OprahWinfrey

Veterans should have profession knowledge to operate heavy 50 cal mgs and military vehicles for late game use. Hip firing machine guns wouldn't really fit the realistic theme of the game imo, unless maybe as a perk of being a veteran able to fire short bursts. What makes sense is setting up a bipod MG and turning zombies into crawlers or incapacitating them without outright killing, since it would be pretty rare to get a headshot. Think of the chapter of World War Z where the military gets overwhelmed despite using tanks, MGs, and airstrikes. MGs could knock down the horde but to finish it off you would need accurate shots from small arms or melee

It would be neat to have an interface showing every "junk" item that you have collected and the ones left to find. The stuff you haven't found would show as a greyed out silhouette, and the items you have looted would show their regular icon. Just so long lived players can have something else to do.

Stone tool recipes could be tied to the foraging skill, and gain durability when crafted at higher foraging levels.

Driving through the American countryside, you will often find stone walls on the edge of farms. Many of these walls are shoulder height and have stood for decades, constructed only by stacking the right size rocks together. We should be able to construct walls of stone, which have higher durability than log walls at the cost of much more labor and finding many stones to use in construction. Stages of construction, similar to how wood frames are transformed into walls or windows, could allow for a half-wall that zombies can vault over, and a full wall which they have to navigate around or destroy. The shoulder height walls could allow players to attack with a spear. There are also other common fences called "split rail" or "snake rail" which do not require nails and are fast to assemble, something to think about for building animal pens.

Right now we have default. sneak (c), and combat (holding right click or LCTRL) Freelook seems unnecessary since combat stance does basically the same thing, you can look 360 degrees in less than a second at 0 nimble skill, adding a freelook would be additional control complexity for little real change. Personally I would enjoy the option but I think many people already find the current controls difficult

Do yourself a favor and set all loot to normal and skill exp to 2x. After you survive for months and months, you realize how tedious some of the default mechanics are. Why should there be only a single saw in an entire town? With the settings above, the game is still difficult but just saves much more time irl doing the carpentry/tailoring/electrical grind. The new VCR tapes of the skill shows are a great way for a new character spawning late to quickly gain levels basic skills but they are rare to find (make sure you have a max multiplier before watching the shows). For the weapons, it might be personal preference but if you intend on lots of combat you are shooting yourself in the foot if you don't take some maintenance boost and use up crappier weapons until you have a high maintenance level. No sense wasting a good axe until you have maintenance 3 or 4. Hopefully soon they will do a balance pass and up weapon spawn or durability, make it easier to repair or level maintenance. Perhaps an option to grant all players on the server level 2 of every skill by default would fix the multiplayer issue without changing the way the game is designed.

Sewers and basements are a maybe from the devs, I think they said the engine would need some work to accommodate a "level -1"' on the map. Really will add a ton to the game if they can make it work.

Most of those options already exist, not auto eating but if you have a water bottle or any water filled item in your inventory you will drink it automatically as you get thirsty. If you check out sandbox options, you can make the zombie hordes bigger to create a more intense base assault. Or just enable helicopter event "sometimes" instead of "once" and you will occasionally be attacked by swarms of zombies from all around. Right now there is a known bug that nerfed the zombies response to gunshots. When it gets patched, using guns will go back to being a last resort.

Sounds like your main issue with the current default is that it takes a long time to level up in real time, particularly mechanics and tailoring. Tailoring is really more of a "needle quest" than a grind, as long as you have the skill books. But mechanics needs to level faster on the low levels, I'm with you there. As for the combat skills, I think it is by design that an un-boosted combat skill will pretty much be impractical to level beyond 2 or 3. PZ is an RPG and an unspecialized character isn't really meant to gain high levels of combat exp without stat boosts. The only multiplayer I touch in PZ is co op with 3-4 people, so I don't know if skills are too easy to get or ubiquitous on the big public servers. Since it is impossible to fast forward I added a 2x multiplier to all exp gains on my server to reduce downtime during the multiplayer gameplay.

By the time the character lives long enough to start forgetting skills, I will probably be starting a new game out of boredom. Grinding them up is hard enough, I don't want to have to worry about maintaining an exponential decay. In my opinion, the progression will also feel less impactful (that moment when you level up a skill to 5+ after hunting high and low for materials). Maybe skill decay could be an additional difficulty option that can be enabled in the settings, for those who don't get bored of the late game.

Those mostly sound good to me. The farming section was especially interesting. A lot of the recipes you mention such as the waterwheel and natural filtration system would be useful, but not something that you would find in a farming textbook or that any typical 90's farmer would know how to build. But perhaps someone with a particular profession would know how to build them. +1 for adding the "Amish" profession with its unique recipes (similar to the pipe bomb being unique to engineers), strength and fitness +1, farming +2, trapping and foraging +1, carpentry +1.

Came to report this, but in my game it was 90% priests, 4.5% regular, 4.5% guards, and 1% inmates.

It would be nice to be able to see all the new little details up close- playing on a 2560x1440 monitor and would also like further zoom-in levels.

Currently, when expanding a list of identical items in the inventory (such as T shirts), every item not at the top of the list is greyed out. When searching for a certain color in a large collection, it takes a long time to find the one that you want because all the colors are too dark to distinguish within the list. With all the new options for customizing your look, it would be a big time saver and quality of life addition. It would be nice if there was an option to disable the greyed out colors in the stack and show the real color, or maybe just remove the effect. Example below:

The cars were the first big update since the new map addition- and the map addition was more like a small update in that it was mostly the effort of one member of the team (artist). It just seems like the devs' time would be better spent on developing rather than rigorously testing each new addition internally for weeks or months before releasing it to the Early Access, IWBUMS opt-in play testers who can find bugs way faster. That's all- I'm happy with the game, just an observation of a potential efficiency loss in their process.

The game is great, but it would be nice to see more progress. I think that the perception is that progress is slower than the reality, but IndieStone is afraid of releasing content due to past experiences. However, at this point, it is hard to recall the last "big feature" that was released for testing... It appears that the team may have fallen into the trap of perfection- everyone who bought this game bought it with the understanding that is in development. I for one enjoy 'testing' the game and helping ultimately accelerate development by finding hilarious, annoying, or sometimes game breaking bugs while testing new features; that is what early access is all about. It is frustrating to see a small team of testers trying to iron out bugs and simultaneously develop the game, while we who purchased it with the expectation of testing new and possibly terribly implemented features have to sit and wait for them to be essentially ready to go before getting to try them out. Why couldn't the vehicles have been released back when the dev team started testing them? For every person whining about glitches and bugs, I am sure there are 3-5 excited to test out vehicles and help the devs fix some stuff.

The siren seems pretty gamey. Why not just make it dangerous by filling it with zombies?

1. Your profile pic is whoopy not oprah. 2. Jatta is right, we need this sort of thing. If NPCs are ever to become a things, I think this sort of thing is going to be necessary. My only quarrel with the idea is the mind point thing. Honestly, more point/level things would get annoying, although I do like your idea on it, it just needs some work. If anything, the player shouldn't have it and only the NPCs should as a sort of behind-the-scenes code thing, as this could create a very balanced system based on triggers and events (kind of, as with the "emergent" part). We shouldn't really be able to directly control our characters mind (ie mind points). The actions that we take are what drive the story and our relationships with NPCs and players, not how we assign mind points. An easier and more natural way to accomplish the "battling personalities" he outlines would be to have an initial bad mood debuff when you are with that person, but for it to be lessened over time through interaction and getting to know them. Could also be potentially made worse. Kind of like how the fitness and strength skills work behind the scenes

No to zombie slaves. Human slaves should be allowed though. I will be disappointed if the devs do not allow taking a person hostage and forcing them to work for the community.

Seems like too much. Sort of like how the devs are avoiding hygiene- too Simsey.

I would like to see the tent cities and checkpoints you mention spawn randomly, as part of making the world "lived in". Pretty sure that build 33 has some of the "lived in world" features coming, maybe this could be part of a future update.

Personally, I think that is exactly the reason that they should be included! Hear me out...Right now, you hop into a kitchen and throw open all of the cupboards - you immediately see two knives, a few cans and a gun. You grab them and run in seconds - no problem. Personally, I think that needing to scan through junk items (simulating searching cupboards that are actually full) would add that extra tension. Zombies at the door and need a weapon? If you open any given cupboard in a strangers house, chances are that your not going to immediately know if there's anything useful there without looking. That, and if the items are there, perhaps there might be some minor uses for them, like burning socks or something. Including all of the items from daily life pre-infection makes the game more immersive. The added bonus of forcing the player to actually look harder at the inventories he/she is looting is a great bonus

What I gather from the devs is that Level 10 is meant to represent the world champ of whatever that skill is. For example, an Olympic sprinter or Thomas Edison engineer.

ROFL Its true, modern cars last much, much longer than their older counterparts without regular maintenance. They don't break as much, but the repairs are more costly. Part of the reason older generations know so much more about car maintenance and repair is because a few years ago, they were more than just hobbies.

I don't think it is really meant to be possible for any one character to level everything up to 10. This combined with the multipliers from traits encourages a more realistic representation of people: decent at most stuff, professional at some stuff. When the dragons are added, these specializations will encourage teamwork and make everyone an asset.