Cash Cards should be nerfed

[Star3ye]

As the title says, cash cards drop way to frequent from zombies and they also give way too much cash.

After 2 weeks you accumilated over 12k in money, and you can buy basicly everything you want from the merchant without worrying.

This also devalues the bartering skill, since you always sit on an abundance of cash.

The droprate of those should be drasticly lowered as well as the amount of cash you get from each cash card.

On a side note: Values of many items are very unrealistic compared to other ones, stuff like antibotics sell for nothing compared to other items like a lighter or a pair of jeans.

I just wanted to give my feedback here, overall this game is great and a lot of potential in the future especially with more npc’s maybe more factions and settlements.

[Umbra.Animo]

hmmmm yeah i think cards are a little much on price

[mlangsdorf]

Cash card drops, and the amounts on them, are fine.

The problem is that any NPC is willing to trade anything at all for electronic currency. NPCs should only take barter or Free Merchant scrip. So if you show up at the refugee center and want that merchant to provide you with that lovely rifle scope, you should have to provide him the equivalent of 30 lbs of meat jerky. If you meet some random NPC and want the antibiotics she has, it should cost you valuable goods, not some pieces of plastic you took off some zombies nearby.

The game actually has post-collapse prices for some items that are somewhat reasonable. It just uses pre-Catalysm prices in too many places and as a default when post-collapse prices aren’t available.

An easy way to contribute to the game would be to add more post-collapse prices to more items.

[kevin.granade]

Cash cards wouldn’t necessarally be valueless, but the inflation would be ridiculous, like value should be dropped to 1/1000 face value or so, your 12K would buy a few pieces of jerky.

[sam]

like NPCs have eftpos, lmao. assuming they’re like debit cards; cash cards should be used for nothing other than old world vending machines and what-not. but how those vendors have power is beyond me, someone lore-me-up!

[Umbra.Animo]

since they have atomic cars i assume the vending machines could have small power cells in them

[Star3ye]

Yeah that sounds very reasonable, to leave the drop rate but inflate the currency is good idea so you are forced to do an actual trade ( items for items) and the cash cards still keep their use for things like vendors and gas pumps.

The way it is now its just to easy once you are near a refugee center it feels like cheating with all the amount of money you get.

I dont know how to code things but if someone changes the item values ingame, he should keep that in mind to inflate the value rediccolusly high of items and consider which items should cost top $( food, medicine weapons) compared to other items ( like low level clothing etc).

[Rose]

Well, the prices should not neccessarily be RIDICULOUSLY high. There may be communities that have vast reserves of food, seems logical for them to trade some surplus meat, otherwise it would rot away anyway.

[proxiehunter]

It would be nice if you could disassemble the machines for whatever is powering them. Since that would inevitably call in the robot police (and their noise call in more zombies) there’s even a downside to doing it.

[Star3ye]

Provided there ill be other comunities we have only the refugee center so far.

Small friendly and hostile/neutral npc settlements (randomly throughout the map) would be a fantactic addition to the game, with quest’s given by a “town major” , maybe a questline with the old guard to bring those settlements in goverment controll or siding with the free merchants to keep the settlements independent.

This would make up for a great story.

Those settlements also could have resources depending on what area they are in their shops.

[mlangsdorf]

So a quick introduction to the game’s data files:
Much of the game’s item data is stored in text files in the data/json/items/ directory in a format known as JSON. Each file contains a bunch of items definitions that look like this:

  {
    "id": "can_sealer",
    "type": "GENERIC",
    "category": "tools",
    "name": "can sealer",
    "description": "A hand crank powered cast steel machine designed to automatically seal tin cans.",
    "weight": 9800,
    "volume": 20,
    "price": 52500,
    "to_hit": -2,
    "bashing": 8,
    "material": "steel",
    "symbol": ";",
    "color": "light_gray"
  },

where all the bits between { and } are an object’s definition, in this case, a can sealer. It has a weight of 9800 grams and a price of $525.

All you (or anyone else who cares) needs to do to give an item a post apocalyptic price is add a line like this:

    "price_postapoc": 200000,

so the result looks like this:

  {
    "id": "can_sealer",
    "type": "GENERIC",
    "category": "tools",
    "name": "can sealer",
    "description": "A hand crank powered cast steel machine designed to automatically seal tin cans.",
    "weight": 9800,
    "volume": 20,
    "price": 52500,
    "price_postapoc": 200000,
    "to_hit": -2,
    "bashing": 8,
    "material": "steel",
    "symbol": ";",
    "color": "light_gray"
  },

so now NPCs will trade can openers for $2000 instead of $525.

It’s not hard to do, it doesn’t require any programming skills, it requires a text editor and time.

[Vastin]

I’m willing to bet that any electronic currency would be 100% valueless in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Paper money might retain a little value with more established settlements that are trying to maintain some concept of economics. Other than that I’m pretty sure people would mostly be trading for food/ammo/spare parts, barter style.

As for gameplay I’m fine with the cards dropping and acting as currency rewards - but its true that you very quickly accrue far more currency than you could ever use if you emptied every vending machine and gas station you ever encountered.