KyousukeAzai

Foraging definitely is very strong skill, its balanced by the fact you cant power-level it by reading books, but yes definitely it is the most efficient way to get food and basic materials if you dont use loot respawn and as someone who has gone through the pain to level it to the max gathering thousands of things, berries do go bad after about 2 weeks and there are poisonous berries that if you eat too many (3 or more) will actually kill you. Still the best way to get food is to combo farming cabbage into trapping rabits with it. Needless to say however the game is in early development and things are very much a subject to change.

Guys remember there is this thing called "Sadistic AI director" which will be added eventually and is currently being worked on, if Im not misstaken some of its features will be amongst many others, zombie hordes that will migrate towards your safehouse if you hole up in it for too long, NPC looters (actual human dudes looking to mess your day up), NPC survivors, random events, radios which will trigger different events in the world. So the late game will be covered reasonably afterwards, but as people said eventually you become good at the game and be able to deal with anything and everything, hopefully modding scene will take care of that afterwards. So remember this game is still in ALPHA, the whole game has to yet even reach the beta stage which in a lot of games is not even considered playable. And this is coming from someone with over 500 hours in the game as of today, most of which have been in single player. If you want a challenge try insane/super zombies with extreme senses with very rare presets across the board...or dive into a few mods there is quite a few of them out there if you look around.

Well, no I dont necessarily want to make the recovery times longer (for that we have the slow healer trait) I just meant to have some assortments of cosmetic touches for their long-time survivors, since you cant really tell the difference today between someone who just started and someone who survived for months and cleared thousands of zeds. And the actual impact on your character would be a one time thing so what I meant if you mutilated your leg you would have a CHANCE to suffer from a small penalty, but that penalty would not add up again if you did suffer the same injury again later on (for the sake of playability) so it would be more of a one time thing, that is all. And as far as the moodles, the psyche changes I had meant were somewhat a bit different, so say normally if you make a campfire normally your character is completely calm and normal, but say if you were to suffer a reasonable burn injury, after that your character would maybe become a bit shifty around open fire (say over a certain distance your character would very slowly build the "stressed" moodle) it would not be that big of a deal if any at all, but it would help immersion and people would be able to feel a bit of empathy for their characters (those that enjoy that sort of thing anyway). Again as I said it would probably have to be a feature that could be turned off in the options menu for people that are not that much into the idea and hell there is a lot of ways this could be implemented in a purely cosmetic way only.

Hi, so recently there has been a topic regarding permanent scars on your health panel, which was quite interesting to watch and read, lot of people liked the idea, myself included and it got me thinking a little, why not take it a little bit further, now there is way more ways about doing this, but here is the core idea. So, as a long time survivalist and an absolute idiot at times I tend to break my face over a lot of objects (jumping out of windows on a second floor and shattering my legs into million pieces is my absolute favourite or setting my rear end on fire while cooking that one's good too) and honestly, if you were to break your leg in a zombie apocalypse, thats a pretty heavy injury to sustain and without a doctor around, even splinted there is real possibility you would suffer some sort of permanent damage or psychological impact of some sort. So, the idea is to have a character after such a heavy injury gain some sort of a "stat penalty" or affection to them say you break your leg and there would be a chance your character would not recover to 100% movement speed after that, rather maybe 80% max, not so much to make it a pain moving about, but still enough for you to notice and to not consider these kind of injuries just like any other scratch. But physical injuries also often incur some psychological impact as well, someone who has had pretty heavy burn happen to them probably isnt going to be all that comfortable around a fire, or someone who slit their arm open and bled all over the floor when crawling through a broken window would be more conscious about it the next time. As far as the cosmetic side of things the most obvious things would be the scars or slightly "missaligned" limbs from having a bone grow back a bit crooked, maybe a limp and stuff like that, it would add a little bit of flavour and more realism, it would also encourage the player to again be more wary about heavy injuries. Another thing was that not only bad things would come from this say, which is another thing I want to mention, over-time perks. We all know there are traits at the start when you create your character, but when you begin you are still just your regular Joe who just found out there are a lot of deaders roaming outside, the only thing to you is just your natural talents. These perks I had in mind would be more alongside the experience through surviving. Say you use the fire axe to chop of zombie bits all over the place, after a few hundred kills(or levels in blade profficiency) you would learn where and how to cut them better and with a little bit less effort, making you tire slightly less when swinging your weapon of choice. Or say you like to keep your distance and shoot them suckers from a far, after some time you would have enough guns gone through your hands you would learn to understand them a bit better, increasing the maximum and decreasing the minimum range or maybe learning how to stuff a few extra bullets into a mag for maximum efficiency. Now you could argue that these improvements is what the levels are there for, however I mean them as lets call them milestones in your progression, since experience right now is a steady line, it would be nice to have a little bonus for reaching the higher levels, by making them a little bit more impactful that way. All in all I would imagine some people would find permanent penalties for such things annoying so probably have this be an option/feature that could be checked in a sandbox or the options menu (similar to reloading) would probably be required. Anyway I'm sure this was suggested before in bits and pieces, so I just had thrown it all together in my brain and if not an official feature, it would make a cool mod at least.

Hmm whilst definitely not completely silent, an average(somewhat) quality-made hunting crossbow does have quite a bit of range, having owned one such thing in the past that sucker definitely could go for 150 maybe 200 feet if you are a good shot so, while yes the thwap would be heard in about 20-30 feet around you I was thinking such weapon would be of course used at larger distance so to use it effectively reasonably good aim (maybe a few extra upgrades such as a scope etc.) would be required. As far as game requirements for making a bow I was thinking it would require a reasonably high trapping perk along with carpentry say something along the lines of (4 - 6 trapping a.k.a hunting as thats as close as you can get to it and at least 5/6 in carpentry) to justify having a somewhat silent ranged weapon and I believe the devs said that at some point there will also be actual game to hunt in the game (pun absolutely intended). Anyway...thats just me ranting at this point...I must have missed it on the suggested list since I actually gave it a look before this...guess that makes me an idiot so as I said apologies...

So playing around and surviving for a little bit (2 months to be exact) got me to think a little bit about the area I was surviving in, that being West Point and after looting pretty much the whole city dry and seeing everything there is, I just thought of something that could be added, would fit in with the lore and make a survivor's life a bit easier, though it was a bit too obvious so I thought it must have been suggested before, but after skim-reading around a little bit I havent really tripped over it, but if its around I apologize for repeating it Hunting crossbows Yep, not very original I imagine, but hey I dont know why such weapon isnt really available already, the idea would be pretty simple, mid-range, silent firearm that would allow you to take care of those pesky deaders that are so inconviently in your way to loot and oddly close to a horde that you could just sneak past, if it werent for that one annoying strangler. As far as lore goes, West Point has a gun store specialized in hunting gear and in my personal experience these tend to have not just guns, but also hunting bows and crossbows if you are into that, so the loot spot would probably be only it or the shooting range a bit to the east or one of the few hunting cabins in the woods around if you wanted to make them really hard to get. Ammo-wise it would be pretty simple to craft together a stick and a sharpened rock (it would give use to those things aside some very basic tasks that you can use actual tools for anyway). And for the sake of balance it would be either a single shot weapon or you would have to rack each bolt after shooting with a relatively small capacity, lets say 4-6 bolts max. So efficient enough to take one or two guys out and be on your way, but nothing to be killing thousands with and it being silent it might just be your best friend once you find it. You could even be able to make a hunting bow after all, that would take just a few flexible branches and a bit of twine that could work the same way, but be just the poor man's choice instead.

All of these things, they would be amazing also another maybe a little bit extra feature would be allowing it in single player sandbox setting as someone who plays around with game's files and modding having the ability to clean up after a bunch of testing would be amazing, also it would be helpful to people who play on insane amounts of zombies since clearing those corpses out by hands would be ridiculous to say the least.

*I will just hide in there* que the alarm going of...

Indeed, it has been proven that without human contact, a regular person will indeed go insane and I believe once NPCs are re-implemented, that will be taken into account in some way, again though the game offers plenty of ways to relieve depression somewhat well, even having anti-depressants, one thing I could think to make it a bit more impactful to the game as it stands would be making the "easy" methods of relieving it have a negative side to them, reducing the reduction on books and/or probably making the pills make you sick if you take too many over certain time period, since right now, you can literally never sleep and fuel your survivor on vitamins if you find enough of them, a.k.a. raid the pharmacies as they provide enough meds for 30 people.

It is not exactly working in a way you suggested, but this mechanic is somewhat already in the game, if only slightly indirect. At the beginning when you start up everything is fresh and bearable, but if you manage to survive for at least a month with electricity and water dead, the boredom and depression get to you through having to eat older foods and I'm not 100% sure if it is the case, but the older the world you are in, the more like the world is to respawn rotten food as well, so longer you go along, the more effort you need to put into getting satisfying food. Furthermore, honestly I think the depression would settle in only the first few weeks of survival, even an average person will adapt and get used to very stressful and depressing environment (people will simply stop giving a f*** about bashing a used-to-be-person's brains out all over the wall). I mean in one of my survival maps my survivor made it so far 3 months and massacred 1500 zeds, so honestly I think she reached a zombie-hunter status, can walk up to a zed and splatter it all over the road instead of running away hiding and crying.

I may not have had a good laugh like this for quite a while, talk about extremes. As far as the suggestion originally goes, little accidents would be okay, I think, as in scratches, bruises, everyday mess-ups, but I don't think there should be an instance where they could randomly infect or kill you, since there would be no chance of you avoiding those, punishing players by a slap for doing something reckless(working while fatigued, exhausted etc.) will, in a game like this, be tolerated, but shooting them in between the eyeballs for cutting down a tree is a rage-worthy death.

Ok, so first of, this is more of an idea that went through my head as I was playing, more so than a suggestion, anyway, the core of the idea is pretty simple. Adding a craftable radio, or simply snatching one around from a house, a garage, a car(once and if they are in the game) the list could go on where you could get your hands on one. Essentially, after some time in the apocalypse, the only reasonable means of communication pretty much would be your old radio and the idea is once you would acquire one, your world would once in a while transmit some kind of conversation or just a message and spawn the "event" somewhere in your world. It could literally be anything i.e.: Other survivors calling out to the world giving a bit of information about their status and location(once NPC are in the game) Warnings about zombie hordes movement(the horde would spawn, once you'd hear the message) Zombie attacks and call-outs for help, being limited by time Maybe even some military convoys running through the area being attacked/killed off leaving some weaponry behind to scavenge(assuming they are not all dead knowing we still hear the helicopters every now and again) That's just to mention some of the ideas, the events could literally happen anywhere in the world i.e., you could be in West point and the event would be in the Mall or Muldraugh, they could be both positive or negative and not always reachable. It would add a bit to the late-game, provide resources for people who don't enjoy having their loot (unrealistically) respawn, spice up the difficulty a little bit as well probably and would support forcing people out of their comfort zone to explore a bit.

I do like the idea of you being able to see the map, but rather than a zoom, maybe craft or find a map of the area would be much better (tourist guides and such for town layouts), on top of which I'm pretty sure the game would EXPLODE if you had it render the whole map, you can see roughly one street length around you, and the map is several square miles with forests, farms and 2 towns (which a lot of people don't realize), so rendering it all at once, I can imagine the game would instantly freeze.

Having actually encountered the problem myself and finally losing my mind about my FPS being ruined today, I decided to storm the forums about it, I see I'm not the only one...now I'm a quite a digger and a tinkerer having a system where anything in it, is customized by yours truly in some way for max performance. To sum up the issue: Every so often framerate drops/stutters from 60 to mid 50ish, on the last build 30.12 that is, I was using 30.10 till yesterday with no issues at all. Now I was running several monitoring programs while playing to see if it was hardware related as well(Everest and afterburner), nothing ever maxed out on my system, which is slightly above average at best, so there were plenty of resources for the game to breathe in. Tested on: Phenom II 960T 3.6ghz OC GTX 680 20% OC and even an older GTX 550ti 15% OC with FPS being really dead same, and either of the GPUs were practically asleep never going above 20% usage at any point in time with latest drivers of course for each of them DDR3, Corsair, 2133mhz 2x4GB So I think I can safely assume that no matter how good of a computer you might have it has to game-related issue only, my best guess would have to be the lighting freaking out every now and again, since when I was in the woods the problem rarely ever appeared, but the moment I got into housing areas, it happened every minute or so, I could replicate it by simply running from one edge of town to another and it would drop from 60 fps to about 50-55 for a second or so, but never in the same spot. Also I have started noticing strange artifacting, messed up lights every now and again(as in completely black spots outside during the day for no reason at all) Also, it being java and having played a ton of minecraft, I also know the games running on java like to run out of memory every so often and as expected so does PZ, my PC does drop framerate when fully zoomed out on max resolution to about 40-50 in town, when freshly started, after 2 hours of playing or so, I got back to the same spot and the framerate hovered significantly lower in the same setting, around 25-29 then, so maybe allowing it to use a bit more could fix the issue? But that's just me guessing... Now again, there is no complaint from me, I'm just giving feedback as someone who enjoys the game a great deal, alpha is alpha after all. Haven't tried it but a temporary solution for everyone who would get iffy about the frame rate, try to lock your framerate lower (45 fps), maybe that might circumvent it for the time being.

Not a bad idea. There needs to be dangerous situations where you find yourself cornered or you'll always just be able to kite them around and pick them off. If you didn't know each zombies real capability that might help. Unfortunately, that would really only work a few first hours/days, if the game randomized the zombies at the start every time you would only have to adapt to what you would be able to experience the first day or so, unless it would randomly generate zombies throughout you playing, meaning in a world with no sprinters, few weeks in you would suddenly encounter some out of nowhere. Which according to the lore the game is using wouldn't be able to happen, since the zombies deteriorate and rot over time (as their flesh withers away and dries) and eventually become pretty much glass statues, weak and slow. Though it is a cool idea for a sandbox option or a mod.

This Every other household might have a firearm in it, well firearm, your regular 9mm handgun you can buy pretty much anywhere these days for self-protection. But bullets are the problem...without them your guns are as useful as a paperweight + west point has an actual gun store so it does make sense that a lot of people in the area would have some kind of a firearm.

Definitely an interesting idea, as someone who likes to mess around in cooking/modding the game a bunch, I have already tried to do something similar in making the cooked food to have more of an impact, than your regular junk food you find all over the place. Though I do disagree on the whole point of cooking being irrelevant since it decreases the amount of resources you need to cook/allows you to use rotten ingredients to a certain point...and that with "rare" loot rarity and 3 people in the house, can be pretty damn useful...being the only one in our group with high cooking skill, nobody else is allowed to cook except me in order to keep ourselves from running out of food. But anyway, having a 3rd kind of effect along the lines of "quality" that would give actual long lasting positive effect (instead of having to stuff your face every 2-3 hours for well-fed one) would definitely fit well in the game and it would make sense a well cooked food by someone who knows how to cook, would keep you going longer, instead of stuffing yourself full of chips.

Several points to be made here, albeit really simple. First exertion moodle, is very severe, in build 30 anyway and it cannot be ignored as is. Sure you can man-mode through Moderate/High exertion if you have a few blips in your sprint/are proficient at your weaponry as those already nuke your damage and speed pretty badly. However, Excessive and Exhausted levels, are a suicide trip if you get to that point in the middle of a fight with a bunch of zeds. Exhausted prevents you from running, pretty much nullifies your knockback and damage entirely(with guns as well) and you move slower, than a regular fast shambler. So the worst level of that is currently probably the worst status effect in the game right now. Now, the tired moodle, from not having enough sleep/foraging a bit too much, will in fact in the end(as confirmed by the devs) cause your character to pass out if you ignore for too long, giving sleeping a lot more urgency/making the vitamin pills, probably the best pills in the game...seeing as even I make my character function on pills alone instead of sleeping half the time anyway.

I know its probably super-low on the to-do-list of the devs...but damn...you have no idea how much YES, this has from me...having no way to warm yourself up inside in cold winter nights is so obnoxious, I just pretty much have to sleep through it like a bear.

well its pretty simple, you just need a couple items, all have to be in your main inventory: Empty jar Jar lids Full bottle of water (or any other container filled with water) bottle of vinegar (it only uses a little bit so one bottle of it can make quite a few cans) Bag of sugar and of course vegetables of your choice from your harvest I think that's all of it anyway.

Now here is an idea, riot gear/police equipment for protection, in west point there is a police station after all with a locker room and an armory in the back of it...you could use that as a means of protection and still compromise on the idea of smithing by being able to make improvised bladed weapons in your backyard.

Well, of course if you pick lower speed the game will never generate faster zombies, so "Fast shamblers" will never generate sprinters, "Shamblers" will never generate fast shamblers, it will only generate and mix of lower or equal speeds to what you choose...I see your point in wanting the extra customization...its not impossible to imagine, that at some point you will be able to pick what percentage of what Zed do you want something along the lines of: 50% Shamblers 20% F. shamblers 5% Sprinters 25% Z's on crack(moving at a speed of sound)...Just kidding If this is what you would like to see I'd say its probably likely if enough people will ask for it...given it doesn't require the game's spawn system to be programmed from the ground up again.

Well as far as MREs, we know that Devs said that eventually houses will have basements, so if we are talking about people grabbing up and squirreling the goods away for themselves, that could be made to be the place to look for them, I would imagine a lot of people (before zombifying) would probably hunker down underground anyway. And I don't know about MREs for hurricanes and such...but when I was in the army...those things...man...yeah there edible and filling...but good god, some of them tasted like week old socks...different place...different things I guess. Food preserving was mentioned as well and already I think it was since build 30 we can preserve food via canning it...at least what you get of your harvests with vinegar and water to keep it from rotting...so farming is now somewhat better than fishing, so maybe to even the odds they will introduce a method of preserving meat products, smoking/drying the food would probably make the most sense since it would be easy to establish.

Well...I can't say the idea isn't entertaining alright, I mean going through the forest minding my own business foraging a bit...when suddenly...a wild Emu appears... ... It would probably crack me up having something like that happen every now and again...but maybe its a little bit too crazy...great idea for a mod if someone decides to grab onto it...it could probably come out great...for vanilla game...I'd agree up to being able to from to time catch something like a lizard, or find a few snake eggs here and there though.