Crotchfire

Generally, my strategy with them has been to put them on zombie bodies so that they disappear with the bodies after a time, but it'd be a slight improvement to QoL if you could just drop them and they'd disappear like hats and glasses do. After all, who ever would bother to repair these things when duct tape is so much scarcer than tree branches?

According to the wiki, we should expect that a crafted spear should average 10 hits/20 hits before breaking and a stone axe should average 25 chops/35 chops on a tree before breaking at Maintenance 0/1. However, neither of these appear to be affected between these levels. I don't yet know whether this is also the case with higher levels of Maintenance.

Not too significant because it doesn't actually affect gameplay, but in a game where I had my survivor do burpees for a whole day and then was in agony the next, after the pain went away and the Ok button for exercising was no longer grayed out the "Too much pain to exercise." message still pops up. It doesn't affect anything, as my survivor can actually exercise despite that, but it's still a little bug regardless.

On the other end of things, some alarms should go off specifically because the power has gone out (might be interesting to have smoke detectors emitting a low-battery alarm).

Branch weighs 1.0 Whittling down that branch into a spear reduces its weight to 1.7 Attaching a hunting knife to that spear with duct tape increases its weight to 1.5 (I like to imagine Dr. Zoidberg noises when I'm crafting spears)

In my most recent Survival game, I'd been looting for over a month and hadn't found any sewing needles. So... maybe they could be found more commonly in houses or there'd be a way to improvise one? Maybe carved out of wood, shaped from a paper clip, or somesuch? An improvised sewing needle might have drawbacks, like when sewing a patch it might give you a lower effective tailoring level.

In multi-story houses and buildings, upper floors tend to be warmer than lower floors. I was thinking that it would be neat to have something like this implemented for interior spaces. It'd also be something to keep in mind for a player constructing a new building to keep warm in the winter, having an enclosed upper floor to help trap heat.

Was just reading about linothorax armor and thought: "hey, this stuff would be relatively easy to make with modern materials." My suggestion is this, have a book in the game that gives you the recipe to make linothorax armor pieces, given sufficient ripped sheets, adhesive (glue, etc. Maybe a mechanic for getting tree sap, iono), and sufficiently high tailoring skill. It'd be lightweight, durable, very good at protecting against bites, and wouldn't overheat the PC. Wouldn't be able to provide full protection against bites on all areas, though, because you wouldn't be able to have it cover all your joints effectively. You'd have to get the recipe from a book, too, because most people anywhere, much less rural Kentucky, won't have heard of this type of armor.

I have a survivor with a belt and a double holster equipped. Both were soaked in a rainstorm, and never dried unlike the rest of the clothing. However, the wetness did start to decrease when they were unequipped.

I was just thinking that it'd be nice to have a starting trait, maybe called "Gun enthusiast" or some such that'd add +1 to aiming and maybe +1 to reloading. So far as I know, in the current vanilla game the only way to raise your starting level of aiming is by choosing either the Police Officer profession or the Veteran profession... but c'mon! This is rural Kentucky we're talking about; lots of kids grow up shootin'!

That doesn't really change my position, though. Sure, you can introduce a mod that makes a vanilla skill relevant, but shouldn't a vanilla skill be relevant in the vanilla game? And sure, you'll notice a difference in the shotgun's reload speed, but I've yet to find myself in a situation where how fast my survivor could reload the shotgun made a difference.

"What would ya say... ya do here?" Reloading: "I have people skills!" I've played a while now, and it only just occurred to me that the reloading skill has quite literally never mattered to me, until I thought about how it never mattered to me. If its at level 0... AND if you're extremely panicked, sure, it's a little slow to load those shotgun shells, but it really has so little effect on gameplay that I'm just scratching my head as to the point of it. So as for alternative suggestions: 1. Make it so that with a high enough reloading + metalworking (with maybe a magazine recipe?) one can craft some types of ammo. We can already get gunpowder from existing ammo, after all. 2. Replace it with Gun maintenance (i.e. gun condition degrades more slowly). Now if there's something huge that the devs have planned for reloading, I'm all for it. But right now, leveling up reloading has got to be the most underwhelming skill level up.

This is inspired by the fact that my girlfriend and I have been making homemade sauerkraut recently. If you've never tried making your own sauerkraut, doing so is surprisingly easy. All you really need is a knife, a head of cabbage, a 1-1.5 tablespoons of salt, a bowl, a jar, and something that's heavy but also fits in the jar. (Suggested PZ ingredients: kitchen knife, cabbage, salt shaker, jar, bowl, stone) Chop the cabbage into little bits. Put the bits into the bowl. Put the salt in. Squeeze and mix the bits and cabbage until you get a fair amount of juice to come out (5-10 minutes). At this point, put all the cabbage into the jar. Pack it in as much as you can. Pour the cabbage juice into the jar over the cabbage, enough so that it's completely submerged. Put the weight into the jar to help keep the cabbage submerged in its juices (IRL, I use a smaller jar that fits into the larger jar--jarception--but in PZ, a rock would do the job). Put the jar in a room temperature place out of the way somewhere. Come back after 2-6 days and voila, homemade sauerkraut. Of note: any cabbage that's not submerged can grow mold on it, so be sure you've submerged as much of it as you can. If mold does grow, just discard the moldy bits; the rest should be fine. Don't completely seal the jar; if air can't escape, it doesn't ferment very well. That said, you may want to put a cloth or something over the jar opening to keep the area from getting too smelly while the fermentation magic happens. Sauerkraut doesn't go bad quickly once made (it's very acidic and salty, natural preservatives), so if the player is growing tons of cabbages and has spare salt, this can be a great way of preserving food. It's not hugely filling by itself however, so I would think it game it'd function more as a condiment (goes into salads, stews, sandwiches...) than a meal unless the player is desperate. By itself, it'd be like -10 hunger (varying according to cooking skill), +10 thirst. I'd guess most people in rural Kentucky wouldn't be making sauerkraut by themselves, so the player would probably be required to have read a recipe in order to make it. Also, the process scales up really easily, so you could probably make barrels for fermenting sauerkraut if you really like the idea.

Maybe this is too radical, I don't know. But here's the thought: All skills could be continuous, and all effects thereof could be as well. XP would remain pretty much the same, with whatever tweaking you'd like. Instead of blocks, you just have one long progress bar that increases more slowly the longer it is. Instead of having, say, 6 points in strength and being 3% of the way to 7 points and having your carry weight remain at 14 until you hit that final bit of xp, you'd have a progress bar that would translate to a max carry weight of 14.03. You could keep those arbitrary skill point cutoffs for crafting certain things, OR you could make everything from the start with hilariously disastrous results. Wanna make stairs with no experience in carpentry? SURE! Just don't be surprised when it collapses under your dumb ass, breaking your ankle and giving you all sorts of cuts and scrapes and now you wish you'd gotten that tetanus shot. Want to make a salad from your rotten food with no cooking experience? SURE! Just don't be surprised that it gives you food poisoning. Want to make a rain barrel with no experience in carpentry? SURE! Just don't be surprised that it leaks out all the water it catches and you just wasted all your materials. It would be quite an overhaul, I suspect, but I also think there are some (occasionally hilarious) possibilities here.

Having been playing survival, and what with the huge amounts of zombies that unceasingly find their way into my neck of the woods, it's hard not to notice the crazy huge numbers of zombie corpses that are piling up. I was just thinking that it would make sense for the player to move more slowly over these bodies (and occasionally trip if trying to sprint through them). Zombies, being less coordinated than they were in life, should be liable to occasionally stumble and fall as they trip themselves over their fallen brethren. Bonus request: I'd love for a way to craft an axe better than the raw axe... the normal axes are rare enough and raw axes are pretty good but you go through them really quickly. Failing that, it'd be nice if you could break a regular stone into a chipped stone with a hammer.