sprkng

Personally I think early game is fine as it is, just trying to survive while looting for basic items is a full time job already. I agree with your reasoning that early game is important since it's the first impression for new gamers. But there's no downtime where the game gets boring during the first couple of days, so I don't think this part needs that much more content. For me this is the most fun part of the game I also think NPCs will bring more towards endgame content, not just from the rebuilding society perspective, but as in having built your zombie-proof base and filled it with loot, you might attract gangs of looters etc. which would provide more powerful opponents.

Share away! I like talking about game design and theorycrafting And since you mentioned game progression in another comment, I might mention that I've written a suggestion regarding that too Pretty sure the devs have said that when everything else is done they're going to add stories (i.e. mini campaigns) that you play through, similar to how the first demos were. Of course things may change, but I don't think sandbox mode is meant to be the main game mode for PZ.

1177. Have sound events cause a bit of anxiety in the player character. Different amounts depending on the sound, i.e. dog bark = low, gunfire = medium, human death scream = high

I wrote a similar post a while ago. No proposed solution, just some discussion in case you're interested in what was said then.

Shouldn't need nutritionist to see stats on canned food, it's literally printed on the can Well, at least today it is, not sure if food had energy info labels in USA in 1993

Change the helicopter event to be recurring by default, though with different effects each time they occur: * First time it moves semi-randomly and follows you around if they can see you (i.e. they might circle and move away if you go into a building). * Second time they use a megaphone to shout things at you, e.g. "this zone has been evacuated, no civilians allowed", "looting is a federal crime" etc. * Third time they escalate the threats, e.g. "this is your final warning", "looters will be shot on sight", etc. * Fourth time and on they shoot at you with a rifle. Nothing would suck more than being instantly killed by an off-screen invincible enemy, so I think they need to be pretty bad at aiming. You should probably be safe as long as you keep running around, though the noise would have course attract zombies to your location. If you drive they shoot at the car and damage it, but still with low probability of hitting players inside as long as it is moving. Maybe there could be a red dot laser sight following you around, and bit of dust thrown up when they miss and hit the ground, to better communicate what is going on. Currently the helicopter event can easily be dodged by driving away from a town and just sitting in your car until they go away. I think this suggestion would make the events more fun, and it could force the player into interesting scenarios (e.g. having to run into a building that hasn't been cleared from zombies). Also it would make late game more difficult, which is something I think is needed.

Just to clarify so that we're talking about the same things: Vitamins and dietary minerals are considered micronutrients, as opposed to fat, protein, carbs, water and fiber that are macronutrients. The reason I suggested the system should be simplified to just 2 different values (+the existing macronutrients ofc) is to keep it easy enough to be playable for people with minimal nutrition knowledge, and I think 2 values could be enough to force the player to diversify their food intake. For example cabbage should be low on calories (making it a pretty inefficient food source), low on protein (protein intake ought to be connected with strength gain IMHO) and with the proposed simplified system it could be low on minerals. As long as all the easily obtainable foodstuffs lack at least one nutrient I think you have a good start. Not sure I'd count on the majority of the PZ player base would be able to recognize them. I've read a bit about nutrition, though with focus on the macros, so I think I probably know a little more about it than the average Swede (or at least I'm sure I know more about nutrition than all my coworkers ). I knew the cause and symptoms for scurvy, I had heard of goitre but didn't know exactly what caused it, and I don't think I had ever heard about beriberi before I googled it now.. "Eat iodine when your throat swells up" is much less intuitive than for example "put on gloves when your hands are cold" (comparing with the body heat system which is a fairly complex and accurate model of the human body). But I don't know, maybe throwing up a "malnutritioned" moodlet will be enough for anyone to get that they need to vary their diet, even if they don't understand the mechanics behind it. And it's your game, so if you want to model more micronutrients I'm definitely not going to complain about it, I just wanted to explain my reasoning behind the suggestion. Options/sandbox are great, but having good default settings is also nice. Also don't underestimate what people will complain about I've seen a couple of threads with people saying some aspect of the game "must" be changed, just because they refuse to use the sandbox mode

I thought about that too, but I keep remembering how it turned out in ATLAS (they had 3 different vitamins that you needed to manage IIRC, though the number of them wasn't the only issue) What some fans thought about that: The risk is that managing your vitamins isn't a *fun* mechanic, it's not something that you're looking forward to doing and I'm sure many players will hate it if it becomes too present. What I hope it would do is to add a little flavor to the game and break the monotony a bit, not for it to become a chore. Depending on how you balance it, having more different micro-nutrients would either force the player to diversify their food sources even more (e.g. seek out specific items to fill each need) or you'd get enough of everything from just eating normally. I'm just not convinced the former would make the game more fun for the majority of the player base, and the latter would make it feel unnecessary. Perhaps it would make a great addition as a mod? Another problem is that it would be massively unrealistic to show the vitamin/mineral levels to the player, so if their character suddenly got sick they would have no idea what caused it. I was thinking there could be a new moodlet, for example "lethargic" and it says something like "you might be low on vitamins or minerals" if you hover it, but with more micro-nutrients it would be impossible to know what you were missing. Normally you wouldn't know what kind of deficiency you have without doing a blood analysis

1112. Reduce field-of-view when wearing a helmet that covers your face. A small reduction for mc helmet and a big reduction for welding mask

How vitamins currently work has been bothering me more than it should, it's just ridiculous that you can chug them for an instant energy boost. So I was thinking how it could be made more realistic in an interesting way. * Add two internal values (similar to how the game keeps track of hunger and thirst) for the player: vitamins and minerals. * Add vitamin and mineral content to all food items: Vegetables have high vitamins, meat has high minerals, junk food is low on both, etc. * If the player doesn't get enough of either vitamins or minerals for an extended time (e.g. eating nothing but chips and soda for weeks) they get tired, weak and more prone to illness. * If the player gets too much of either by munching vitamin tablets they could get queasy, but this shouldn't be possible by eating normal food. The goal is to give the player a reason to seek out more healthy food, which is also more difficult to find than the candy and snacks that is everywhere and never goes bad. I'm not trying to take a stance against junk food, I just think the game is more fun when you have to go questing * Add caffeine tablets as a game item. Eat these to get instant energy boost * Eating more than 3 starts making the player anxious, eat 10 and you get queasy, eat 50 and you die

I'll add a disclaimer in case my previous post appeared to endorse WWZ style zombie physics: IMO World War Z looks ridiculous, but I think it some variation of this idea could be realistic. If you have a large horde of zombies pushing towards a building, and you keep killing the ones in the front, it would eventually result in a pile of corpses. Maybe it depends a little on your zombie lore, but I don't see why the rest of the horde wouldn't try to climb over the fallen to get to their goal. Zombies in PZ already walk over corpses, except the corpses are paper thin

It could (maybe) be implemented as adding a Y-offset to characters/zombies based on how many corpses there is on a tile, and if this gets high enough let them climb up to second floor. It's obviously just a guess but I think it could be doable without making large changes to the engine.

Maybe they should add this item to the game

Lots of zombies using tools in Romero's Land of the Dead (example) but that movie also has an intelligent zombie who even appears to be capable of feeling emotions.

I'm pretty sure that article was talking about baked potatoes when they said that. Raw potatoes are around 70kcal/100g And if you search that database and find cooked potatoes that has magically gotten a significantly higher energy density (i.e. more calories per 100g) it's probably because they think "boiled potatoes" has butter in it. For reference a 25 year old male who's 180cm tall and weighs 75kg needs 2700kcal/day to maintain weight if they exercise daily (which I think is an appropriate exercise level for a PZ character who runs around, fights zombies and chops lumber regularly). He would need to eat 3.9 kg potatoes every day to get that energy. That's a lot of potatoes. The USDA database has a slice of apple pie as 363kcal, but this does of course depend on the size of the slice and exact ingredients. Your number of 67kcal for a slice is extremely low, I think you need to check your sources.