So I've been thinking about how the game is currently iterated and how that has changed from my personal entry point of Alpha 16.4. I feel like there's a whole lot of room for what I'm about to propose that would actually make some of the annoyances of the current release line up in a better with the reality presented in the game.
1. All low level ferals to start. Not lots of ferals, but the few zombies encountered would be feral.
2. Modern weapons and ammo - but the guns slowly break over time and are not repairable at all.
3. Bootstrapping tech makes more sense, you have to learn how to craft weapons because you can't repair what you have.
4. Tied to this zombies 'in the world' go back to non-feral, but increase in number, and tankier zombies also start appearing.
5. Biome specific stuff would also loosely tie to this, as the axis over time would allow for the harder biome specific zombies to emerge, and ultimately the true mutant zombies to arise (Wights, spiders, etc.)
You could also tie the farming system into this, with some sort of 'ground contamination' element for why you have to build farm plots over farming in the ground. That would also let give you a reason for all ground water sources to be contaminated as well, though I think a filtration system with a filtering upgrade path would make more sense can boiled > reverse osmosis > carbon and ceramic filtered. Fill it with buckets, get out jars, fill it with jars get 4 jars to 1 jar. Lets jars get back into the game without trivializing their utility and ubiquity, esp if you don't let them stack (honestly water should always be a very low stack just like cement buckets.)
Having a hybrid between learn by doing and learn by reading might also fit this really well, since there are some activities that you'd need to 'read' about (farming in the apocalypse being special to this specific apocalypse) vs say learning how to build bikes thru to cars.
Working cars from go could also be a thing, again with the 'unrepair-ability' or things like 'can't driven more than 5 miles before it quits because it doesn't have a chipped key which is how modern cars work with valet keys. that type thing.
But yeah this to me would be a fun way to take the elements of the current game release and make them a bit more palatable without having to do a 100% overhaul of every aspect of the game. (Though headshots/head destruction should be required to kill any zombie.)
1. All low level ferals to start. Not lots of ferals, but the few zombies encountered would be feral.
2. Modern weapons and ammo - but the guns slowly break over time and are not repairable at all.
3. Bootstrapping tech makes more sense, you have to learn how to craft weapons because you can't repair what you have.
4. Tied to this zombies 'in the world' go back to non-feral, but increase in number, and tankier zombies also start appearing.
5. Biome specific stuff would also loosely tie to this, as the axis over time would allow for the harder biome specific zombies to emerge, and ultimately the true mutant zombies to arise (Wights, spiders, etc.)
You could also tie the farming system into this, with some sort of 'ground contamination' element for why you have to build farm plots over farming in the ground. That would also let give you a reason for all ground water sources to be contaminated as well, though I think a filtration system with a filtering upgrade path would make more sense can boiled > reverse osmosis > carbon and ceramic filtered. Fill it with buckets, get out jars, fill it with jars get 4 jars to 1 jar. Lets jars get back into the game without trivializing their utility and ubiquity, esp if you don't let them stack (honestly water should always be a very low stack just like cement buckets.)
Having a hybrid between learn by doing and learn by reading might also fit this really well, since there are some activities that you'd need to 'read' about (farming in the apocalypse being special to this specific apocalypse) vs say learning how to build bikes thru to cars.
Working cars from go could also be a thing, again with the 'unrepair-ability' or things like 'can't driven more than 5 miles before it quits because it doesn't have a chipped key which is how modern cars work with valet keys. that type thing.
But yeah this to me would be a fun way to take the elements of the current game release and make them a bit more palatable without having to do a 100% overhaul of every aspect of the game. (Though headshots/head destruction should be required to kill any zombie.)