PC My big list of 13 random negatives with A18 (which is otherwise great)

Ghostlight

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OK first of all, this is my favourite alpha yet. I am having a blast. So this is just a brain dump pf niggles and complaints that have occurred to me as I played A18 (currently on day 10 solo and day 6 co-op with my usual group; playing on default so we can power-level through all the new stuff; we usually play on Insane)

1) All of us are afflicted by a bug that makes everything too bright at night. We can see quite plainly when it's meant to be dark. Going to options and flipping Reflection Quality from Off to Low (hit Apply) then back to Off (hit Apply) fixes this, but we need to do this each time we log in.

2) There's far too few zombies now, specifically out in the world. [Although I have a gut-feeling that increasing GS might remedy this]. Nevertheless, this is the first alpha where I am venturing out at night to do stuff, with little to no fear.

3) Put points into Intellect 3 so I could get Grease Monkey and make a Bicycle. Then found out I needed Intellect 4 and Advanced Engineering 2 to build the Workbench I needed to make the Bicycle with. Very annoying.

4) Birds Nests heavily nerfed, especially the eggs. We were a Bacon and Eggs colony, so this is a pain.

5) Melee is different. Cant put my finger on it. As a Club-user with 2000+ hours in this game, I am/was quite good at melee combat. Basically if fighting versus walking daytime zombies, I *never* get hit. Never. Not so in A18. They seem to somehow sneak "unfair" hits on me as I melee. Not sure how or why, but it's different and not as fluid as it used to be.

6) Having to spend 20 Stamina to jump up one block is ridiculous. This is one Stamina balance change I think you got badly wrong in A18. Since we can't make ramps until Table Saw is unlocked, people are going to have steps leading into their base, probably with jumps at the top to stop the zeds getting over. Our base had 5 steps then a 2-block jump. 5 steps = 100 Stamina = I need to stand and wait for Stamina like an idiot at the top step before I can make the last jump. Or I forget and fall onto the spikes below.

7) Not enough Bones. So now everything needs a Repair Kit to be repaired. Everything. Kits require Duct Tape which requires Glue which required Bones. Since the need for Repair Kits has exploded through the roof in A18, so has the need for Bones. There are simply not enough of them. This is, without a doubt, the main bottleneck in the game, especially in a multiplayer situation. For the record, a level 2 Pick being used to Mine for an entire day will burn through 12 Repair Kits. We need either more Bones (a LOT more), or a second recipe for Glue.

8) Some of the roads textures are not being displayed properly (I can see a 'texture failed to load' error in consol. Everythig else looks wonderful in A18, except my roads which looks garbage, low-res placeholder textures. Please fix.

9) RWG. Still garbage. Vertical roads all over the place, and not enough water features.

10) Food poisoning mechanic. Get rid of it. It adds nothing. Players only eat at their base. And always have yellow tea. So if I eat something that gives me poisoning, I simply get a yellow tea from the very same chest and cure myself. What did that add to proceedings? Lose this mechanic, it's garbage.

11) Farming got screwed. The new Plots are a pain to build and limited in use (can't mix seed types in large co-joined plots). Farming with the Hoe etc was a fun part of the game, and its replacement is poor. If Hoe farming was deemed OP, then there are a ton of other ways it could have been fixed that are far superior to this nonsense.

12) Pointless Magazines. So the magazine allowing me to create the Bicycle Chassis dropped. What's the point of reading that without the Handlebar one? Even if both dropped I'd still need to put the point into Grease Monkey to assemble the actual Bicycle. Some mags are great but the ones that let you craft one aspect of a thing that you will still need to spend perks on to fully assemble, are pointless.

13) And now my BIGGEST hate of all....the changes to mining. Surface boulders no longer produce Iron, Nitrate and Coal. I have been playing with the same group since A14, and I have always been the group's miner. I have perfected the art. I know for example that flitting from boulder to boulder was BY FAR the best way to mass mine Iron, Nitrate and Coal for 4 people. I never (or rarely) dug an actual mine as it was so inefficient in comparison to boulder mining. Plus moving across the boulder fields meant I was exploring the map at the same time, which made it practical, and also great fun as you never knew what you'd encounter). Now I am forced to mine downwards when I find a surface node. I hate this change. I hate having to dig mines underneath all the surface nodes. It has seriously killed a lot of the game for me. With a co-op group of 4 to supply with gunpowder, I need to mine 3 full days in every 7. With boulder mining, that was fine and fun as I explained. With underground tunnel mining, do you know how BORING three full days of it is? I want my boulders back.

 
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Totally disagree about your last point. For me, boulders have always been a hotfix while they improved the mining in the game. Doing real mines and mining out of it is awesome. Boulders were just... trading time for materials.

Some mags are great but the ones that let you craft one aspect of a thing that you will still need to spend perks on to fully assemble, are pointless.
Really? So if I put a point into a skill, it allows me to craft a finished item and all its parts, and if I unlocked some of the parts with magazines, I still need the same perk? Doesnt make sense indeed. Makes all those magazines, except in the rare ocasions where you get all of the same item before needing the item, useless.

 
1) Sorry to hear it.

2) Kinda agree - I wish we could have way more zombies, but it's just not possible at the moment it seems.

3) This should have been obvious, but it's possible it wasn't.

4) Was never much of a bacon 'n eggs guy, so I haven't really noticed that. There's tonnes of canned food though.

5) Loving the melee - absolutely loving it, but I do play SP, so I might be avoiding synch issues some MP players are reporting.

6) Can't say I agree with that. It gets easier to if you do happen to perk it.

7) Haven't found that personally, got just over a 1,000 of 'em now.

8) RWG has been kind to me. Got a great 4k map going.

9) See 8).

10) Yet to get poisoned. Maybe there's some screwy RNG going on, cause I'm surprised I haven't been poisoned yet.

11) Haven't started my farm yet, so can't say on this one.

12) The new books are my absolute favourite bit of A18 actually.

13) Mining, imho, should always have meant more than picking off surface boulders. I think the new mining is great.

 
Well just talking about 13) - thats just not true. Mining underground was always by far the fastest way to mine. After you found the ore deposits (which could be a pain in the ass in A17) you could easily mine 10.000+ Coal/Nitrate in a single day or 2. No way that you do this with boulders. Boulders were great for the beginning (and I miss them for that!) when you didnt have proper tools to do underground mining. But for Horde Night 14 THE LATEST, I would ALWAYS go for underground mindes to mass produce ammo in the 1000s.

Though that being said: I agree with you, that especially iron can be a little painful in the beginning. And now that you need to specifically mine for iron, you dont magically get some Coal/Nitrate/Lead when doing so - which was nice to have in A17. Just minding your business till day 6, mining iron, and then on the night from day 6 - 7 you could turn all this Coal/Nitrate into GP and make bullets. Now you actually need to make up your mind on where to get those ressources.

I for one e.g. found an Auger on Day 2. Would have been game done in A17 - endless ressources forever. Now I needed to find all the ressources and couldnt find a nitrate mine no matter how long I searched for one. So I spend a whole precious 5th day to try and find a nitrate mine, then changed my whole horde night tactic bc I couldnt find one, and finally found it on Day 8. And I freakin love it. It makes the game WAY more unpredictable, which is a giant point in making a survival game fun.

 
I agree to all but I want to add a few helping notes:

About the bones, the ratio between farming with axes and farming with knives seems to be around 3.33 : 1 . Using knives to harvest materials is therefore mandatory.

As for your opinion on the boring mining I would advise making a base above an iron ore. This way even if you do mine vertically you'll have more iron than you can probably use. Make iron to junk rounds , sell them for 3 times the iron price and get 1500 coins. Turn coins to brass or trade them for bullets.

Also you keep mentioning that you can't build the same type in conjoined plots. I have plots attached to each other and I see no issue mixing them up however I did notice the blocks cannot hold mid-air and they immediately fall with their seeds into oblivion. Perhaps you could post an image showing what you mean with conjoined farm plots?

 
Well just talking about 13) - thats just not true. Mining underground was always by far the fastest way to mine. After you found the ore deposits (which could be a pain in the ass in A17) you could easily mine 10.000+ Coal/Nitrate in a single day or 2. No way that you do this with boulders. Boulders were great for the beginning (and I miss them for that!) when you didnt have proper tools to do underground mining. But for Horde Night 14 THE LATEST, I would ALWAYS go for underground mindes to mass produce ammo in the 1000s.
Though that being said: I agree with you, that especially iron can be a little painful in the beginning. And now that you need to specifically mine for iron, you dont magically get some Coal/Nitrate/Lead when doing so - which was nice to have in A17. Just minding your business till day 6, mining iron, and then on the night from day 6 - 7 you could turn all this Coal/Nitrate into GP and make bullets. Now you actually need to make up your mind on where to get those ressources.

I for one e.g. found an Auger on Day 2. Would have been game done in A17 - endless ressources forever. Now I needed to find all the ressources and couldnt find a nitrate mine no matter how long I searched for one. So I spend a whole precious 5th day to try and find a nitrate mine, then changed my whole horde night tactic bc I couldnt find one, and finally found it on Day 8. And I freakin love it. It makes the game WAY more unpredictable, which is a giant point in making a survival game fun.
Exactly, boulders were too cheap. The new mining (actually it's the old way of doing it too), makes games more random, since you have to consider resources in the map for your strategy and base location.

 
Ramps can be crafted without a table saw.

You should definitely be able to plant different seeds in adjacent crop plots. They are just blocks.

As Kalarro pointed out, surface boulders were never meant to provide more than a few resources to get you started. We were finally able to fix this properly.

Really? So if I put a point into a skill, it allows me to craft a finished item and all its parts, and if I unlocked some of the parts with magazines, I still need the same perk? Doesnt make sense indeed. Makes all those magazines, except in the rare ocasions where you get all of the same item before needing the item, useless.
That is true only if you put a restriction on your game of being unable to use looted or bought parts.

Most play without such a rule.

 
3) Put points into Intellect 3 so I could get Grease Monkey and make a Bicycle. Then found out I needed Intellect 4 and Advanced Engineering 2 to build the Workbench I needed to make the Bicycle with. Very annoying.

7) Not enough Bones. So now everything needs a Repair Kit to be repaired. Everything. Kits require Duct Tape which requires Glue which required Bones. Since the need for Repair Kits has exploded through the roof in A18, so has the need for Bones. There are simply not enough of them. This is, without a doubt, the main bottleneck in the game, especially in a multiplayer situation. For the record, a level 2 Pick being used to Mine for an entire day will burn through 12 Repair Kits. We need either more Bones (a LOT more), or a second recipe for Glue.

10) Food poisoning mechanic. Get rid of it. It adds nothing. Players only eat at their base. And always have yellow tea. So if I eat something that gives me poisoning, I simply get a yellow tea from the very same chest and cure myself. What did that add to proceedings? Lose this mechanic, it's garbage.

11) Farming got screwed. The new Plots are a pain to build and limited in use (can't mix seed types in large co-joined plots). Farming with the Hoe etc was a fun part of the game, and its replacement is poor. If Hoe farming was deemed OP, then there are a ton of other ways it could have been fixed that are far superior to this nonsense.
3) Agree, I feel that all the vehicles should be merged into Engineering.

7) Agree, I would prefer that repair kits have x uses before they are used up. This way one repair kite can repair multiple items before it is exhausted.

10) Disagree, I kind of like the food poisoning mechanic. I fill the alternative for the TFP would be to add a spoiling timer to all food. However, there should be additional methods other than iron gut to remove it. Perhaps, every level in cooking reduces the food poisoning chance for food/water you cook.

11) Agree, I'm not a fan of the plots. I feel like the plots should be in addition to the hoe and possibly increase the output.

 
That is true only if you put a restriction on your game of being unable to use looted or bought parts.

Most play without such a rule.
True, didnt think about that. you can craft one part and find or buy the other.

 
1) Definitely needs a fix, but is not so much a game breaker, as more of an annoyance.

2) I agree there could be more. Some people say there are more Zs than in A17, although i can't really compare on the numbers. Seen quite a few, but there are times where i see none around.

3) Don't need Grease Monkey to make a Bicycle. You need it to craft the parts, otherwise you can assembly at any Workbench. Finding parts and finding a workbench is totally luck based. This is similar as in A17.4, where you could find parts and craft what you wanted at a workbench.

4) Would be nice if at mid-late game you could craft an equivalent of feathers for arrows, but using more advanced materials.

5) Melee IS different, but i think an upgrade to what we had. More weapons and enahncements to current mechanics is good. Just needs more polish.

6) Ramps can be crafted from Wood Frame. Just push and hold R, select multiblock feature and choose a Ramp.

7) As in 4, there could be an advanced recipe for making glue with more advanced/other materials. More possibilities to do some things is better.

8) Not seen it yet, although i only been in Forest and Snow.

9) Playing on RWG and have not had any problems with it yet. So far i'm pretty content, but i'll reserve my judgement on when i explore more of this world.

10) Haven't been FP yet, got enough teas to last me a lifetime. This is something like bleeding, you either are prepared for it or not.

11) Not farmed yet, gonna check that out when i flesh out my base more.

12) Definitely not pointless. If i don't invest into crafting recipes, i will try to find the magazines. If i don't care about magazines, i sell them and invest a skill point. Simple as that.

13) Love the mining. The amounts you got in previous alphas were nothing compared to what you get now. If you mined a lot of Iron and got a wee bit of Coal, Nitrate and Lead, it still was not enough to support making A LOT of bullets. I always needed to find veins of specific resources. Now i can find specific resources, mark them on my map and go digging this on day x, this on day x+1, etc. I can also find various resources and focus on something purely if i need it and decide if i dig near my base or far away (leaving the resources close up for when i need it fast). Better management, more possibilities.

 
I am always the miner/crafter in my MP games. I am currently loving the change to mining, with my only concern being the swiss-cheesing of an area with several mines converging, but that is easily resolved with wood frames and flagstone blocks.

 
2) I have only played 5 nights now but every night I had visitors (once only one, once a whole wandering horde). It may be because I was not in the same place twice. Maybe respawn in the same chunk takes a while if you cleaned it once.

3) Build workbench or find one. Don't know myself but I heard someone report that a lot more POIs have workstations now.

11) "(can't mix seed types in large co-joined plots)". First time I hear that. Are you sure? It would only mean more space needed for farming plots, so I don't see much of a problem with that per se. But I also don't see what it brings to the game and it would mean the game would need to check every time you place a plot that it doesn't join two plot-rows with different seeds! I really doubt they added so much special code for a relatively meaningless "feature".

13) So you want to supply a group of 4 singlehandedly with gun powder? Maybe that is your problem. Even unspecialized someone with a steel pick gets a lot of material out of a mine. So get the other 3 to work for their ammo too (at least at night everyone has some time to dig). And tell them to buy any ammo they find at traders and conserve ammo when possible. (PS: I play co-op with 3 others, so I know the situation as well)

 
Well just talking about 13) - thats just not true. Mining underground was always by far the fastest way to mine. After you found the ore deposits (which could be a pain in the ass in A17) you could easily mine 10.000+ Coal/Nitrate in a single day or 2. No way that you do this with boulders.
I have several points to make o what you said here:

a) Boulders gave you Coal and Nitrate in roughly equal measure from one source; very convenient. No need for 2 mines. And Iron as well. No need for 3 mines.

b) You said yourself the veins could be a pain to find. All that time you spend looking for them, I was just moving to the next boulder.

c) Boulder flitting opens the map, which is important, and is also fun because you encounter things out on the surface

d) And sorry to say it, but 10k per day? No. I was pulling 2 or 3 times that from boulders (assuming I had a mini-bike ofc) per day.

As an obsessive min-maxer, I ran extensive tests comparing underground mining (having located the vein) and boulder mining. There is no contest.

 
Thanks for those who educated me on the Ramps thing, and - as far as I could tell - advising me to use a Hunting Knife on gore blocks?

As for the Plots, I placed the first 2 I made side by side and the combined into a big plot. I put a Potato in the first one and it would then not let me put anything except another Potato in the second. Shrug.

 
Thanks for those who educated me on the Ramps thing, and - as far as I could tell - advising me to use a Hunting Knife on gore blocks?
As for the Plots, I placed the first 2 I made side by side and the combined into a big plot. I put a Potato in the first one and it would then not let me put anything except another Potato in the second. Shrug.

Yeah not sure what is goin on with that. It should allow you to plant one in one block and something else in the other. Sounds as if you triggered a bug some how. Take the seeds out then destroy the plots (if you don't know you get then back just make sure nothing is in them or the seed will vanish). Try to either place them back or place in a different spot. Could possibly be a bug in that specific location? Hard to really say but it isn't working right for you is all for certain.

 
1) Yeah i also was wondering whats up with that. A17 was very dark but in a18 it went so bright its mildly unnatural.

2) I don't feel like there is not enough zombies to fight. I mean if you look at it in my perspective 25 zombies in 1 poi is absurd. From 3 pois you could get around 5-6 lvls. Your gamestage went up too fast and gave you not enough other stuff to withstand increased gamestage zombies. Not to mention horde nights. But it need some work beacuse sometimes Poi indeed have around 3 to 5, which it might seem realistically, it will not bring too much action.

3) The point is you can find workbench chemistry station forge and campfire in trader buildings, random garages. All working. Its an option to get stuff early to be crafted without perks allowing you to create stuff that need it. You don't need to rush intellect to get your bike.

4)That pains me a lot too, but i can offer you to chog like crazy red tea now. It gives you buff that reduces usage of food and water. In addition it stacks so if you drink around 6 of those you get 20 minutes of less food consumption. As far for regular poisoning i didin't get it yet with is weird. As for feathers i skipped bow entirely. It feels too weak to use now.

5)As for melee i don't feel anything bad about it in a18. Truth is those glancing blows might work not as intended yet and need some work. But for me clubs (especially a baseball bat) is too strong. You just power attack then across 5 meters away. Even blades feels nice now.

6)Yeah i still dislike that change. Perhaps a 10 stamina cost instead of 20, but we are minority here.

7) I don't have any problem with finding bones. In fact you eat them a lot since it cost 1 duck tape for repair kit, and 5 bones for 1 glue. Be conservative with it and use it when you use tool health to maximum. You don't get damage penalty for 80% damaged tools. Not anymore.

8) I haven't yet encountered it. Any way to reproduce it?

9) RWG in my humble opinion will never be bug free. There will always be something wrong with it.

10) As in previous point just use a lot of red tea and stack the passive. It just works :)

11) I'm on day 12 60 minutes day and i only got 7 farming plots done. Its way harder to make a significant income with it.

12)They should generalize some books. That's true.

13)1 night gave me around 2k coal from mining a 1 node. Its very easy to get gunpowder now. The problem is you need to find a chemistry station asap. If your trader don't have it working your doomed. For my lucky case it was in trader for 9k dukes. Just do digging quests(they are too easy now) and get those. But for ammo its RNG until you get chemistry station because I'm not doing it 2 to 1 in my inventory.

But boulders seems scarse now for stone you need to dig down.

 
Yeah not sure what is goin on with that. It should allow you to plant one in one block and something else in the other.
I did try that because it seems to make no sense and I can plant seeds in any pattern I want.

 
That is true only if you put a restriction on your game of being unable to use looted or bought parts.Most play without such a rule.
Or if you don't happen to loot or buy the other parts, which is far more likely.

 
I mine with a stone axe because I don't want to waste my duct tape.

Duct tape is reserved for things that save my characters life.

Knife that road kill for the win! :) Or is the machete better?

 
Or if you don't happen to loot or buy the other parts, which is far more likely.
Yeah, if you don't find that book that upsets some people then there is no imaginary problem at all.

 
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