Kajin

Playing on normal because I'm not a masochist. Androids never gave me much trouble. I got grabbed by a couple of them but I managed to fight them off and escape before the other ones could get to me. Right now I'm in the second area of medical where you get the stun baton. The alien got me there. Was on the computer when I heard the door behind me open. Turned to find the alien right there, so I pulled out my newly acquired stun baton and charged right at him, heroically jamming the prod into his face for his troubles. Then he ate me. Ah well. Does anyone else at least try and fight him when he sees you? I usually just pull out my revolver and do my best to fight him even when I know it's futile because Ripley is the worst runner ever.

Sowing = wasting seeds which seem unreplenishable as of 29.3 - I have 5 farming, didn't get one seed from harvesting. As for log sawing, it is work too, you have to find an axe, a saw, and get in an area which may be dangerous - well worth some XP, if you ask me. You gotta wait for the plants to go to seed, first. It's the final stage of growth after the plants have become harvestable.

Got it. Playing it on and off. I love it so much but it frustrates me to no end with glitches. Takes me a full two or three seconds to even start climbing into a vent or a locker or for the door to open or close after I've pressed the key to perform the task. It's even worse when I know the alien is bearing down on me but I just can't get the damn locker to respond fast enough for me to hide in. I've died several times to this glitch. Several times I've seen NPCs and even the alien glitch through the surroundings. It's even worse when I'm hiding in a cupboard and the alien's tail glitches through the cabinet and right in front of my face as it walks by. That one caused a spontaneous browning of shorts. And the death scenes are worst of all. The sound ends quickly, even as the animation takes a full ten, fifteen seconds after the sound ends to finish playing out. It's so horribly out of sync it just takes all the horror out of being eaten alive. Even with all of that, though, I'm still having a blast with this game. Quite fun.

I usually just burn the twigs and branches in my campfire so I don't have to use logs and planks.

I'd probably be in support of the AI taking control of your character while logged out of a server, but only if the control was very limited. It stays in the safehouse, maintains the barricades and gardens so that you'll always have fresh food and a disease free garden when you log back in, and grabs a go bag and flees elsewhere in the event some asshole decides to grief you by burning your safehouse down and/or luring a horde in that'll eat you as soon as you log back in. Crap like that is the single biggest reason that I will never play PZ multiplayer. I experienced bullshit like that when I played Rust and I won't put up with it here where I have the option to play singleplayer instead. Not wanting to take control away from the player is all well and good, but logging back in to find everything I worked for destroyed and taken while I was off doing real world things is the ultimate mood killer for me. Hell, the meta game would be perfect for this purpose. On the flipside, there would have to be an option to turn the thing off for people who think this is cheating or dislike the prospect of the game controlling their character. All well and good for those people, but I think it'd solve or at least mitigate some of the biggest complaints I have with the prospect of multiplayer short of turning the server off when you're not online yourself.

If appliances can't be turned on, it's possible that the electricity is out? And I don't think putting beans in a bowl of water is a valid recipe. Try an empty bowl? Most cooking recipes are centered around frying pans and cooking pots, I believe.

I remember discussing something like this a while back, and it was my recommendation at the time that you should be allowed to start with extra group members, but only if you had limited control over how they were created and only if the advantage of having extra group members was offset by some major disadvantage that stood a high likelihood of screwing you over. Like, say, you choose to start with a brother and the game gives him the traits "Isolationist" and "Huge Asshole", so dealing with other NPCs has a far greater likelihood to end in disaster. Sure you have a loyal NPC in your group that can help you out, but it cuts off options significantly and forces you to play in a way that limits what means you can utilize for getting ahead. Choose a girlfriend? Her leg is broken and you'll need to look after her and keep her alive until it heals. Start the game with your character's Mother? Hiding a bite wound from you and she's probably gonna turn in the next couple days. Start the game with an adult Son? He was mugged and is bleeding out and you have to try and stop the bleeding while zombies pound on your doors. After that it's a long road to recovery, assuming you managed to keep him alive while simultaneously fending off the zombies and the muggers who kindly introduced their knife to your poor boy's insides. Any advantage you get from starting with an NPC in your group can and should be offset by some huge disadvantage that hurts you more than it helps you. Or else why would anyone ever choose to go solo?

I imagine the animals would attract the zeds at the very least. Depending on how things go, though, I can see a lot of animals escaping into the woods where the zeds would have a hard time catching them. Hell, if I was a rancher and I saw a bunch of zeds breaking down my walls I'd let all the animals loose and try to help them escape so I could round them up at a later date.

O.o

I wanna play this game so bad.

Been a bit since I've played this. Might not mind getting back into it.

I don't think you'd need carpentry that high to make a stall for chickens, pigs and cows. Hell, I live in a somewhat rural area and I see cow pasture walled in by nothing but weak fences made of a couple lengths of barb wire strung to various wooden poles. Granted you'd need a somewhat sturdier wall to help keep out the walking dead, but you can already make a bunch of fencing that can manage that at level zero.

Even if you say that... I still don't get why you'd even want to eat something raw. We cook food not just to get rid of any disease or parasite that might be on it, but also because that makes the food a lot easier to process into nutrients. Sort of like digesting it once before eating it and digesting it again. And just because it's safer to eat modern foods raw doesn't mean it's actually safe. Quality control isn't perfect, which is why a lot of these things come with a warning label not to eat it raw. It's why most restaurants say they'll cook your pork and eggs to order, but warn against ordering it under cooked. And why go to the effort to make the change when it's only going to affect the early portion of the game and have next to no influence after the two weeks or so it takes for the food to spoil anyway?

I would consider a highway clogged with cars to be a boon for any established group of survivors. Get into them and dismantle them for all the metal scrap you could possibly need.

I do a fair bit of farming but I've never made it to winter so I'm not sure how that affects things in the game.

To be fair, eating any kind of raw meat nowadays is a lot safer than it used to be, what with quality control and all that. That's why you see a lot of people eating raw meat products like pork and eggs. Generally speaking, it's safer than it used to be. Still not a recommended practice, though. Especially in the apocalypse where most food you find is either going to be wild, home grown, or has long since gone past its sell by date.

We already have trapping and we'll be having more kinds of animals later on. Would be nice to be able to make fur and leather clothing. I also floated a suggestion a while back about being able to grow cotton so you could weave it into useful things. Clothing, primarily, but bandages and stuff like that would work too.

Well, in real life it's not genetically modified so much as it just naturally goes dormant like all the other plants do during the cold winter months, living off of energy stored in the root systems. Then it resumes growing once the snow thaws come spring. It behaves sort of like a tree in this regard. The hard part is trying to come up with a way to accommodate this behavior with in game mechanics. Be able to harvest it mid winter for a small bit of food to help keep going (in working with the current mechanics of shorter growth cycles for plants), or give it a more realistic growing time and harvest it in the spring time for a massive boost of food to start the year off? Rain barrels, if you had a bunch of them it's possible. I'd hesitate to use the water on my crops and instead save it all for myself in case rainfall is light unless I had a huge number of them, or rigged up some kind of water catch out of a tarp to funnel more water from rain into the barrels. The plants wouldn't have as great a harvest in the long run without the extra water but they'd survive. I'd still rather build a well as soon as possible, but rain barrels certainly wouldn't hurt. As for the farming? Seeing as that's how ninety percent of all humans survived for the past couple millennia, yeah I imagine it is indeed possible to survive on nothing but farming. All we'd need is some proper methods of preservation and storage such as smoking, drying, salting, pickling, and root cellars. That's how people did it in ye olden times.

I'm sure you've heard the old saying one bad apple spoils the bunch? Well I think it might be a good idea to apply this in game. Adjust things so that there's lower then current base spoilage rate for all perishable foods in game. All foods last at least a little bit longer in storage then they do now if you're vigilant and pick through it every so often to make sure it's still fresh. Then make it so that any item that does spoil in your food storage vastly accelerates the spoilage rates for all the food it's stored with, giving that storage container in particular a much higher base spoilage rate than the current rate. If that happens, you'd stand to lose food much faster if you aren't careful. Got a spoiled item in storage and leave for a couple days to get other supplies? Come back and a third of the food in that container is either rotten or starting to go stale. Other fun complications! Why should crop tiles get all of the fun with pestilence? Rats and mice are sure to want to get into some of your hard won food stores. It can't be healthy for your fruits and vegetables. The rodents gnawing tiny little pieces out of them here and there, resulting in breakage of the protective skins and leaving vulnerable the flesh inside to pathogens that cause rot. Also, it can't be good having them crawling around your food, pooping and peeing all over it. Rodent infestations cause some of your stored food to become rotten at various intervals depending on how bad the infestation is. This in turn causes the rest of your food to go bad a lot faster. Better find some rat traps to manage this problem. Maybe even a cat. Insects could also cause trouble for you. Small amounts of rotten food could attract gnats which slightly increases the amount of spoilage for all food items and makes your survivors unhappy. Moderate amounts of rotten food attracts flies, who lay eggs in the rotten food that become maggots. Flies and maggots make your survivors very unhappy and increase odds of getting sick if you stay near them too long. Maggots will also work their way towards the fresh food after they've reached a certain critical mass, causing the fresh food to spoil and become maggot infested as well. If it gets really bad and you lose too much food, then... Well, at least maggots are good protein I guess? The good news is that, if you catch it early enough, the insect infestation can be managed simply by removing the rotten food. Rotten food is easier to digest for the insects, so they'll all move along to find some other source of rot as opposed to bothering your fresh crops. If it gets too bad, though, you may have to get some pesticides to spray on your stored food to kill all the insects. Hope you got plenty of fresh water to rinse it off before eating it.

New crop type. Winter wheat. Planting season is mid to late fall. Harvest season in real life is anywhere between mid spring or mid fall of next year, depending on the specific variant you're planting. Tweak it a little bit for to accommodate current game mechanics and you could have yourself a halfway decent crop to grow that'll hold you off til spring arrives. Maybe make it so that growing time during the colder days is two or three times as long as regular crops? Or extend the growing time so that it lasts the entire winter and gives you a nice bit of food to start the spring off with. Either way it'd give you something to pass the time and look forward to during those dreary winter months.

Well, relatively speaking it's a horrible source of nutrition- the main benefit is that it's *something*. Would be nice to have as a foraging option maybe in the city areas some times of year. (For the record, 1 cup of dandelion greens is only 25 calories- you'd need to eat around 80 cups a day to sustain yourself comfortably) It does have a fair share of vitamins and minerals in it, though, so it's a good addition to your diet despite it's lack of caloric energy. That one cup contains all the vitamin A you need and 32% of the vitamin C you need, as well as trace amounts of a lot of other things that'll help keep you going. I don't think this is an issue. Acquiring food is only a part of the problem of survival. I say add as many different potential sources of food as you want, so long as things are balanced out by other factors in the long run. Wild game like rabbits or fish can be depleted and need time to replenish in number. Crops and animals need to be fenced in and protected from zombies and fellow survivors looking for an easy meal. Fertile land can be depleted and need time to lay fallow so it can recover, or fertilized if you can't let it sit idle. Animals you'd acquire would need to have a huge field to graze in or they risk destroying the sod and starving. Improperly stored food can spoil and the resources to preserve it at all are hard to come by. Once you've established your character, getting food should be relatively easy. Keeping it should be the difficult part. There are a thousand different ways you could balance the issue of having too much food. Limiting ourselves to only a few different methods adds nothing when there's so much extra potential for having multiple different ways to make your living. I, for one, would love to play a nomadic survivor with a bow and a tent, roaming through the woods and hunting whatever game he might find. Supplementing his diet with whatever foraged plants he comes across. Always picking up stakes and moving on when the local food sources run out.

One of the most common yard "weeds" in existence, the humble dandelion, is an excellent source of nutrition. Flower, leaf, stem, and root. It's all edible.

Don't need to have a fire, what? Please elaborate. I'm unsure as to the point you're trying to make.

I'd love to be able to take a bunch of stones to make a fireplace or a stone oven inside of a player built structure.

I travel a lot and work in a lot of peoples houses as part of my job and I don't think I've ever seen actual, non-decorative shutters. The majority of the ones I've seen have almost always just been the cheap, plastic decorative kind that are just there to be pretty.