Breathing Room

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

This must have come up a thousand times before, but y’know what? From where I stand I think it’s pretty much the only thing that is a genuine problem with this game. Everything else is tweaks and fine tuning, but there is one gaping flaw in the mechanics of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead that is genuinely hurting it. It’s so important that I hope the creator of the game or the coders working on it actually see this and consider it.

Space. That’s it. That’s the only thing wrong with this game. That’s all that’s keeping me from liking it, and all that’s keeping me from playing it. There is not enough space.

My last game made it painfully clear to me: my character broke her leg and was forced to flee from town, because my NPC ally was being killed by cougars and I could not stay in that area lest I join her. I had to leave my companion for dead, and when I got back to the shelter I’d been using, I realized that zombies were wandering towards it. A horde. I grabbed my shit and limped away as fast as I could, desperate to find some kind of safety.

I could not find it. Why? Because everywhere I went I was oh so carefully squeezing my way between sectors of the map in the cloak of darkness that, say, a Decayed Pouncer was lingering on, or a Bear was sitting at, or a wolf was lurking, or a coyote was stalking around, or some random-ass zombie had hobbled into. It wasn’t just the area; I left the forest and I continuously dodging between the enemy’s awareness zones, and I wasn’t comfortable sitting in the gaps I found because it was just barely out of range and come morning they’d possibly spot me and chew my other leg off. For some reason the animals refused to attack any other part of my body but my legs, and essentially if I got seen I would die. The same for any zombies. Anything would kill me and I needed respite, and it was not possible, because things were everywhere. Literally everywhere. I traveled three times the length of the starting field of vision just trying to find somewhere something else wasn’t.

And then I died. Why? Because I got run down by something faster than me, both at my current speed and base speed. And if it hadn’t been it, it’d have been some zombear. Or a cougar. Or basically anything at all. Maybe a skeleton? Dogs? Wolf pack? Take your pick, everything’s a valid choice, given the density of bodies across the entire continent.

This was something of a rare circumstance, being on the run, because I normally die when things like this happen. I can’t move anywhere and I am caught and I die. MAYBE i get ahold of something, and MAYBE i get my feet on the ground and I can defend myself, but it’s a real dice roll and the odds are NOT in the player’s favor. To me that’s far, far too much reliance on luck of the draw and how unfortunate your starting location may or may not be. And let’s not even talk about how many times I’ve been mauled to death by random crap simply stepping out the door to find a rock.

The point I’m trying to make is, this game needs (and by “need” I mean “requires in order to preserve its functionality and to ensure the player gets a fair shot and is able to actually play the game”) adjustments in the world generation code. If you did this, you could legitimately get a pretty decent grade on the game overall if you released it right then and there and never touched it again. I’ve been playing this game non stop for weeks since I picked it up and that’s the one thing that comes up again and again: space. I need space. I need peace. I need air. I need to breathe.

I really hope that someone somewhere in a position to do anything about this takes this seriously; I’ve played a lot of games that had similar world generation patterns and it just killed it for me. Factorio’s a great example: love the hell out of that game, I’m all about moving parts and systems and organizing and micro-managing factories and all that awesomeness, but everything was too close. Too cramped. Too tight. You couldn’t GO anywhere, or you didnt NEED to go anywhere, and that’s what’s driven me away from it whilst it continues to get maintained. I’m paying less and less attention to it these days, too, just cuz of that.

Basically I feel that this is something that would be much better getting looked at sooner rather than later. I hope my encouragement leads to something.

2

I don’t think you’re getting the point of a zombie apocalypse roguelike; it’s supposed to be hard, you’re supposed to die alot until you get you cata legs. That’s what makes it so rewarding when you can finally bitchslap a zombear into next tuesday and not even break a sweat.

if you’re really struggling, try turning down the monster spawn rate and upping the item spawn rate. Or try giving yourself more starting points. But don’t demand that we water down the game to fit your play style.

3

Compared to reality, I do find the default spawn density to be absurdly high. then again if I made cata comparable to my own subjective reality there would rarely ever be wolves, next to no bears, maybe a cougar. A BILLION DEER, and two billion squirrels like every other tile. So I don’t know what ‘default’ should even be.

I will tell you though, I basically die until I happen to spawn in a town I am able to escape from, and then engage with as few things as possible trying to get my hit-stuff-accurately skill up. To engage much of anything sooner than day two seems to be part of the survivor learning curve. Again, that’s just me. Turning down the spawn rates might prove interesting in that it would remove hostiles and food sources alike (hunting). That seems a decent tradeoff for a different sort of survival experience.

4

Here’s a very important pair of hints: raid cities during the night, sleep in the basements. Smell and hearing isn’t as reliable as sight, so you won’t get mauled by things, unless you stumble in their direction.
As for getting rekt when going out for a rock: use the peek through curtains function. Travel and forage at night, maybe even start at night (in the world options).

Having an unarmored (and wounded at that) rookie survivor stroll through a zombie infested city/forest in the middle of the day is risky and probably not very rewarding.

Also, you can ignore early “very hungry” signs. Don’t go out in the day just because of a grumbling stomach. I recently had my survivor go on a reading binge, went deep into “Famished” status with 0 stored food in the middle of the winter (forage results are very, very bad in winter) because of how lenient is the hunger clock when you understand it.

And if that doesn’t help, drop the spawn rates for an empty world.

tl;dr git gud or just wait for the night

5

[quote=“HunterAlpha1, post:2, topic:7863”]I don’t think you’re getting the point of a zombie apocalypse roguelike; it’s supposed to be hard, you’re supposed to die alot until you get you cata legs. That’s what makes it so rewarding when you can finally bitchslap a zombear into next tuesday and not even break a sweat.

if you’re really struggling, try turning down the monster spawn rate and upping the item spawn rate. Or try giving yourself more starting points. But don’t demand that we water down the game to fit your play style.[/quote]

In hindsight I suppose it’s a bit presumptuous of me. Granted it wasn’t a demand. I would hope that the devs somewhere give the matter some consideration, because I feel like it’s a pretty big deal. If you don’t have a properly distributed landscape, I have to wonder what else you can really do with it without having the same problems lingering overhead at any given point. In real life you don’t see five, ten, fifteen predatory dogs all roaming within the same square mile or so, and I have to assume realism is top priority in this thing, because they’ve been sticking to their guns on that pretty well so far. I’m not sure exactly, it’s a bit of a weird thing when you start to think about a solution.

But I still believe that the density it a bit…off. There’s hard, and then there’s hard for the wrong reasons. Currently there’s not a really reliable way to change things without either feeling like you’re not playing the game as intended, or by making it TOO easy. Bits and bobs and tweaks and nudges and blah blah blah…

Feel free to disagree. I personally think this is a fairly large and possibly overlooked problem. I felt the need to emphasize it.

6

I would love if animals had their own spawn rate scaling factor. Although the devs have cut back animal density I would love if I could easily tweak it in the worldgen options myself.

7

To be honest, hiw high are the chances to survive with a broken leg in a zombie apocalypse in the middle of the night while escaping from town? Space isn’t really the problem. World gen sometimes produces giant empty fields. I think you screwed up as soon as you broke your leg. One can’t expect every char to survive under any circumstances.

8

Theres no where to run… /punches zombie to death while reading porn

I finde lots of empty fields though… empty meaning maybe 1or2 zanimals.
Try the sewers they are pretty empty. You can kill the ocasionaly spawning rat or snake or so for food and drink some yummy sewage water. The sewers are your space … for breathing room uh… yeah .

9

It’s why I use sewage treatment plants. They’re uninhabited by design. Well, the underground portion of mine has some ants due to an anthill off-map, but they never come upstairs. They are delicious.

10

Well, honestly if you are looking at realistic version of New England there is lots of space. Lots of “wilderness”. Not many wolves or bears. Lots of deer and squirrels as was said. Lots of old houses. The house I grew up in had main support beams that were hand hewn (aka made with an axe). Lot of rambling farm house buildings. I wish we could have the gas stations in the middle of no where back. We just need a small parking lot next to the gas station with a random assortment of zombies to guard it. :stuck_out_tongue: The main gas station for my home town is about a 1/4 mile out of town. Lots of out of business stores in my old home town (town council are morons). Do we have city halls yet? :stuck_out_tongue:

11

Restrict bears and zombears to forests. Divide spawn rates of all large predators and zanimals (not zombie dogs) by 10. Double spawn rates of deer, squirrels and such. There will be fewer BS deaths to wildlife, fewer animals in general, and a more realistic ratio of animals.

12

If the deer were made faster and a stronger tendency to flee when injured, that might help balance the proposed deer abundance. Otherwise, walking dinner party.

I can’t for the life of me throw anything far enough to hit a cat before it rockets away, nevermind attack it. I am not wasting bullets on housecats for food. Deer, I might risk. How is it cats are so much more flighty than deer? I’d have expected the inverse haha.

13

Lower monster spawn rate, increase item spawn rate.

14

I have to agree. Vehicles are nothing but a comvenient storage location right now. Part of what makes the United States so unique is its wide open space. Everything is so cluttered and close together, there’s no wide open wilderness with a single road with a gas station along the way. If you have a vehicle, gasoline is always nearby. If you need wood, a forest is never too far. If you need supplies, a town is always right there.

There aren’t any open spaces, anything that gives the map an American feel. There’s no worries of running out of gas in the middle of a long road and having to grab what you can from your car to go on foot to find a gas station.

Everything is too compact.

15

hm maybe but also consider that too much open space filled with nohingness will create boredome as well.

16

Boredom? Anything but. At this point, do you need a vehicle for travel? No, it just makes it faster.

Wide open spaces will not create boredom. It creates invisible boundaries for players to say “I shouldn’t go down this road unless I have the supplies I need.” If you have a car or truck and you hit a rogue zombear in the middle of a long open road, you have an immediate crisis - you’re stranded without a working vehicle, your gas ran out, your wheel is gone, whatever - and you need to grab what you can to either ditch your vehicle for good or come back with what you need. It creates goals and quests for other players and makes traveling to new locations more than just “oh this place sucks lol bye.” It means adding true distance to the game.

17

On the note of animals, this is something I’d definitely like to fix once we get working static groups wandering around the map. Once that goes in, you should be able to find random deer or a pack of wolves that wander onto the map and then wander off rather then just having hundreds of small woodland creatures constantly spawning around you. (Maybe make it so that there is a chance for them to trigger traps, even while off-map so you could set up some traps and then occasionally go around to check them). The current system is, sadly, still highly remnant of the old dynamic spawning system.

18

Boredom? Anything but. At this point, do you need a vehicle for travel? No, it just makes it faster.

Wide open spaces will not create boredom. It creates invisible boundaries for players to say “I shouldn’t go down this road unless I have the supplies I need.” If you have a car or truck and you hit a rogue zombear in the middle of a long open road, you have an immediate crisis - you’re stranded without a working vehicle, your gas ran out, your wheel is gone, whatever - and you need to grab what you can to either ditch your vehicle for good or come back with what you need. It creates goals and quests for other players and makes traveling to new locations more than just “oh this place sucks lol bye.” It means adding true distance to the game.[/quote]

There more then just one problem with this… and distance.
First implementing more distance would create many more map tiles which results in huge save files.
You ll be searching a lot in open space where there is nothing for something remotly usefull which isn t much fun.
Hm for me going by car is faster ingame but it takes actually longer irl to get from a to b unless i am traveling in a perfectly straight line in which case it takes the same ammount of time… if you add more distance it would take a considerable ammount of time to cross the space of 2 points of interest.
The actual distance one tile represents is not realy defined realy precisely so whats much open space?
Whats then in those open spaces? how does new england look like??? grassland sounds imensly boring to me .
It would probably complicate the worldgen.
What if your unlucky and at your start is nothing for you to survive on and you can t reach the next point of interest because you just satrted end don t have a running car? Sounds like another way of stupidly dieing to rng hate.

And then crossing some open space with a car?? wheres is the fun in doing that?

19

Lots of points in no particular order:

Considering one starts in shelters, or in houses, or a couple other starts that specify building interiors, the RNG would not screw one over by placing them somewhere with no supplies at all. These places are all tied to towns, or the outskirts thereof. Unless you picked “in a field somewhere” or “in the woods”, in which case, that is a choice, not RNG.

Has save files being too big to run ever been an issue for anyone recently? It’s a potential problem but as I have seen said before, it seems to be a problem people worry about more than it ever happens.

If I were in open space, I would be either trying to cross it to get somewhere I can search, or I would go back towards the town I started at to search. Searching in open space IS silly, so I would opt to search in not-that. See first point for why I think going back towards town is perfectly viable.

Adding more distance between towns would make leaving town for elsewhere harder. Making EVERYTHING bigger would not work. Buildings would be scaled bigger and thus cities much larger. That I don’t think is such a good idea, far too much work. Distance between towns though - that is ok to me. It would teach one to make the best of their starting town before attempting to gear up significantly to leave it - or get a vehicle. Which I now have significantly more space to drive without worrying about crap every 3 tiles in my way.

I think increasing distances between cities would not be so hard. You would just have to tweak rules for where things are ‘allowed’ to spawn along the roads to account for the improved distance. I think lonely gas stations had a rule to spawn them some 100 blocks away from the nearest town? But then towns are all so close that they never have viable spawning points. More distance would allow ‘special’ outside-town places like these to exist. This would include labs, FEMA camps, all the specials. I think it would be doable.

If all the empty space between towns is empty, can I not just drive in a diagonal line if the road isn’t going a straight line? I think driving for longer stretches would be manageable if those stretches are also not packed with clutter. I think it would balance out.

I2amroy’s points concerning how animal spawns operate are ones I agree with. If distance between towns were increased (I think this would be alright to try!) then animal spawns need to also be worked over before that point. This will make tracking and hunting animals across these large non-town spaces more viable as well.

I am super appreciative to see pros and cons both argued for this, it’s really interesting to follow.

20

Boredom? Anything but. At this point, do you need a vehicle for travel? No, it just makes it faster.

Wide open spaces will not create boredom. It creates invisible boundaries for players to say “I shouldn’t go down this road unless I have the supplies I need.” If you have a car or truck and you hit a rogue zombear in the middle of a long open road, you have an immediate crisis - you’re stranded without a working vehicle, your gas ran out, your wheel is gone, whatever - and you need to grab what you can to either ditch your vehicle for good or come back with what you need. It creates goals and quests for other players and makes traveling to new locations more than just “oh this place sucks lol bye.” It means adding true distance to the game.[/quote]

There more then just one problem with this… and distance.
First implementing more distance would create many more map tiles which results in huge save files.
You ll be searching a lot in open space where there is nothing for something remotly usefull which isn t much fun.
Hm for me going by car is faster ingame but it takes actually longer irl to get from a to b unless i am traveling in a perfectly straight line in which case it takes the same ammount of time… if you add more distance it would take a considerable ammount of time to cross the space of 2 points of interest.
The actual distance one tile represents is not realy defined realy precisely so whats much open space?
Whats then in those open spaces? how does new england look like??? grassland sounds imensly boring to me .
It would probably complicate the worldgen.
What if your unlucky and at your start is nothing for you to survive on and you can t reach the next point of interest because you just satrted end don t have a running car? Sounds like another way of stupidly dieing to rng hate.

And then crossing some open space with a car?? wheres is the fun in doing that?[/quote]

That space, while increasing save file sizes, wouldn’t make exploring open space less fun - it would make exploring the not empty space more fun.

[quote=“Pthalocy, post:19, topic:7863”]Lots of points in no particular order:

Considering one starts in shelters, or in houses, or a couple other starts that specify building interiors, the RNG would not screw one over by placing them somewhere with no supplies at all. These places are all tied to towns, or the outskirts thereof. Unless you picked “in a field somewhere” or “in the woods”, in which case, that is a choice, not RNG.

Has save files being too big to run ever been an issue for anyone recently? It’s a potential problem but as I have seen said before, it seems to be a problem people worry about more than it ever happens.

If I were in open space, I would be either trying to cross it to get somewhere I can search, or I would go back towards the town I started at to search. Searching in open space IS silly, so I would opt to search in not-that. See first point for why I think going back towards town is perfectly viable.

Adding more distance between towns would make leaving town for elsewhere harder. Making EVERYTHING bigger would not work. Buildings would be scaled bigger and thus cities much larger. That I don’t think is such a good idea, far too much work. Distance between towns though - that is ok to me. It would teach one to make the best of their starting town before attempting to gear up significantly to leave it - or get a vehicle. Which I now have significantly more space to drive without worrying about crap every 3 tiles in my way.

I think increasing distances between cities would not be so hard. You would just have to tweak rules for where things are ‘allowed’ to spawn along the roads to account for the improved distance. I think lonely gas stations had a rule to spawn them some 100 blocks away from the nearest town? But then towns are all so close that they never have viable spawning points. More distance would allow ‘special’ outside-town places like these to exist. This would include labs, FEMA camps, all the specials. I think it would be doable.

If all the empty space between towns is empty, can I not just drive in a diagonal line if the road isn’t going a straight line? I think driving for longer stretches would be manageable if those stretches are also not packed with clutter. I think it would balance out.

I2amroy’s points concerning how animal spawns operate are ones I agree with. If distance between towns were increased (I think this would be alright to try!) then animal spawns need to also be worked over before that point. This will make tracking and hunting animals across these large non-town spaces more viable as well.

I am super appreciative to see pros and cons both argued for this, it’s really interesting to follow.[/quote]

This guy gets what I’m saying. Increasing the distance between towns would make each town feel like its own area and leaving would be a chore of its own.

And yes, I’m glad that we all can have a civil discussion about this!