It really has very little to "meh glue" it has everything to do with dumbing down an already dumb system. The new system isn't harder it's just worse.
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PC Glass Jars Question, A21
- Thread starter OneManStanding
- Start date
It really has very little to "meh glue" it has everything to do with dumbing down an already dumb system. The new system isn't harder it's just worse.
Riamus
Well-known member
If that's true, where are the complaints about the missing empty cans?
I don't disagree necessarily with saying it's dumbing it down but that's not why people are really complaining or they'd complain about the cans as well. And they'd have been complaining about the other items that don't have empties all along.
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RipClaw
Well-known member
Empty cans were only needed in the recipe for oil. There is no model for an empty cans and one did not have this interaction where one would have filled the cans with oil from e.g. an oil tank.
Therefore, it is understandable that the empty jars are more prominent in the discussion. We had a refilling animation / drinking animation and when you threw an empty glass from the inventory there was really a jar on the floor and not a bag. In that sense, the jars were much more real.
In the Undead Legacy Mod, the concept of empty containers has been expanded. To collect gas from a gas pump or a gas barrel, you need an empty jerry can. And to pick up water at a tap, shower head or hydrant, you need an empty jar or a empty plastic bottle. In addition, in many cases the empty containers are returned when you craft something.
To balance this, empty containers can only be crafted in level 3 or 4 workstations which you will not get until very late in the game.
RipClaw
Well-known member
Well, one of the goals of the Learn by Reading system was to get people to craft much of their gear not just once but several times. And when you do that you need a lot of duct tape and glue. Who would have thought?
I know that the developers increased the amount of glue and duct tape you can find in loot and the trader sells both but I still have a shortage of glue. And this isn't even a play-through where I need duct tape for ammo like the exploding crossbow bolts. At the moment I have 6 dew collectors and I use most of my water to produce glue.
I'm glad you brought that up. The idea that somehow crafting the same item, or slightly upgraded item, with 3 graphics total per type, for example spears and doing it several times and thinking that is fun is beyond me, that leads into the laughable balance that is, mod slots/tier levels for upgrading at all, where crafting an iron item is in every sense of the word a downgrade from the stone version that does less damage, has less mod slots and is vastly more expensive to repair. Rinse and repeat for steel.
It took a year and a half to come up with this absolutely brilliant plan!
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RipClaw
Well-known member
I have switched to only crafting something for the new technology tier when I can craft at least at quality level 3 in it. Going from quality level 5 to 1 does not work because the stats overlap. And of course a Q3 item has 2 mod slots instead of just one. Then I usually craft the item one more time when I reach Q5.
The only exception so far is that I made a Q1 M60 that has lower stats than my Q5 Assault Rifle but it can hold 120 rounds of ammo with the drum magazine, which is useful for a T5 boss fight.
In some cases I managed to craft only Q5 items for each technology tier like with the armor.
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zztong
Well-known member
Sure, some people are complaining about missing jars. They've not fixed their frustration in the correct place, so they complain about missing empty jars. It's the obvious target. I don't think a love affair with empty jars is the real issue. So, yeh, pointing out the lack of other containers seems like a convincing argument -- and it is -- just not in response to the real complaint.
I think what some miss is the ability to carry water away from a water source. Not only is it a fundamental human thing, but it puts the player in the driver's seat (as opposed to a loot table) and rewards their planning. Make the game such that when you point at a water source and click E you get murky water and that would be resolved without empty jars.
However, free murky water on demand (if you're standing by a pond, river, or ditch) runs contrary to the early game's water scarcity goal. I think few oppose this goal. The real trick would be how to do both. I think there are options and I'd happily talk of them (again) if I had any sense it might be useful.
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The overlap between tiers is a rather obvious fault. And I remember someone from TFP saying they would remove any overlap.
I expect this to be corrected eventually, maybe without someone reminding TFP of it, maybe only after a reminder that there is something they forgot.
RipClaw
Well-known member
I am not quite sure if this referred to the overlap between quality levels or if it meant the overlap between technology levels.
But I haven't seen anyone go from Q5 stone to Q1 iron, for example. They has always waited until they could make at least Q3 iron items, if only because of the mod slots.
OccamsShavingCream
New member
Having played a21 a while, I'm not a fan of the glass jar change. It does improve the early survival aspect, which is good, but the implementation (removing the jars) causes other problems, at least in my view.
Mostly, it just seems bizarre that we can't carry water from a water source and purify it. That's been basic human behavior since the dawn of time. The analogy with gas cans is flawed in my view, because that's just a system that was itself messy: the correct fix for that would have been (and this would have been a gameplay improvement I think) to require finding or crafting a gas can to carry it around in, and maybe even a siphon or hose to collect it from gasoline sources.
Aside from how it feels to not be able to collect water or to just have jars and bottles wink out of existence as soon as they're emptied, another issue is that this change ties players to the traders and quest system even more. You have to access a trader to get a water filter, now. This won't be a problem for new players, but a lot of us have played this game enough that we change our gameplay in order to keep it a challenge. Steam's claiming I've got over 8,600 hundred hours in (which is probably a Steam bug, those numbers aren't all that reliable, but I'm sure it's not too far off.) I actually prefer to play without using traders at all just to jack up the difficulty (insane, low loot percent, all those already set) but that's not really an option in this build. Making the filters available via dismantling something or by looting would sort that issue out in my view.
The change I would have preferred to have seen would have been to remove the option to craft jars, and set the max stack size to three (or so.) The most expensive resource in the game is cargo space, and water is heavy, so that would limit how much a player carries around or stockpiles.
Alternatively, allow players to carry water in unstacked cooking pots, which could then be boiled to produce drinkable water. This would at least reduce the conceptual issues with not being able to carry it around.
Mostly, it just seems bizarre that we can't carry water from a water source and purify it. That's been basic human behavior since the dawn of time. The analogy with gas cans is flawed in my view, because that's just a system that was itself messy: the correct fix for that would have been (and this would have been a gameplay improvement I think) to require finding or crafting a gas can to carry it around in, and maybe even a siphon or hose to collect it from gasoline sources.
Aside from how it feels to not be able to collect water or to just have jars and bottles wink out of existence as soon as they're emptied, another issue is that this change ties players to the traders and quest system even more. You have to access a trader to get a water filter, now. This won't be a problem for new players, but a lot of us have played this game enough that we change our gameplay in order to keep it a challenge. Steam's claiming I've got over 8,600 hundred hours in (which is probably a Steam bug, those numbers aren't all that reliable, but I'm sure it's not too far off.) I actually prefer to play without using traders at all just to jack up the difficulty (insane, low loot percent, all those already set) but that's not really an option in this build. Making the filters available via dismantling something or by looting would sort that issue out in my view.
The change I would have preferred to have seen would have been to remove the option to craft jars, and set the max stack size to three (or so.) The most expensive resource in the game is cargo space, and water is heavy, so that would limit how much a player carries around or stockpiles.
Alternatively, allow players to carry water in unstacked cooking pots, which could then be boiled to produce drinkable water. This would at least reduce the conceptual issues with not being able to carry it around.
Supposedly you can get them very rarely from destroyed dew collectors, but in 60-70 hours in A21, I've yet to see a destroyed dew collector.
Riamus
Well-known member
And that's the thing... if you are concerned about glue, then it isn't really empty jars that you're upset about. It's the difficulty making enough glue. That is a balancing issue and not really an issue with the removal of empty jars. Sure, the jars made it possible to make the glue you wanted without any real effort but that's also not balanced. They basically went from one end of the spectrum to the other regarding glue production. As far as hydration, this is a better solution, imo. For glue, they need to work out a balance that makes it possible to make glue more easily. Perhaps even making it so 1 water = 5 glue. That would not affect hydration but would help with glue production. I am not saying that is the best solution but that it is a solution and does not require tons of empty glass jars or making water simplistic.
Well, the overlap was already there. It isn't new in A21. That being said, it does need to be corrected because there isn't any value in making lower tier items. I've even given up on tier 3 or 4 now and only upgrade when I can do quality level 5. There just isn't any reason to bother with the lower quality levels. About the only things I'll make lower quality levels of are stone items since they are cheap enough to make and are always an upgrade, or the nail gun. No reason to make a level 5 nail gun. Level 1 works just as well for far less resources.
I agree that it isn't realistic. I even posted that before A21 when they announced the water changes. It doesn't make sense that you can't carry water back to your base to boil. At the same time, I feel like the overabundance of water when you allow this defeats any reason to include hydration in the game. Because of that, I am fine with removing the option to carry water. The game doesn't have to be realistic if there is a gameplay reason for doing something, imo. It would be great if some compromise could be made that would allow for both water scarcity and carrying water. I don't know that they want to change things, though. So you're probably right thinking it might not be useful to rehash the ideas, unfortunately.
I've seen them a few times. Try going to some survivor stations and you'll probably find some. I think that's where I usually found them. I think I found one in a house's basement as well, though I may not be remembering that correctly. I wasn't really trying to keep track of them.
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RipClaw
Well-known member
I'm not upset that they removed the jars. I just wanted to point out that changes to the game in general has led to a higher demand for glue and that has nothing to do with mass production. Mass production was in A20 when I played with exploding crossbow bolts. I used 100 pieces of duct tape per week for that alone.
There are only two things that bug me. One is that only 3 jars of water fit in a dew collector, so you have to empty them daily, and the other is that the Fun Pimps haven't increased the stack size of clean water.
I am glad that empty jars are gone, because they were annoying inventory clutter. But I really don't like how hard it is to get a steady supply of water now, especially as you scale up the amount of players in your party. You will need to make an entire farm of these ridiculous dew collectors (which of course you can't even craft without uncraftable water filters) to get a whopping 3 waters at a time. And you'd better be on top of constantly collecting the water out of them or they won't collect water anymore! This is not a fun addition to the game. At all. It feels like we're moisture farmers on Arrakis now. And how are we supposed to do any kind of mass production in the late game with this pathetic amount of water income? Glue was already a bottleneck for crafting, and now the issue is 100x worse. I really don't understand Fun Pimps sometimes. They're so dead set on dragging out the tedious parts of the early game instead of adding more endgame challenges.
Don't get me wrong, I'm actually okay with the early parts of the game being gated by the survival challenge (i.e., food and water shortages), but the collection of food and water shouldn't be a tedious process throughout the entire game. It should be a timed gating issue like getting a crucible to make steel production. That way, later in the game, you can have fun doing the actual fun part of the game, which is killing zombies and building. It would be a much better solution to have some higher tech solution that removes the unfun burden of collecting water from 100 dew collectors. Let us build an automated water filtration system that connects to a river or something, I don't know. Just do something that's more fun than these dew collectors, please. Give us a higher tech solution; dew collectors should be the tier 1 way of obtaining water, if anything.
Don't get me wrong, I'm actually okay with the early parts of the game being gated by the survival challenge (i.e., food and water shortages), but the collection of food and water shouldn't be a tedious process throughout the entire game. It should be a timed gating issue like getting a crucible to make steel production. That way, later in the game, you can have fun doing the actual fun part of the game, which is killing zombies and building. It would be a much better solution to have some higher tech solution that removes the unfun burden of collecting water from 100 dew collectors. Let us build an automated water filtration system that connects to a river or something, I don't know. Just do something that's more fun than these dew collectors, please. Give us a higher tech solution; dew collectors should be the tier 1 way of obtaining water, if anything.
So you "abused" glue production to make "op" bolts. Do you feel good that everyone can't do that (make glue) anymore? I've never played with exploding bolts, but I'm sure it's more than just glue, perhaps they should have made it more difficult somewhere else. Using glue to make everything more difficult is silly, or perhaps, just lazy.
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RipClaw
Well-known member
Exploding crossbow bolts are not OP. They do the same explosion damage as pipe bombs which are much easier to make.
If you want to make exploding crossbow bolts, you will need steel arrowheads, gunpowder, and scrap polymer, in addition to duct tape. You also need to have found two books to unlock them. One is for the steel arrowheads and the other is for the exploding crossbow bolts themselves. And you need a crucible to craft the steel arrowheads.
The fact that glue production has become more difficult has certainly had nothing to do with me. The change to the water system was decided long before I had my playthrough with the exploding crossbow bolts. You might as well blame Grand Spartan, who also likes to use them.
I agree that the use of glue and duct tape in most recipes is really excessive. The Fun Pimps could adjust this and reduce the required quantities. Especially for the vehicles. They might be the biggest problem for multiplayer. A motorcycle, for example, needs 30 duct tape for production and everyone in the group will certainly want to have one.
Those who have the most problems with glue production are those who do not use the traders. One possibility could be to adjust the loot table so that the water filter can be found not only in broken dew collectors, but also in other loot containers. That would help these players.
Fair enough, I didn't mean to blame you, I only think it's odd when some people are like I totally abused something (I know now that's not what you meant) and for some reason cheer the change that also breaks a ton of other things, or in this case crafting in general since water=glue and water and glue are basically everything in the game.
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Lokeus
New member
Vintorez said:
I am on your side. I also understand why they wanted to stop the jar inflation but there are a lot of ways to do this without breaking the immersion so hard. A neat idea why water collectors are necessary: The catastrophe happened as a result of atomic accident. So water which you find anywhere could give the player radiation debuff so he is
hardly pushed to switch to natural falling down water. Also rainy days could have an impact on water collection... so much potential to raise immersion without disctract fans of the established water system so much. Also: They should have keep old water system (with radiation effect) and limit the stacks as they did now. Everything consumable made of radiated water could have the radiation effect.
Anybody there to make such a modlet? I would pay for it!
Broken is such a strong word. There are reasons for people to not like the change, because of immersion, because filters are basically single-supplier only, because looting the filters may be seen as a chore.
But I don't see anything broken. You can basically buy yourself as many dew collectors as you want and looting them with hitting "E" "R" keys while going along a row is done in less than a minute even with 20 or more of them and much less time than farming a similar number of farm plots.
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