And also ability to create batteries on vehilce with charged accumulator (because we can’t really use solar power for that for now), or atleast the way to acquire ammonia from terrain (or is there already a way to do so?).
Both are sort of in the experimental right now. You can craft rechargeable battery mods and attach them to devices, and craft a recharging station and attach it to your solar-powered vehicle. Putting a device with the rechargeable mod in the recharging station will then slowly recharge it. As for ammonia, you can make it with a chemistry set, charcoal, scrap metal and water at 6 cooking. I think the recipe for it is now in the chemistry textbook, because that’s the terrible trend in fashion at the moment. If you can’t find a well-stocked library, you’re a brain-dead caveman who deserves to bang rocks together numbly until he starves to death because you’re too stupid to feed yourself.
Or just find gallon jugs of ammonia in random houses, they tend to spawn in kitchen or bathroom; the lab is also a good place to find all sort of chemicals. No need to make ammonia yourself unless you need them in large quantity. Also, chemical textbook can be found in regional school or library, by the time you need ammonia in large quantity you are powerful enough to take on those places - more reasons to go and explore.
Okay, I feel kinda stupid now. I wasn’t really involved in the gameplay like half of the year or so, and didn’t notice those changes in the changelist.
It’s pretty hard to keep track of yea.
As for your correct counterexamples, well classic zombie movie is the goal, but it isn’t perfect.
The goal is to tag individual entities to indicate which mode they should appear in, then we could control it in a finer-grained way. Unfortunately progress on that front has stalled a bit.
I like, how they managed it in NEO Scavenger. All items have a bunch of hidden tags, like “medium shaft”, “sharp edge”, “heat source” and so on, so when developer adds new item, he doesn’t need to change a lot of crafting recipes. And crafting itself is as intuitive as it should be.
When all your items will have such tags, I can even imagine a feature like 3d printer, which can print any scanned (apparently on destructive analyser) solid items using other items with the same material tag (optionally, wasting like 80% or 90% of resource and a lot of energy in process).
We already have the basis for this in the game already actually, (you can see the CUT:X value show up on knives) it just hasn’t been fully implemented yet.
I really like the move to put the complex recipes in books. Though I left it auto-learn originally, I really don’t think that the hero should automagically figure out how to (as in your example) produce ammonia using the Haber–Bosch process because they’ve cooked a bunch of squirrels over a fire. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the vast majority of people in the world have never even heard of the Haber–Bosch process, much less know exactly how to run the necessary reaction with a home-built chemistry set.
This makes libraries even more valuable than they ever were before, as they should be. As for banging rocks together and being too stupid to feed yourself, I can’t really help you there. Basic cooking recipes are all auto-learn, and I don’t imagine that’s ever going to change; maybe those of us who can’t figure out how to burn meat on a stick should just eat it raw or stick to scavenged cans of beans?
Just make it few levels higher then, like 10th or 12th level of cooking. Player will actually need to read chemistry books to acquire such a high levels because of skill rust. If they still can do it by cooking, simply tweak XP gain for easy cooking tasks. Right now you already need a bunch of books to make your character worth something. And there is still no way to just read digital data as skill books, so why make player to carry even more books in the zombie apocalypse?
And still, I imagine survival skill as more appropriate for simple cooking and skill “chemistry” or “applied science” for heroin recipes and such. Actually, let’s go even further and think about such complex tasks as about something what requires a range of different skills. If I wan’t to cook something more, than cooked meat or plain pie, I need also chemistry skill. If I want to make drugs, I need medicine, chemistry and maybe even some fabrication.
The whole point is some things are fairly intuitive, and just require figuring out how to do it right, like a lot of simple cooking tasks, but others, like nearly any chemistry process are simply not things you’re going to just figure out via repitition.
There are certainly some in between that we’re planning on having a low level to learn from a book, and a high level to figure out yourself, but I don’t think most chemical reactions are reasonable to put in that category.
I’m not clear on the mechancis here. Is this about requiring some background knowledge(aka skill), or actual knowledge of the precise recipe? Because, you know, the job of a well educated chemist is not really to make something according to recipe, it’s more to come up with new recipes and processes through thought and experimentation. Someone with a decent understanding of chemistry will indeed be able to come up with new recipes, simply by looking at what materials they have, what they want to produce, and lots of trial and error.
Good luck with that, independent thought is anathema here. You want a scientist to be able to work things out through the scientific method? How foolish, rote memorization is the only way to progress in life. Eventually there will only be one viable strategy to play the game, and woe betide anyone who deviates from it.
If finding recipes in books is a woe, then I guess I’d gladly impose it on myself. The recipes in books solution can use some improvements and others has suggested many good ideas, but right now it’s definitely better than what we had before.
I’ve been kicking around here since I found this game back in… what, .3? .4? A long damn time, at any rate. I’ve made my fair share of suggestions, some of which have been accepted, others (dinosaur cloning labs) which the devs don’t feel match the tone of the game they’re trying to make. You know what, though? That’s FINE. It’s not MY game. It’s THEIRS. Our job, as people who love this project, is to feed them ideas and feedback and bug reports, and their job, as people who love this project but are devoting WAY more effort and knowledge to it than us, is to take the stuff they like and implement it.
In all my time here, I’ve never once felt like making an offbeat suggestion was frowned upon. I’ve seen plenty of stupid-ass ideas get a decent level of discussion in the forums, often with Kevin or Gryph jumping in to explain exactly why they’re not gonna do a thing. I can understand if you’re pissed about something, or if you feel like no one is listening to you, but perhaps you should try revamping your idea and presenting it again like a rational adult, instead of just whining that no one wants to let you play.
Because no matter how bitchy you are, you are still totally allowed to play this completely free, completely kickass game. Don’t forget how awesome that is.
I’ll agree withe previous post. If devs decided to chang game, one way or another - its’s good because changes means development and progress.
I’m agree with recipes books, because, you know - it is hard to learn how to craft, to say, a solar panel, via disassembling a flashlight. Not all recipes might be learned by intuition. Survival is hard.
Maybe , some solution will be in skills added in character generation, representing more deep knowledge of subject, or a profession from the “past life”. For example, adding a level 1 in cooking, before you start, would add a, to say, 10% chance to uncover some “only-in-book” recipe when leveling up. And char with pre-start level 3 at mechanics, as a skillfull mechanic, would have bigger chance to discover “hidden recipes”, than his colleague that learned mech 3 from 0 in game (without books). Something like that, sorry if my explanation a bit messed up.
And I, also, will be happy if skill rust system would get some attention. I think its hard to completly forget some knowledge within even a year, not to say a few weeks.
Also, adding in a ‘research’ action that you can do with the right environment and supplies is actually planned. But no one is going to program that while all the good recipes are easily available through auto-learning!
KA101 the recipe-booker here.
The general idea for whether/not something gets booked is whether it’s simple enough that you could some up with working/complete plans to make it from he general knowledge represented by your skill level.
For instance, it’s not too tough for someone with some ability to work out fabric and sew it together (Tailoring 2) to stitch up fabric to cover themselves. Thus, the cloak remains autolearn.
The fur cloak will also remain autolearn. BUT, since it requires both tailoring (the primary skill) AND survival to make, I’ll probably have it show up in a few survival books. This way, survivalists who haven’t studied tailoring can learn about their options and why they might wanna crack open a Sew Awesome Monthly & reinforce some gear.
The gas mask, though, isn’t something that I’d be able to work out just from learning how to handle fabric and plastic. I might be able to work out the idea of pitting something on my mouth, but that’s bandana/scarf/dust-mask territory. A rubberized mask with clear face shield and chemical filters ain’t something that tailoring ability can handle on its own.
So the gas mask is no longer autolearn. If you take it apart to understand what’s involved, an amateur/hobbyist tailor can put it back together, and then make others: the gas mask has “decomp_learn” at skill 3.
If you’re a student of several other disciplines, that same understanding should let you work out what you need to make a gas mask from studying firefighting, post-nuclear survival, chemistry (lab safety precautions & filtering), emergency medical assistance, or (of course) gas warfare. There are several books containing the gas mask recipe.
So you’d end up with “Huh, if I had goggles, a filter, some hose, and spare filter material, maybe I could attach it together, but it might take some doing.” <tries, insufficent skill> “Nope, too much fine-detail. Need more practice.”
After all this, I take playability into consideration. I originally was extremely stingy with archery, but let the lower-level bows remain autolearn so folks playing no-city or illiterate would have some upgrade potential before the research system gets going.
(For the record, I heartily support a research system, so long as it’s not the typical “sink X resources, wait Y time, get Z upgrade” game-research. Science goes by fits and starts.)
Hoping that helps.
I’m not clear on the mechancis here. Is this about requiring some background knowledge(aka skill), or actual knowledge of the precise recipe? Because, you know, the job of a well educated chemist is not really to make something according to recipe, it’s more to come up with new recipes and processes through thought and experimentation. Someone with a decent understanding of chemistry will indeed be able to come up with new recipes, simply by looking at what materials they have, what they want to produce, and lots of trial and error.[/quote]
I don’t see chemistry skill as representing formal chemistry education, especially to the level of a professional chemist where you have a broad enough knowledge base to come up with new chemical reactions. It’s more like lab technician level stuff, where you learn to perform the steps, but don’t necessarally have a total understanding of how everything works.
Any ETA for the next stable version?
All my zipping around the country is over for now, I’m settling in in Seattle, so I’m going to start the release process by marking release-blockers, and the release will be whenever that list is emptied and I have time to do it.
So VERY loose ETA is Jan 18th.