I think there's far too big a gap between stone tools and iron tools though, need a middle ground for crude iron pickaxes and blunderbusses. By the time I unlock forge with iron tools I'll be building high quality tools.
Here, several scrap iron tools have been suggested as an intermediate step between stone and iron. These would then have a low durability but are better than the stone tools.
4. Feels near impossible to have enough food and water for more than a couple of minutes, eat and swing an axe several times and you're hungry again.
Once you have a garden, it gets easier. Compared to the experimental the consumption of food has decreased. At that time it was much worse.
6. Zombie A.I is much more competent at knocking down buildings and I no longer feel completely safe just camping on a random roof on the seventh day. The zombie A.I is better but it's missing some crucial pathing calculations that allow it to be taken advantage of easily which may make it seem stupider than before or too intelligent. Zombies shouldn't know the exact location of far away doors on the other side of bases and they shouldn't constantly change direction everytime you jump from one platform to the next. Zombies need a greater appreciation of actual distance when it thinks walking up some stairs 100m away is a better option then just attacking the blocks you're on when it's standing right below you and zombies should also sometimes just make a decision and stick to it. The problem seems to be zombies all think completely independently of each other while all acting under basic same rules allowing you to "cheese" an entire horde and they either need some randomization or they could do with some "horde" governing code e.g like how ghosts in pac man work together to try and trap you, or if one zombies is in the range of a door or a breach then it'll signal other zombies in a radius of that zombie and so on and can cause a chain reaction of following the pack which is a zombie trait.
Any random behavior with these zombies would be a disaster. Due to the increased block damage, they can quickly hit their way through any material. Accordingly, the most effective defense is to use the path finding against them.
Random behavior would make this type of defense useless and you would have to resort to firepower. But if you rely solely on firepower, you lose in the long run.
I have tested how much ammo I need against a gamestage 450 horde if I only use firearms. I used 6000 rounds of ammo. That's not really efficient and you have to make 6000 rounds every week so you don't run out of ammo during the horde.
7. Log spike removal, can you not just not allow people to rotate them upside down? Can't we at least have kept them as decoration blocks so I don't have to mod it back in? The trader in the snow biome on navesgame still gets to have them on his wall. Along those lines can we have the wood ramp corner frames added and wood ramp corners buildable please? Known on the creative menu as "WOOD CNR RAMP".
There's some other stuff gone from the game that was still present in the Alpha 16. For example you only have one kind of lamp for the illumination.
Of course this is a pity for the players who like to build beautiful bases.
8. Random dog packs can be hard to survive if ill equipped and slow and feel pretty cheap, especially early on or if you don't notice them. Actually had a wolf pack on day 1 on my first try on alpha 17 killing me and a friend. Giant wolves who he trapped inside the trader which then somehow got out again by somehow floating over the walls, it looked very glitchy. Should at least allow till around day 5 at the earliest I think and I think before one appears you deserve an audio warning like a "wolf howl".
Yeah, the dogs and wolves are little, sneaky bastards. But I am happy in the Alpha 17 every time I see a horde of dogs because they give me bones.
9. I fully support and appreciate how it's now more difficult to set up and build an underground base, I would've hated not being able to do it at all but it was far too easy how quickly you could do it and be pretty much perfectly safe and out of danger, I feel nowhere in the game world should be a permanent safe space.
That's something I'll never understand. Security is a basic human need. Is it so hard to understand that some players also have this need for a game ? Not every player is constantly looking for thrills and fights. These players often take the position of the one who collects resources or makes tools in a group, and that's an important role to play in the game.
This doesn't mean that these players don't fight zombies at all or sit in their underground base during the Bloodmoon Horde. For example, in Alpha 16, I had an underground base for my workstations and storage, and I had a separate base to fight the horde.
It's also important for practical reasons to have a safe place. If you leave your base you don't want to come back and find out that a wandering horde has taken its way through the base and destroyed what you have built up with difficulty.
There are also those who play on servers. If you go in single player AFK you can pause the game but on the server it doesn't work. You would have to log out and people usually don't do that when they go AFK for a short time.
I experimented a bit with underground bases in a test game and you have to deal with some limitations regarding the AI here. For example the zombies tend to dig their way through to you if the next entrance is more than 30m away. If you go too deep, the zombies will dig their way through to you. Accordingly it is difficult to build larger bases in the underground.
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