Kamikaze Snark

The planet I started on had a handful of abandoned Apex laboratories on the surface. I turned one into a small base of operations. Then, I put some coal in the ship to fill the fuel tank and went to explore a nearby planet. I figured out that I could place all of the essential equipment right on the ship, so my ship now has a bed, campfire, crafting table, furnace, and anvil. It's a mobile base of operations! On the nearby planet I dug down, way down, to a layer of "magmarock." I found hundreds of pixels, tons of gold, diamond, platinum and silver, and enough iron to fully upgrade by hunter's bow and armor. I think I'm ready to build the distress beacon and take on what comes. I'm only a few hours in. It's a pretty fun game!

Awesome. I haven't played in a few weeks but I look forward to the update. The changes sound good. Glad to see that things are still coming along. The last beta build had a big performance increase but performance could still be better, so further performance improvements would be much appreciated. Thanks for making such a fun and unique game.

I personally couldn't enjoy Oblivion without installing a mod to remove the "relative leveling" where all NPC enemies would be adjusted in difficulty based on your player level. It just felt insane without it, especially after being such a huge fan of Morrowind. I would have hated Oblivion if not for those mods, which came out almost immediately after release because so many elder scrolls fans were not amused.

Where is your one-story set up at?

It is working but still buggy as hell. Everything I build on the NW wall to the highway in the way of fences, walls or even floor tiles beyond the floor tiles connected directly to the wall, ends up disppearing. It is also possible to walk through the 2nd story fence and either fall and get stuck in the boxes or crash the game. So I am definitely having some issues and I definitely wouldnt consider trying to build my own stairs at this point. This is all in the steam beta build 17 (0014). I am really liking the new box of nails item. It has made finding enough nails for construction much easier.

I've gotten walls set up for a garden. There is a box for my farming supplies and 3 rain barrels for water:

If they have reached the last growing phase, they will rot after a few days, depenting on the vegetable.You can harvest some of them at the second to last growing phase, but you will not get any seeds. How long will they stay good after harvesting?

That's WW:Z, all credits go to Max Brooks.I should read that.

I'm having fun with the warehouse; there are a ton of supplies inside and it can be made rather secure: http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/3210-rushed-the-warehouse-what-now/?p=46276 Referring to the zombies as "Zack" is brilliant.

The resilient trait doesn't affect the chance of zombification, it only slows it down. Well, it says "Less prone to disease. Slower rate of zombification." My interpretation of that is that zombification is a disease and therefore you might be less prone to it with the trait. It's kind of unclear just based on the tooltip and I haven't found any guide, wiki article, or developer comment that clarifies that matter more. You might be right but I'd like to know if you have a source for that information, or possibly hear a developer confirm this. If it doesn't reduce the chance of zombification from a bite or a scratch, then I would definitely take a different trait instead. With disease it could with stuff like catching a cold, or have nausea? Rather than zombiefication. Yeah. I could see it going either way, so some clarification would be nice.

The resilient trait doesn't affect the chance of zombification, it only slows it down. Well, it says "Less prone to disease. Slower rate of zombification." My interpretation of that is that zombification is a disease and therefore you might be less prone to it with the trait. It's kind of unclear just based on the tooltip and I haven't found any guide, wiki article, or developer comment that clarifies that matter more. You might be right but I'd like to know if you have a source for that information, or possibly hear a developer confirm this. If it doesn't reduce the chance of zombification from a bite or a scratch, then I would definitely take a different trait instead.

Does anyone know how the resilient trait affects the chance of zombification?

Thanks! At some point I will try to do a better write-up of the bugs and get them on the bug report forum. I am sad if it is the case that zombie spawning is broken now. Who will try breaking into my fortified superfortress? Once I get the farm operational I am going to experiment with using barbed wire fences.

I've been fooling around with this for awhile now. I started over again from scratch because I wasn't too far into it yet and I managed to "decorate" the inside of the warehouse office with the blood and bodies of 3 zeds, and it was just killing my feng shui. Here's what I've got so far on attempt number two: Interior: Exterior: All 4 sheetropes are functional; 3 are only possible due to the catwalks all the way around the 2nd floor. The next step is to put rain collection barrels on the roof, and start building a garden in the SE corner. I'll completely wall the garden in with no doors and access it only by using the sheetrope in that corner. I've ran into a bunch of bugs, unfortunately, and I've backed up my save game a couple of times in case of a crash. The biggest bug is that if I walk into the fence on the 2nd floor, I can walk right through it. Even if I walk through it just a little but then turn around and get back on the catwalk, the game freezes shortly after and I lose all progress since the last save. Very annoying but it doesn't happen if I am paying attention and don't accidentally walk into the fence. Another bug I noticed is that if I built any fences or walls along the catwalk on the NW side of the building, parallel to the wall, they would shortly disappear. Walls and fences built perpendicular to the NW wall do not disappear. Finally, the 4 windows on the NW and N sides all seem to be "reversed" - the game thinks that the inside of the building is the outside. So, if I put a sheetrope on any of those windows, the rope ends up descending to the floor on the inside of the building. Attempting to use the rope causes the character to just jump out the window and fall to the ground outside, which is painful but not lethal. Curtains are also placed on the outside of the building instead of the inside, which I found made it impossible to close the curtain if it had been closed and then opened just one time. So, to be on the safe side, I put a curtain on each window, closed it, and then barricaded it with 4 planks to remind myself not to open the curtains again or put ropes on those windows. In short, the catwalks are working but there are some major bugs that need to be worked on. The freeze and crash when clipping through the fence is a major issue, but the catwalks are still functional as long as you pay attention and don't walk into the fence. I also haven't seen any zombies around the warehouse at all since day 2 and I'm on day 6 now, so I was able to cut trees and build all of this in peace. I'm using a house in the nearby residential area to keep food frozen in the fridge, and to occasionally sleep at. I looted all the houses in that immediate area.

I've just survived a bite, so I can confirm that it is possible.

All true. You're probably right, I just think merch sounds better than some of the other ideas put forward. There's always kickstarter. But it probably would be a huge distraction from development. The best thing any of us can do to help is get out there and generate publicity for the game. I've been talking about it to my gamer friends.

Immediately after cutting the tree down, without moving at all, just left-click the floor icon in the loot menu. That should refresh the menu and you will see the logs. If they go away, just click it again. I was driving myself nuts until I figured that out.

This is probably the best suggestion. I would totally buy a spiffo t-shirt or stuffed animal. It's not, though, because that costs them not only time but also money, so it's inefficient on top of everything else. As Nasko said, the best possible thing you can do is buy gifts for friends. If they enjoy it, they can buy gifts for their friends, etc. Well, only they can say whether or not it makes business sense for them to do anything like that at this time. They'd have to develop the art assets and spend some money to initially create a small inventory, but the profit margin on individual sales of these kinds of items is usually quite high; think along the lines of $5 to produce a t-shirt or stuffed animal that sells for $20 or $30. It's possible that this sort of thing could even generate enough income to hire a part-time merchandise coordinator position, thereby ensuring that no development capital is spent on creating merchandise. There are already a lot of art assets created; it might not be too difficult to copy one of the Spiffo animations over to a t-shirt or coffee mug. Again, this would require some work and it might not be the best use of their time, depending on their particular business situation. I agree that if you want to support the game, gift copies are the way to go. However, merchandise would create an entirely new revenue stream, and there are lots of people who might consider purchasing a t-shirt who wouldn't otherwise give that money to the company. Since PZ is a small game, it might not generate enough sales to be worth it, so there would be some risk involved, and I can't say for sure what the total initial investment would be. I submit Left4Dead2 merch as an example: http://store.valvesoftware.com/index.php?g=5 - this is a huge game with a huge audience and a big development budget, so it would definitely be easier for Valve to see a good ROI from producing this merchandise, but this does go to show that it isn't the worst idea in the world. All that said, like you and others have suggested, I think the best way you can donate to the developer right now is to buy some gift copies and give them to your friends. You can also help spread the word about the game. I did my part by writing a positive recommendation on Steam.

This is probably the best suggestion. I would totally buy a spiffo t-shirt or stuffed animal.

Maybe, but using the mod to escape was relatively painless. What happens if you destroy a box with unlooted items in it? Do they disappear or go to the ground? At some point I might consider destroying all the boxes in the warehouse.

Stunted means that it isn't growing. No idea how to fix it. I haven't ever tried farming carrots. After reading some guides on farming I'm sticking with broccoli, cabbage, potatoes and tomatoes. Some folks have said that strawberries, radishes, and carrots all die too easily.

Okay, I did run into some kind of bug. While making catwalks in the SE side, I noticed that in a corner that was fenced in, I could walk outside the fence. It appeared momentarily that I could walk on the top of the stacked boxes, since I didn't immediately fall. However, when walking too far away from the floor (but still on boxes), I fell, into the middle of a bunch of boxes, where I am now stuck and can't get out. I tried to alt+f4 the game, hoping that it wouldn't save my progress, but unfortunately it did. Is there any way to fix this or is my game basically shafted? At least there's a backup from when I switched to the beta build, but that still means I'll lose like 4 hours of game time. I appreciate the sentiments behind a rogue-like game but unfortunately I think it might be better if the game had a built-in save backup system. Update: Okay, I'm going to try this "Dida's multihack" thing to see if I can teleport out of the box stack ... stay tuned. http://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/1205-stable-release-dida55s-multihack-10a/ Update: It worked! I'm free! Thank goodness for that mod. I think I'll just backup my game now ... before something else terrible and buggy happens. Extra update: the fences along the catwalks on the SE corner seem to be super buggy. I can easily walk right through them, and if I walk back and forth through them a few times the game freezes and requires a restart.

True. I did read that the new build has re-balanced the berries so you get way less from each bush. Haven't verified this myself. However, until they add all those extra features, farming is the only way to guarantee indefinite survival.

Here's what I could leave the house with right now in an emergency situation: Not very promising! I don't have any guns, armor, or other serious survival gear. At least I have some food.

It could be because I am building floors off of pre-existing second story floors, and not making any of my own staircases.