system introduced. Loving it!

However, the jump feels flawed. The moment you hit a tier 6, there's often no good reason to ever look at tier 5 again. The reason being, the number of mod slots.

If I were to balance this, I would have no difference in mod slots between tier 5 and 6. Keep it the same, so the crafting still makes some sort of sense.

And even then, I doubt it's enough. For example, I went 5/5 heavy armor early, yet I never crafted a single piece. The amount of mats I need, compared to the armor I have already looted, just don't compare.

So I basically only specialize, to gain more benefit from the heavy armor I wear, not actually crafting. It seems a little dull.... I might have missed something and you're laughing at me now.

But I imagine that maybe crafting your own stuff, could give better stats or extra stats or something. I don't know the answer, I just know it doesn't feel right.

In our current world, I haven't crafted a single tier item since Iron Knucles Tier 3, at day 4 if I'm not mistaken. We are at day 50 now, and I don't have any loot bonus items, yet every single piece of item I use, is looted, not crafted.

It also doesn't help, that we are looting tier 6 before first Blood Moon. Maybe the numbers are off, but several tier 6 items that early seems like a miss calculation.

I was looking forward to the whole RNG crafting system. You know? Crafting several identical items, just to try get an awesome roll.

But there is no point, when a Tier 6 has the extra mod slot. Just ain't worth the time, struggle, and cost. It's a shame.

I'm not saying this is how you intended the system to be. I'm just pointing it out, as it makes very little sense to me/us, and also feels like a diamond overlooked.

Personally, the RNG mechanic is the thing I have been hyped for the most. It just fits!

Summing up:

Tier 5 & 6 has same mod slot count

Crafting should be (or be able to be) better, regardless of tier

Reduce chance of high tier items dropping

Hope some of this info is useful :)

Regards

 
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Like you said, tier 6 stuff spawns way too often and way too soon making it fairly easy to have a couple tier six tools/weapons by the first bloodmoon. I had a tier 6 leather chest and a tier 6 steel sledgehammer by my first blood moon in A18. The horde didn't know what hit them. lol

Needing the parts in an of itself isn't a bad thing but the large amount you need versus the likely hood of flat out finding a tier 5 or even a tier 6 before you can gather enough parts make a tier 5 makes it a total waste of time.

I would like to see either the specialty parts go away or become player craftable in some way. Would also be cool if players "could" craft a tier 6 as a rare RNG proc when crafting a tier 5.

The revamp to the perk system and crafting is great and I'm loving it but crafting was handicapped hard at the finish line by making looting the only way to get the best gear. It really goes against the "The survival horde crafting game" slogan.

 
i definitely agree that the STEEP increase in materials per increased quality means you constantly hold off on crafting that high end armor...especially because you're likely to loot a better off-type piece, or a nearly as good or better piece before you get the parts.

 
We have been thinking and talking about the craft/loot balance. You're all guinea pigs. =)

Some of what Amotaraso wrote is heading in the direction we are thinking to go but I can't say what it will be exactly.

 
Agree. I am loving the alpha. Much more than a17 which for me was the only alpha I enjoyed less than previous one.

But yes, looting is too powerful vs crafting right now IMO.

 
I wonder if tying crafting to several different attributes might not be much better than tying it to one.

Seems like with this setup, you're never going to be able to craft useful quality version of most tools & weapons before you loot them. Skill progression is so slow and looting is so fundamental and constant that only your specialized skills will offer you a chance of crafting something good before you've already looted it. Secondary skills might as well not have crafting tied to it at all.

I'm not sure this is much better than the previous situations where you'd be maxed out on tools & weapons fairly early if you were willing to beeline towards high intelligence early game.

 
I wonder if tying crafting to several different attributes might not be much better than tying it to one.
Seems like with this setup, you're never going to be able to craft useful quality version of most tools & weapons before you loot them.
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If you are talking about the ones you decide to to specialize into, that's exactly what they wanted. The problem is even in the ones I specialize, I end up using looted items.

Now that I need to choose what to craft, at least those items should be better crafted than looted. Right now I am using looted weapon and tool, even tho I specialized in a weapon perk and tool crafting perks. I didnt even know tier 6 isnt craftable, and I think it sucks. Reason to go out and loot is to get the items we didnt specialize into crafting. I was having a hard time beeing motivated to spec into crafting perks before even knowing this.

 
Perhaps add a mechanic that recipes you perked into have lower item usage, when having higher perks? Instead of 100 parts at level 5, you'll have 50 at most (due to bonuses)?

 
Increased material cost for better items feels like a punishment, not a reward.

Oh wow I get 25 instead of 23 damage, but I need 20% more mats (depending on the weapon thats a lot) that is never going to make a difference.

Just increase the crafting cost for ALL itemqualities, make crafting cost a bunch. But DON'T punish the player for getting better.

Also yes looting should be more powerful, but crafting should be a viable option for dire times.

 
I've been going with a heavy armour build. Making Iron armour was fine, though it was annoying that I couldn't make anything better than tier 2. (the first point in a perk only 'unlocking' tier 1 stuff is kind of ass, tbh. It feels like t1 is the default, and each point should send you up a level.)

Anyway, I made myself a full set of iron armour, but I can't make steel.

I have the metal, I have the blueprint, but I don't have any 'armour pieces'.

What are the pieces exactly? Because I assume that steel armour is made from forged steel, leather, glue and sewing kits.

What else do I need? Metal plates? Isn't that what the forged steel is for?

Anyway, the only way to make steel armour is to have steel armour parts, but the only way to get the parts is to scrap intact pieces of steel armour.

Why? What's the point of an armour recipe that requires you to destroy the end-result of the recipe in order to create one?

That's like a cake-recipe that requires you to throw an entire intact store-bought cake into the mixing bowl, in order to make a cake.

Surely any sensible person would just eat the store-cake?

You can't even use low-rank pieces to make a better piece, because each low-rank piece will give you a pittance of parts, and the high-rank one you can make will require like... thirty.

Crappy steel armour (or weapons, or tools) aren't common enough to make the blueprint for a good quality one cost a dozen of the crappy ones.

Franky, I don't really like this 'parts' mechanic at all.

It works ok on guns, and much better now that 'pistol parts' can make magnums, and 'double-barrel shotgun parts' aren't a seperate thing from 'pump action shotgun parts' (I don't like that the double-barrel shotgun is a sawn-off by default, I want my double-barrel full-length, but that's another matter entirely)

Even melee weapons are ok with it, because there are more sources for those parts.

'Steel Tool Parts' though? steel tools aren't common enough for me to stock up enough to make decent quality steel pickaxes for me and my group...

Maybe of all those low-rank low-durability wrenches gave steel tool parts?

(maybe they do already, I don't remember checking)

If steel-tool-parts were shared between all steel tools and melee weapons (machetes, knuckles, clubs, spears) then you'd be able to stockpile them and choose what you want to prioritise making, instead of having not enough of any of them to make anything decent.

In that case though, then you're just using steel-tool-parts as 'uncraftable forged steel'

That said, using steel blade parts from a machete to make a spear makes perfect sense to me. Steel knucles have blades too.

Less so on something like a shovel or a baseball bat.

Unrelated, the final tier of club should definitely be made of metal. Probably steel, to match up with the rest of the steel-tier-melee weapons.

I like baseball bats, but it's weird to go from a wooden club to an iron reinforced club, then back to just wood again. A metal studded club should definately do more damage than a pure wooden baseball bat. Maybe if the baseball bat was one of those metal ones? (aluminium over an oaken core?)

But yeah, TLDR: to echo the comment above, incrasing the crafting cost as you level your skills up feels like a punishment for getting better. It sucks.

I disagree with the thing about boosting crafting costs globally though. Crafting is a big part of the game. I want the best items in the game to be crafted, after you've looted a ton of mediocre-to-good weapons, and taken them apart for pieces.

I'm totally down for craft-able t6 or 7 max quality weapons, which require you to have found and dismantled dozens of tier 1-4 items to gather the pieces for, and have maxed out the relevent skill-tree.

I'd rather put the work in to build something, instead of just randomly finding a t6 shotgun because rng smiled on me as I opened a random crate I found in some dude's attic.

 
It feels as if this needs a tweak. I love the fact that we can't craft tier 6. Amazing change. It gives a reason to loot, especially with the RNG system introduced. Loving it!However, the jump feels flawed. The moment you hit a tier 6, there's often no good reason to ever look at tier 5 again. The reason being, the number of mod slots.

If I were to balance this, I would have no difference in mod slots between tier 5 and 6. Keep it the same, so the crafting still makes some sort of sense.
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Although tier 6 seems to drop quite often. Every tier 6 item I own has only 4 mod slots. RNG and all that. Seems tier 6 items with 5 mod slots are rare indeed, if they exist at all. I also have a tier 5 Pistol with a bigger clip size than a tier 6 I found.

Personally I feel that crafting should never be able to produce a better item than finding, or else we would be back to never having to leave our base, like in A17.

 
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Although tier 6 seems to drop quite often. Every tier 6 item I own has only 4 mod slots. RNG and all that. Seems tier 6 items with 5 mod slots are rare indeed, if they exist at all. I also have a tier 5 Pistol with a bigger clip size than a tier 6 I found.
Personally I feel that crafting should never be able to produce a better item than finding, or else we would be back to never having to leave our base, like in A17.
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Disagree. First, they added tons of things for looting, including recipes that will save you many perk points, and uncraftable items like parts.

Second, you have to specialize in a few perk lines to be able to craft the top tier items. So you still need to find the ones you didnt specialize into.

meanwhile, crafting now is almost useless, same as going out looting was useless in a17

 
Skill progression is so slow and looting is so fundamental and constant that only your specialized skills will offer you a chance of crafting something good before you've already looted it.
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Up the XP gain so you get perk points faster.

 
Up the XP gain so you get perk points faster.
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That still doesn't make crafting viable. Now you can just spec into lucky looter faster and get your tier 6 stuff that much quicker while you still ignore crafting.

I ended up skipping A17 for multiple reason both related and unrelated to A17. So with that said from what I know looting was as much of a waste of time in A17 as crafting is now in A18. With A18 they attempted to make looting viable again but ended up going too far in adjusting looting and crafting which ultimately made crafting a waste of your effort and time.

They will eventually fix it but for now it is far easier to just loot what you need instead of wasting time attempting to craft what will always be an inferior product.

 
That still doesn't make crafting viable. Now you can just spec into lucky looter faster and get your tier 6 stuff that much quicker while you still ignore crafting.
I ended up skipping A17 for multiple reason both related and unrelated to A17. So with that said from what I know looting was as much of a waste of time in A17 as crafting is now in A18. With A18 they attempted to make looting viable again but ended up going too far in adjusting looting and crafting which ultimately made crafting a waste of your effort and time.

They will eventually fix it but for now it is far easier to just loot what you need instead of wasting time attempting to craft what will always be an inferior product.
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I was offering a suggestion specifically to this point of yours "Skill progression is so slow" Upping XP is the obvious counter.

Crafting/Looting obviously needs more balancing though as evidenced by what what several Dev Posts have stated.

 
We have been thinking and talking about the craft/loot balance. You're all guinea pigs. =)
Some of what Amotaraso wrote is heading in the direction we are thinking to go but I can't say what it will be exactly.
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Yeah the mat costs are just way to high that I usually don't bother crafting anything that uses parts as its just to hard to find the ones I need usually. Also the mats doubling for each tier for stuff like iron pickaxe has got to stop or be toned down some. a T5 iron pickaxe costing 100 forged iron is kinda nuts.

The problem with crafting is two fold as well: 1: you need a diff stat for diff weapons, so your basically forced to loot them, this is why nerfing the loot will hurt a ton with the curret system thats in the game. This is due to the slow leveling speed mainly. 2: The mat costs and difficulty of getting certan types of parts makes it pretty much unfeasable to bother trying to craft it yourself, its better to loot it. I've never been able to find enough motorized tool parts to ever make one as a example.

Also higher tier things when scrapped need to give more parts back, a T3-4 item should be giving much more than the same 3 parts you get out of a tier 1 item.

I do admit loot does need some tweaking though, Its too easy to find tier 4-6 items in loot even by day 7. The main reason its too easy is the reinforced chests at the end of virtually every Poi, they seriously need their loot nerfed hard with how common they are. I shouldn't be finding 3-4 guns in 1 of those chests at all, I should be lucky to find 1, and even luckier that its not some crappy tier 1. Then again I think the whole treasure room mechanic is kinda stupid in the first place with the setting of the game. I mean if its like a military base, or something yeah I can see, but every little house shouldn't have a room full of treasure. The gun and normal safes are fine, they aren't that common. But yeah those reinforced chests need a serious loot nerf, keep the ammo the same, but drastically lower the chance of guns and armor.

My current game I have a tier 6 iron club by day 3, my trader had one for sale for 5600 dukes, just sold a ton of loot t3-4 stuff and did quests to get the cash. Unlike many players I am not a pack rat, if I have no immediate use for a weapon or armor I repair and sell it, or scrap it. I see players at times with storage boxes full of guns and its just like... Why? you can only use one at a time, there is no real point to stockpile them like that.

 
That still doesn't make crafting viable. Now you can just spec into lucky looter faster and get your tier 6 stuff that much quicker while you still ignore crafting.
I ended up skipping A17 for multiple reason both related and unrelated to A17. So with that said from what I know looting was as much of a waste of time in A17 as crafting is now in A18. With A18 they attempted to make looting viable again but ended up going too far in adjusting looting and crafting which ultimately made crafting a waste of your effort and time.

They will eventually fix it but for now it is far easier to just loot what you need instead of wasting time attempting to craft what will always be an inferior product.
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Crafting would be worth more if it wasn't so easy to find the stuff in loot. I usually never craft anything tool/armor wise other than maybe leather armor or padded armor at the most. Basically anything that requires parts I just sell the parts as its to much of a pain in the arse to gather enough parts to make anything, and more often than not by the time I do gather the parts i've already looted one thats better than I'd be able to craft.

The system needs some tweaking, but you have to be careful where item quality is determined by its perk in a stat now insted of just intel, if you kill the loot too hard, no one will ever get items outside of their spec worth using from loot. I do feel as I mentioned that higher tier items should scrap into more parts. If it takes 12 parts to make a t3 item, a t3 should scrap into at least 6-7 parts. Then again, why would you scrap a t3 if thats the best you can craft and you just looted one. I generally only scrap t1 items that have parts, t2 and up I repair and sell to trader usually. As its not worth scrapping them when you get more dukes than the parts would be worth.

 
Personally I feel that crafting should never be able to produce a better item than finding, or else we would be back to never having to leave our base, like in A17.
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I strongly Agree with this. A17 crafting was too overpowered. After the first game, I put restrictions on myself regarding what I could craft to make looting fun again. In A18, looting is fun again. I sympathize with those that feel crafting has been nerfed, though. I don't believe I've crafted a tool, weapon, or armor in my current playthrough because of the lack of parts to craft with / finding good loot. There probably needs to be a balance in that respect. But no top quality item crafting should be done.

 
Increased material cost for better items feels like a punishment, not a reward.Oh wow I get 25 instead of 23 damage, but I need 20% more mats (depending on the weapon thats a lot) that is never going to make a difference.

Just increase the crafting cost for ALL itemqualities, make crafting cost a bunch. But DON'T punish the player for getting better.

Also yes looting should be more powerful, but crafting should be a viable option for dire times.
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Thing is, by going out and looting ALL the stuff needed for crafting, chances are one comes back with a better version of the item one wanted to craft in the first place.

 
There probably needs to be a balance in that respect. But no top quality item crafting should be done.
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I disagree. I think anything my character crafts should be better for him/her than anything I could possibly loot. (The "real world" theory there being anything manufactured and sitting in a box would be "one size fits all" type stuff.)

If I'm making it myself, and sinking (the currently CRAZY) the materials into it; I'd like to see it more tailored to me. I'd like to see some randomness in it too (to help encourage re-crafting an item). In my ideal world, I'd love to see this slanted toward my character build a bit to incentivize the extra effort involved in going out to collect (and break down imperfect looted items) the crafting materials.

(If there is a "too much payment from the trader" problem, then crafted items perhaps shouldn't be worth as much as sold items... :: shrug :: dunno. I know the balance is tough to do.)

 
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