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Art Falmingaid

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Everything posted by Art Falmingaid

  1. Currently, you must choose unemployed or a profession then take negative traits in order to acquire positive traits. Why not have the option of a starting profession that does not come prepackaged with specific traits but allows the choice of a some of the lower end ones? I do, however, agree with the need for a blank template that offers the choice of no traits, but if someone is going to handicap themselves on purpose, why not just make it so they are not required to take traits if they don't want them? I still feel "unemployed" is the best option to cover both.
  2. Yes, this is it. I never meant unemployed gets dozens of points to spend on whatever they want. Unemployed could get just enough points to purchase the lower end traits. 3 points = brave, light eater, hardened drinker, or resilient 4 points = all of the above and patient, stout, lucky, and graceful I don't think being able to choose just one of those is game breaking. I think, if anything, just one of those isn't as good as any one of the profession's unique traits.
  3. I am aware that there are many profession threads, but I found none with this specific suggestion. The fire officer, police officer, park ranger, and construction worker all offer unique traits and no points to spend. The "unemployed" profession should behave as if it were the custom profession choice and offer a fair amount of free trait points since it offers no other benefit.
  4. I am a skilled woodworker and I can comfortably say that carpentry in Project Zomboid is quite realistic. Building multiple story structures, admittedly, is quite difficult and probably should have stricter limits, but it isn't too far a stretch past everything else that can be done in an already implemented and believable game system. Building a simple staircase, storage crate, fence, door, or table is not difficult. Being that, without adding points into the carpentry skill, these items all look terrible when you first build them in Project Zomboid makes the system completely believable. The only thing I might recommend is that carpentry require hammer, nails, AND a saw be in the player's primary inventory for all recipes but I'm not too bothered if it isn't. It would not take months of practice to be able to saw a usuable board from a log. It would take maybe an hour of practice. We're talking a usuable board that you can use to make a door (big, flat rectangle) or a storage crate (several small, flat rectangles attached together). You're not sawing a board that you can make into a baroque chest of drawers. A good example of how practical and realistic the carpenty skill and recipes of Project Zomboid are is the rain collectors. Making a crate or barrel water-tight would involve coopering which is a highly specialized, specific carpentry skill you could NOT learn without an apprenticeship. That PZ requires an already water-tight trashbag in the recipe shows that a lot of thought went into making that recipe and the carpentry skill as a whole quite believable.
  5. From what I've read, honey bees are easy to "capture" to start your own hive. When they swarm, they are actually quite docile. The swarm is really just a big ball of bees around a queen. You can knock off that ball of bees with a queen into a box with a hole and you have an apiary. I just googled "new hive from swarm" and found this: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-introduce-your-bee-swarm-to-a-new-hive.html
  6. That is correct. I suppose, then, that making doors with windows see-through would be nice as long as you could add sheets over them.
  7. Making soup from scratch is not hard. I've done it myself. Yes, good soup requires stock or broth. The cool thing is that broth is super easy to make. You boil stuff in water to make broth. Boil meat, like chicken or beef, and it pulls all the oils and fats from the meat and makes broth. Boil vegetables, and it pulls all the oils and juices out of the vegetables and makes broth. Add some simple spices like salt or garlic or basil and you've got some tasty broth, vegetable or meat. To illustrate how simple making broth is, please consult these recipes: Allrecipes.com vegetable broth Allrecipes.com chicken broth To make these two things into soup, add vegetables and/or meat. Being that you already used those things to make the broth by boiling them in water, you really do just boil vegetables and/or meat in water and add spices to make soup. The secret to being a good cook (not a chef, a cook) is starting from a good recipe. I guess it's a good thing Project Zomboid has cook books.
  8. I thought Project Zomboid was a tiny hammer simulator? What game have I been playing?
  9. I Still Pee in the Shower: A Memoir by Art Falmingaid I steal wallets from re-dead zombies.
  10. I recently acquired jewelry smithing at my work and can confirm that it involves lots of hitting things with tiny hammers.
  11. If the log were the length of the entire tree, it would be near impossible to saw planks from it with a handsaw. Fortunately in Project Zomboid, the trees are short and several logs are produced from each tree. It, thus, is not unreasonable to saw decent planks from the logs. You would probably need to split the logs through the middle with your axe, admittedly. The process is simplified in the game, sure, but it’s pretty close. You can easiliy carve rough dowels from wood with a knife.
  12. I generally do not ask for people to believe I am an authoritative source on any topic, but on this I must. I am a sculptor by education and profession. Of particular relevance, I am a skilled woodworker and metalworker (this includes welding and foundry work and both require a lot more than average knowledge of metallurgy). In addition, one of the sculptors I work with daily is a blacksmith. Not a farrier (horseshoes), she is a blacksmith as in she can and does make all of her own tools. As a metalworker, I often employ smithing techniques but use an oxy-acetylene torch rather than a forge to heat the metal. Until someone better presents themselves, I think I can speak with at least limited authority on many of these issues. Neither cinder blocks nor granite countertops would work. Cinderblocks are easily destroyed in one swing of a smith’s hammer. Remember, please, that martial artists break cinderblocks with their hands for show. Granite does resist compression very well, but a countertop is more at danger of being split because it’s thin. A granite boulder could potentially be used as a makeshift anvil, but a very poor one since the surface would be irregular. Implausible is a huge understatement. To make anything larger than a jeweler’s anvil (for hammering small shapes of soft metals) would require a huge, high temperature heat source and/or a foundry. The amount of steel needed would be near impossible for anyone outside of a foundry to acquire. Steel cannot be melted down and re-poured. The process, at best, would create cast iron (cast iron is both the end result and the specific alloy of iron that the cast object is made from). Cast iron has a VERY high carbon content and is EXTREMELY brittle. It would, obviously, be totally unusable as an anvil. This is not terribly likely. Any farm with horses needs a farrier (makes and fixes iron shoes). Unfortunately, farriers are quite rare. One farrier probably services dozens of towns like Muldraugh and West Point. It’s highly unlikely. You need not only a high temperature, but a lot of heat over a relatively large area and you must maintain it at a constant temperature for a long time. Also, generating heat becomes exponentially more difficult the higher the temperature. Getting from 1000 degrees Fahrenheit to 1200 degrees Fahrenheit is significantly more difficult than going from 100 degrees to 1000 degrees. Everyone starts the game a terrible sneak and sprinter and their ability grows very slowly. I find the progression of the agility skills to be very realistic. I would hardly consider any crafting recipe in the game for carpentry or cooking to be “world-class.” Creating a food recipe from nothing using rare ingredients would be world-class, but most the recipes in the game are quite simple. If anything, the cooking skillbooks are recipe books and most anyone can follow a recipe. The cooking skill makes meals more nutritious and gives more information about things like cook time. Nothing “world-class” about it. There isn’t a carpentry recipe in the game that couldn’t be easily learned from a book. Again, if you were designing these objects from scratch with no pre-existing written instructions, it’s different. Further, even the highest skill carpentry items aren’t very well built. As a very skilled woodworker, I can say confidently that carpentry in Planet Zomboid is realistic. Being that I already have a lot of knowledge about things similar to traditional smithing (welding, foundry, jeweling, etc) I could probably learn from trial and error. I am being generous to myself, as it would still take many months to produce anything remotely usable. The common person would have no chance. While the basic premise of smithing is easy to grasp, the actual execution is not. Not at all. We’re not talking Olympic athletes. Project Zomboid sprinting allows you to be a competent, as in physically fit. Making a tasty soup or stew out of those ingredients is, in fact, quite easy. Would it get you a five-star restaurant? No, it wouldn’t, but it would sate your hunger. Project Zomboid is not talking world-class executive chef. If anything, it’s more the skill to recognize the difference between burnt and tender vegetables or rare, medium, and well-done meats. Growing plants is very easy. People grow tomatoes and other vegetables in window sill planters in their apartment. Sustenance farming is admittedly more difficult, but well within reason. Large scale agriculture is not the farming system in Project Zomboid. In the game, farming is growing simple vegetables in just enough quantity to sustain your individual life. Smithing is not easy to do at all. For someone who has read about the process in detail, the premise is easy to understand. The execution is absolutely not. That metallurgy is something the everyman possesses knowledge of is not accurate. I work among artists and a blacksmith, and the sculptors are probably the only ones who have even a clue about smithing. Even then, a minority of the sculptors would know anything past the basic premise.
  13. Perhaps, then, the issue is much broader than skillbook reading. A topic for boredom may be needed. I should think that boredom only increase when idle or, if it's reasonable to include, with repetitive behavior. In RL, even the things I love to do get boring if I do them too much.
  14. I find it a little insulting that boredom increases while reading skillbooks. I think learning new things is great fun, but everyone should at least think learning is sufficiently engaging to prevent boredom. As such, reading a skillbook should prevent your character's boredom from increasing. However, it should not reduce boredom your character has already acquired (to sustain the value of other literature).
  15. That would be quite nice. It would be easy enough for the player to keep track of each individual book's progress as long as the icon in your inventory or the container had the green progress bar like the skillbooks. Also, the number of pages in each piece of literature could be randomized between a maximum and minimum. The page count could be displayed in the description similar to the skillbooks.
  16. This idea has been loosely explored in other topics, but not as the primary focus. When the player reads books (skill books and leisure books), newspapers, journals, and magazines, it should be that the item cannot be read a second time but it does not disappear from the inventory. Instead, it gains an adjective in its name like "finished" or "read" and remains usuable as fuel for fires. Below are links to the other threads this has been discussed as well as some relevent quotes: books not wasted and panicked when gun aimed at PZ Suggestion Compiliation
  17. Is everyone aware that you can pause the game and select items to move? The actions will queue up while paused, then the green action bar will start firing off for each item when you unpause. This is the case when moving items from any container or inventory into another container. I find this works well enough as you can browse your inventory or the container freely, but it still takes time to actually move the items back and forth because of the green action bar. I suppose the downside is that it allows unlimited time to think about what you will loot, but I think it a fair compromise since the inventory is currently very difficult to keep organized.
  18. I believe it may be because I did not start a new game when going from 25a to 25b. It is working on every window for me, now. My apologies for the confusion.
  19. I am playing Build 25b They can be closed, but require that you walk around the outside of the building to do it. My character cannot reach over the counter to shut them.
  20. Players should be able to reach over counters to close windows. Players already can close curtains this way. Currently, you can enter through a window and climb over the counter into the building but you cannot reach over the counter to close the window. You must exit the building and go to the exterior of the window. Also, the undead often get stuck when entering through a window behind a counter.
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