7 Days To Die: Better Than Giant Bees Mod

[FlowerChild]

Well, you just made me realize that logs are early game building blocks that I need to remove, so yes, definite value here :)

Whoa... I was sure this was intended :D

How would that be possible thou? Turning the Item into a Block?

Yeah, converting the block into an item basically. It's a bit of a pain, but there are already precedents for it within the configs, like with torches that convert back and forth.

But honestly, that log thing caught me so by surprise when you mentioned it that I had an immediate "KILL IT! BURN IT WITH FIRE!" response. But yeah, upon further reflection it's potentially quite cool (log cabins and such), so I'm going to try playing that way for a bit in my current save, which is still quite early on with me searching for a decent POI to call home.

Will decide what to do with it after. I've been procrastinating about doing a few block item conversions to get rid of some weirdness with some blocks, but will give this one a decent workout before applying it there.

Was just an assumption on my part in that I always thought logs were an item, and never tried placing them. I think I've been conditioned by MC to only consider blocky looking stuff to be placeable, so I think the round shape of the logs made me think they weren't.

EDIT: To add further complication to the equation, I just checked out the configs and it turns out logs can be upgraded using a wrench to reinforce them with additional wood and metal. Also really not sure about them being particularly fragile, as they're using the same damage stats as everything else made out of wood.

The trash piles on the other hand, I don't know, maybe not so much. You can find one of those surface lvl coal ore fields in the burnt forest, where there are about 10 trash piles in a small area, and literally only find tin cans or ammo cases or both in each one. There are so many items in this game that could be concidered trash in normal circumstances, you know? i don't want to find valuable stuff there, just... stuff. I hope that makes sense. I don't want to make the game easier in any way.

I think the big question on this one though, is how much should trash looting be incentivized.

It's fine at the start of the game where your character is desperately scrambling to gather some meager resources, but as the game progresses, because of the truly crap loot to be found in the trash, I find I naturally progress to ignoring it more and more, except maybe around my base where I feel motivated to clear pretty much everything in the area, to reduce visual confusion and constant "what's that over there?" moments. Generally I find that past the first couple of in-game days, searching through every pile of garbage you come across is a huge waste of time which could be much more productively spent moving towards the next group of buildings and looting them.

IMO, this is a good thing, as the environment is so utterly saturated with trash everywhere that if looting it is somehow beneficial, you're encouraging the player to have a crap time by going through each and every pile of it.

So yeah, overall I do not think looting trash is something I want to try to promote or reward, and really man, my loot tables for trash aren't all that different from vanilla, with many of the same junk items appearing.

On the topic of clothing on zombies, the game is currently over saturated with cloth, so there's really no need, and not sure if salvaging clothing off of rotting corpses really fits either, especially if you're then stripping it down to make bandages :)

Really, I think the only thing that would be promoting is more fiddling with the crafting gui and inventory management as you feel obliged to strip down each individual piece of clothing you loot into cloth.

[VegasGoat]

Really, I think the only thing that would be promoting is more fiddling with the crafting gui and inventory management as you feel obliged to strip down each individual piece of clothing you loot into cloth.

Heh, I already do that whenever I find something, and there's definitely lots of clothing to be found in houses. It actually took me a while to realize I should be wearing some of the clothes I find instead of immediately scrapping them as they provide defensive bonuses on top of the cloth armor. I had assumed clothing was just cosmetic.

On that same note, one thing I noticed: Cowboy Hats break down into cloth scraps, but they actually have the stats of leather armor, and use leather strips for repair, so it doesn't match up.

[FlowerChild]

On that same note, one thing I noticed: Cowboy Hats break down into cloth scraps, but they actually have the stats of leather armor, and use leather strips for repair, so it doesn't match up.

Only if you assume that the whole thing is leather and that you aren't ripping out the cloth lining.

At least that was the logic I used when setting them up to be scrapped, as I certainly didn't want to just be handing out leather, bypassing hunting in the process. You're right though, in that they feel weird, especially given how common they are, and you wind up with circumstances like crafting your cloth armor at the start of the game only to realize your cowboy hat was providing better protection.

I'll likely switch them over to being made out of cloth entirely.

EDIT: K, I think after considering it a bit I have a better idea of the design intent behind the whole hat thing.

It looks like what was being done there is that you're expected to craft armor for yourself in everything other than the head slot, where you can find a bunch of different helmet and hat types as loot throughout the game which look like they're either equivalent or superior to your crafted stuff.

This kinda makes sense with the whole "fallen civilization" thing given head protection is probably one of the most common forms of "armor" around today in the consensus reality. It was also likely done so that you have multiple equally effective head-armor options as you progress through the game so that everyone doesn't wind up looking identical in multiplayer with the same full sets of crafted armor.

All of the above is good stuff IMO, so I don't want to screw it up in the mod.

So, what I've decided to do is tone down the number of cowboy hats you find given they are superior protection to the cloth armor you can make yourself and thus are a bit of a score in terms of loot, leave them as leather, and remove the ability to scrap that down into cloth.

[FlowerChild]

Ok, I like it...

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That's my base as the evening sets in on the 7th day in my new game.

The log thing really serves to make a few different things "pop" like both the scrap iron and the planks you salvage from breaking stuff now. My supplies of both were extremely tight, so there was no way I could upgrade all the logs.

I've also made a few changes to how logs function as blocks to make them more of an early game building material. Namely, they need to be supported from below, so if a hole forms in one of your columns, the whole thing will come crashing down. This allows for some fortification ability, without making actual construction later useless.

It also takes a hell of a lot of work (about a day and a half in-game for me to put together that perimeter), both due to using a stone axe, and because using logs that way is less efficient than if you convert them to frames.

But yeah, overall I think I'm sold on it. May need some further tweaks to get it just right, but all told I think it's one of my better totally unintentional features ;)

EDIT: And after....

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Next time I'm using my supplies to upgrade logs near the doors ;)

[FlowerChild]

[**** NEW RELEASE ****]

Version 1.14 of Better Than Giant Bees is ready for download!

Download Link

This release contains the following changes:

-Added plank drops to wood stairs on destruction.

-Changed wood logs placed as blocks to fall if unsupported from below. This allows them to be used as an early game building material while still providing incentive to progress towards more advanced construction techniques given a barricade made of them will quickly collapse when attacked. Note that this also applies to the upgraded forms of logs as well (reinforced with wood and scrap metal).

-Changed cooking pots, drift wood, and campfires to not be capable of being used in building unsupported horizontal "bridges", similar to the log change above.

-Changed the first aid bandage recipe to use a regular bandage and aloe cream, to make it more of an upgrade to the regular bandage.

-Changed (reduced) the overall probability of finding wrenches as they were a tad too common. Also moved finding them mostly in cupboards over to cars to have a little more control over how many the player has potential access to (given cars are rarer).

-Changed the iron fragment drops on some light fixtures to scrap iron for consistency with the brass ones.

-Changed brass items such as trophies, door knobs, and candle sticks so that they don't appear both in trash and from zombie drops and moved those same items to being found in dressers, as the game was over-saturated with brass, and that whole thing with zombies carrying around big brass items in their pockets was rather odd, even if they did seem quite happy to see me.

-Changed (reduced) the probability of finding cowboy hats, and removed the ability to scrap them into cloth, as the combination of their better-than-cloth stats, repairing them with leather, and finding them so abundantly was making them a rather weird and out of place item.

-Changed (reduced) the durability of hollow tree stumps to make them a bit easier to clean up after looting, and removed the wood plank drop from them.

-Changed metal store shelves to be much easier to break down for scrap iron, given those kinds of shelves are rather easy to break down ;)

-Fixed a few boarded doorways that weren't dropping planks on destruction.

-Removed oil and gunpowder from both garbage and zombie loot given their value and to make weapon maintenance a little more challenging.

Enjoy! :)

[Ethinolicbob]

I love the couches in the window.

[FlowerChild]

I love the couches in the window.

Hehe...yeah, I use those as "doors" :)

That's my exit route for mornings up on the 2nd story: through the window, down to the awning, and then onto the car, since zombies often bust through below and wading through them is generally a bad idea. I can then lure them out and either pick them off one by one, or lead a big zombie conga line down a road and away from my base.

The sofas are there mainly to keep the giant fucking bees out ;)

[DerAlex]

IMO, this is a good thing, as the environment is so utterly saturated with trash everywhere that if looting it is somehow beneficial, you're encouraging the player to have a crap time by going through each and every pile of it.

I think that's the crux of the matter. After thinking about it a bit, I'll call it crippling perfectionism. I feel the urge to check every container because the base game, or even every video game ever for that matter, conditioned me to do so. As I said, I didn't want to add anything valuable, only trash, but if they are not valuable, and stay not valuable, and I *know* they are not valuable, it begs the question why the fuck I check them in the first place...

You're right... you're almost always right, god damn it.... just you wait, one of these days I'll tell you something useful, I just know it :D

BTW, What's your opinion on the antibiotics? I checked the code today:

buffs.xml

Code: Select all

<buff id="cured" duration="2400t" name="Cured" description="You are immune to further infection." actions="increment(@wellness, 0.25, 100, 0, 0)" icon="buff_icon_medicine"/>

items.xml

Code: Select all

<item id="398" name="antibiotics"
            ....
            gain_wellness="5"

Not only gives antibiotics an initial wellness buff of 5, but the resulting "cured" buff increments wellness as well, so the resulting wellness increase is more among the lines of 10-15 wellness. I will change this for our playsession today, that is an obscene amount IMHO.

And btw, thank you for still answering me even thou I say stupid shit like "please make the bees huntable" sometimes. It was late... also Whiskey... somehow, gaming is way more fun at the Ballmer Peak. May have been slightly past it... :D

I look forward to 1.14 tonight!

Edit: A few lines about 10.5 here. Seems to be mostly fluff. Maybe a "drunk"-debuff coming. There may be some fun possibilities for "enhancing" the concussion debuff, if they introduce the possibility to assign screen distortion effects to buffs, which the "drunk"-debuff will likely entail.

[FlowerChild]

You're right... you're almost always right, god damn it.... just you wait, one of these days I'll tell you something useful, I just know it :D

Oh, you are man. You've made several useful observations that I've wound up tweaking around (the log thing being huge for example), and at the very least explaining my reasoning for various things often helps me solidify my thoughts and turn them into more of an overall design direction than a loose collection of individual ideas.

BTW, What's your opinion on the antibiotics?

I still don't really have one, as I haven't looked at the buffs yet.

As is my method of balancing with each of my mods, I tend to tweak things as I play, and honestly, I just haven't fucked up enough to have any kind of buff going in quite awhile :)

It's definitely on my todo list though, I just always seem to have a priority item I want to address. Like right now I want to take a look at the movement speed for animals and see if I can tweek it given yesterday I discovered it's fairly easy to chase one down with a club which messes around quite heavily with the desirability of firearms for hunting, and makes it much more of an early game activity for something I was thinking more of as a mid-game food-source once you have a gun. It also makes the conservation of ammunition much less of a consideration than I'd like.

Edit: A few lines about 10.5 here. Seems to be mostly fluff. Maybe a "drunk"-debuff coming. There may be some fun possibilities for "enhancing" the concussion debuff, if they introduce the possibility to assign screen distortion effects to buffs, which the "drunk"-debuff will likely entail.

Yeah, more fluff. Will be rather happy when they're more or less done with the character customization thing and get back to gameplay related stuff.

[DerAlex]

I want to take a look at the movement speed for animals and see if I can tweek it given yesterday I discovered it's fairly easy to chase one down with a club which messes around quite heavily with the desirability of firearms for hunting, and makes it much more of an early game activity for something I was thinking more of as a mid-game food-source once you have a gun. It also makes the conservation of ammunition much less of a consideration than I'd like.

Good luck with that...

I like the fact that you can chase down rabbits. The fact that you can also melee a pig because of stunlock is somewhat realistic, but from a game design standpoint, it would propably be better if they would be faster than you. I've never got a deer on land with melee. The big problem with hunting ATM is something else entirely. Random gen is full of lakes and rivers, and since the AI is crap, every wildlife just runs away from you in a straight line. Once you get them into a body of water that way, you're golden. Free Meat! I don't think this is fixable with the xml files alone. Moving in water is just fucked ATM.

I played alone yesterday, the first time since A8, and the first time in BTGB ever. New game, newest version of BTGB (1.14), default/recommended settings, no xml modifications

Short Version:

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Long Version: It's dawn day 6 now. I have 20 Water, 25 Meats, 3 Painkillers, 5 Antibiotics, 4 first aid bandages (Tier 2, forgot the right name), 2 Beakers, 7 Cooking pots, a grill, spiked club, pistol with ~30 shots, over 30 leather... Also full health and wellness of 170+

SP is incredibly easy compared to co-op MP. I basically need half the supplies while I cover almost the same ground. I can carry only half as much alone, of course, but inventory management is a fun little meta-game in itself like that. Plus, you don't have to spend half of the first day trying to find the other dude. Since you balance for SP, IMHO, droprates for many items could be nerfed.

This was a somewhat lucky playthrou up until now. The very first zombie I killed dropped a beaker. It was glorious. The very second zombie infected me not even 1 minute later, it was like karma or something. I almost ragequit :D. I pulled throu, and found antibiotics in the afternoon of day 1. Since then, I found enough antibiotics to be perma-immune to infection throu the "cured"-buff, and I build up wellness like crazy (the more I play, the more I hate the wellness system as a whole). I'm getting really good at spotting nurses.

I found both skillbooks related to wood and construction, and a repair tool before dusk day 3. So yeah.... gg. The book that teaches chests and frames and so on I found 3 times already. I also found the one with the explosives and the one with Tea and tier 2 bandages. I have not found any forge/metalworking/pottery book, no leather book, no weapon book, no ammo book. I also found a pistol on a corpse. One of those set-piece corpses, not a zombie. I don't know if this drop is intended, but it was nice accidental enviromental storytelling. Like the "bunker-booths" in Fallout, where sometimes a skeleton with a gun and blood splatter behind him says more than 10 minutes of exposition throu dialog.

My pistol, Bertha the 2nd, is in pretty bad condition, and I love the change to the drop rates of oil. I have found exactly 0 oil up until now, and I hope I find one until the horde arrives for a repair kit. Doesn't look like it thou. (I looked in the .xml files for which container has a chance to spawn oil, and it seems only cars do. I think I like that. According to the xml, it spawns, if it spawns, between 1 and 10. I consider 10 to be too much at first glance.)

I was searching for buildings, I ran on the seam between grass land and wasteland for a bit, and what I thought to be a Bloat turned out to be a police zombie. He dropped 21 9mm bullets. As I said. Lucky playthrou. This was the only time I fired the pistol.

I have already built a small house with campfire, torches, chests and so on. Done on day 5. I won't spend night 7 there, but I have a home. Let's see what the day 7 horde brings. Since I can build structures, I'll fortify one of those 3 story shops instead of my hovel. The hovel wouldn't make it yet. Not really concerned with the horde, to be honest.

I did not die yet, once I was incredibly close thou. The first night I spent in my own house, I thought, I bet wood has enough stability so I can remove this pillar. I lost that bet. Should have tested this at day. The roof collapsed, and 3 spider zombies invaded my personal space at the same time. This was day 5, before the horde. They DO spawn before that, but they don't seem to trigger a horde. Anyway, this was a close one. Other than that, smooth sailing.

I'm really surprised how easy this mod is in SP as opposed to co-op. As I said, I had incredible luck with uncommon items (beaker, skillbooks, the pistol), but normal stuff like food and medical items seem to be overabundand. I can keep my health topped off all the time, and I'm perma-immune by finding more antibiotics than I can eat. Also, the eggs. So many eggs. I have about 40 of the things as a last resort, if push comes to shove. At the very least, I disagree about the fried egg recipe. I can't imagine how that would work on a grill in the first place... :D

Seriously, 2ppl sticking together, working together, at 25% loot is a really dire experience, where you have to eat what you find right away. It is grim but amazing. I imagine you could propably halve the droprates for food SP without it being unfair. Things might get interesting later on, if you still cannot farm because of RNG being a bitch and you not finding the metal skillbook as you exhaust all of the food items in nearby villages and the wildlife, but as the Stranger in Big Lebowski said, sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes the bar eats you.

One more thing that could be ripped out from vanilla: Chests can be placed on walls. Sounds harmless and useful at first, but, if you built a house, and on the outside, on the 3rd block from below, you place a row of chests horizontally all around the structure, you have a cheap and cheaty (the chests don't attach to the wall, they float before it) walkway 2.5 blocks high, meaning you can hit down, and zombies can't hit up. Also spider zombies go below it and can't climb up. It's the perfect defence, and I would concider it bugusing. I can provide screenshots if needed.

Edit: Sorry for the lengthy post, I'm quite obsessed with the game and your mod at the moment. GF is slowly getting grumpy. I dreamt that I found an auger the other day... maybe I should take a break... but, fuck it, sleep is for the weak. That's what coffee is for ;)

[Renegrade]

Hey man, just some points:

- Thread topic still says 1.13 :)
- I've noticed that the gun safe version of the dumpsters that spawn in towns collapse, destroying the gun safe, if you break anything on top of 'em (I'm pretty sure this is a vanilla issue, but normally you don't break anything on the top of the dumpster as they only have one-stage safes in vanilla). I don't think this can be fixed in an XML file, but I thought I'd mention it just in case I'm wrong in that belief.
- The stamina drain (or lack thereof) on the bone shank actually makes it a better weapon for dealing with small/medium crowds of zombies than any of the clubs. It might take an extra hit or two, but you can swing it all day, whereas a club drains your stamina down to nothing in short order. (I've been meaning to mention this for a while but I keep on forgetting)
- I think I'm seeing some animal respawn still, although it could just be leftovers that were hiding somewhere. NB: This is a save originating in 1.13, currently using 1.14.

Random gen is full of lakes and rivers, and since the AI is crap, every wildlife just runs away from you in a straight line. Once you get them into a body of water that way, you're golden. Free Meat! I don't think this is fixable with the xml files alone. Moving in water is just fucked ATM.

That's how I do all of my hunting, I maneuver around the animal until it's between me and a water source, and then chase it into the drink. Barbeque time!

Long Version: It's dawn day 6 now. I have 20 Water, 25 Meats, 3 Painkillers, 5 Antibiotics, 4 first aid bandages (Tier 2, forgot the right name), 2 Beakers, 7 Cooking pots, a grill, spiked club, pistol with ~30 shots, over 30 leather... Also full health and wellness of 170+

Don't overestimate small-fraction drop rates just because RNG is favoring you. I'm heading into day 12 now, and I have the basic metalworking path and ammo path all booked up, and while I have a pile more metal and hard gear, I'd say I have about a quarter of the food you do and only two thirds of the medicine (and at day 6, I'd only had that one antibiotics pill I'd been jealously hoarding). Wellness is still only in the 130s thanks to some long starvy stretches and an incident almost right off the bat where a fat zombie spawned literally close enough to tap me on the shoulder (I did a 360 scan, saw nothing behind me, and then BAM, hit by a fat man).

Part of the problem is the frequency of those micro-villages: in this current save, there's only two micro-villages in a 3km radius, and there's a large amount of wasteland about. In one of my previous saves, it was like a grid of forests, each with a micro-village of at least two blocks (and thus eight structures) each, and items rained from the sky.

I pulled throu, and found antibiotics in the afternoon of day 1. Since then, I found enough antibiotics to be perma-immune to infection throu the "cured"-buff, and I build up wellness like crazy (the more I play, the more I hate the wellness system as a whole).

Don't hate on wellness for problems with antibiotics. If it weren't for wellness, I'd be abusing hardcore spawn right now to warp all over the map, pre-raiding villages (collecting all the loot into a single location and reading all the books) and dying to avoid having to eat or drink. It would get me all booked up in very short order, with a pre-loaded map and high density loot caches.

Given that most other items are only really giving about +1-ish wellness tops, I think antibiotics would pretty much be limited to +2 total and still be powerful.

[FlowerChild]

Long Version: It's dawn day 6 now. I have 20 Water, 25 Meats, 3 Painkillers, 5 Antibiotics, 4 first aid bandages (Tier 2, forgot the right name), 2 Beakers, 7 Cooking pots, a grill, spiked club, pistol with ~30 shots, over 30 leather... Also full health and wellness of 170+

I think the big difference there between us is the meat. I don't hunt without a firearm for the most part, unless an animal derps out right next to me and gets stuck in a building or something (I really wish they wouldn't do that), so in my current save, I'm constantly hitting the hungry state around day 10 (haven't found a gun yet), and have zero in the way of food stores. I'm basically eating as fast as I find food.

Granted, I spent a day and a half there building that log fort in the previous screenshots, during which time I wasn't collecting squat and that really hit my food stores hard

I only realized a couple of days ago that animals were slower than I was and I could use a club on them, and once I did, and thinking "that's lame", I immediately made the change to increase their movement rates ;)

And yes, I realize you can chase them into water (off cliffs too although fall damage seems to be pretty trivial), I've been doing a bit of that, but at the very least it encourages some though on the part of the player, and there isn't always a convenient terrain feature to make use of when you spot a high value animal.

SP is incredibly easy compared to co-op MP.

That shouldn't necessarily be the case. Given equally skilled players that are willing to split up to scavenge, I think it should actually be easier in MP as you'll multiply your chance of finding rare drops while still scavenging individually at the same rate.

If you're carrying players of a lower skill level, yes, it will of course be harder for you personally. If you all cluster in the same area, then yes, you're also multiplying the total amount of food consumed while scavenging the same supplies you could find alone.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but to me it seems like MP should actually be substantially easier for a group of skilled players that are willing to spread over the landscape.

This was a somewhat lucky playthrou up until now. The very first zombie I killed dropped a beaker. It was glorious. The very second zombie infected me not even 1 minute later, it was like karma or something. I almost ragequit :D. I pulled throu, and found antibiotics in the afternoon of day 1. Since then, I found enough antibiotics to be perma-immune to infection throu the "cured"-buff, and I build up wellness like crazy (the more I play, the more I hate the wellness system as a whole). I'm getting really good at spotting nurses.

Anitbiotic drops in previous releases were actually overly high due to me neglecting to adjust them when I removed other drops (blood bag, draw kit, etc.) that inadvertently also upped the probability of antibiotics.

I've already fixed that for next release, but they've been dropping at about twice the rate I have it set to now.

One more thing that could be ripped out from vanilla: Chests can be placed on walls. Sounds harmless and useful at first, but, if you built a house, and on the outside, on the 3rd block from below, you place a row of chests horizontally all around the structure, you have a cheap and cheaty (the chests don't attach to the wall, they float before it) walkway 2.5 blocks high, meaning you can hit down, and zombies can't hit up. Also spider zombies go below it and can't climb up. It's the perfect defence, and I would concider it bugusing. I can provide screenshots if needed.

Will fix. I've been correcting issues like that with multiple blocks recently, and it's easy enough to do, just need to know which ones have that problem out of more than a thousand in the game ;)

Hey man, just some points:

- Thread topic still says 1.13 :)

Fixed :)

- I've noticed that the gun safe version of the dumpsters that spawn in towns collapse, destroying the gun safe, if you break anything on top of 'em (I'm pretty sure this is a vanilla issue, but normally you don't break anything on the top of the dumpster as they only have one-stage safes in vanilla). I don't think this can be fixed in an XML file, but I thought I'd mention it just in case I'm wrong in that belief.

Does the gun safe drop loot when you do that, get "cracked", or is just outright destroyed? I actually think I have a couple of those in my current POI, so I'll give it a try.

- The stamina drain (or lack thereof) on the bone shank actually makes it a better weapon for dealing with small/medium crowds of zombies than any of the clubs. It might take an extra hit or two, but you can swing it all day, whereas a club drains your stamina down to nothing in short order. (I've been meaning to mention this for a while but I keep on forgetting)

Make sense, will take a look. I've been thinking awhile that ditching bones and shanks entirely might be in order as they're a fairly useless little bump on the progression right now.

- I think I'm seeing some animal respawn still, although it could just be leftovers that were hiding somewhere. NB: This is a save originating in 1.13, currently using 1.14.

I've had those moments where I've wondered if they're still spawning too, but I really don't think so. Before I removed the animal respawns, I had one day in my save where animals just starting popping in like they were beaming down from the Enterprise.

When it happens, you're certain it's happening :)

Don't hate on wellness for problems with antibiotics. If it weren't for wellness, I'd be abusing hardcore spawn right now to warp all over the map, pre-raiding villages (collecting all the loot into a single location and reading all the books) and dying to avoid having to eat or drink. It would get me all booked up in very short order, with a pre-loaded map and high density loot caches.

Given that most other items are only really giving about +1-ish wellness tops, I think antibiotics would pretty much be limited to +2 total and still be powerful.

Ok...ok, I'll look at the bloody antibiotics thing :)

EDIT: Done. Wellness benefits of antibiotics completely removed and the duration cut down to a quarter of what it was. I'll look at it further down the road, and may even implement a wellness penalty to using them to prevent them being abused late-game when you can make them yourself, but this at least prevents exploits with them now, and with the limited supply of moldy bread (go figure), what you can do late game with them is rather limited anyways.

[VegasGoat]

Make sense, will take a look. I've been thinking awhile that ditching bones and shanks entirely might be in order as they're a fairly useless little bump on the progression right now.

While it's true that I usually skip bone shanks because I tend to have the materials for a club before I find a bone, it's got a really satisfying animation the way you stab them right in the face so it'd be a shame to lose it. It might actually be better as something to use in-between the regular club and spiked club. Then finding a bone would be a nice temporary bonus to your melee capabilities since you can't repair the shiv, or if you had a spiked club already you might decide to use the shiv until it breaks to save on having to repair the spiked club.

[FlowerChild]

While it's true that I usually skip bone shanks because I tend to have the materials for a club before I find a bone, it's got a really satisfying animation the way you stab them right in the face so it'd be a shame to lose it. It might actually be better as something to use in-between the regular club and spiked club. Then finding a bone would be a nice temporary bonus to your melee capabilities since you can't repair the shiv, or if you had a spiked club already you might decide to use the shiv until it breaks to save on having to repair the spiked club.

Was just a thought. I already nerfed them and took care of all the items mentioned in my above post actually.

I had a release close to ready to go, so I added those items in and just want to do a bit of testing before putting it out.

[Renegrade]

Does the gun safe drop loot when you do that, get "cracked", or is just outright destroyed? I actually think I have a couple of those in my current POI, so I'll give it a try.

The cracked one appears for maybe ah, one frame, and then the entire center of the dumpster collapses, destroying the safe. Note that destroying anything on top of the dumpster seems to trigger it, I tested the second time by just breaking one of the garbage bags, and that triggered the collapse (it's really a vanilla issue, just normally you wouldn't notice in vanilla since gun safes are just regular containers).

BTW, I love the two-stage containers :)

I've had those moments where I've wondered if they're still spawning too, but I really don't think so. Before I removed the animal respawns, I had one day in my save where animals just starting popping in like they were beaming down from the Enterprise.

When it happens, you're certain it's happening :)

Yeah, I haven't seen any of them beam in, so it is entirely possible they just managed to avoid the ravenous horde (or rather, avoid derping out on some rock while the horde closes in) until now, or wandered into the active blocks around my base when I returned from an expedition.

I'll keep an eye out for that beam-in drop they do just in case though..

EDIT: Done. Wellness benefits of antibiotics completely removed and the duration cut down to a quarter of what it was.

Thanks! :)

I got infected a couple of times after my previous post (and found a few more pills), so I'm now soaring along at 168 and climbing... there's definitely something out of whack with TFP's concept there..

FYI, it seems like vanilla has actual icons for the various colors of pants, still getting a kinda leather thing for ones that aren't blue in BTGB...

Current Status:
Day 17.
- Spent some hungry time around day 14-ish, but the crops are finally maturing in decent numbers. Veggie stew for all!
- The night of the 14th was interesting; without log spikes, the stick-based spikes weren't able to kill more than half of the zombies. The cop zombies did heavy damage to the special building I'd fortified (I'm avoiding using my main base for hordes until it can have proper defenses), but it held up through the night and I was able to make a clean getaway in the morning (minus one dog, to whom I axed a question). Next time, I'm not going to taunt them by peeking over the wall.
- I now have basic carpentry (twice!), so I don't have to store my stuff in garbage bags and squishy corpses anymore (walking on corpses makes the squishiest sound I've ever heard)
- I now know how to make an SMG, and three iron armor bits (chest, feet, gloves, with a spare gloves scroll) thanks to some very generous safes

[FlowerChild]

BTW, I love the two-stage containers :)

Me too, but the credit for that is entirely on the Pimps' side. Like usual, I just pushed the concept further than a well adjusted game designer would ;)

Not sure if you've seen them, but they have "shotgun messiah" crates in the store of the same name as of Alpha 10, that work in an identical manner to the BTGB safes, EXCEPT, that they're made out of wood, so the end result is rather negligible.

However, when I ran into one of those stores in one of my many tests and decided to check it out, it took me a "wtf?" moment to realize I needed to bust the crates open before accessing the contents, and I then had a "that's brilliant!" moment :)

- Spent some hungry time around day 14-ish, but the crops are finally maturing in decent numbers. Veggie stew for all!

Doh! I'm just about to release the first of my farming changes too :\

[Renegrade]

Me too, but the credit for that is entirely on the Pimps' side. Like usual, I just pushed the concept further than a well adjusted game designer would ;)

Yeah, I saw in your notes about where it originated from (although I hadn't seen the originals until today in a youtube video), but there's more to an idea than just a raw concept -- the BTGB version is meaningful (gating goodness), whereas the TFP version is basically just cute fluff. :)

Although ... you were testing in the city? That's a scary place :S

Doh! I'm just about to release the first of my farming changes too :\

Oops :S

Oh well, I restart periodically anyhow (I restarted for 1.13 for example), might be time for another restart :)

Or, depending on the changes, I might be able to simulate them by adjusting my inventory/storage to an appropriate amount...

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, I saw in your notes about where it originated from (although I hadn't seen the originals until today in a youtube video), but there's more to an idea than just a raw concept -- the BTGB version is meaningful (gating goodness), whereas the TFP version is basically just cute fluff. :)

Well, that's what I mean about taking things to a level that well adjusted game developers generally don't ;)

You may notice that often times when I grab hold of an idea I take it all the way, even if many are left screaming "but that's too much/difficult/phallic!" in my wake :)

In this case, yeah, it rapidly occurred to me that this could be used as a means of progress gating in an open world (which is not really a trivial thing to do). I REALLY wish I could limit a tool's effectiveness on a material to make it entirely impossible to say crack a safe with a stone axe or fist, no matter how long you beat on it, but for now, I think this method works rather well.

Having said all that though, it wouldn't surprise me if those messiah crates were just a proof of concept for the Pimps, intending to do something similar to what I'm doing now with safes. I can't see much reason for them to have done it unless they had bigger plans for the concept, as the crates themselves make next to no difference in practice. It strikes me as just the seed of an idea there.

Although ... you were testing in the city? That's a scary place :S

No, I think I actually found one in a snow biome.

When I make changes I often create temporary worlds to act as test cases for them where I can go nuts with the creative menu and get technical level testing done quickly. Then I have my actual game worlds where I test changes for gameplay.

I think it was in one of those test worlds where I spawned in a snow biome and found a shotgun messiah store nearby. I could be wrong, but I get the impression different biomes haven't different chances of spawning more intersting POI's. I think the regular forest biome is one of the dullest in that regard and mostly just contains suburban sprawl. I've taken to exploring the other biomes more as a result, and I'm hoping in the future to further differentiate them if possible to create a more varied experience.

You probably noticed that I undid a lot of the "homogenous gruel" kind of changes that the Pimps have made over time to make all biomes rather similar in terms of survivability.

Doh! I'm just about to release the first of my farming changes too :\

Oops :S

Oh well, I restart periodically anyhow (I restarted for 1.13 for example), might be time for another restart :)

Shouldn't matter much for now. My changes at present just revolve gating farming behind a book by locking the plant to seed conversion recipes initially, and removing all seeds from the loot tables.

I was scratching my head for awhile about how to gate farming with my limited modding capability in the config files and while the above solution is a tad contrived and gamey, at least it works given what a huge jump forward farming is in terms of self-sufficiency.

I'll tweak actual farming later once I get there in my own play, but for now just wanted to make sure it wasn't a viable activity in the very early game if you happened to just luck into finding a hoe. At least now there's a two-stage process involved where you have to luck out on both the hoe and the book which helps reduce the odds of it occurring immediately substantially.

[FlowerChild]

Oh, btw guys: if you already have a 7 Days forum account, mind moving some of this discussion over there? Don't sweat it if it's a pain in the ass or whatever, but as is typical of game forums, the conversation about the mod over there mostly revolves around lame suggestions, folks going on about how the crossbow is so vital to their Daryl experience, and people wanting a completely different mod lamenting over BTGB not being it.

Would love to have some more constructive conversation going to give people there a better indication of what the mod is really about, rather than me constantly talking about what it's not :)

I should probably consider shutting down this thread soon anyways, as right now it's serving to increase my workload in putting out releases in two places, and the moderators have been super cool with me over there so my initial fears about the thread devolving into complete madness seem to have been unfounded.

[Gilberreke]

So uh, reading this thread and the other one on the official forums started sparking my brain, so I'm looking into picking this up :)

Not sure yet if my friend will join me, but I'm not going to wait for her.

Is there a quick guide for BTGB players that haven't played vanilla yet? I want to play blind mostly, but I want to avoid pulling an Icy and never figuring out you can craft stuff or whatever.

[FlowerChild]

Is there a quick guide for BTGB players that haven't played vanilla yet? I want to play blind mostly, but I want to avoid pulling an Icy and never figuring out you can craft stuff or whatever.

Honestly, the game is much more self-explanatory than Minecraft is.

Pop into the game, open the crafting menu/inventory ("I" is the default key I believe), and you'll have a drop down menu that displays everything you can craft. Clicking on individual entries will give you the exact recipe you need in the grid to get the desired result. This is actually much simpler in BTGB than in stock as you only have access to a handful of recipes at start where in the base game you're saturated with stuff like aesthetic furniture recipes right from the get go. Even with the tons of 7 Days I've played, I hate the recipe spam in vanilla upon starting a new game.

First thing you want to do is make a stone axe. The one potential disconnect for new players, which Icy ran into, and which I suspect is a particular problem for Minecraft players, is that the means to harvest new resources isn't entirely consistent.

So, for example, to make a stone axe, you first need to pick up a stone off the ground (they're just laying around in a manner I believe is similar to TFC). They'll prompt you to hit your action key (I think the default is "e", I have it set to space bar due to some very old-school FPS control conventions I am hopelessly habituated to), and it'll instantly be added to your inventory.

Then you'll need a stick, and this is where the disconnect can occur. To get a stick, you'll need to punch a bush in the Minecraft manner, and hit it a few times with your fist in order for it to drop (which will potentially make you think it's not doing anything).

Same thing with the grass you'll need for the plant fibers to complete your axe. You need to punch grass for that, although as a quick tip since it isn't obvious unless you look at the item stats, it'll go a lot quicker if you use the stick you just picked up to hack at the grass (if you get attacked, hitting with the stick is also more effective than punching).

Beyond this point and once you know the basics, I think everything should be fairly self evident if you are familiar with standard zombie lore like "hit'em in the head". Look at your crafting menu to get an idea of what you can make and what you should work on next, look for food sources, etc.

My advice would be to browse the crafting menu fully once you find shelter and are waiting out your first night, as otherwise you'll be burning valuable daylight hours. I usually take some time each night to go over everything that's accessible to me and plan my next day.

Have fun man! I think you'll enjoy it :)

[FlowerChild]

[**** NEW RELEASE ****]

Version 1.15 of Better Than Giant Bees is ready for download!

Download Link

This release contains the following changes:

-Added a gardening skill book that provides recipes for turning blueberries, corn, potatoes, goldenrod, and cotton into their related seeds and removed all seed drops as loot. This essentially turns farming into a skill that needs to be learned so that it can't be used as a food supply early on in the game, and ups the value of finding whole veggies as loot substantially. I have more farming changes planned for the future, but for now this at least gates it so that it isn't immediately available should you get lucky and find a hoe.

-Changed (increased) the chance of finding books slightly since there are now more of them.

-Changed (increased) the running speed of all animals so that they are all faster than the player. This is to increase the difficulty of hunting with a melee weapon, thereby increasing the value of both firearms and ammo. You can still manage to kill them with a club if you put a little thought into it, but it generally won't be easy.

-Changed (increased) the field of view on bees to help reduce their current problems with just flying around harmlessly. It doesn't resolve it mind you, but does help slightly.

-Changed bloated walkers to have a bit more junk loot so that their inventories don't wind up being completely empty so often.

-Changed (decreased) the chance of finding antibiotics slightly, as some of my previous changes (like removing blood draw kits and blood bags) had inadvertently increased the probability of them showing up, and they were a tad too common as a result.

-Changed antibiotics so that the immunity buff they provide doesn't last as long, and to remove the wellness increase from them, as they were way too open to abuse.

-Changed storage chests to fall if unsupported to prevent base-defense exploits involving them.

-Changed (increased) the value of loot found in chests. This is one of the few times I made things easier, as the cycle of hope and disappointment in finding a chest, which is relatively rare, only to have it contain nothing or junk, just wasn't fun. They're now interior "survivor cashes" similar to hollow tree stumps with a small chance of high value loot like firearms. They'll still occasionally be empty, but will often contain valuable supplies.

-Changed (decreased) the durability of the bone shank, and increased its stamina drain, as it was open to abuse.

-Changed (reduced) the stamina boost provided from coffee as it felt rather cheaty before, to the point where I didn't even want to use it. It still helps but should no longer allow you to do stuff like sprint indefinitely.

-Removed the ability to plant coffee beans. Coffee thus can not be grown and can only be found as loot. I did this to accomodate the new gardening skill book above given it would require me to either add a new item for coffee seeds of some kind, or eliminate coffee as loot which didn't seem very fitting given how common a household item it is. Plus, growing coffee from what are likely roasted beans just always seemed rather odd, and given coffee is very much a luxury item, it seemed best to just remove farming it entirely.

Enjoy! :)

[Gilberreke]

Thanks for the write-up, really helpful :)

Finally managed to buy new headphones, so I might stream it too. We'll see.

[FlowerChild]

Finally managed to buy new headphones, so I might stream it too. We'll see.

Let me know if you do. Would love to see someone's first time play experience :)

[DerAlex]

I played this mod for over 45 hours now, spread out over many games. My overall opinion is very good, and the potential is incredible. My big/only problem with it right now is the fact that progression is too random, and too tedious, as you propably know yourself. You are a great designer, you have solved quite a few of the problems I had with this mod, and, for that matter, in BTW, in ways I could not have thought of, that work better than what I would've done (for example, I would've hidden the weapon repair kit behind a skillbook. Limiting oil works much better I think. Also, the change to hunting in the newest update is perfect. The abscence of rabbit meat in my early game diet makes much more of a difference than I would've thought). And I completely understand that everything here is very much WIP, especially mit-to-late game content. I hope you nevertheless appreciate this chunk of outside input, even thou I'm convinced you'll work your magic as you usually do.

1.15 added another skill check for farming. I have never found any intact tool apart from the repair tool in this mod (no shovel, pickaxe, hoe). Past behaviour does not guarantee future performance, but if I nevertheless exapolate this into the future, I now need 3 skill books to farm, "forging", "clay", and "farming". If I don't find a hoe, I need all 3 books for farming. Even if I do find a hoe, without the farming book it's useless. I'm interested in your in game justification for this? If you remember, in my first post, I asked why tea is behind a skillcheck, and you presented your cause, quite convincingly I might add, by saying that this is a necessary abstraction, you are not learning how to make tea, you are learning what leaves can be turned into tea and what plant is potentially dangerous, basically herbalism. But growing potatoes? You can discover that completely by accident by just leaving a potato in a dark corner for 2 weeks. And if the player wouldn't know what a potato is in the first place, he couldn't cook with it ether. Wouldn't it be less contrived to remove the farming book and take the hoe out of the loot table, and therefore get the same skillchecks with one less skillbook you have to find? The recipe to turn a potato into "popato-seeds" is an abstraction in itself, nothing to take literal. I get that the way it is in 1.15, you have 2 ways to farming, ether finding a hoe and the farming book, or finding the forge book, the clay book and the farming book, and this does have it's benefits.

I, like propably many other people, play 7DTD up until the point of self sufficiency, and not open ended like for example Minecraft/BTW. Even if you are only playing BTW until you finished progression and have the best available farm, domestic animals, self sufficient food production, SFS tools and so on, you are talking about 30-50 hours of play, depending heavily on skill and somewhat on luck. The big difference to BTGB is that you always feel like you are working torwards a goal and slowly climbing up the tech tree. In BTGB you are completely dependent on RNG. In BTW, you know at all times, I want to achieve this so I have to do/grind this. This is grind done right. I have, apart from our first MP server on 1.10, never played a game of BTGB to "completion" yet. The early game is exiting and fun, but it get's tedious and grindy for all the wrong reasons (RNG) later on. (I know that compairing a multi-year mod of a game with enormous modding access to a 2-week-mod of a game with very limited modding possibilities as of yet is a bit unfair, but you get my idea)

At its current state and with the current modding possibilities, I consider 7DTD a better "permadeath roguelike" than a "persistent roguelike/roguelite". Death means the end of my playthrou. For this, progression, while somewhat dependent on RNG, should be a bit faster, and more steady, stable, predictable and dependend on the players skill. One playthrou should take about 10-15 hours, or about 20-30 days, until "completion". If I get stuck or die, I want it to be my fault, more than anything. There can and should be playthrous where you just starve to death. Such is the nature of roguelikes. Our philosophies and concepts on what 7DTD is and what it (currently) isn't might be different here.

________________________________________________________________


I kicked all modifications I did with the mod from version 1.11 to 1.13 out and played completely vanilla BTGB for 1.14 and my first game of 1.15. I will make a few adjustments now, for when I play with my buddy next time, hopefully tonight if all goes well:

-I modify loot container backpack so it has a small chance (prob="0.04") to spawn basic skillbooks (could be the backpack of a student)
-I modify loot container hollow tree stump so it has a small chance (prob="0.04") to spawn basic skillbooks (a good deed by another survivor)
-I modify loot container suitcase so it has a small chance (prob="0.04") to spawn basic skillbooks (if you travel you take stuff to read with you)
-I modify loot for Bloats so it has a small chance (prob="0.04") to spawn basic skillbooks (logic is gameplay-related, being they are harder to kill)
-I modify loot for spider zombies so it has a small chance (prob="0.04") to spawn basic skillbooks (logic is gameplay-related, being their numbers increase the longer you play) Seems to be impossible since it doesn't have it's own loot table AFAIK.

A propability of 0.04 should be 1 in 25, please somebody correct me if I'm wrong, that's the chance I want to set it to, then test it, and then adjust accordingly. As I understand it, the loot chance calculation is somewhat strange, as it might be ratio based rather than percent based? I might very well be wrong here, input would be appreciated! What happens if the sum of all prob values is greater than 1? Does the rest get ignored or is everything dropping according to the ratio?

Two other changes I'll make is reducing the amount of the potential oil drops from cars from "1,10" to "1,2", and in turn give the biome "street" a very small (prob= "0.01") chance of spawning cars. This should change every 100th loot container on streets into cars. This should make the roads a little less samey and boring, and oil-supply less jumpy. Again, I'm not sure if the prob value works like I hope it does. I also don't know if the cars-on-streets-one is possible at all, I'm not quite sure I understand that part of loot.xml. I'll just set cars to 1.00 and see what happens. If it does work, car loot has to be nerfed a bit to regain balance. (Edit: Does not work. Roads are not a biome, they are a POI, and lootable cars are not a block but a prefab.)

Also, as the only deviation from the recommended settings, I'll enable airdrops every 7 days. This creates the interesting dynamic that airdrops drop on the day of the 7th night horde, so ether you prepare for the horde in a predictable way, or throw the dice and chase the package. The last airdrop in my last game led me into a burnt forest, where dogs ate a bit of my face. I was on 1/3 health for that horde, in a not properly enforced shelter, and I wouldn't want to trade that experience for anything, torwards the end of the night I was literally shaking.

All in all, I do hope I don't break everything, just speed up progression, adjust it a bit for playing MP, and remove the complete dependency on book cases for progression. IMHO, the focus should be finding food and shelter, and not finding skillbooks. Obviously the two go hand in hand, but I prefer searching for food and finding skillbooks to searching skillbooks and finding food. As I said previously, 25% loot in MP is hard as nails and works great when you stick together, in that you almost never have a stockpile of food, only barely enough to not starve. And we do stick together, for three reasons:

1) if you spilt up, you might as well play SP
2) performance on the host tanks hard the more chunks are active at the same time (2 players is still playable thou)
3) it's mostly a decision to roleplay a small group of survivors. I've seen enough horror movies to know that splitting up in case of a zombie apocalypse is a terrible idea ;)