Vundecat

I've been playing a lot of the studio challenge map lately, and I've had a lot of time to look at that fountain in front of the office on the west side of the map. At the current moment I think it's just a sprite, doesn't have a 3D model? I've also noticed bird baths in some of the yards on the main Knox map as well, pictures below for reference: https://imgur.com/a/aOIE2h3 There was a multi-week long drought on my Studio run, in which there was no rain for quite a while. I was desperate for water, and I kept passing by that fountain on my scavenging runs and I kept thinking about how convenient it would be if that water fountain actually had water in it! Admittedly this is a bit of a fluff feature but at the current moment, the only rain collectors are pots/bowls placed out by the player, and the collectors that the player builds normally. I would love to see these fountains double as naturally-occurring rain collectors, to make it more viable for players who don't want to invest in skilling carpentry to have access to water sources without having to rely on wells/natural water bodies. Bird baths would be the easiest to implement; they're already 3d models and furniture you can pick up and place at a base. Obviously bird baths don't hold much water, so they'd only contain something like 10-20 units of rainwater? However from an implementation standpoint you'd only need to add whatever component makes a object a rain collector and change the value for the amount of water it can store. I don't imagine that this would unbalance the game in any way, as the baths are too uncommon to be spammed, and the amount of water they'd collect would be too low to be exciting anyways. It would require doing a variation of the birdbath that was empty, though, from an art asset point of view. The larger, decorative fountain would be the more impactful change. Like with the birdbath it would need an 'empty' art asset, and my suggested version would require a small amount of recoding but nothing so low level that you'd need to rework the game's engine. Here's what I suggest: -At the start of the game, the fountains serve as an 'unlimited' source of tainted water, similar to a sink/toilet -When the knox water grid goes off, the fountains transition from a water source to being a rain collector -When it becomes a rain collector, it starts with a full container of tainted water From a code point of view, it would start as a 'sink' for tainted water and need to have a one-way transition to a 'rain collector' after the water grid goes off. Given the size of these fountains, I would suggest something like a ~200 unit water capacity for them. This is more than the lvl4 rain collector barrel, but I don't think this would be OP as the fountains can not only not be crafted but also can't be moved, as they're cemented-in fixtures that are part of the location they start at. They're also fairly rare and only appear in certain locations, kind of like wells. From an aesthetics point of view, I could totally see people relying on these old stone fountains as a source of rain water collection in an apocalyptic even if it's not one's sole source of water collection. Plus they visibly contain water, so it makes sense that we should be able to use them for their water. From a balance point of view, I could see fountain rain collectors changing the viability of certain locations as survivable bases, and give certain city areas passive supplies of water generation without needing rivers/lakes/wells/etc.

I came to the forums to report a similar issue in Studio challenge map, and I can confirm this bug still exists in the current build (41.71) of the Studio challenge map. Only Forests and building interiors contain foraging biome definitions. Roads, plazas, construction sites, and even the park doesn't contain any foraging biome definition! It makes foraging this map super hard!

I've thought the same about this myself. With should be able to rip up bath towels and dish towels for sheets at the least, and be able to burn them for fuel. A dish towel might not be able to cover a whole window by itself if it were a large window, but it would be nice to have the option to stitch ripped sheets together to make new sheets as a way of grinding tailoring too.

while it is not technically impossible to repair a power plant and get it operational after a zombie apocalypse, there's a lot you'd have to consider that most people don't really think about, like for example if it were a coal power plant: The power plant itself has several parts to it: The turbine, generator, burn pit, the cooling towers and pumping station. The generator and turbines are specially made machines, and you can't really just patch those things up with scrap metal, if they're broken they'll require machined parts to fix, something that would be scarce at best. The pumping station would likely be connected to the ohio river, and not only would you need to keep that area cleared it's also going to occasionally suck up zombies into the pipe which is going to have to be unclogged manually. If those cooling towers don't get water the plant isn't going to be running either. That and the transformers outside of the plant too, if zombies run into those things and damage them it could short-circuit them and they could explode, and those aren't something you can just put scrap electronics into either. The power plant, transformers and pumping station are all going to be making hella noise, and constantly attracting zombies who will break in and potentially damage the machines. You'd also need giant truckloads of coal, and when I say truck I mean like, a 16-wheel trailer truck, not some pickup truck, to fuel this plant for any significant amount of time. The amount of game-days it'd take for that to be mined up by hand, and then transporting it and keeping the transportation vehicles in good condition would already be a full-time job by itself. And not only that, even if you had the plant running, if any of the power lines go down anywhere, it will cut off that section of the grid. Things are falling apart after only a year of game time, and any heavy storm could easily take out a whole power grid. You need those specialized cars with the thingy on top to repair those lines, as well as the whole power cables, and you'd have to maintain those cars too. Looking aside the astronomical amount of devwork that it would take to implement all those features and content, the amount of things you'd need to actually get a power plant running, even at a limited capacity, are so overwhelming that there's no way a single player would be able to do it. It'd be a full-time job for a small community of players even, if you weren't hand-waving many aspects of actually running one. I don't think it's very feasible at all personally. However! One thing I think people are sleeping on, and something that I think is similar in concept but far more obtainable would be backup generators. Many large buildings like apartments, hotels, malls, offices etc have backup generators (usually at the top for tall buildings) that will power emergency lights/power for if the main power grid goes out. I'd love to see those generators be repairable/refuel-able and with enough gas, be able to power individual buildings/complexes back up. They'd guzzle lots more gas than a tiny generator, but they'd be able to restore ovens/fridges/emergency lights to a mall or hotel or apartment complex. They'd require generator knowledge to operate of course, and higher electric skill (4+ at least) to be able to repair, but I think it's totally feasible for even a single player to be able to repair those kinds of generators!

Hello! Enjoying the new .71 patch, I feel like one of the most underrated additions to the game were the new snack cakes, the plonkies, choco cakes and zebra cakes made me smile with delight when I first found them! I know it's more fluff than something like the combat music system overhaul (which is banging btw, props to the music team!) but little item details like that make the game far more immersive! I'm playing on the Studio map atm, and things are going pretty well, but one of the things the studios have are a lot of metal doors, it was then that I noticed that the metal doors still drop sheet metal when they are broken by zombies, despite wooden doors dropping wood scraps. I like the wood scrap drops more than the planks, as it does fit the aesthetics of the game a lot more, but for a zombie to break through a metal door they'd be banging and bashing up against it for a long time, the door would definitely get dented and bent up, and would definitely not be a usable, nice sheet anymore! I propose the metal doors drop scrap metal instead of sheet metal for the same reason wooden doors were changed. As an aside, I've noticed that the snack vending machines that contain food snacks (not the soda machines mind you) only ever contain chips. While there are some machines out there which only ever have chips, the ones that have chips would generally at least have one slot which dropped pretzels, and with the pretzel snack item now in the game, I think the droplist for vending machines should be updated like the display shelves were! They'd still be like 80% chips, but a distribution of 80/20 chips/pretzels seems about right IMO There's been mention in the patchnotes as well that there were food items like perogies and potato pancakes that were added in-game, are there going to be recipes for those? Perhaps some more cooking magazines to collect?