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Durability Modifications


Kajin

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I think weapon degradation could be handled a bit differently. Has anyone here ever owned an ax? Those things are damn near indestructible. It makes no sense at all for one to break and become unusable because it's worn out. The head is pretty much a solid hunk of metal, and if you wanna break one of those plastic grips they're made with nowadays you actually gotta put in an extreme amount of solid effort. I'm talking bolting it to the ground and tying the handle to a truck amounts of effort.

 

Why not make it so that the edge dulls and it becomes a lot less combat capable as a result? You can still use it to fight zeds, but the effectiveness is diminished a huge amount. If you wanted to keep using it, you'd have to go and get a grind stone and a vice to keep the edge sharp, and even then it would take literal hours of effort to get the edge back up to perfect condition. And if the handle were to break for some reason, you could craft a new handle out of wood. An ax with a meagerly sharpened head and a hand-made handle would be less effective in combat than a brand new machine sharpened ax, but it would still be a decent weapon nonetheless.

 

It would be the same thing for guns as well, except you need a weapon maintenance kit to do the same thing. Special cleaning tools and oils would help clean out a frequently used gun and help keep it in top working order, and if parts break on it you'd have to machine shop new ones or steal parts from other broken guns of the same model to make repairs.

 

Knives would still break, though, because they're a lot smaller and as such are more easily breakable unless they're combat knives specifically designed for pitched combat. The combat knives would suffer the same fate of the humble ax in that it would need a frequent amount of time spent sharpening to keep the combat knife in working order.

 

There should be two different kinds of bats as well. Wooden bats and metal bats. The difference is that the metal bats are hollow and a lot less durable because of it, while the wooden bats are solid, finely crafted wood and therefore would likely last a lot longer.

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Wood tends to get gauged by bone if used on animals too much, causing it to weaken and snap. I'm not entirely sure they'd be more durable against humans.

 

This plays into one of my threads in the old forums: http://theindiestone.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=12446

 

Item damage is all around an immersion breaker for me right now. It's a decent bit better than it was with the green lines showing durability loss, but some things I still think you shouldn't see and some things should be handled differently. I very much agree about the weapon sharpening bits. I think they should just become so dull that eventually an axe would only be as effective as a bat and a knife would only be as effective as a pen.

 

I'm not sure what the most practical way to work on the bladed weapons would be though? A whetstone? Seems a bit hard to find. A lathe? Most need power and aren't that common either. A file? Most files aren't tough enough to do weapon/tool grade metal but it's probably the most plausible in the group as they're both commonly found and could work decently at the task.

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I use a file to keep my ax sharp whenever I'm cutting down trees that have died of disease on my property, and let me tell you it is time consuming. If you want to do it any sort of quickly you'll need a vice to hold it down nice and tight, and even then it takes me an hour or so to get a halfway decent edge on it. Anything better than that takes a loooong while. Maybe take only a short while to get the ax up to 30% sharpness, but getting anything better than that would take a serious time investment?

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