7 Days To Die: Better Than Giant Bees Mod

[DerAlex]

This release contains the following changes:
<snip>

Sounds horrible! I love it. I'll jump right in, wish me luck!

Will play SP today and MP tomorrow with 2 guys who haven't played since Alpha8, just like me.

Will give extensive feedback on saturday, and hopefully share a story or two. Thank you FC for making me want to play 7DTD again!

[DerAlex]

Sorry for the double post, but I decided to give my SP feedback right away.

I played around 3 days set to 40 minutes each, dying twice in night 1. I'll stop playing SP now and wait for MP tomorrow, so that I don't spoil all the fun, but can give a few basic hints to my teammates and I don't have to carry their weight all alone.

First of all, the decision in vanilla to lock or barricade all the houses is amazing. This change, combined with the limited equipment throu this mod made scavenging in the early game feel amazing. Also, I think stealth works better than it did before, but I'm not sure on this, might be totally circumstancial.

To your mod specifically:

-Weapon progression is amazing. I found not a single gun and very few bullets, no crossbow means no cheaty op noscoping zombies on the first day, and the clear progression with melee (Fists < Sticks < Stone Axe/Bone Shiv < Wooden Club < Spiked Club < Hunting Knife < Fire Axe (I assume? Have not found one yet)) is soo much better than the cluttered vanilla system. It's amazing how a simple change can change the feel of the game so much.

-Most of your changes make perfect sense gameplay wise (stone axes, which cost basically nothing, aren't the best and most important tool AND weapon anymore, removing the desert log to planks recipe, removing yucca-juice, no more supertea, more cotton needed for cloth, no more cluttered recipe list with truckloads of crap like sofas,... Well, no use on repeating your whole changelog...), and just flat out make the game better.

There are, however, some things I disagree with:

Skillbooks are too random to rely on. I agree with locking mid to late game stuff behind skillbooks, like the forge, metallurgy, weapon/armor forging, casting, cement mixing, bullet production and so on. I would even argue that the "scrap" recipes for metal, lead and copper belong behind a skillcheck as well. But I disagree with locking 3 things:

-There is no way to stop bleeding in the early game. I agree with locking the ability to make cloth with a skillbook, but as it is, 1 zombie could fuck you up if you roll the bleeding debuff at the first hit. Even some primates know to treat a wound with some herbs and shit. I don't know if you can add completely new recipes, but maybe some improvised bandage/herbal remedy from some combination of grass/grass fiber, cotton, goldenrod flower and red flower? It should not give health back, maybe even damage wellness. Only stop the bleeding debuff.

-Tea (especcially after you nerfed the effectiveness, rightfully so I might add). Its just hot water and leaves, not rocket science. Anybody has made tea at some point in their lives.

-Planks (if I can cut down a tree, I can build stuff with the stuff. I built a fort by tipping over a sofa when I was 5 years old. I built a tree house out of planks when I was 12. Planks and basic building blocks should not be locked. I get the design idea behind it, increasing foraging and scavenging, but if RNG is not on your side you can't place a chest for example. That sucks.)

Maybe add the ability to craft those basic skillbooks, meaning you have to put in some work but can get them reliably instead of praying to RNGesus? A normal book + 15 logs and 4 stone axes could be a skill book on woodworking, a normal book + 5 coffeebeans, 5 goldenrod flowers, 5 red flowers and 4 glasses of clean water is a skill book on brewing (why hide tea with a skillcheck and not coffee?). I realize those are really gamey solutions to these problems, but... actually, no "but"...they are gamey solutions as long as they do not implement the planned skill/lvl system.

I know all of this stuff is somewhat based on realism, and I know about your stance on realism vs game design. I love the idea of making the game harder, but harder for the sake of hard gets tedious very easily. Disclamer: I may be stupid and all that stuff is possible and I could not find it.

Anyway, I can't wait for friday night to play together with my mates. It was suprisingly hard to stop playing. Kudos, dude, I love this!

[FlowerChild]

-Weapon progression is amazing. I found not a single gun and very few bullets, no crossbow means no cheaty op noscoping zombies on the first day, and the clear progression with melee (Fists < Sticks < Stone Axe/Bone Shiv < Wooden Club < Spiked Club < Hunting Knife < Fire Axe (I assume? Have not found one yet)) is soo much better than the cluttered vanilla system. It's amazing how a simple change can change the feel of the game so much.

Yup, that's the basic progression. Bone shivs and wooden clubs overlap a bit too much IMO, so I might do something further there though.

There are, however, some things I disagree with:

Will address these point by point:

Skillbooks are too random to rely on. I agree with locking mid to late game stuff behind skillbooks, like the forge, metallurgy, weapon/armor forging, casting, cement mixing, bullet production and so on. I would even argue that the "scrap" recipes for metal, lead and copper belong behind a skillcheck as well. But I disagree with locking 3 things:

You might not have played enough with it yet to notice, but book cases (which is where you find the skill books) are frigging everywhere in Alpha 10. They seriously increased their numbers within the prefabs, and while that made the skill progression non-existent in stock, I leveraged that for BTGB. You'll easily find one skill book and maybe more within the first couple of game days.

I have started you off with all the skills necessary to survive indefinitely. It will be tough mind you, but there's not a skill in books that you actually need to get by.

-There is no way to stop bleeding in the early game. I agree with locking the ability to make cloth with a skillbook, but as it is, 1 zombie could fuck you up if you roll the bleeding debuff at the first hit. Even some primates know to treat a wound with some herbs and shit. I don't know if you can add completely new recipes, but maybe some improvised bandage/herbal remedy from some combination of grass/grass fiber, cotton, goldenrod flower and red flower? It should not give health back, maybe even damage wellness. Only stop the bleeding debuff.

The recipe for basic bandages is unlocked at start actually, it's just different than stock and requires three rags for one. The only thing you don't know how to do is weave cotton into cloth yourself, which is something I certainly don't know how to do either :)

Rags can be looted everywhere. Curtains in particular can be chopped for a ton of cloth (I usually make sure to rip up a bunch of curtains before the first night so I can craft myself some cloth armor). The one thing I'd like to adjust here though is to provide a conversion recipe to rip clothing up into cloth, but it's unfortunately a tricky thing to do with how the recipe system works.

If you get wounded in the first few minutes, yes, you likely won't have a bandage available. Beyond that though, you most certainly will. At most, I think this encourages a little more caution initially in terms of avoiding combat, but that's about it.

-Tea (especcially after you nerfed the effectiveness, rightfully so I might add). Its just hot water and leaves, not rocket science. Anybody has made tea at some point in their lives.

Ah, but knowing which herb to make tea out of in order to cure dysentery on the other hand is not common knowledge. It's not the ability to make tea itself that I see being unlocked there, it's the herb lore. Later on in the post where you ask why this isn't applied to coffee: that's why. That coffee makes for a tasty beverage is extremely common knowledge.

Again, this is the kind of thing I'd have no idea how to do if I was dropped in the wilderness. I'd probably be more likely to poison myself cooking up random plants than to find a cure to something.

-Planks (if I can cut down a tree, I can build stuff with the stuff. I built a fort by tipping over a sofa when I was 5 years old. I built a tree house out of planks when I was 12. Planks and basic building blocks should not be locked. I get the design idea behind it, increasing foraging and scavenging, but if RNG is not on your side you can't place a chest for example. That sucks.)

Planks are unlocked with the stuff you can build out of them, so not having that recipe is essentially there to reduce clutter in the crafting interface initially (which I find vanilla suffers way too much from), not because I want to restrict access to the planks themselves.

You can't build storage chests, doors, or any other furniture type item (or anything at all really) until you get the corresponding unlock. HOWEVER, there's a ton of existing loot containers around man. If you take shelter in an existing structure, you're bound to have access to some and I find that stashing your stuff anywhere you can adds to the feel of desperation early on.

Also worth noting: you tipped over a sofa for a fort when you were 5. Well, you can pick up a lot of furniture (chairs, sofas, etc.) and use them to barricade entrances. What you are gaining access to with the recipe is the ability to build decent functional (and in some cases upgradeable) stuff that will last indefinitely *from logs* (I suspect your tree fort at 12 was using pre-cut lumber), and likely with very primitive tools at start, and I think it's fair to require a certain amount of carpentry skill to pull that off.

Ultimately, I think the core gaminess here revolves around the concessions made for building in a voxel world, not the recipes themselves. Could you make crappier stuff yourself improvising entirely with no knowledge of carpentry techniques? Sure. But the game doesn't have items, blocks, or systems that really support that level of crapitude :)

The books themselves are of course an abstraction, but I think what they result in is fairly reasonable: a few days at start where you do not have the skill or time to build your own structures, and have to rely on pre-existing ones for shelter. In trade for that you get the ability to build massive amounts of stuff in a fraction of the time any human could after that period has gone by in voxel-game fashion. I think that's a fair concession to gameplay overall and to preserve an element of the fun of building in these kinds of games, but restricting it a bit to a particular stage of development. In trade for this concession we get greater gameplay diversity and progression where early game fortification is very different from mid to late, which ultimately means more kinds of fun that we experience along the way.

You're already accepting these kinds of concessions and abstractions left and right in this game. What I think is relevant here then is whether you are willing to accept them only when they act in your favor power-wise, in which case, I don't think that's an entirely reasonable expectation, and would result in a more watered down and less diverse game if it were the sole standard by which I evaluated such features.

Do I realize these kind of things represent trade-offs and that too many of them can wreck a game? Absolutely, and I think if you're familiar with my other mods you know that I try to avoid them wherever possible for the sake of suspension of disbelief (I think that may also why many people mistake what I do as having some basis in realism as a design goal). I often obsess over precisely these kind of decisions for that reason. HOWEVER, one area where I tend to differ from other designers is that ultimately I will make them if I feel the gameplay gained is of greater value than what is lost in the trade-off for a net gain overall, and in this case, if you play for awhile without the ability to construct I think that you will find it brings a great deal to the table. It's almost like a game within a game where the initial stage represents one with a very limited ability to modify the environment, almost akin to pretty much every non-voxel game out there and which requires a different set of survival strategies as a result.

Anyway, I can't wait for friday night to play together with my mates. It was suprisingly hard to stop playing. Kudos, dude, I love this!

Glad to hear it man. Let me know how it works out with a couple of other people in there. The extra pressure on resources should make it rather interesting :)

[Ethinolicbob]

Hurray you did all the hard work for me :D
Glad you were able to give this game your Midas Touch.
Looking forward to trying this out.
Kinda sad about crossbows going entirely. My fantasies about being Daryl from The Walking Dead! :)
The loot flattening on animals was something that bothered me from my previous play-through too. Glad to see that could be resolved. No honey from hornets? (and I think by extension, hornet hives) I kinda liked it as it was my tangible reward from removing those noisy wretched things from the sky.

[FlowerChild]

Kinda sad about crossbows going entirely. My fantasies about being Daryl from The Walking Dead! :)

Well, Daryl has a kick ass hunting crossbow that I'm sure he's quite attached to, along with a limited supply of bolts that he's quite careful to retrieve.

On the other hand, the 7 days crossbow can be crafted within about 30 seconds of spawning in the world, has bolts made out of materials in limitless supply, and has the range and damage of the most powerful of firearms while not even attracting any zombies through its use.

Some of those things I could do something about with my limited modding capability with the 7 Days config files. Some I can't, and considering the many gameplay systems that get tossed out the window because of it (firearm maintenance and crafting, ammunition scavenging and crafting, and a good chunk of mining having any value as an acitivity), seriously...fuck crossbows :)

If and when Squad (EDIT: Ok, too many mods...make that "The Pimps :) ) makes the underlying mechanisms governing their use more reasonable, I might revisit them, but for now I think the game is WAY better off with them removed.

No honey from hornets? (and I think by extension, hornet hives) I kinda liked it as it was my tangible reward from removing those noisy wretched things from the sky.

See, I'm the exact opposite with that as I find it's way easier for me to forget I ever fought them if I'm not carrying a reminder of it in my inventory :)

Plus, as Icy was quite amused by when he cracked open his first hornet, the *jar* of honey they contain was just the cherry on the cake ;)

And wait: hives? Do those actually exist?

[Ethinolicbob]

Yeah hives were added in 8.7 in a couple houses at the burned forest. Not sure if they got added to the random gen maps.
I was pretty amused by the jar graphic too.
I don't even eat the honey. It's more like a trophy to me. I bring it back to our pit and I'm like "here's all the hornets I have killed"

[DerAlex]

Hey FC, thank you for your extensive answer, that did clear most of my issues up!

I did not now about the curtains, I did not now about how common book cases are, and somehow I forgot that you can pick up containers. The first 2 things are A9 or A10 issues I just didn't know about because I didn't play them. The container-issue is just stupidity on my part :D

You're right, if one gets damaged before having any kind of supplies, it's 100% the players fault. I honestly can't say anymore why the bandage issue irked me as much as it did, this wasn't even something that happened to me...

Ah well... the rest of your post makes perfect sense too. Somehow, "things I noticed" mutated to "things that need changing, ASAP" while I was writing the post, e.g. "gotta find those books" while playing mutated to "there are no books, nowhere, I won't find them ever, HALP" in writing...

I still kinda-sorta disagree about the planks, but I'll try to approach it with an open mind today. 3 days playtime are certanly not enough to judge anything, and I totally get your reasoning. I think the problem is that I'm just used to it.

The 3ppl game later today will certanly be interesting :D. I imagine SWAT-style techniques for foraging buildings and stuff like that. Maybe 1 guy getting all the building skillbooks, 1 guy getting everything related to the forge, and one guy getting the weapon books and maybe cooking, so that everybody plays a specialized role in the party. I feel way too giddy right now for someone who turns 29 soon...

I will set it to 50% loot with no respawn, and air drops every 3 days, 60 Min per day. I don't think your recommended settings work for more than 1 person, but I gotta test that. I certanly don't want to be trapped in a 3 person death spiral because of that strange wellness system.

My next report will be of more use, hopefully :D

A couple of questions thou, can you please elaborate this:

many gameplay systems get tossed out the window (firearm maintenance and crafting, ammunition scavenging and crafting, and a good chunk of mining having any value as an acitivity)

What is gone, what is still there, roughly?

As I understand the change log, you can't forge all of the weapon parts yourself, apart from some basic ones. But putting together a weapon from found parts is still possible, is it not? If you read the skillbook, of course.

Is repairing weapons still possible? I just checked, the weapon repair kits are still craftable.

What do you mean by "ammunition scavenging and crafting?

Can't really say that I would miss mining much...

[FlowerChild]

many gameplay systems get tossed out the window (firearm maintenance and crafting, ammunition scavenging and crafting, and a good chunk of mining having any value as an acitivity)

What is gone, what is still there, roughly?

No no, I think you misunderstood. I was referring to which systems the crossbow wrecks, not stuff I was taking out :)

And no worries on the points you made man. If I discuss my reasoning for things at length it's usually because I want to discuss them. With regards to each of the points you brought up, it was stuff I had thought about pretty extensively while working on the newer updates to the mod, so I had a lot to say about them ;)

I actually have a few more items added into the mod (I figured out ripping up clothing and such). Just about to head to bed here, but I'll try to get those changes out when I get up tomorrow, hopefully in time for your play session.

[DerAlex]

No no, I think you misunderstood. I was referring to which systems the crossbow wrecks, not stuff I was taking out :)

aaaahh! Ok that makes much more sense. I was worried there for a bit ;)

(I figured out ripping up clothing and such).

Nice! That is something I instinctively tried. After I read about the "amazing system" for clothing one of the developers wrote about in his blog, I got the feeling that it would be quite the feat, but I seems they did indeed implement it in a moddable way. I'm so used to the minecraft devs doing everything in a somewhat stupid and convoluted way, so that even somewhat competent indie-devs still surprise me sometimes -,.,-

Spoiler

Show

From the DevBlog: The best thing about all these new clothing pieces is they were essentially free to add (no texture, mesh or ram increases). Our new character system allows for coloring with a simple HTML color and boom, new outfit. You can pick any color you can imagine. Maybe later we’ll allow for characters to mix custom dyes to color their stuff with.

[Renegrade]

I've been enjoying 1.11, it's quite nice, thanks FlowerChild! :)

(I just wish TFP had made the general stores show up a bit more often..those are a lot easier to use to survive the 7th night horde than most other structures)

By the way, MadMole was talking about gating the forge behind a book here:

http://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread ... post169470

Reading on, it sounds like it's an implemented feature for A10.2...

[FlowerChild]

The "not sure I want to listen to all the screaming" bit is a rather sad statement.

And yeah, looks like they went ahead with it. Relevant bit of a post from madmole:

Changed: The forge is now gated by an easy to find book called "Forge Ahead". So you won't be able to make a forge until you find this book.
Added: Murky water can now be collected in old empty cans you find everywhere.
Added: Canned murky water can be boiled on a stick in the campfire. Canned water has a stack limit of one since there is no lid to the container and it is meant for basic survival in the wild with primitive means until a cooking pot can be obtained.
Added: Canned water can be turned into scrap metal.
Added Forge Ahead Book icon.

Funny too, as I was considering making boiling water a recipe that could be done with the stick and the regular glass jars. The can thing seems a tad convoluted for nothing.

EDIT: Actually, I think a more effective and consistent solution would be to make the can a cooking utensil like the stick which has a single recipe for boiling water. I think I'll put that in for next release.

On the bright side, sounds like I get an extra book to play with to help spread out the progression a bit more. My original attempt at adding more skill unlocks had a whole whack of extra books added to the game, but unfortunately it looks like that's something that can't really be done through the current config files. So, the pimps adding more books means I can get something closer to what I had originally wanted.

I really don't like the sound of what he mentioned about adding some forges to the environment though to help make up for the skill unlock. Very wishy-washy design there, in the half-apologetic manner that I mentioned before.

EDIT 2: Actually, no, screw the boiling water with a can thing as that effectively eliminates dysentery from the game given how easy it is to build a fire and find a can. I almost caved to "realism" there myself.

(I just wish TFP had made the general stores show up a bit more often..those are a lot easier to use to survive the 7th night horde than most other structures)

I dunno man. I tend to find those all over the place. The building abundance in Alpha 10 is pretty crazy, and with 7 days to find one, it really shouldn't be an issue.

And yes, they're definitely very useful structures. I find that a standard 2-3 story house only safely lasts a single non-horde night when you can't make repairs come morning. I've had a portion of the attic floor of one give way after only a single night before. The taller brick structures stand up much better.

[FlowerChild]

Ok, new release (Version 1.111) with a few more items:

Download Link

Version 1.111

-Added the ability to rip up most cloth based items (like clothing and bandages) for rags.

-Changed the cotton to cloth recipe to be unlocked from the start. Unfortunately, I can't lock a single recipe for a specific output item (like rags), without locking all others (like clothing to rags).

-Changed (increased) the amount of time it takes to craft cotton to cloth given what a labor intensive process it would be. This means, for example, that it's not something you can effectively do to make a bandage while bleeding to death.

-Changed the wood club to require plant fibers to hold it together, to make crafting one initially a little more involved and to give more of a place to the bone shiv in the progression.

-Changed the spiked club recipe to use a wood club surrounded by nails, so that it acts as an upgrade of the wood club, rather than an item onto itself, to help smooth out the weapon progression.

-Changed safes so that they need to be "cracked" before you can open them. This means that they function similarly to the shotgun messiah crates in that you must first do sufficient damage to them before the option to open them becomes available. Gun safes are particularly hard to crack. This was done so that the powerful loot contained within is not necessarily accessible early on in the progression, but are still there as late game rewards, while providing incentive to remember locations you have visited containing them, and revist them later. Unfortunately, this change will reset any safes already opened in your world to the "uncracked" state, and spawn new loot within them.

[FlowerChild]

Well, in the end I decided to bite the bullet and release this to the larger audience over on the 7 Days forum. I've put enough work into it now that I figure as many people as possible should get some entertainment out of it.

May the tentacled gods make my death prolonged and painful:

Better Than Giant Bees Thread Link

[DerAlex]

Just finished a 6 hour play session, we are on day 6 now, so 1 day left for the horde. I'm a litte tired atm and a litte bourboned up, so I'll try to make this quick, pullet-pointy and in no particular order:

-cooking tea seems to be bugged (MP). My theory: one of the other players read the skill book, but the crafting station (campfire) get's "calculated" at the host, since the server is running p2p on my PC and my character does not know how to make tea, and so the tea does not get cooked even thou the other guy sees the recipe. Also then the cooking pot disapeared, but that might be a different issue. Campfires in general seem to be buggy. for example, p1 and p3 can't see what p2 is cooking sometimes.

-I found a handgun on one of the first fat guys I killed. Is it possible to make weapons not spawn with a full magazine? That is 3 deers worth of bullets.

-dysentery fucks you up big time. I rolled the dice at a pond and lost. This was on the first day, and I lost 60 wellness in very few minutes before I killed myself to make it stop, so I was at 30 wellness about 30 minutes after we started. I am still only at 58, without dying inbetween. That's a bit harsh, but I don't know if it's a vanilla issue or not. Wellness overall is a very strange system that punishes those who do badly anyway. In MP specifically that leads to strange social Dynamics, e.g. "you died AGAIN?" "Bitch I have 1/3rd of the life that you have!". I don't like the wellness system in the current state, even more so because if they wouldn't allow that healing-by-death meta with the beds and sleeping bags, it would not be needed...

-50% loot feels about right for 3 players, as in we are barely surviving most of the time. The airdrop on day 3 was utter crap. Day 6 airdrop didn't happen yet

-we did indeed find some skillbooks, sadly none that unlock the planks. Day 7 is gonna be interesting. Luckily we did manage to find the one about metalworking, and so everybody has fire axes, so we are kinda sorta prepared. A little. We found all the parts for 1 hunting rifle + gunsmithing skillbook, and I still have my trusty pistol, but no ammo for it.

-I'm carrying about 8 refrigerators for short term storage in places we spend the night. Funny mental image...

-Some floors, I think it was carpet, can still be broken and drop the block instead of nothing or maybe cloth

-the first day was spent trying to find ourself and not much else, and so the first night was a desaster, supplywise. We had no food and nothing to drink. Also we didn't have time to find shelter, so we sneaked around zombies and away from the damn dogs. That night was the scariest experience and yet the most fun I ever had with this game. No stone axe as a weapon and no damn crossbow changes how you approach.... basically everything

-before shutting down for the night, we left the little settlement we spent the last 2 nights in search for new adventures, we have enough water for a few days, but right now about 1 rabbit for the 3 of us, foodwise.

-did not yet pick up a toilet

The 2 guys and me played at least 40 hours of 7DTD vanilla in this exact constallation, and we are by no means noobs. This mod makes the game harder, better, flat out more interesting and fun. All 3 want to continue with the mod enabled, so we will do just that :D

[FlowerChild]

-cooking tea seems to be bugged (MP). My theory: one of the other players read the skill book, but the crafting station (campfire) get's "calculated" at the host, since the server is running p2p on my PC and my character does not know how to make tea, and so the tea does not get cooked even thou the other guy sees the recipe. Also then the cooking pot disapeared, but that might be a different issue. Campfires in general seem to be buggy. for example, p1 and p3 can't see what p2 is cooking sometimes.

Hmmm...ok, not certain about this one, but yes, I get the impression the campfire might be a little messed up in multiplayer in vanilla.

As for the recipe unlock on golden rod, damn, I was uncertain as to whether unlocks for campfire recipes worked properly or not given there are no such recipes in vanilla. I gave it a try and tested it out in single-player and everything worked well in that environment, but I suspect it breaks down in MP :\

-I found a handgun on one of the first fat guys I killed. Is it possible to make weapons not spawn with a full magazine? That is 3 deers worth of bullets.

Unfortunately, no. All weapons seem to spawn with full clips, with nothing I can do (that I know of) to change that. Otherwise, yeah, I would have changed the pistols you can find on corpses or zombies to have empty mags, as not only is it good for balance, but it's also a cool bit of implied "story" as to what happened to the person.

-dysentery fucks you up big time. I rolled the dice at a pond and lost. This was on the first day, and I lost 60 wellness in very few minutes before I killed myself to make it stop, so I was at 30 wellness about 30 minutes after we started. I am still only at 58, without dying inbetween. That's a bit harsh, but I don't know if it's a vanilla issue or not. Wellness overall is a very strange system that punishes those who do badly anyway. In MP specifically that leads to strange social Dynamics, e.g. "you died AGAIN?" "Bitch I have 1/3rd of the life that you have!". I don't like the wellness system in the current state, even more so because if they wouldn't allow that healing-by-death meta with the beds and sleeping bags, it would not be needed...

The wellness system is all stock. All I've changed about dysentery is add a sound effect for when it progresses to stage 2.

I haven't been dying enough as of late to really give the wellness system a good run-down (I've gotten good enough at the mod now that I have about a 100% survival rate in the early game), nor have I really looked at how moddable it is.

-50% loot feels about right for 3 players, as in we are barely surviving most of the time. The airdrop on day 3 was utter crap. Day 6 airdrop didn't happen yet

Glad to hear the air drops were crap, as if they were good they would have been pretty game breaking :)

I haven't really touched the air-drops, so they still have their stock balance and you could have wound up with something like a crate full of guns.

-I'm carrying about 8 refrigerators for short term storage in places we spend the night. Funny mental image...

Do you mean coolers? I don't think fridges can be picked up.

-Some floors, I think it was carpet, can still be broken and drop the block instead of nothing or maybe cloth

Hmmm...you'll have to be more specific. I basically had to go through every block in the game to check their drops, and if I remember right there's more than a thousand different blocks in the game :P

But yeah, given that, I'm bound to have missed a few.

EDIT: NM, found it. A quick search on "carpet" did the trick, so you were right there :)

-did not yet pick up a toilet

Haha...noob.

The 2 guys and me played at least 40 hours of 7DTD vanilla in this exact constallation, and we are by no means noobs. This mod makes the game harder, better, flat out more interesting and fun. All 3 want to continue with the mod enabled, so we will do just that :D

That's awesome man! Glad you had so much fun :)

[DerAlex]

Do you mean coolers? I don't think fridges can be picked up.

No, fridges. I was just as surprised. As soon as we got a pickaxe, I went berserk on everything remotely made out of metal in the small town we occupied. I tried harvesting every container I came accross. I knew about the coolers, but I didn't find any. But now we got 8 fridges.... The big, 2-block one. The fridges that consist of an upper and a lower part I could not yet test. Every kitchen counter, desk, safe, desksafe, AC and oven broke down on harvest.

(Goldenrod) I suspect it breaks down in MP :\

I will test, with the next "tea-book", if it works when the host learns the skill, if it does, it's an easy work-around, at least for CO-OP players

The wellness system is all stock.

I thought so. The fact that 1 death is minus 10 wellness, an drinking murky water one time is a total of minus everything is a little strange, to put it mildly.

I haven't really touched the air-drops

I understand they are low priority, since your recommendation is to simply turn them off. Are you planning to bring the loot tables for them a little more in line with the rest of the mod? I don't want to turn them off completely, since, imho, from a gameplay perspective, they are fun as hell, even if the contents get nerfed. They spice things up a bit, give a bit of risk/reward. The only real bad and propably unfixable issue with them, for the time being at least, is how predictable they are in terms of when they drop down

[FlowerChild]

No, fridges.

Wtf? :)

Ok, I'll take a look at that tomorrow. Weird.

I don't want to turn them off completely, since, imho, from a gameplay perspective, they are fun as hell, even if the contents get nerfed. They spice things up a bit, give a bit of risk/reward.

You know, I can hear that. I only ever experienced 1 air drop myself when they were first introduced as when I opened it up and got a shit-ton of unneeded equipment on top of the shit-ton I had already accumulated in a very short time, I think I was so depressed I gave up on that save entirely and turned them off whenever I started a new game next.

HOWEVER, if I think back to the experience of chasing the packet down, I did have a brief moment of fun before it was replaced by save-breaking depression ;)

Won't make any promises man, as I suspect balancing them reasonably so they don't break the progression while still retaining some kind of meaning would be rather rough, and I'm a little leery of the thematic implications of the air drops, but I will think on it to be sure as I do like fun :)

[Renegrade]

The "not sure I want to listen to all the screaming" bit is a rather sad statement.

Agreed, but at least he went ahead with it in the end. I get the feeling he wants to design a Better Than kind of experience based on what he's said in that thread and the past, but lacks the uh, fortitude to push ahead...

I really don't like the sound of what he mentioned about adding some forges to the environment though to help make up for the skill unlock. Very wishy-washy design there, in the half-apologetic manner that I mentioned before.

Yeah, it's rather wishy-washy, but if done right, it might make for some interesting early-base location decisions as forges are completely non-movable AFAIK... not sure if their biome system (or should I say, tiny-towns-in-forests-system) could make that meaningful though.

EDIT 2: Actually, no, screw the boiling water with a can thing as that effectively eliminates dysentery from the game given how easy it is to build a fire and find a can. I almost caved to "realism" there myself.

Yeah, I wouldn't worry about the "lack-of-cooking pots" thing, man. I had three by the first night (one from the environment, two from looting) of my 1.11 save, and didn't have a workable forge until the ninth or tenth day (almost none of the dozen or so bookshelves I found had readable books, just scrap ones).

They're quite easy to come by, and you only need one. The forum people are just being whiny.

I dunno man. I tend to find those all over the place. The building abundance in Alpha 10 is pretty crazy, and with 7 days to find one, it really shouldn't be an issue.

Actually in Alpha 10, I've only found one or two in my two playthroughs to date (Vanilla, BTGB 1.11), and I didn't find one in the BTGB save until literally the morning of the seventh day. The new random-gen system seems to be blocks of houses, barns, those new small junkyards, and sheds/garages in a pair or quads of 2x2 building blocks.

And yes, they're definitely very useful structures. I find that a standard 2-3 story house only safely lasts a single non-horde night when you can't make repairs come morning. I've had a portion of the attic floor of one give way after only a single night before. The taller brick structures stand up much better.

Yeah they're much stronger, and they have that ladder that goes up to the roof that you can knock away like you did in Icy's videos, plus they have a kitchenette (usually with a cooker sitting on top of a shelf), a bookshelf or two, and often some medium-value looting things on the roof (purses, duffels, suitcases, etc).

By the way, there's two important things I've noted that might be relevant to BTGB:
1. They might have fixed the loot percentage to affect the rate rare/single stack drops in A10, I seem to be getting a lot less at 25 in BTGB than I did in my 100 vanilla playthrough (might just be unlucky too though, small sample set)
2. Toilets are a source of murky water that you can fill jars at (this was true in 9.3 as well, possibly before)

I'm going to be trying out 1.111 this weekend, going to be an interesting time, thanks man :)

I thought so. The fact that 1 death is minus 10 wellness, an drinking murky water one time is a total of minus everything is a little strange, to put it mildly.

Yeah, that is, most of the wellness events are very small, slow changes in either direction. Starving is -1 only a couple of times a day, advanced foods are just +1 each, etc. To lose sixty in a short time has to be some sort of vanilla bug.

[DocHussey]

Heya Boss. Since our forums don't allow for editing after five mins, ship me your changelogs via PM on the forum and I'll keep your OP updated. Glad to see you're doing some good with all the messups the design team have been making lately...

[FlowerChild]

Agreed, but at least he went ahead with it in the end. I get the feeling he wants to design a Better Than kind of experience based on what he's said in that thread and the past, but lacks the uh, fortitude to push ahead...

Yup, I'm happy to see that he manned up and did it regardless, but I find it unfortunate to see that community reaction is part of the thought process there. Mind you, I've suspected as much from the half-apologetic thing that I've seen in many recent design decisions.

Yeah, it's rather wishy-washy, but if done right, it might make for some interesting early-base location decisions as forges are completely non-movable AFAIK... not sure if their biome system (or should I say, tiny-towns-in-forests-system) could make that meaningful though.

These decisions add up though. You can't effectively gate the player's progress if you keep inserting back-doors around it everywhere.

Yes, an argument can be made on an individual basis, but if it's your overall ideology to do these kinds of things you just wind up with a nebulous mess where everything is possible in the first few minutes of play.

Yeah, I wouldn't worry about the "lack-of-cooking pots" thing, man. I had three by the first night (one from the environment, two from looting) of my 1.11 save, and didn't have a workable forge until the ninth or tenth day (almost none of the dozen or so bookshelves I found had readable books, just scrap ones).

They're quite easy to come by, and you only need one. The forum people are just being whiny.

That's been my experience as well. I've played through the first few days several times now, and I've yet to run into a situation where finding a pot was a problem.

Actually in Alpha 10, I've only found one or two in my two playthroughs to date (Vanilla, BTGB 1.11), and I didn't find one in the BTGB save until literally the morning of the seventh day. The new random-gen system seems to be blocks of houses, barns, those new small junkyards, and sheds/garages in a pair or quads of 2x2 building blocks.

May just be variance there as I almost always find a brick structure in the cluster of houses, and if I don't, I usually skip looting a cluster (except maybe going into the kitckens for a quick restock of water and sometimes food), and try to find another.

Yeah they're much stronger, and they have that ladder that goes up to the roof that you can knock away like you did in Icy's videos, plus they have a kitchenette (usually with a cooker sitting on top of a shelf), a bookshelf or two, and often some medium-value looting things on the roof (purses, duffels, suitcases, etc).

Well, maybe you haven't noticed, but three story houses, and some single-story ones, have a ladder leading up into the attic, which is usually where I wind up taking shelter if I can't find a brick one.

Some of the brick ones have metal ladders too, which can make getting rid of the ladders problematic early game, and if you do get rid of them, it can be a bitch to exit come morning as you are too high up to jump it without damage and likely have a house full of zombies below you :)

1. They might have fixed the loot percentage to affect the rate rare/single stack drops in A10, I seem to be getting a lot less at 25 in BTGB than I did in my 100 vanilla playthrough (might just be unlucky too though, small sample set)

I don't think so man. All my testing in this area has been in alpha 10. Keep in mind that I've altered the loot tables substantially though, so the drops between BTGB and vanilla aren't really comparable anymore.

2. Toilets are a source of murky water that you can fill jars at (this was true in 9.3 as well, possibly before)

Seriously? Ok, thanks for letting me know. Will nuke that for next release as I had never noticed it, and toilets spawn in a lot of locations where that just isn't appropriate.

I suspect they did that to provide water sources in the wasteland, which is just wishy-washy once again :)

I'm going to be trying out 1.111 this weekend, going to be an interesting time, thanks man :)

My pleasure :)

Yeah, that is, most of the wellness events are very small, slow changes in either direction. Starving is -1 only a couple of times a day, advanced foods are just +1 each, etc. To lose sixty in a short time has to be some sort of vanilla bug.

I'll take a look at that as well.

Heya Boss. Since our forums don't allow for editing after five mins, ship me your changelogs via PM on the forum and I'll keep your OP updated. Glad to see you're doing some good with all the messups the design team have been making lately...

Yikes. That's quite the pain in the ass.

Thanks for the offer of helping there. What I'll probably try to do is put together one general purpose message that directs people to the latest release post or something so that I don't have to pester you multiple times.

It might be something worth bringing up regarding forum management as it's going to make maintaining mods in general a real pain. I'm noticing HAL9000 is already running into similar problems in the official modding thread as he can't update the links to the latest versions of his modding tools.

[Renegrade]

These decisions add up though. You can't effectively gate the player's progress if you keep inserting back-doors around it everywhere.

Yes, an argument can be made on an individual basis, but if it's your overall ideology to do these kinds of things you just wind up with a nebulous mess where everything is possible in the first few minutes of play.

True. They could probably design it into Navezgane with some careful level design (ie bad locations have forges, good ones don't, so you have to choose which you want or make long treks), but I really doubt their random gen/biome engine could make that work. :/

That's been my experience as well. I've played through the first few days several times now, and I've yet to run into a situation where finding a pot was a problem.

Additional feedback: I did a new playthrough for 1.111 (still in progress), and I had FOUR cooking pots by the evening of the first day. Definitely no need for shortcuts there :)

Also I found a crapton of stores in the new save, the lack of stores in my 1.11 save and my vanilla save (which uses default vanilla settings, only with airdrops/loot respawn off) appears to have just been bad luck.

Well, maybe you haven't noticed, but three story houses, and some single-story ones, have a ladder leading up into the attic, which is usually where I wind up taking shelter if I can't find a brick one.

Yeah, I holed up in that for the 1.11 save, although I became nervous as a small uh, emergent horde (ie just four or five zombies that happened to wander by and get on my trail due to the feral setting) absolutely trashed the upstairs of the house in short order, so I lost confidence in the house and built a tiny, primitive fort out of basically unrefined logs and log spikes, which the 7th night zombies tore to shreds..

Some of the brick ones have metal ladders too, which can make getting rid of the ladders problematic early game, and if you do get rid of them, it can be a bitch to exit come morning as you are too high up to jump it without damage and likely have a house full of zombies below you :)

Yeah, I discovered how slow those are to break with the stone axe the hard way in my latest save. Was a nervous in-game hour as I rushed to break the ladder before 9pm.. :)

You certainly know how to promote tension. In stock play, I would have used the same building, but I'd have had a pickaxe and would have been able to take out the lower stairs well before the first evening, heh. Best first night I've had in a while :)

I don't think so man. All my testing in this area has been in alpha 10. Keep in mind that I've altered the loot tables substantially though, so the drops between BTGB and vanilla aren't really comparable anymore.

Ah cool, it's definitely feeling more sparse and desperate, so whatever those alterations entailed, it's spot on :)

I suspect they did that [water from toilets] to provide water sources in the wasteland, which is just wishy-washy once again :)

Ack, what the hell? Wastelands are SUPPOSED to be dangerous, bad places. :C

AFAIK, Wastelands are supposed to be below City, but above everything else (including burnt forest) in terms of difficulty.

[FlowerChild]

You certainly know how to promote tension. In stock play, I would have used the same building, but I'd have had a pickaxe and would have been able to take out the lower stairs well before the first evening, heh. Best first night I've had in a while :)

Thanks :)

Yeah, I think I've been taking mental note of all the tense situations I've run into in normal play that I've had a lot of fun with, and been trying to recreate them through the progression. Things like being stuck for the night without any way to build any kind of shelter and that kind of thing.

And it certainly does add up to situations I hadn't even thought of or experienced before. Like the other day I was trying to get into the 2nd floor of a three story structure, which had a locked metal door on it, and all I had was a stone axe. So, after thinking about it for a moment, I climbed to the third story, busted a window, jumped on the awning extending out of the 2nd story, busted another window and climbed in.

That just doesn't really happen in stock given how rapidly you progress through the tech, and it was a very cool moment that I don't think I've ever experienced in all my years of gaming.

I've mentioned before how I consider different thought processes to be at the core of good gameplay experiences. In the above case then, new thought process ftw :)

Ack, what the hell? Wastelands are SUPPOSED to be dangerous, bad places. :C

Yup, and the toilet thing is just an educated guess on my part. However, it follows the design-trends I've been noticing as versions have gone by.

Like, in much earlier versions of the game, there was a cool biome dependency thing going on where you had to travel to different ones to accumulate the resources for making concrete. This promoted exploration and lead to adventures, and I thought it was a very cool little detail.

That has disappeared of course. Aloe plants became a source of water in the desert (and a more plentiful source than you get in any other biome). Drift wood became a source of planks, making deserts also be the easiest source of wood, and with a host of other changes, the biomes slowly had their distinctiveness drained away in anything but a visual sense.

With each of those changes I felt that it must of been in response to people whining about not being able to do absolutely everything absolutely everywhere and how they just want to be able to build a house and live there indefinitely without going anywhere else...ever, because I really can't understand why such potentially cool design would have been reversed otherwise. These are also many of the same changes I'm now re-reversing through the mod.

Now, of course I can't be certain that's also what's behind the toilets, but it certainly fits with what I've been noticing so far and seems an awful lot to me like a response to "but...I can't get water in the wasteland!" given you find them all over the place in that biome with all the half-destroyed buildings there. Regardless, whatever the cause, the end effect is the same in that it provides an easy and abundant source of water in the wasteland, and that sucks :)

Oh, and I got rid of that this afternoon btw. Will be changed in the next release ;)

AFAIK, Wastelands are supposed to be below City, but above everything else (including burnt forest) in terms of difficulty.

Yup, that's my understanding as well. There's also a big potential payout there too as all the girders laying about are a potentially HUGE source of iron in the late game.

[Taleric]

I love it all but the close spawning. I feel like they pop in behind me around 20 meter and that is 90% of my deaths :(

Has anyone else noticed this? I am pretty darn aware and know it is stock behavior that gets amplified by Slower progression. I guess I could start doing pirouettes every few seconds to catch them materializing.

[FlowerChild]

Has anyone else noticed this?

Maybe? :)

I've had a few "hey...I didn't think there was a zombie there..." moments, but nothing blatant. They've also never popped in close enough to do any real harm.

On a hunch, what's your view distance set to? I always try to set it as high as I can by reducing other options to keep my frame rate up, and was just thinking if spawns occur in the loaded area (which I assume is affected by view distance), then having it set lower may cause zombies to spawn closer in.

I think I also read somewhere that this is associated with zombie spawns being one of the last things that occurs in chunk generation (or whatever the equivalent is in 7 Days), so if you run into an area that's still generating, you can get screwed and wind up in the middle of a bunch of zombies that weren't there. I think this is particular noticeable in the wasteland, where you can really get mobbed if you sprint into the middle of a city or something.

Again on a hunch though, it might be a good idea to try turning down some of your settings. I'm taking a total guess here, but I get the impression that if the game is bogging down, it may set zombie spawning as a low priority task while the game crunches other stuff, and it may wind up postponing the spawns for a chunk you're walking towards until you're already in the middle of it. Thus, if the game is running smoothly, everything is cool and you don't see this kind of thing.

I'm thinking this because I used to notice this kind of problem much more, but when they added the ability to turn down texture res in Alpha 10, I was able to get a MUCH smoother experience out of the game, and I haven't noticed it at all recently.

[Taleric]

Ah! Interesting, I have view distance low, a habit from MC, and the problem is really pronounced during exploration. Thank you I wil play around with a larger render to see if this is the culprit. After some testing I will give a shout out if the ninja zombies calm down :P