Yolan

I get what you mean, and I generally agree. What I think of though as a good example of late game difficulty in a sandbox style game is The Long Dark. Interloper mode is quite a challenge even for experienced players. I’d like to see some equivalent in vanilla PZ. For now, I will content myself with mods and sandbox tweaks.

Just came to say I agree with IndustryStandard entirely. My impression of this thread is that some people are reacting very defensively towards a pretty reasonable and carefully worded expression of concern about development priorities and the late game. I’ve been a Zomboid player since year 1, and I’m very excited for the future of the game. I was confident PZ was going to blow up majorly once MP and the anim update came out, and it did! I trust the IndieStone are going to add a lot of very cool shit over the coming years and make it -even more- popular. At the same time, this forum is a place where people can offer feedback and voice concerns. And that feedback can be useful for the devs. So why be so defensive about it? I agree that difficulty will likely ramp up nicely with NPCs. I’m especially hoping to see a new meta with loot. If NPC groups form in each town and start looting all the houses (happening in the background code in the abstract for the most part) then you might only have a month or so before the easy to loot areas are stripped, forcing you to contend with the higher pop centers or to get out and get creative. Or maybe go a bit mad max. But still, my issue with PZ is also the same as OP. The sense of tension drains pretty quick once I have secured myself well, with months of food supplies. I’m not against any of the work being done on crafting and husbandry that probably targets long term group survival on servers. But solo play would benefit from some focus on difficulty beyond NPC addition IMO. Maybe actively roaming hordes crossing the map is one option. The adjustment to farming speed that is already happening should hopefully be another. Fishing is also getting tweaked. But maybe needs even greater skill check requirements. The loot table balancing that is occurring might help too. I personally though would like to see some of the hard core mod options brought in to a preset “x years later” mode. Something harder than apocalypse. Search times added and drastically reduced loot volume. Cars more ruined. Everything super overgrown as per that cool mod. Etc.

Darn. In that case choosing skinny for now seems unbalanced, as it actually protects you from losing weight. Incidentally, I also noticed I was still able to grow stuff in my garden in late December. Is that normal? I hadn't got any snow yet as of the 1st of Jan. Seems a bit odd that my tomatoes were growing in such cold weather. Anyhow, I'm trying again then, this time with the regular survival mode (hard core of course). I really want to see this nutrition system in action to get a feel for it. Maybe I'll set a rule for myself against living in the woods. Anybody know what kind of survival times people are racking up recently in survival mode? Still seems theoretically easy enough to live forever if you live by a river and fish.

Hmmm. So maybe there is some kind of issue or bug here for me? Is it because I'm using the 6 months later preset and not the regular survival mode? Or perhaps because I chose "skinny" as a trait?

A few days more into my game, since the last update, but still no weight loss or gain. Nobody else having this problem?

Thanks for the quick tweaking updates. So far I have noticed I need to eat slightly more. I haven't lost any weight yet, but I'm only two days into playing with these adjustments, and I have been chowing down pretty heartily. Looking forward to seeing how easy it is to survive in my woodland hut in the winter with nutrition in. Hmmm. I do wonder though. I can trap birds with worms, which are themselves a renewable resource. Will it consume too many calories in terms of effort to gather the worms for my bird traps, relative to the calories I get from the birds? If not, then I can just eat birds all the time without concern. Catching rabbits and squirrels requires vegetables, which don't grow in the coldest months, but worms are year round as far as I know.

Anybody else not having their body weight change? I'm playing IWBUMS branch, 6 months later pre-set, which I assume has nutrition working. I chose a skinny character, reasoning that life had been tough for the last half year, and I really wanted a challenge. So far however my weight has remained stable at 70 kg. It hasn't budged up or down at all over 15 days of playing. That seems a bit odd, as I was under the impression that with all the wood chopping and zed killing and running around I was doing the few cans of beans bits and pieces I was eating wouldn't really be enough to sustain my bodyweight. Any chance that the skinny perk has actually caused my weight to become fixed as static? I.E. a bug? Or is it that this feature is not enabled for the 6 month later preset?? Just wandering. Cheers.

Hmm. It seems like you still don't need hot water to create a cup of hot tea. Just water. Seeming as we have kettles in game, I thought I would have to heat up water in one. But I suppose this is still to be implemented later.

Cool. That's exactly what I was thinking. I hope it does get changed some time.

Doing a bit of cooking in my forest hut, I found out that you can no longer create bread unless you have the chef class, or find the recipe book. Now, I don't know how to make bread properly myself, but I think I could guess my way to something edible, or just use the flower and water to make a simple dampier or jappati kind of thing that has a shorter shelf life. It seems kind of perverse that I've got five bags of flower just sitting there that I am incapable of turning into food. So, can we remove this restriction? Or alternatively, add a new recipe for "bushmans bread" or "dampier", that doesn't require yeast, but maybe also goes stale quicker? Secondly, I noticed that plain cooked rice gives you a massive unhappiness boost for some reason. Freshly cooked rice is actually really delicious though. Especially if you are a hungry person. Doesn't seem to make sense that it is as unpalatable as eating wet dogfood. Can we fix this? That's all I've really noticed so far that seemed odd.

I don't think there's any real problem so long as it's not making the game easier to play in any significant way.

Epic story. Thanks for sharing!

Cool. I've updated the score board. I haven't touched my save in a week either, but I'm alive at Pony Romo. Actually managed to find a trowel. Then I threw it on the ground of course.

Cool. Thanks for this.

Cool! The more the merrier. It takes a bit of adjusting to but I I am hoping to live for quite a while. EDIT: now at 8 days, 3 hours. Up around the pony romo.