Kajin

I'd love to see addiction is cigarettes and alcohol being in the game, as well as the ability to grow tobacco and brew alcoholic beverages. Tobacco and alcohol would be wonderful trade goods if push comes to shove.

Devs are against bathing and using the bathroom but I'm unsure if they're against washing clothing. Could be a good idea to have it in if they're not. Get a small boost to happiness to have clean clothing and help prevent infection in wounds.

How is a windmill more complicated than a watermill? They're quite literally the exact same thing apart from the mechanism by which they capture moving energy to generate power. I'd love to see a bicycle generator, personally. Help your character get or stay in shape and generate small amounts of energy at a time.

If you've played Unreal World you probably know what I'm talking about. Basically just a storage container that acts like a fridge. Requires planks, stones and a shovel to build. Put your food in it to keep it cool.

I'll get on to a proper response sometime tomorrow, but right now I just want to comment on how hilarious it would be if there was a joke character named Lord Cutlery who wears armor fashioned out of pots and pans and dual wields frying pans in combat. I had that random thought while reading your post for some reason.

I'm not saying every weapon should have a specialization. Just different sub groups for various kinds of weapons is all. I just want it to have more variety than a simple binary this or that sort of deal. Kitchen knives would fall under the same weapon category as pocket knives, combat knives, and probably machete. Rolling pins would likely fall either under club or hammer. Golf clubs and frying pans would be under club as well, I figure. I don't know how big exactly you're thinking I want to make this, but I'm DEFINITELY not suggesting we have individual skills for golf clubs, rolling pins and frying pans Weapon scarcity is a big reason why I also suggested having generic combat skills like Fighting and Ranged that cover basic combat ability beyond your skill in your chosen weapon, so even if your last axe breaks you'd still be somewhat capable with the knife or hammer you have in reserve even though you didn't put as many points into it. Different weapons perform well in different circumstances, is what I'm saying. A cheap spear you sharpened out of a stick would do great at a decent distance well outside the melee or grapple range of your opponent and is disposable enough to be thrown at an advancing or fleeing opponent. A knife is a good slashing weapon against humans who are unarmed or caught by surprise and can easily take out a single zed without much noise or fuss, but isn't that great in an extended fight against someone with greater reach like an axe. A hammer would be really durable and an axe or sledge would have high damage potential but be exhausting to use in prolonged engagements. Stuff like that is the reason why I say it would be good for people to consider specializing in one weapon over another. It'd give people a reason to weigh the potential pros and cons over what weapon would be good for what situation as opposed to a straight linear succession from worst to best. It'd give the game a greater breadth of options for how you engage in combat and give a group of people a better reason to cooperate. Give them roles to fulfill in a group dynamic whenever they're engaged in a fight as opposed to sending in whoever happens to have the most powerful weapon at the moment. I'm not saying make it so that combat in PZ is Dwarf Fortress levels of complex, but I think a system that's just a little bit more complex than the rather simple one we have right now would be awesome. EDIT I think this might be going too far off topic from the original post. This is your thread, deprav, so if you want to keep the conversation going here or have it split off into another thread it's your call.

Conflict with other survivors will definitely be a factor, though, and having different weapon skills to fit different situations could prove useful. Also, given that the professions system is becoming more in-depth to the point of rewarding specialization, I think that doing the same thing for weapons skills wouldn't be too far out of place. In fact, it could make it more rewarding for characters that operate in groups to specialize in one weapon skill over another. EDIT That being said though. if nothing else I think having one and two handed weapon skills would be a good idea to add to the current system. It drives me insane when I notice that a knife and an axe share the same skill group.

I had an idea for weapon reclassification a while back but I'm not sure if I posted it or not. Personally, I'd like to see weapon skills expanded a fair amount with knife skills, axe skills, club skills, hammer skills, spear skills, bow skills, crossbow skills, handgun skills, rifle skills and generic fighting and ranged skills. Basically, a skill for every weapon sub group and a skill that governs melee fighting in and ranged fighting in general. The generic skills would cover basic fighting ability. Even if you're main skill is with a knife, if you've been in enough fights you're still going to do better with an axe than someone who is of similar skill level but not as experienced a fighter as you are. The generic skills would combine with weapon skills to boost overall combat effectiveness.

I think the non game breaking part comes from the fact that some of the more villainous NPCs will murder the shit out of you if they find out you're in control of a gas station with a wealth of fuel so they can take it for themselves. If we can pull gas out of stations I kind of figure they'll be a majorly contested resource amongst a myriad of opposing factions. The fights over them will be bloody indeed.

I can back this. If you're worried about the fragility of your weapons then it's the smart thing to do.

Pretty sure this is already in the game.

There's an archery store and range that's about a five or ten minute drive from my house. They had a couple hundred bows, a dozen or so crossbows (those things are EXPENSIVE let me tell you) and several hundred arrows and bolts of varying qualities. Once the zombies get done munching most of the people in my town there'd probably be enough bows and arrows to arm an entire post apocalyptic village with them.

A favorite color wouldn't have any impact on your character. Limiting them to a specific type of food with penalties if they eat something forbidden DOES impact your character. It means that they cannot partake in anything but fruits and vegetables without taking a penalty for it, in this case a hit to happiness that makes them depressed. How does that have no impact? How is that not intrinsic? How is that a poor design choice?! A trait is something you take to give your character an advantage or a disadvantage. This is a disadvantage. It's not a huge disadvantage by any stretch of the imagination but it'd still be worth a pittance in points for other traits. I'm really having a hard time seeing why you're against it.

It's only a roleplaying choice if the mechanics for it do not exist in the game. If the devs do choose to add a Vegan or Vegetarian trait that makes a character unhappy from eating meat then that's perfectly fine. Depending on how easy it is to acquire fruits and vegetables it might not give you a whole lot of points, but it'd still be a character trait with real consequences if added. I don't see how that's a problem.

Apart from getting you high, everything you can do with hemp you can also do with flax and cotton. Since I'd be unlikely to use it for its recreational properties, I'd really rather just grow the flax or the cotton. Having large hemp fields would likely just make you a high priority target for large bandit groups and would-be bandits who might not otherwise have bothered you. I might grow a small amount of it for medical purposes but beyond that I think it'd otherwise be too much of a hassle.

I can imagine a Vegan or Vegetarian gaining unhappiness from eating meat or meat products, but I doubt it'd limit their consumption of it entirely.

It might be a good idea to put the generator in an outdoor shed or ventilated garage of some kind. That way the carbon monoxide concerns are somewhat mitigated. Though, for this to be fair the generator tooltip should include a warning describing that this might happen if care isn't taken. If there was any actual concern for this happening the odds of a generator having a warning about carbon monoxide would be pretty high.

I'd love to be able to smoke meat and put it in a cool, dry root cellar for long term storage. And if we get milk making animals of some kind we definitely need a way to process it, whether it be churning it into butter, processing it into cheese or concentrating it into a condensed or powdered storage tolerant form. That said, none of this is currently possible

Cows would likely be almost impossible to breed given the lack of available bulls. I've seen dozens of cows in my life but have never seen a single bull. Goats would be a better bet, I imagine. You'd likely have a better chance of finding a male if you wanted to do breeding. Plus, they're a lot smaller and easier to care for than cows. Less space and food requirements. Not as much gains as a cow in terms of milk and meat, but still definitely easier. Pigs might be hard to take care of but the meat gains would be ENORMOUS if you could get your hands on some. With an average yield of about 180 pounds of meat, you could keep a single person fed for a couple months off a single pig. Pigs reach slaughter age every three months and a sow can give birth to a fair number of piglets, so you'd be set for meat. A decent farm for fruits and vegetables and some goats for milk? You have everything you need, food-wise. But enough bragging on the wonders of animal ranching. Onto the difficulty! I don't see any reason why Male + Female = Baby would be impossible, but I can see the possibility for any number of complications. Males would fight each other for breeding rights and possibly kill each other. They could accidentally hurt the female or the female could hurt the male if they find their prospective mate unsatisfactory. Males might hurt the babies during birth or afterwards. There could be complications during birth that might kill the babies or the mother or both, resulting in a whole lot of wasted time and effort. You'd obviously have to deal with all sorts of problems when raising animals.

really? Only ones I've seen in real life have been so big you'd need both arms to carry it if it was full. Could you carry it? Yes. Would it be incredibly cumbersome and awkward? Also yes.

Would be awesome to have a few of those to refill them with boiled water so you'll have them in an emergency

Was thinking about it a little more and I think the addition off tools and tool kits specifically for cooking would be awesome. It would really improve a cook's ability to make good, high quality food if they also had access to good, high quality tools. Knives of varying make and quality would produce different results. A pocket knife is better than nothing, but it'd get beat out by a really good quality chef's knife when it comes to chopping ingredients. Having a proper meat tenderizing hammer would be better than a carpentry hammer which would in turn be better than just hitting the meat with your fists. Measuring cups would help minimize overuse of ingredients and make meals more cost efficient to make. Then there'd be tools not directly for cooking but still sort of related. A quern or mill of some kind to help grind grains and starches into flour. A churn to turn milk into butters and creams. A meat grinder for making ground beef or turning otherwise undesirable parts of the animal into a sort of meaty paste that can be more easily consumed.

While I'll agree that learning how to MAKE a bow or crossbow is something that an average person couldn't easily figure out how to do by themselves (good thing we'll soon getting instructional manuals for crafting recipes, eh?), I'm gonna have to call all kinds of bullshit on people not being able to use a bow and arrow. I've been using bows on and off since I was a kid in elementary school. Rocket science it is not. It's difficult to pick up and get any good at it, but difficult to master does not equal difficult to use. I'm seeing no proper justification for why bows shouldn't be in the game. Nor am I seeing any proper reason why you'd need a special trait or skill book before you can even start trying to use a bow.

Since ongoing skill and profession overhaul became a thing, I've been thinking of ways this could be applied to various skills and right now I want to talk about cooking. Cooking, in it's most basic form, is the act of taking food and transforming it into another state that is more readily digestible. To put it simply, edible matter has a given nutritional value. But, in order to use that nutritional value, the body must invest nutritional value it has in reserve in order to process the edible matter. This results in a loss to the net gain of nutrients where, if a piece of food gives you 50 hunger, your body might invest 30 energy in digesting it resulting in you gaining only 20 hunger. In this cooking skill system I propose, your character will learn and eventually master various recipes for cooking that maximize the amount of hunger satisfied versus the amount of energy lost during digestion. In the earliest levels, your character is doing little more than throwing ingredients into a pot or skillet or crudely butchering the meat and chopping the vegetables before cooking it. Little preparation is committed to the task of cooking and what preparation is done is rough and inefficient. As levels are gained, the character becomes better at previous prep techniques (more efficient butchering techniques harvesting more meat, better chopping techniques that slice food more evenly helping it cook better) while new techniques are gained (creating broths for soup, tenderizing meat before using it in a recipe, letting foods marinate in succulent juices, rendering ingredients from one state to another before using it like extracting fat to make lard, churning milk to make butter or grinding flour out of wheat, corn, potatoes, or anything else that is starchy and can be ground). These new techniques gained start out rough (meat is tenderized poorly, flour is coarse and whole grains are left intact, broths are watery and unsatisfying etc.) but as the character levels up they improve upon previously learned techniques to help create the most beneficial dishes possible, driving down the ratio of potential nutrients lost to nutrients gained in each dish created. So at level 0-2, the character will only have very basic food prep techniques that consist of simply putting uncooked ingredients to fire or roughly chopping them up to put in basic soups or fried in a basic pan dish. Butchered animals will also provide unsavory ingredients such as organs and bones that can be crushed and ground up into a sort of meaty paste that is still unpalatable but not altogether as unpleasant as in the original form. At level 3-4, previous techniques are improved upon and become more efficient (ingredients are chopped more finely resulting in a more even cook and the ability to cook unprepared ingredients like a simple slab of meat results in slightly higher quality meals). A couple new techniques are gained as well. Say, for example, tenderizing meat, grinding flour, and extracting fat to make lard or churning milk to make cream and butter. These gained techniques are newly learned and still rough, but give the cook more options where he previously had only a few. Instead of cooking grains into a porridge, he can instead grind those grains into a flour to use in gravy or soup or bread. Meat can be tenderized and made easier to chew and digest. Fats, creams and butters can be created and used to pack more energy and nutrition into individual meals. At level 5-6, the ability to make broths and marinades is introduced. Use ingredients to make broths and spices to make marinades. Broths boost the flavor and nutrition of certain meals and dishes while marinades boost the flavor and nutrition of individual ingredients during the preparation stage before cooking. As before, previous techniques are improved upon. Flours aren't as coarse and meats are better tenderized. Not sure what to do with techniques to add beyond these levels, though. Will add more after some thought and discussion. Changes like this would make a cook far more valuable and give a cooking specialist player something better to offer while giving them a plethora of tasks to involve themselves in so that they never find themselves sitting still and being bored waiting for timers to go down.

I think the devs are planning on making it one life one save to prevent people from picking up where they left off on death.