[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:48, topic:12277”]Giving 3 rags and 3 kevlar plates for that wouldn’t change shit.
It wouldn’t be that hard to add, but it wouldn’t do anything meaningful.[/quote]
Sure, a booby prize wouldn’t change much, but how about it becoming “broken” instead of disappearing?
You have a broken suit, it offers terrible storage, protection and warmth because it’s so badly damaged, but still exists and may be repaired at a high cost - but lower than the cost of making one from scratch.
You have a broken axe. It’s just an axe head now, and pointless in combat or as a tool, but if you can get some tools and some wood, you can make a new handle and it’s good as new.
Realistic: Fairly. Clothing and the like rarely disintegrate so badly that nothing remains unless you’re in one of those types of movies. When things do break, like the handle on your axe, blade of your machete (this is actually quite possible to happen), then you replace
Effect: Potentially very high, depending on the item in question. You break your survivor suit because of a Grenadier and sixteen hordes charging you at once, you repair it from the rags, plastic and kevlar of your fallen foes with maybe a leg pouch or something where it couldn’t be recovered vs. You break your survivor suit and must go through intensive crafting, scavenging and construction to make a new one from scratch.
You're pretending there is some magical way to bypass all the presented problems that will not get anti-realistic, but will actually achieve anything. But so far you weren't able to present it.
I’m just going to drop the whole idea of item damage. I’m tired of bringing up gameplay implications only to be shot down with “but it’s realistic therefore it should be in”. Even if it was (it isn’t, because huge damage rate difference would make it crazy), that is not anywhere near a good enough argument to bring up the giant bulk of tedium that it would necessarily come with.
You’re attributing a position to me that I do not hold. I am exploring a possibility with you to see if the idea is workable. I am not dismissing your arguments, I am not, and have never, claimed or pursued realism uber alles, I am not in any way diminishing your position. I am not being prescriptive, and I have happily conceded many points - my ego is not at stake here, and if there is something I disagree with you about, it is not less that I have faith in the arcane and more that my priorities, perspectives and playstyle presumably differ from yours.
But regardless, if you seriously don’t believe that minor affects achieve anything, consider something even more easily managed: Food. While it is easily managed, the fact I must acquire more aspic has a constant effect on my playstyle and activities in-game.
Firearm maintenance: Easily managed. You need a fire (for light, if it’s night time), oil, a rag (reusable). If you do not have oil, you will need to find some or improve your skills to make some, or suffer penalties on the performance of your firearm.
Thirst: Easily managed. You need a fire, a bottle (reusable), and a water supply. If you do not have a water supply you will need to find an alternative supply.
Minor gameplay goals have far reaching effects. I am entirely serious when I say that having low level pressure from having to repair decaying items would change my entire playstyle to account for it.
If repairing items is tedious, that’s not a reason for nothing to ever break, it’s a reason to make repairing as simple, rewarding and intuitive as possible before you make things start breaking. Repairing vehicles is in the game, repairing gear is in the game, repairing weapons is in the game. Repairing items is CORE GAMEPLAY. It’s fundamental to the game.
1: Fix core gameplay.
2: Expand core game design aspects to improve Survival/Simulation/Sandbox elements as much as possible.
#2 is desirable for its own sake as a goal, in much the same way as “adding more first person shooting” is to DOOM, or “more epic sandbox features” to Skyrim, but let’s be clear here, I have never suggested this in isolation. This was proposed from the beginning along with the idea that repairing equipment be made simpler and more convenient as the first, integral step. Simple, logical tools, simple, logical ingredients, simple, easy UI.
In fact, let’s take that even further, and make repairing easier than ever before. Here’s some goals:
No specific “fix kits”. Tools already have properties, use them, it’s already quite intuitive.
No repairing items one by one unless the player opts into that, and with that, remove wading through menus.
No unreasonable skill level requirements for success - remove skill gain from repairing stuff if necessary.
And while we’re at it:
Add a favourites menu for crafting.
Decrease tedious skill grind.
Tedious: Dull, slow, monotonous.
If these goals are met (and before you once again leap to suggest I’m just using magical thinking about these, I’ve already made several suggestions for how these might be implemented, or at least attempted) then expanding item repair would not not be tedious, because repairing items would not be tedious - it will be quick, easy, and, by incorporating a variety of resources the player must acquire, it would actually serve to reduce monotony.
Out of the examples you've provided, all are tedious, but only repairing totally broken guns is anything beyond that. Because you made that disproportionately expensive, to the point where it's a horrible idea to repair non-amazing broken guns that spawn broken.
1: They are not intended to represent insurmountable hurdles to the player, any more than thirst or hunger do. The examples given are intended to show low level maintenance.
If you don’t have a supply of oil available, you can’t keep your gun in good condition and put wear and tear on the parts.
If you don’t have access to fire, you can’t cook and must make do with less.
Fire is a very easy hurdle to overcome, so let’s remove it because it doesn’t achieve anything.
Rocks are everywhere, things that require rocks are irrelevant, remove them.
But the absence of these low difficulty perks can be some of the most severe in the game - no light, parasites, freezing, death, and rocks are keystones to bootstrapping your crafting.
And again, vehicle damage: You run over a zombie, you need to fix your headlight. It’s in the game right now, it’s either trivial to manage or the most important thing ever, depending on a wide variety of factors. I’m suggesting at worst a little more consistency that more your personal luggage isn’t harder to destroy than your Abrams Tank.
2: Expensive? How? Lab barracks, military outposts, one use fired launchers, cop zeds, cop stations, swat cars, NPCs, army zeds, FEMA camps… The game is swamped with more firearms than you will ever use, in calibres you will never need. And you want to talk expensive? Solar panels. Crash your car, major project to replace. Pre-cataclysm Firearms should feel more “expensive”.
Also, even if you managed to somehow get perfect real-life breakage ratios, this wouldn't do anything to the gameplay, since the breakage ratio would be too low to matter.
In real life you can use same tools for a long time without any repairs, since they’re made for long term use. Some tools do get used relatively fast, but they do not randomly break - they just get dull. Adding that to the game would make car changes more tedious since hacksaws happen to be one of those items, but otherwise it would be rather meaningless.
There’s that word again. % -> R -> Y. Your hacksaw has been sharpened. Good thing you have a whetstone and 5 in-game minutes. If repairing items is tedious, that’s not a reason for nothing to ever break, it’s a reason to make repairing as simple, rewarding and intuitive as possible.
Yes, you can use a precision crafted tool for pretty much ever. How about a makeshift lump of metal and wood tied together with string? How about a rock you roughly cracked part of to make a crude cutting edge? How about a glass bottle held directly over an open flame to boil liquid? How about a wooden bloody skewer?
By all means, let’s say all the top tier tools are invincible: Cordless drills never break, Toolboxes are untouchable, hammers can hammer forever (but break when used as a weapon. Hm.), a solid Butcher’s Knife will never break or dull, a copper pot will never tarnish no matter what you cook. Tailors and sewing kits? Carbon nanotube needles for all I care.
Realistic?
A makeshift knife is less useful than a Butcher’s Knife for the sensible, intuitive reasons you just gave yourself: Good tools rarely break, just like good weapons rarely break. Weapons already function this way (rebar claws need repairing constantly, since they’re a makeshift, non-durable, weapon despite their power, but the well-forged punch daggers and brass knuckles last forever), so this would again be internally consistent.
Gameplay effect?
Player aims to upgrade their equipment away from fragile, weak, easily damaged tools that are easy to acquire in favour of strong, durable, more effective tools that are harder to acquire.
Again, in terms of gameplay this is simply consistent with every other aspect of the game. You get better weapons that don’t crumble, you get better armour that can survive a hit, you make a hammer out of a rock and snot and keep it forever.
But the "scrap" in game isn't high-tech tungsten carbon nanotube steel. The sources are mostly cars, fences, structural support, electrical utility equipment etc. It may not have a ton of sulfur and phosphorus, but that's mostly it.
Nanotube tungsten alloy is not necessary, and high grade carbon steel is commonly found in wires and springs. This includes suspension springs found in vehicles. While the game abstracts this as “steel is steel”, so you can get it from anywhere, it is not unreasonable for an individual to scavenge it.
And is naturally curved due to the way it was forged (not shaped like that manually), has significantly harder cutting edge than the rest of the blade, is light and thin like a sword has to be etc. It's not just a curved sword. It is a specific curved sword that has rather strict requirements.
1: Whether a curve is natural or not is irrelevant, the origin of a feature is irrelevant.
2: Once again, the properties of the folding process are to change the physical properties of the katana to produce a certain result. A replica katana made with carbon steel shares these qualities without folding, while folding the wrong type of steel can easily introduce more impurities and weaken the resulting blade.
3: The qualities it does not share, such as the distinctive grain down the blade and other features that result from the folding process, matter extremely little compared to the qualities it does - size, weight, balance, hardness, edge, thinness, single edge, curvature.
Look up the “showato” - mass produced katana made during the WWII era. made by smiths with no knowledge of traditional forging methods (or, one presumes, with forging swords at all) using non-standard forging practises. They’re 100% functional weapons, and similar enough in form and function that they required a stamp to denote that they are not authentic katana.
If you want to remove “katana” as a crafting option entirely and bring in a showato with identical stats that the player can make, you can if you want, but I sincerely doubt anyone living after the apocalypse would know or care about the difference.
Even the "sword" part alone warrants book locking.
Okay, while I accept that a theoretical inexperienced layman may find swords a bit daunting, are you seriously suggesting that you could not possibly fathom how to make a bit of metal with a sharpened edge? It’s already silly we can’t carve a wooden baseball bat out of a log. Where do we draw the line? Nails are pretty fiddly, can we manage nails? Bodkin arrowheads? A length of copper wire? How could one possibly produce something so long and thin? And don’t get me started on literally every possible thing that is involved with putting together a functional roadworthy doom car out of scratch.
If you can make a bit of metal with a sharpened edge, you could not refine your process to produce a bit of metal with a sharpened edge that balanced better in your hand? Remember that you’re a master swordsman who knows exactly what a good sword feels like because you have killed more super mutants in the last week with a sword than Miyamoto Musashi’s duels in his entire life.
While better/worse blades exist, and are ideally tailor made to the intended wielder, all of this is unnecessary given the current level of abstraction present in the game, where a player can produce “sword”, and their skill level is the means by which they make “sword”. If 3 is “proficient”, then I at skill level 3 can be expected to make a plain, serviceable blade, because I, as a someone modestly proficient with metal-working, can do so.
If skill level 10 is “I can be considered an expert in the field of metallurgy” (and skill level 8 is “a black belt”) then that expert can make a damn fine sword by improving on and surpassing me in every respect. It doesn’t matter if that skill 10 smith has made a million blades or learnt their trade by reading three books over about three months, skill 10 is skill 10, just like steel is steel. If we’re not being realistic in the name of fun (which is fine, a lot of systems do the same thing in the name of fun), we can at least be faithful and consistent with our abstraction.
You can't have both in one recipe. You either set autolearn to false, true or an array of skill-level pairs.
Internally, false becomes an empty array (special cased), while true becomes an array containing required skills and [recipe_skill, recipe_difficulty].
Cool, thanks. I’ll take a gander.
