PC I think this game is dead for me now.

[realgrumpy]

So the way I play with a couple friends is no towns or poi, no airdrops, no loot respawn, no mods.  Total scavenge, see how long we can live off the land with only Z packs and treasure maps for bonus. Been playing this style for the last few alphas and we like the challenge. But now, no towns = no traders = no water filters = no dew collectors = die from dysentery and thirst pretty darn quick.  Is there something I'm missing or am I screwed?

 

[AllTheGoodNamesAreInUse]

You won't be able to find many magazines either, so no building things like forges or workbenches or higher than Q1 weapons/gear.  But you're right, you'll probably die from the water issue way before that's a problem.

 

[Maharin]

So the way I play with a couple friends is no towns or poi, no airdrops, no loot respawn, no mods.  Total scavenge, see how long we can live off the land with only Z packs and treasure maps for bonus. Been playing this style for the last few alphas and we like the challenge. But now, no towns = no traders = no water filters = no dew collectors = die from dysentery and thirst pretty darn quick.  Is there something I'm missing or am I screwed?

You will likely have to change one thing about the way you play... add some simple XML mods to make some things available in alternative ways.  Maybe add water back to the loot tables or make filters available through some other means (make them craftable or make them a byproduct of scrapping some other hard to find item).  You don't have to get too complicated with it.

I also do not play with traders, loot respawn, or air drops.  I vary map layouts frequently so some have few POIs, some have many.  But I've gotten used to modding things in or out of the game based on what is needed for my personal style of play.  I only do simple XML edits at this point but that is by choice.  My "super-duper me-mod" won't happen until after release and then I will share it with others.

 

[Riamus]

So the way I play with a couple friends is no towns or poi, no airdrops, no loot respawn, no mods.  Total scavenge, see how long we can live off the land with only Z packs and treasure maps for bonus. Been playing this style for the last few alphas and we like the challenge. But now, no towns = no traders = no water filters = no dew collectors = die from dysentery and thirst pretty darn quick.  Is there something I'm missing or am I screwed?

It is possible to find a water filter in a broken dew collector but it's rare and I'm not sure if any wilderness POIs have dew collectors as I really don't do the wilderness POIs as they are too far apart for me to want to bother with them.  Water normally isn't really an issue even without dew collectors unless you're trying to make a ton of glue/duct tape.  But that's because you're usually scavenging a lot of buildings and getting plenty of murky water from toilets and cabinets and such.  I'm sure this would not work as well in the wilderness and with loot respawn off.  If you were lucky and got a helmet filter mod, you'd be fine for drinking.  You can also make use of pills and bandages to drink murky water from water sources without that mod if you have them.  But it will certainly be very hard to be successful with the vanilla game and that exact playstyle.  I'd say you have the options that Maharin mentioned - mod some things to get it the way that works best for you or make some adjustments to your playstyle.  I know people tend to get in a rut in a given playstyle and not want to change it but you may find adjusting it to work with these changes might even be more fun than your current playstyle.  Or not.  Hard to guess without trying it. 

 

[ElCabong]

I see nothing wrong with using creative mode to load a few dew collectors to get you back into the game play you like

Be careful not to over do it so you loose the biting edge

 

[BFT2020]

Probably the best way to do this is modify zombie loot drops - both the loot tables and drop frequencies

 

[mprojekt]

Probably the best way to do this is modify zombie loot drops - both the loot tables and drop frequencies

This. I had to do it to my own "parachuted from a burning C-130 into the Mojave desert" scenario in order to get any filters.

 

[PoppaSmirk]

I've been silent for awhile, My group of regulars kept on chugging along,  still not really pleased with the farming changes from the introduction of A20 (yes We can get enough to eat but the whole premise of being a "Farmer" at Level 3 of Living Off the Land would seem to indicate that the player was now well versed with farming, so only having a 50% chance to get back a seed still seems ludicrous.  Its like a freaking coin-flip which is not how actual farming goes.  Farming is do-able but no longer gives any joy of accomplishment)    but, after having the members of My Community Play group chafing to see the new drop of Alpha 21,  We All bought tickets on the Hype Train and waited for the Streamer Weekend and the release of the New Build.  Now less than a week later,  My group decided to "pass" on trying to play this weekend.  This will be the first time in 21 weeks that we haven't gotten together on a Saturday to play.  Several are saying,  "Maybe we should wait a while longer to see if it gets better", and we have been sharing discussions all week on 7D2D.  The LOOK of the game is incredible,  but one of My players is now sure that TFP are simply become too obsessed with extending the game start progression to lengthen the struggle before Players become so adept in their surroundings that they "can't see the forest from the trees", and lost sight of the ideal that challenge needs to be balanced with enjoyment of game play.   Who gives a flip if 7DaystoDie gets the vote for "Years Most Challenging Survival Game", if the enjoyment of the player base drops dramatically.  I know games that go the route of mucking up mechanics so far to become daunting.  Those games wind up with tons of praise from that select niche that loves masochistic gameplay;  but those same games don't sell very well to a wider audience.  

One of My regular gamers actually suggested that our group try playing...."No One Survived", a new entry into the Survival/Zombie genre that debutted in January, but already released an update early in June with "Bandits".   I truly LOVE 7Days to Die but if the majority of My friends want to play something else because the gameplay has become too effed to support multiplayer gaming;  then I don't know what I will do.   The reasons this water change and the crafting changes are harmful to multiplayer games is that.....there are only so many lootable places,  the amount of places to search for books doesn't increase if you are playing a game with 5-6 friends.  So you wind up with everyone getting 2-3 books in needed skills/occupations and everyone suffers because no one can get enough books to advance in any meaningful fashion. 

A group of just 4 of us played on Wednesday Night.  We had multiple deaths from bleedout caused by taking hits from zombies when stamina was low due to lack of water.  We actually did make 2 Dew Collectors but that really only provided enough water for one person.  If you do any mining,  one person winds up needing 5-6 water just to make it through the day.  I won't go deeply into the discussion one friend started,  that there is no sense in trying to play 7D2D because it is a lost world if there is no more potable water ( i.e. you can't collect water from any open water sources such as lakes, river, canals, ditches.  And how silly it seems that there are ONLY bottles of murky water in toilets.  (Who the hell bottles toilet water anyway?)   So realistically if you examine the game,  there are only a few water sources,  mostly controller by Traders.  Then Thursday came and the new 317 build increased the price of water filters from 1500 to 2250 coins.  The amount of books to be found also decreased, and By Friday, two of us playing together experienced a total of 3 deaths from hunger or thirst over a gameplay period of 4 days on a newly created RNG World.  Playing in Alpha 21 is lovely to look at...but much more depressing to play.   I'm really not sure whats going to happen in days to come,  but this change seems to be doing the Zombies work for them .... by killing the Player Base. 

 

[Riamus]

It all comes down to adapting.  I have yet to have any issues with thirst or hunger in A21.  I've been low but never in the red.  That is true in a two player game I've been in.  I have no issues at all with finding something to drink even without dew collectors.

Don't forget that you can drink from water sources and even create your own by your base by transporting water with a bucket.  Water sources give you a chance of dysentery but there are pills that prevent that.  They also damage you a little bit if that is a concern and you don't want to use for it bandages to heal, you can put one point into the healing perk and get 1 health every 35 seconds.  So if you lose 5 health from drinking from a water source, you will retain it within 5 minutes 25 seconds.  Not really something to be concerned about.  Certainly not any reason to allow yourself to die from it.

And you really shouldn't even need that.  I've yet to drink murky water in A21.  There just hasn't been any reason.  If you quest and loot, it is easy to find water and other drinks and boiling murky water you find into regular water isn't a big deal once you get a pot or make one.

As far as cost, a few quests easily makes you enough money to buy a filter even with the price increase.

On the other hand, if you are reducing loot amount, it'll be more challenging.  The same is you aren't questing or scavenging.

Also remember that tea is better than plain water, so making tea from your water is a good way to make the drinks last longer.

Edit: Also try to avoid eating food that reduces water.  Things like charred meat, corn on the cob, baked potato, corn bread.  Use those only if you absolutely need to because you'll need a lot more water if you eat those.

 

[PoppaSmirk]

It all comes down to adapting.  I have yet to have any issues with thirst or hunger in A21.  I've been low but never in the red.  That is true in a two player game I've been in.  I have no issues at all with finding something to drink even without dew collectors.

Don't forget that you can drink from water sources and even create your own by your base by transporting water with a bucket.  Water sources give you a chance of dysentery but there are pills that prevent that.  They also damage you a little bit if that is a concern and you don't want to use for it bandages to heal, you can put one point into the healing perk and get 1 health every 35 seconds.  So if you lose 5 health from drinking from a water source, you will retain it within 5 minutes 25 seconds.  Not really something to be concerned about.  Certainly not any reason to allow yourself to die from it.

And you really shouldn't even need that.  I've yet to drink murky water in A21.  There just hasn't been any reason.  If you quest and loot, it is easy to find water and other drinks and boiling murky water you find into regular water isn't a big deal once you get a pot or make one.

As far as cost, a few quests easily makes you enough money to buy a filter even with the price increase.

On the other hand, if you are reducing loot amount, it'll be more challenging.  The same is you aren't questing or scavenging.

Also remember that tea is better than plain water, so making tea from your water is a good way to make the drinks last longer.

Edit: Also try to avoid eating food that reduces water.  Things like charred meat, corn on the cob, baked potato, corn bread.  Use those only if you absolutely need to because you'll need a lot more water if you eat those.

You really don't have many overall options when starting a new game.  If you don't have both a cooking pot and a grill then you are extremely limited on the first few days on what you can eat.  Since the latest B317 drop I have mostly survived foodwise on snake and deer meat.  Charred, not grilled since I haven't found a cooking grill yet.  We tried to play with just two people on Friday and after 4 game days of play we don't even have a full clothing set, and on Day 4 bought a second water filter to add a new Dew Collector so we might keep two people alive with enough water.   Meanwhile its been very slow in finding enough books to advance.  I believe My other players have been having the same issues,  other wise We might have played our Regular Session today with 5-7 people instead of four players wanting to "wait and see" if there are more changes to improve the gameplay experience.   Also,  I see a lot of comments about 'adapting' a certain style of gameplay in order to survive.  Doesn't that go against the whole concept of "build your Game Character to play how you wish" ?  Two of My players start taking trader quests right away but two others really don't like running around on what they call  "grind missions'.  I myself am middle ground on that.  I do some Trader Quests if I have a need to generate "guaranteed" coins to purchase a certain item,  but I prefer to craft My own items when I can,  or loot to find them.

 

[Riamus]

You really don't have many overall options when starting a new game.  If you don't have both a cooking pot and a grill then you are extremely limited on the first few days on what you can eat.  Since the latest B317 drop I have mostly survived foodwise on snake and deer meat.  Charred, not grilled since I haven't found a cooking grill yet.  We tried to play with just two people on Friday and after 4 game days of play we don't even have a full clothing set, and on Day 4 bought a second water filter to add a new Dew Collector so we might keep two people alive with enough water.   Meanwhile its been very slow in finding enough books to advance.  I believe My other players have been having the same issues,  other wise We might have played our Regular Session today with 5-7 people instead of four players wanting to "wait and see" if there are more changes to improve the gameplay experience.   Also,  I see a lot of comments about 'adapting' a certain style of gameplay in order to survive.  Doesn't that go against the whole concept of "build your Game Character to play how you wish" ?  Two of My players start taking trader quests right away but two others really don't like running around on what they call  "grind missions'.  I myself am middle ground on that.  I do some Trader Quests if I have a need to generate "guaranteed" coins to purchase a certain item,  but I prefer to craft My own items when I can,  or loot to find them.

Grills and pots are available at all traders.  Pots can usually be found in residential kitchens without too much trouble.  The grills aren't as easy to track down, though you usually will find one eventually.  But since you can buy them, you don't have to wait on RNG if you don't want to.

Clothes are one of the easier things to complete.  Most houses have a lot of clothing in them between clothes on the floor and shoes/boots on the floor as well as in the nightstands.  A clothing store has enough to outfit an army if you happen to be near one.  But even without that, go into a few houses and you are normally set on clothing just like in A20.  Just don't forget to loot the clothing that is on the floor.  It might look like decoration but it is lootable.

As far as magazines being slow, yes... they reduced the number as people said there were too many.  Now it is slower and all that means.  Not sure it was a smart move but you can still get a lot of magazines.

And to be clear, adapting does not mean changing your playstyle entirely.  It means makes adjustments to your playstyle to make it work in A21.  And all playstyles needed some adapting for A21 as things were changed that affected everyone, even if only a little for certain playstyles.  Water was a big one for most people.  They adapt by making dew collectors.  That doesn't mean they change their playstyle.  It means that make an adjustment - build dew collectors - while still playing the game the same way they were before other than for that adjustment.  At least that is what I mean when I said adapting.

 

[boban]

Grills and pots are available at all traders.

Seriously I rarely have issues with finding pots (grills as you said are a little bit harder to come by). Especially that some POIs have them laying around.

As far as magazines being slow, yes... they reduced the number as people said there were too many. 

Idk, I'm on day 4 in my current game (with longer days, so I did have more time in a day for doing quests/looting) and I feel that I'm still progressing as fast as I was in A20. It's just more random of what I'm leaving up at a given moment. But that's SP, and in MP I can imagine more scarcity.

And to be clear, adapting does not mean changing your playstyle entirely.  It means makes adjustments to your playstyle to make it work in A21.

That depends on what your play style was before. I was mainly building/crafting with very occasional questing/looting before. And when I did quest/loot I was mostly playing stealth. This playstyle is not very enjoyably in current experimental. I have to loot to progress my crafting ability. But when I loot, I do find better gear than I can craft, so I don't really feel a need to focus on it. And fully alert zombies spawn behind you are so common now that I find stealth underwhelming. I went full on fortitude brawler this time, focusing on questing and looting exclusively and it is fun punching zombies in the face and doing POIs rambo style, but I don't like the fact that my proffered play style for many, many alphas is not fun anymore.

 

[meganoth]

 And how silly it seems that there are ONLY bottles of murky water in toilets.  (Who the hell bottles toilet water anyway?)  

The rationale is different: You always have lots of bottles with you or available, they are just not represented in the game, just like you have as many gas cans to fill up gasoline whenever you need to. So you find water in a toilet. You bottle it up and voila you have a water jar. You drink it and the water jar is somewhere not shown again.

If you looted a petrol station in previous alphas, the same happened. You seem to have empty gas cans with you, or you find them there. But they are not shown, just the bottled up gasoline is shown. It is implied that you never have a problem finding containers for any of the fluids in the game.

It is even the same with food: You don't ever see or have an empty container for cakes, but you surely won't try to stuff a cheese cake or a meat stew in your backpack without using a container. Yet you never see or need to take an empty container with you for meat stew in the game.

 

[NoMan]

The rationale is different: You always have lots of bottles with you or available, they are just not represented in the game, just like you have as many gas cans to fill up gasoline whenever you need to. So you find water in a toilet. You bottle it up and voila you have a water jar. You drink it and the water jar is somewhere not shown again.

I loved this rationale. I used it. It made the water changes easy to wrap my head around.

Then they went and @%$#ed it up by returning the ability to slurp pond water.

Drinking from puddles adds nothing to the gameplay, but it creates a logical rub that doesn't need to exist.

If the pond water is the same substance as the murky water in a looted jar, if it is worth sipping from our hand, then the invisible jars in our rationale would be used to collect it and take it home for purification. 

Easy fix. Just make groundwater toxic and useless. This gives a valid reason for not taking it home without disrupting the new system in any real way. 

EDIT:

I am editing to be clear that this is a minor thing for me. I am not endorsing the title of the thread. A21 is beautiful.

 

[PoppaSmirk]

The rationale is different: You always have lots of bottles with you or available, they are just not represented in the game, just like you have as many gas cans to fill up gasoline whenever you need to. So you find water in a toilet. You bottle it up and voila you have a water jar. You drink it and the water jar is somewhere not shown again.

If you looted a petrol station in previous alphas, the same happened. You seem to have empty gas cans with you, or you find them there. But they are not shown, just the bottled up gasoline is shown. It is implied that you never have a problem finding containers for any of the fluids in the game.

It is even the same with food: You don't ever see or have an empty container for cakes, but you surely won't try to stuff a cheese cake or a meat stew in your backpack without using a container. Yet you never see or need to take an empty container with you for meat stew in the game.

Those are some very good points.,  several items are represented as just a pick up and carry style,  or mini gas cans or (presumably) boxed cakes etc.  Of course that harkens right back to the new "norm"  of being no bottles that someone can carry around in the game.  So where are the bottles coming from that the murky water gets...scooped into?  Realise of course that My biggest issue was not getting to have My usual Saturday 5-6 hour playtime with My other Friends,  so that has me a bit bummed over current events.  I really hope that their taste for playing as a group comes back if they try playing a bit more.  General opinion this week wasn't too enthusiastic, but I think the most anyone played was up to Day 8 in game,  and then the sudden change to B317 sent things back to Start with New RNG worlds. So My hope is that there might be more appeal for the changes once everyone takes the chance to play for longer periods.

 

[realgrumpy]

I appreciate everyones input, helpful suggestions and a bit of clarity of why the changes were made.  I'm in the same boat as PoppaSmirks pals, waiting to see what alpha 21 looks like outa experimental. I've tried to play several times but the water problem and too often no magazine drops keeps getting me killed.  I don't like being forced to have a city on the map just so I can get access to a trader.  If you could have the option or mod it to have a trader spawn without a city I could live with that.  Better yet, make water filters craftable (scrap poly, charcoal, ect) and only have them produce X amount of water before they need to be replaced.  Have a crap version of a dew collector to start with and find magazines to upgrade, lots of suggestions on Steam and other forums, but I doubt they'll be implemented by devs and have to wait for mods. 

A friend pointed out to me how its worded on the 7D2D website and it gave me a chuckle:

"EXPLORE: Huge, unique and rich environments, offering the freedom to play the game anyway you want with many unique biomes."

Yep, just don't get too attached to that freedom... the Early Access fairy likes to visit a lot.

 

[Riamus]

A friend pointed out to me how its worded on the 7D2D website and it gave me a chuckle:

"EXPLORE: Huge, unique and rich environments, offering the freedom to play the game anyway you want with many unique biomes."

Well, there are always going to be limitations to such a statement.  "Any way you want" doesn't mean you can fly a jet even if you want to, for example.  That statement also doesn't say you can do everything you might want to do in vanilla without the use of mods.  The game is specifically designed to make modding easy so that mods can allow you to play the way you want.

As far as traders without towns, that's newly possible in A21.  Unfortunately, RWG has no options to control this, so you'll have some in the wilderness as well as some in towns.  Hopefully they will add more control over RWG settings at some point.  If you wanted to, you could go through and delete all traders who are not in the wilderness from your prefabs.xml file (or edit it from the world editor).  Little extra work but it would give you the traders only in the wilderness if that's what you'd like to have.

 

[realgrumpy]

Well, there are always going to be limitations to such a statement.  "Any way you want" doesn't mean you can fly a jet even if you want to, for example.  That statement also doesn't say you can do everything you might want to do in vanilla without the use of mods.  The game is specifically designed to make modding easy so that mods can allow you to play the way you want.

I thought it was amusing as I was playing how I liked, without mods, now I can't.. without mods.

 

[Survior]

So the way I play with a couple friends is no towns or poi, no airdrops, no loot respawn, no mods.  Total scavenge, see how long we can live off the land with only Z packs and treasure maps for bonus. Been playing this style for the last few alphas and we like the challenge. But now, no towns = no traders = no water filters = no dew collectors = die from dysentery and thirst pretty darn quick.  Is there something I'm missing or am I screwed?

They are slowly killing the sandbox in favor of arcade style linear looter shooter mechanics, play one way, the one true fun way [tm], or no way at all. So many play styles have been stomped on for a21 and a20 for nothing more than, we don't want you to play our game "that way".  As one player recently said in the forums, it's TFP's game and they make it the way you want not the way players want it.

...

Everything you said is correct. Preach on.

 

[Riamus]

They are slowly killing the sandbox in favor of arcade style linear looter shooter mechanics, play one way, the one true fun way [tm], or no way at all. So many play styles have been stomped on for a21 and a20 for nothing more than, we don't want you to play our game "that way".  As one player recently said in the forums, it's TFP's game and they make it the way you want not the way players want it.

Yes, they are making the game the way they want.  It is their game.  If you were the developer, you'd make the game the way you wanted as well.  All developers do that.  You might get some changes due to a huge outcry about something or you might get some feedback that the devs like and so they add something that players ask for or remove something that players ask for but at the end of the day, they are going to make the game they want to make.  And that is their right.

People seem to think that just because something was possible before that it should always be possible.  That isn't how development works.  There were things that didn't work the way they wanted and so they changed them.  There were things that were placeholders or only partially finished and then they finished them or replaced the placeholders.  All these types of things can make some things no longer possible.  If you go back to previous alphas, you'll see that many of the different parts of the game were only loosely connected to one another.  This allowed you to easily do only specific things without it really mattering.  But that's not how the game is supposed to be.  It's supposed to be an integration of all these different parts into a single game.  Each alpha, they are tying these things together.  That may mean you can't avoid playing a certain part of the game anymore... at least, not without using mods.  But that's just how things work.  Their goal isn't to have a game with a bunch of different minigames that can all be played separately without any cohesion with the rest of the game.  They want a single game where everything is interconnected.  That isn't a bad thing regardless of what playstyles may have to change to work with the complete game.  And mods will always give you options that vanilla does not.