Decreasing tedious skill grind

[StopSignal]

Ok i first need to say that i didn’t read what you two said, i’ll just try to answer how i’d tackle the issue of fabrication rather than argue with both of you.

"Crafting Skills: Fabrication, Construction, Cooking, Electronics, Mechanics, Survival, Tailoring.

• Highly tedious: Crafting skills are heavily menu based and requires extensive repetition, staring at your character bulk crafting knitting needles for hours at a time without even a skill progress % or periodic updates.
• No risk - This emphasises boredom early game. There is nothing risky about hammering “-” to make sewing needles one by one, and if you do, very rarely, lose a skewer, who cares? Late game, resources are more plentiful, so even losing pricier components is still effectively “risk free” for the small failure chance that is present.
• Sometimes necessary - You can frequently bypass skill requirements entirely through scavenging, but in order to create certain rare items it is necessary to
• Heavily arbitrary - Being able to craft something is a binary state.

Survival is by far the best of these, and does not constitute a problem for me at all.
You can forage to increase it with mild risk (wasting bushes). Finding bushes is not menu based. You want to do it anyway (bushes contain rewards).
You also increase it by butchering with mild risk (wasting CRMs, exposing zombie meat to rot). Finding bodies is not menu based. You want to do it anyway (corpses contain rewards, and don’t get back up).

It’s possibly a grind, but the grind is short and goes down smooth, it will get the player up to a point where they will be able to do most things they want to with survival. It’s a little arbitrary: You need Survival X to craft your survival kit, therefore you must jump through those early hurdles to make their stone f00, but has the least overall issues.

Compare this to fabrication:

Level 0: Grind cudgels from wood. Cut up Cudgels for skewers. (Or nails to hooks)
Level 1: Turn skewers into Knitting Needles. Cut up Knitting Needles. Repeat.
Level 2: Mass produce Steel Knuckles. Disassemble. Repeat.
And so on, level by level.

Unnatural: You are not playing the game, you are playing a text adventure about literal needlepoint.
No Risk: You can easily craft far more than you need.
Necessary: You must progress through every step and raise every level of fabrication in order to make your Diamond Face Puncher.
No Reward: You do not need multiple ANYTHING that is not consumable or in need of constant replacement.
"
That’s Pantalion’s post and i kinda agree with it, even if i actually never had a problem with this system in the game (i don’t play it to “win”, i play it to just roam around and do what i’d do if i was ever in my character’s shoes) i can see why people would grind it.

Let’s try to see some fundamentals then.

1-Players always want a reward.
2-Players will always try to find the path that gives them the max amount of reward with the least loss in the least amount of time (grinding).
3-You can change player’s behaviour by punishing X things they do and giving a better reward in the Y things you want them to do.

So let’s see how the current system goes. IIRC, it was like this:

A-Players get XP every time they craft.
B-Players can batch crafting.
C-Players get better XP with recipes of a better Fabrication level.
D-Players get recipes from books.
E-Players can practice Fabrication from books. (Is it still like this? I don’t remember)
F-Crafting is fast.

So literally all of that favors grinding. It’s almost necessary to have a high fabrication level.
Which would be good, but there is a problem. As Pantalion said, it’s heavily menu based. It’s barely fun or rewarding.
It also gives a huge importance to books.

What should we do? In my opinion, this:

A-Books should give only recipes. NPCs should be able to teach recipes.
B-You can’t learn recipes by advancing a level.

These two don’t make much sense until i add the next things.

C-You only receive experience by crafting an item the first time you craft it.
D-To advance to the next crafting level, one would have to craft at least 30% (this is just an arbitrary percentage, it could be any number i guess) of the current level’s recipes.
E-Like before, to craft certain recipes you need to get to its level first.

Now A and B play with C and D.
CD make you have to know a lot of recipes if you want to advance to the next level and make you vary what you have to craft. This gives two things, /make you not be able to grind the skill just as you start playing/, and also /make you vary in terms of what you craft, and that gives players a tendency to try new things and new playstyles/, and that’s awesome in my opinion.

/It makes players look more for books and ways to get recipes/, and /stops players from just batching fishing hooks and then know how to, i don’t know, make a turret or something/.

So the first levels would be easy to gain. You don’t need to get books basically, just craft some basic stuff. But after a few levels it becomes ungrindable. You’d have to look for books and that has the danger of being eaten alive by zombies. It has a risk.

And the reward is, well, being able to craft complex stuff. I’d love to see the"masterwork" mechanic as well, being able to craft items almost immune to damage, if your fabrication is a bit higher that the fabrication needed. That would be another good reward.

We also eliminate most of the menu factor. Not because you won’t need it, but because you’ll have to actually play the game instead of sitting down 5 hours and coming back with a huge fabrication level. You’ll have to look for books and npcs, scavenge and fight. And that’s great!

And while you can grind the first level i guess, you’d have trouble to get to the second, and so on. But it wouldn’t be a grind, as you only need more than 30% of the 100% of the items of the current level, so it’s not that big of a task. It’s like 10 or more items per level, and you find like 3 recipes per book. Just finding the books, i guess.

[Pantalion]

1 & 2. My counter-argument is that “you must expend resources to gain X” is not bullshit for the same reason that combat is not bullshit. Combat potentially involves damaging your weapons, person and gear, as well as consuming materials to recover those things. Crafting involving those things is not, in and of itself, bullshit either.

Now, I will say that there is a need for the repairing system to be tweaked, because you’re right, it is tedious, and very, very easy to repair most of your stuff. So in the spirit of improvement:

A: % menu option: "Repair all your shit to good condition. -> Include Risky Projects y/n? -> Most damaged objects first y/n? -> You Repair all your shit to good condition, starting from the most damage. Options: Autorepair Blacklist: Do not repair: %, *, {, o.
That gets rid of a hell of a lot of the tedium.

B: Specific repair materials for specific items: You broke your beaker because of mixing too strong an acid and base, your chemistry set is now |. Repair it requires no tools, but you must find a beaker. You burnt the handle on your pot because you left it over the fire. New handle? Tool: Hammer. 1 Nail, 1 [Wood]. - A player should not be concerned about damaging their cookware, because cookware is common. They may be concerned about damaging their electric forge and needing a heating element to repair it, because that involves entering town and raiding. More combat, more risk, more realism.

Even if it just becomes “you must have something of the same material and a tool to fix this” it would be a lot better than the current “You have Repair Kit and have filled it with magic duct tape to reinforce your everything that isn’t clothing or metal”.

C: Screw it, MORE breaking stuff. When items are assigned to specific containers on your person, as I believe is planned, then those containers getting hit in combat should damage their contents, because realism, and good story-telling, includes your stuff getting wrecked, rather than having glass bottles in your pack being better able to survive getting Hulkpunched than you do. Firearms need maintenance, so do swords. Having them very slowly erode is a good thing, since it reduces the current problem of “I have the best F00, and no longer need to do anything but grind Alpha Mutagen and Mine/Lab bottoms”. Laser pistol getting worn down? Finding a high quality lens or some chemicals to replace the ones that are breaking down could be its own adventure, and these mini-goals, done well, can reduce player fatigue by ensuring they often have short term goals available.

D: Remove vanishing items. On a vehicle, if it’s broken, it becomes scrap metal, or pebbles, or rocks, or glass shards, or whatever. If it’s an item, it becomes ether and vanishes. If a broken f00 can be recovered or parts scavenged, then that’s great. If it’s a shirt that atomises then… Less so. In a scavenger economy, you’d expect to see the protagonist walking around in scavenged, patched, damaged, second-rate gear that is fixed up enough to “do the job”. Cataclysm has very little of this, and lots of people walking around in perfect condition tuxedos and monocles with never-breaking guns and a flaming katana.

Make repair easy on the UI, but involve non-trivial resources, and be fairly common if you’re not careful (this also gives a reason for players to act realistically and use stockpiles for their gear rather than carry it all) - I appreciate that this isn’t a trivial series of suggestions to implement, but gear maintenance doesn’t have to be bullshit, and it’s an important aspect of the scavenging and survival genre that shouldn’t be ignored.

Tool damage? Automatically pick lowest quality, least damaged tool. No reason why the player should have favourites or care.
Hauling around improvised tools becomes a good idea? So what? I don’t consider this to be a downside at all. It would be GREAT if I had a reason to carry around a little scrap metal with me, or rocks if they were seriously that rare. Currently there’s no reason to carry anything except one of the best of everything.

Tool damage would achieve nothing: Disagree, strongly. This game is about scavenging and survival. Bullets are common enough I can get a bunch of rounds, but carrying a lot of spare bullets = Heavy. So either I set up a base (Good, the player should be rewarded for the realistic advantages of having a stable “base” location), or I choose between extra bullets in case I can’t find more for awhile, or other gear and risk running out (Good, the player should be given choices on such things, and be rewarded when they make the “right” choice). So if the only impact of having my pot break and need a new handle is that I need to walk into the woods and make a new handle, what’s the alternative? Sitting in one spot doing nothing?

As a design goal, you should be constantly wearing down, losing resources, and need to fight constantly to stay where you are - not in a high pressure always intense manner, but low level “You go to the river if you’re thirsty, you go into the wilderness if you need natural materials, you go into town if you need processed items to repair stuff”. Natural opportunities to improve skills is another way that helps the grindiness of the game in general, and I don’t know many players who consider “adventuring in zombie infested towns for vital gear” to be a bad thing, and it doesn’t have to be “major”, so long as repair is (for the actual person playing the game) instant and easy. Food is, for the person playing the game, instant, easy, and effectively infinite, but they always need to keep that hunger meter up, and will notice that they’re running low and go get more. Repairs should be as close to that dynamic as possible.

The only “industry” affected would be forging - Forging could really stand to get an overhaul, I agree, but this could be a downside to a mobile electric forge vs an immobile, no moving parts, fire-based stone forge - maintaining higher technology is more difficult than maintaining lower technology, and most of the equipment used in a forge would actually be quite easy to repair using that same forge - heat up, reforge, done.
In fact, the worst affected would more likely be high tier chemistry since chemistry sets are fragile and comparatively awkward to replace, while it’s quite easy to break a beaker if you put it on heat for too long or the like.

CBMs would be weird: They’re already weird. You can never lose your blade, your armour never dents, your fingerpick never breaks. Integrated toolsets are already the best, just give them an associated energy cost while “active” (1/32 turns?) and leave them as far as I’m concerned.

3. It is always better to use the recipe that costs the least but still trains the skill. Tool damage does nothing to prevent that, it only means that expensive tools wouldn’t help with faster grinding.

The recipe that costs the least would rarely be the recipe that is risky enough to train the skill anyway, if you’re grinding. But again, what happened to “Experimentation” where you could just expend resources to train the skill directly, rather than grind [soap bars]? Would it be a bad thing if the player only entered the crafting menu when they actually wanted the item they were about to make?

Protective gear could be just included into recipe requirements as explicit requirement, otherwise it would just lead to layering scarves and gloves.

Like this idea a lot, actually. A protection tag for equipment, rather than specific items?

4. Not magical thinking, I asked you a question - did the earlier parts of this discussion lead anywhere in development? I’m happy to, and already have, suggested changes to systems where grinding is unnecessary, so let me synopsise:

a: Reduced skill gain for attempting overlevelled projects. - It’s not worth grinding high level, dangerous recipes because easier recipes are easier.
b: Outsource grinding to “experimentation”.
c: Make repairing items give skill exp, and repairing items super simple in the UI, so skill exp rises naturally from fixing items.

Yes, some people will complain it will become “handyman simulator” and mod it out, because they want simplicity and cars that never break and to kill zombies all day without trouble, but it should be a goal for any gameplay feature to make it painless and as non-tedious as possible.

“No, it would just result in someone randomly learning how to make reflex recurve bows after making enough plastic bottles and pilot lights.”

This is the downside to abstraction, but it is a necessity of that abstraction. I can do nothing but craft juice until I’m good enough at crafting juice to craft superglue until I’m good enough at superglue to craft denatured alcohol (where the heck am I finding methanol to add to my denatured alcohol, and why am I maintaining pre-cataclysm safety standards, by the way?), and despite doing nothing else, the other skills and talents are assumed to be added to my repertoire, just as the ability to suplex a hulk is added to my wrasslin’ moves if I spend enough time kick-boxing.

As a thought experiment, remove skill gain from all crafting - you only gain from books and “experimentation”. Would it still be silly to learn how to make bows after you spend several weeks using up wood and reading books on carpentry (that do not go into actual archery products)?

You can’t make a tank drone. Not at 99 in all skills. - I’m aware, it was hyperbole. You can, however, make a lot of far, far more advanced stuff, no?
And being really good in one thing doesn’t mean you can do anything similar. Crafting broadswords all life won’t make you understand katanas. - It’s a SWORD. We’re not talking Damascus steel here, we’re talking a bladed implement with gross physical properties that you can attempt to reproduce. It needs a blade, it needs weight, folding naturally curves the blade, so that will happen naturally. Yes, being really good at working metal gives you a very good chance of working metal in other ways.
Making heroin won’t do much to let you design a process to make meth using cheap tools and subpar components. - I already conceded specific “recipes” in chemistry as being the exception.

Some recipes could autolearn at higher level. The problem is, that requires a lot of work - finding all those recipes and changing them. And that work requires either someone doing it or someone giving good arguments for why should it be done by someone else.

Do you have an idea of the JSONs involved, could you provide a quick template or example to work from, or suggest any support software? I’ve little aptitude for programming languages, but I’ve worked on similar files for other games in the past, so I’d be happy to try my hand at a little data entry.

[Pantalion]

Okay, having sat on it for a bit, a proposal, posted separately from the mostly repair related discussion post above.

Crafting gives no experience.
You do not learn recipes with skill levels.
If you read a book, you learn all the recipes - The player doesn’t memorise them so much as “keep a notepad with all their recipes on it”. Carrying a library everywhere is annoying clutter, and as agreed losing books is rare enough to ignore entirely.

To increase your skill, you read books, or you “experiment/practise/I hate coming up with names when I’m not paid for it”.

Experiment consumes materials for skill exp, as discussed. The player may add items to the experimentation to boost their skill gain, and these materials are lost. They may be taken from adjacent squares or containers nearby as well as the inventory.

Clothing items and components are consumed for tailoring, metal/weapons/tools and such for mechanics/fabrication/whatever. Experimentation time increases proportionally to the amount of Exp the materials are worth. Ideally items are consumed in time increments.

If materials consumed for Experimentation are on a non-locked recipe (locked being Elf-A mutagen, for example) then the player may learn the recipe. If the item consumed for experimentation is a craftable item, it may also grant the recipe, with a significant bonus to the chance.

The more materials from the recipe, the more chances, and the higher your skill in relation to the recipe in question, the higher that chance is.

So Jack experiments with Nomex. They may learn recipe: Fire Resistant gloves, and gain crafting experience from the nomex used.

Optionally, if all materials are present for a recipe, then that item may be created, for free, as part of the experimenting process, but this feels unnecessary.

At certain skill levels materials can stop giving Exp, becoming greyed or pinked out, but still potentially granting any missed recipes.

This means:

No grinding. You find materials through play, you turn those materials into Exp, potentially without even cutting them up first.

Reasons to loot zombies: Intact clothing can give more exp than just rags, giving value to otherwise trash loot and helping encourage the player to declutter their world. You don’t even have to pick it up, just practise with it still on the floor nearby.

Minimal menus: The inventory screen can filter out anything extraneous, same as it already does with eating etc, so with a hotkey this could be “#: Study -> Inventory screen -> Tab select all on the floor section -> Watch skill increase”. No batch craft disassemble cycling.

Crafting menus exist solely for getting specific items you want, nothing more.

Thoughts?

[Kedryn]

I like this for a few reasons: the grindiness is a bit too MMO-ey for me and I’d no longer have to find ways to destroy all the scrap metals from disassembling cars and zombie clothes. Reducing clutter ftw.

[quote=“Pantalion, post:43, topic:12277”]Okay, having sat on it for a bit, a proposal, posted separately from the mostly repair related discussion post above.

Crafting gives no experience.
You do not learn recipes with skill levels.
If you read a book, you learn all the recipes - The player doesn’t memorise them so much as “keep a notepad with all their recipes on it”. Carrying a library everywhere is annoying clutter, and as agreed losing books is rare enough to ignore entirely.

To increase your skill, you read books, or you “experiment/practise/I hate coming up with names when I’m not paid for it”.

Experiment consumes materials for skill exp, as discussed. The player may add items to the experimentation to boost their skill gain, and these materials are lost. They may be taken from adjacent squares or containers nearby as well as the inventory.

Clothing items and components are consumed for tailoring, metal/weapons/tools and such for mechanics/fabrication/whatever. Experimentation time increases proportionally to the amount of Exp the materials are worth. Ideally items are consumed in time increments.

If materials consumed for Experimentation are on a non-locked recipe (locked being Elf-A mutagen, for example) then the player may learn the recipe. If the item consumed for experimentation is a craftable item, it may also grant the recipe, with a significant bonus to the chance.

The more materials from the recipe, the more chances, and the higher your skill in relation to the recipe in question, the higher that chance is.

So Jack experiments with Nomex. They may learn recipe: Fire Resistant gloves, and gain crafting experience from the nomex used.

Optionally, if all materials are present for a recipe, then that item may be created, for free, as part of the experimenting process, but this feels unnecessary.

At certain skill levels materials can stop giving Exp, becoming greyed or pinked out, but still potentially granting any missed recipes.

This means:

No grinding. You find materials through play, you turn those materials into Exp, potentially without even cutting them up first.

Reasons to loot zombies: Intact clothing can give more exp than just rags, giving value to otherwise trash loot and helping encourage the player to declutter their world. You don’t even have to pick it up, just practise with it still on the floor nearby.

Minimal menus: The inventory screen can filter out anything extraneous, same as it already does with eating etc, so with a hotkey this could be “#: Study -> Inventory screen -> Tab select all on the floor section -> Watch skill increase”. No batch craft disassemble cycling.

Crafting menus exist solely for getting specific items you want, nothing more.

Thoughts?[/quote]

[Coolthulhu]

@Pantalion

1 & 2. My counter-argument is that “you must expend resources to gain X” is not bullshit for the same reason that combat is not bullshit. Combat potentially involves damaging your weapons, person and gear, as well as consuming materials to recover those things. Crafting involving those things is not, in and of itself, bullshit either.

“Combat isn’t bullshit therefore crafting damage isn’t bullshit” is just another end of the same “x is y, therefore z must also be y” argument.
You still haven’t demonstrated crafting damage isn’t bullshit, while I demonstrated that it is and that it doesn’t even solve what it is supposed to solve.
I showed examples of trivial actions that can be done to make it not do its job (collecting more pots, for example), while you didn’t even come up with a single skill where it would matter, only saying “it’s realistic therefore it’s good”.

Even if it just becomes "you must have something of the same material and a tool to fix this" it would be a lot better than the current "You have Repair Kit and have filled it with magic duct tape to reinforce your everything that isn't clothing or metal".

It would potentially get very tedious. And without a good formula, would require someone to go over all the items and add repair components to them.

Screw it, MORE breaking stuff. When items are assigned to specific containers on your person, as I believe is planned, then those containers getting hit in combat should damage their contents, because realism, and good story-telling, includes your stuff getting wrecked, rather than having glass bottles in your pack being better able to survive getting Hulkpunched than you do.

Very tedious and also wouldn’t achieve much other than shopping carts mandatory. Inventory damage is a bad idea because the only thing that prevents trivial stashing is roaming NPCs who steal your crap. And they’re off by default.

Remove vanishing items.

That would be an incredibly tiny change mechanically. How often do valuable items break anyway? Even if tools randomly broke, most of them are made of cheap components processed by expensive tools.

Hauling around improvised tools becomes a good idea? So what? I don't consider this to be a downside at all. It would be GREAT if I had a reason to carry around a little scrap metal with me, or rocks if they were seriously that rare.

That’s tedious and anti-realistic.
“I have an important job to do. I could use that proper hammer over there. But it only requires a rock, so I’m going to bash it with a rock instead of using the hammer like a human being would”

Bullshit would be excusable with a valid gameplay reason, but I don’t see anything anywhere near good enough in your post.

So if the only impact of having my pot break and need a new handle is that I need to walk into the woods and make a new handle, what's the alternative? Sitting in one spot doing nothing?

Hauling only the new stuff and components, not having pots randomly break like it wouldn’t happen in real life. Not adding extra tedium for realism fetishism that achieves nothing gameplay wise.

As a design goal, you should be constantly wearing down, losing resources, and need to fight constantly to stay where you are - not in a high pressure always intense manner, but low level "You go to the river if you're thirsty, you go into the wilderness if you need natural materials, you go into town if you need processed items to repair stuff".

After a while low-level adventuring becomes trivial.
This would be something you’d send a NPC on if it was implemented. “Bring me 4 pots from that cleared city”
Making player do that would be pure tedium, since it would just involve going into explored, cleared houses and grabbing up the (s)crap that you left last time.

CBMs would be weird: They're already weird.

Unless you want to go over the code yourself and un-weird them, it can’t be just left like that. You want a new mechanic that makes bionics stand out by making everything else more tedious to use.

Integrated toolsets are already the best, just give them an associated energy cost while "active" (1/32 turns?) and leave them as far as I'm concerned.

Just random energy cost? What for? What would it achieve?

The recipe that costs the least would rarely be the recipe that is risky enough to train the skill anyway, if you're grinding.

That’s a contradiction - if you aren’t gaining skills, you aren’t grinding. And the grindy recipes aren’t risky. That’s the point of grindy recipes - moderate gain for low risk.

But again, what happened to "Experimentation" where you could just expend resources to train the skill directly

Didn’t happen yet. Would take a while to implement.
If you expect it to fix some problems with your ideas, you can say it like “assuming that we have skill training implemented, x feature would allow us to y”.
But don’t assume it will fix all grinding.

Reduced skill gain for attempting overlevelled projects.

You don’t gain any skill for most overlevelled projects.

Outsource grinding to "experimentation".

Skill training would not completely replace crafting skill gain, unless crafting skill gain was disabled. For example, there could be skill levels where grinding is more rewarding.
The whole idea of pseudo-crafting just for skill gain would need to replace, not supplement, crafting skill gain, to actually fix grind.

This is the downside to abstraction, but it is a necessity of that abstraction.

Our current abstraction doesn’t have as much of that downside.

You can, however, make a lot of far, far more advanced stuff, no?

You can make CBMs, which is pretty stupid and might be removed.
You can’t even make 40mm grenades.

It's a SWORD. We're not talking Damascus steel here

Folding steel to remove the impurities in some places while retaining them in others, quenching the hot steel in specific ways to harden it only where needed etc.
A good comparison would be steam engine: you can easily think of how to make one, but the chance that you could actually come up with an efficient design are barely above the chance that you are an engineer who specializes in heat engines.

We’re not talking about “curved sword that breaks when swung”, we’re talking about “curved sword that is really good at slicing unprotected flesh”.

Do you have an idea of the JSONs involved, could you provide a quick template or example to work from, or suggest any support software? I've little aptitude for programming languages, but I've worked on similar files for other games in the past, so I'd be happy to try my hand at a little data entry.

Check out data/json/recipes directory. The JSONs are human readable.
You’re looking for an “autolearn” field. It can be a bit confusing since it has two syntaxes. One is simple: true/false - false means never autolearns, true means autolearns when you have skills equal to its difficulty.
The second syntax is more explicit. Search for “welder_crude” - it has an array like this:

"autolearn": [[ "mechanics", 3 ], [ "electronics", 2 ]],

Each element in the array is a pair of [skill, level]. In this case, it means crude welder autolearns when you have 3 mechanics and 2 electronics. The actual difficulty of the craft is just 2 mechanics.

[Pantalion]

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:45, topic:12277”]“Combat isn’t bullshit therefore crafting damage isn’t bullshit” is just another end of the same “x is y, therefore z must also be y” argument.
You still haven’t demonstrated crafting damage isn’t bullshit, while I demonstrated that it is and that it doesn’t even solve what it is supposed to solve.
I showed examples of trivial actions that can be done to make it not do its job (collecting more pots, for example), while you didn’t even come up with a single skill where it would matter, only saying “it’s realistic therefore it’s good”.[/quote]

I have stated, and shall state again, that “Expend Resources to get X” is at its heart not a bad idea. There is nothing wrong with the underlying premise, because if there were something wrong with the underlying premise then it would logically follow that Combat, which shares that premise, would also be bullshit.

Therefore saying “I’ve not demonstrated X” to this particular paragraph is irrelevant, as this is just logical induction.

C + XYZ = Not Automatically Bullshit
Therefore: XYZ = Not Automatically Bullshit
Cr = Not Automatically Bullshit.
Therefore: Cr + XYZ = Not Automatically Bullshit

Unless you are trying to suggest that literally every possible system involving crafting and consequences is automatically bullshit (which would be a fairly difficult to prove), this is not even something you need to argue with - just understand that I am not attempting the logically impossible and instead we can focus on where implementation may introduce Bullshit, rather than pretending that bullshit is a logical consequence of Crafting + Risk.

It would potentially get very tedious. And without a good formula, would require someone to go over all the items and add repair components to them.

Agreed, there’s definitely a pitfall in making materials unfun or complex to find (the current engine replacement parts thing is a good example), but hopefully automated repair would make this a lot less irritating. This would indeed be potentially quite complex to code out, however, so it’s a question of whether the benefit to the game is worth the hassle of implementation.

Spitballing it, let’s try this as an example to work from:

Firearm, Ballistic: Firing = 0.1% chance of damage every shot. 1% while shooting reloaded ammunition.

++: No fix.
3-4 HP: Tool: Rag, Fine Screwdriving. Component: Oil.
0-2 HP: Tool: Fine Hammering, Fine Screwdriving, Soldering Iron (N Charges). Component: Scrap Metal, 10 Solder.
Broken: Fine Hammering, Fine Screwdriving, Soldering Iron (N Charges). Component: Any Ballistic Firearm, Scrap Metal, 10 Solder (Broken items would not automatically fix, but presumably would not break often unless misused). Repairing broken items gives repair component HP -1 to the broken item.

“Simple” firearms with fewer moving parts might have a different subset that has a lower chance to break, and potentially just use “Heavy Stick, Rag, Oil” to clean out the barrel until 2 HP or lower, plain Screwdriving and hammering for 0-2 HP, and fixed from broken with just a Pipe and a welder or soldering iron.

While far more complex than the current, this would give the player a good reason to realistically want Survivor or archaic weapons - Lower maintenance.

Firearm, Energy: Fewer moving parts means these would only really develop problems if not properly maintained.

4-5 HP: Tool: Rag, Saline Solution.
2-3 HP: Tool: Fine Screwdriving, Soldering Iron. Component: Power Converter, Copper Wire, 20 Solder.
0-1 HP: Tool, Fine Screwdriving, Fine Hammering, Soldering Iron. Component: High Quality Lens, Circuit Board, Copper Wire, 30 solder.
Broken: Tool, Fine Screwdriving, Fine Hammering, Soldering Iron. Component: Any Energy Firearm/CBM analogue.

It doesn’t have to be onerous or tedious. Experienced Players would routinely perform low level maintenance on their gear the same way they routinely perform maintenance on their character (it takes an unforgivable number of keypresses to boil water). If they let things slip, they need more materials to fix it.

Very tedious and also wouldn't achieve much other than shopping carts mandatory. Inventory damage is a bad idea because the only thing that prevents trivial stashing is roaming NPCs who steal your crap. And they're off by default.

Alright, I concede that this would be too simulationist for some and probably impractical, but I’d honestly like to see a lot more stuff getting damaged in general, though I appreciate it would probably get to Dwarf Fortress levels to track everything.

Being trampled by zombies should probably damage fragile items.
Being left outside should cause any nearby animal to damage food items if they can get them (and I presume NPCs will be on by default once they’re fully implemented and integrated?).
Being left outside in the rain should slowly damage most items over time.

Obviously tracking every item on the floor is unfeasible (though I dearly hope that animals wrecking your supplies to get your food becomes implemented someday) but as a compromise, perhaps more items could be spawned in imperfect condition about the gameworld, rather than exclusively brand new, flawless items?

That would be an incredibly tiny change mechanically. How often do valuable items break anyway? Even if tools randomly broke, most of them are made of cheap components processed by expensive tools.

Eh, I have a bad habit of bashing windows with valuable skillbooks I was reading, but take this in the larger context of making item damage more common. Any change to increase item breakage frequency should be coupled with measures to lower item breakage annoyance, up to and including consolation prizes like rags and scrap metal - part conservation of mass (I forgot to repair my damaged Survivor Suit, now I am naked is pretty anti-realistic and unfun irself, no?).

That's tedious and anti-realistic. "I have an important job to do. I could use that proper hammer over there. But it only requires a rock, so I'm going to bash it with a rock instead of using the hammer like a human being would"

Rocks, in this case, would be spare materials to unrealistically make pots, rather than as hammers. But you’re the one making this anti-realistic. There is no need to have the tedious, unrealistic binary you’re proposing here between “No items ever break” and “all items break”.

You’re going on a survival situation for a long period of time. Do you bring any spare items that you could use to repair your other items?

If they’re fragile or prone to wear and tear, yes, you obviously would. You balance the likelihood of needing something with the cost of carrying it around with you on your trip.
Spare hammer? Probably not. Hammers are pretty sturdy.
Whetstone for your axe and hunting knife? Probably. A blunt tool can be dangerous.
Spare fletching? Maybe.
Spare fishing line? Definitely.
Spare hacksaw blade in your toolbox? Sure, I have several.
Spare batteries in case your soldering iron runs out? We already have this in the game, “running out of power” is not significantly different to “getting blunt” or “ceasing function”, it’s easily remedied, and the resource is common.

Bullshit would be excusable with a valid gameplay reason, but I don't see anything anywhere near good enough in your post.

That’s why we’re still working in suggestions rather than codifying things, no? In my experience starting with detailed equations and nitty gritty details too early on causes people to argue against an idea because of details that could easily be ignored or reworked while ignoring the overall idea itself.

Like I’ve said before, “implementation ready” is not necessary at this stage. I propose things, you consider their viability and point out anything you consider to be a problem, I listen and suggest refinements, we see where it goes. In the end either we agree that it’s unworkable/impractical and move on, or come up with a solution we mutually agree is feasible and worth further exploration to make a better game. This is a natural part of any design project.

Hauling only the new stuff and components, not having pots randomly break like it wouldn't happen in real life. Not adding extra tedium for realism fetishism that achieves nothing gameplay wise.

I assure you, I’ve broken far, far too many items of cookware, and am in possession of several with a damaged plastic handle or damage to the non-stick surface that does not significantly impede their ability to heat food. But I’ve covered this: non-risky vs. risky recipes, potentially sturdy vs. fragile tags, so stone hammers made with string are actually less useful than factory made solid steel one-piece claw hammers, and commonplace, common sense, repair materials with low hassle maintenance.

Gameplay always involves abstraction, I understand this perfectly. We could abstract boiling water, we could abstract drinking (Nethack certainly does), we could abstract defecation. Without prejudice, does drinking add anything to the game? Boiling water? What if it didn’t already exist? Why would you add that meaningless, tedious element just for your fetish?

On the other side of the coin, what is the game supposed to represent? What are the core features it is supposed to include?

Game: Living after the apocalypse. Survival sim.
Crafting and maintaining your gear.
Surviving the elements.
Fighting monsters.

Repair is a core game feature. The player needs to procure tools to survive, and gear maintenance is a fundamental part of what the game should be simulating. Now, the game should abstract away the tedious parts and make sure this is as painless as possible (Crafting Menu > Tab > Tab > Tab > Scroll > Scroll > Scroll > Scroll > Scroll > Clean Water > Batch Craft > 20 > YOU DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH CONTAINERS FOR THIS WATER YOU WERE GOING TO DRINK ANYWAY.), but skipping out on survival sim aspects because survival sim activities are tedious is not ideal when we’re talking about a survival sim.

Filthy clothes? Not a bad thing to represent.
Current implementation? Needs attention. A single tool you “load” with soap and use, garment by garment is a little awkward.
Could clean clothing be shown through reinforcement ++ that gradually decays to ||, needing to be “repaired” with soap and nearby water by a quick and easy menu command, while heavily damaged gear is considered increasingly filthy and tattered?

Perhaps. A garment could be clean but torn, but it might be a useful abstraction to consider. We can assume any minor wear and tear like fraying seams to be fixed during the cleaning process, while any damage the player is likely to encounter would probably dirty up your outfit and the player not bothering to waste soap “perfecting” a damaged garment. We might reject the idea in the end, but I like the idea of the player needing to maintain their clothing and avoiding boomers because it ruins their epic tux’s Clean Stylish benefits.

After a while low-level adventuring becomes trivial. This would be something you'd send a NPC on if it was implemented. "Bring me 4 pots from that cleared city" Making player do that would be pure tedium, since it would just involve going into explored, cleared houses and grabbing up the (s)crap that you left last time.

Sure, this is a good suggestion for improvement and progression. The player should outgrow these problems naturally.

"The Forgeco Garage Buddy 2.0: Now with automated knife sharpener. - Just like the Foodco skips out on tedious water purification, an automated machine that converts energy into convenience is a fine way of handling this.
"Precision Manufactured Steel Tools: Don’t fall apart like something you magicked together out of ROCKS AND TWINE.
“Your atomic robo-butler, complete with automated repair facilities. Shines your shoes while you sleep!”
“Your faithful corpse pulper now also loots scrap metal for you and repairs your tools while you’re working!”

So sure, make the player do it, let them feel achievement when they (mostly) rise above such petty concerns, and if disaster happens because they’re careless, and they lose the things they relied on, make them feel the sting of that loss.

Unless you want to go over the code yourself and un-weird them, it can't be just left like that. You want a new mechanic that makes bionics stand out by making everything else more tedious to use.

Bionics already stand out. Fusion arms never wear down, blades never break, Laser Fingers can fire 4+ times without time progressing. Bionics are incomparably superior already, I really would need to rework the system heavily to change that, but it’s not a problem introduced by, or even exasperated by, this suggestion, nor is it necessarily a significant change to what’s already there already.

Just random energy cost? What for? What would it achieve?

Currently having no power and an integrated toolset means infinite access to every useful tool even before you find your first power cell, with the sole exception of Soldering/Welding functions. With power, all you need in a vehicle is a forging kit, a basic chemistry set, and a Foodco and you can cover pretty much every imaginable crafting function. This is so far into no-brainer territory I cannot imagine not having an I.T as soon as I can find one.

Give Integrated Toolset an energy cost changes this dynamic to effectively convert Tool Requirements to Bionic Energy cost, which naturally increases for longer, more complex projects. And let’s face it, it’s probably, for space purposes, an electrical auto-hammer, an electrical drill bit with a screw head and bolt turning attachment, an electric saw and a heating element, as well as a miniaturised electrical spot welder, not a volume 10 toolbox you store in your palm and apply using elbow grease and muscle power.

While an advanced player would likely not care, and integrated toolsets would remain extremely useful, they would no longer be better than a Toolbox in all respects, since a toolbox would cost nothing except volume and weight - neither of which matters if you have an established base location and it’s on the floor nearby.

This achieves:
Better balance. Toolboxes are no longer totally obsolete after you find the CBM, nor are actual welders or soldering irons, since they would potentially work out as more efficient than the I.T.
Better realism. The toolset otherwise works without any energy whatsoever, unlike other bionics you must at very least pay to “deploy”.

The exact amount of energy drain is, of course, open for discussion, but the fact that they should drain energy I consider self-evident.

The recipe that costs the least would rarely be the recipe that is risky enough to train the skill anyway, if you're grinding.

That’s a contradiction - if you aren’t gaining skills, you aren’t grinding. And the grindy recipes aren’t risky. That’s the point of grindy recipes - moderate gain for low risk.

That’s the point. If you’re grinding, you wouldn’t be risking breaking tools etc anyway. If you’re trying to do something abnormally difficult in order to attain a result, you take risks to do so.

Folding steel to remove the impurities in some places while retaining them in others, quenching the hot steel in specific ways to harden it only where needed etc.

We’re not talking about “curved sword that breaks when swung”, we’re talking about “curved sword that is really good at slicing unprotected flesh”.

I assure you, a katana is not significantly different from any other high quality bladed implement in terms of performance slicing unprotected flesh, and even the idea of needing to fold metal in the first place is to remove impurities that generally wouldn’t exist unless you were using the low grade steel that traditional katana use, which is particular to Japan regardless and could not be reasonably acquired by the player.

What we are talking about is a solid, functional weapon which may or may not be made using lamination, will not break, and will retain a cutting edge. A katana cannot cut through other swords, it cannot cut through peasants vertically, it is not the ultimate perfect sword outside of fiction. It has properties relating to its length, shape, hardness, and materials. Forging processes are used to achieve those things, but they are not the only way to achieve those things.

So while laminating steel is certainly possible (if largely pointless), a “katana” made without folding, using high quality carbon steel, will have very similar properties, cut as well, be similarly balanced, and perform as well, if not better than, a traditional katana made from jewel steel. Even Damascus Steel itself, which really was a truly incredible achievement (far more impressive than Japanese swordsmithing), is not superior to modern materials available today, despite the nanotubes.

Yes, Steam Engines are a great example of “this is complex specialised knowledge about a device with an alarming property of EXPLODING MASSIVELY if you bollock it up even slightly, therefore you need a recipe”. Please add steam engines, I love steampunk and promise never to complain about them being Recipe-locked, that makes perfect sense. I am not trying to be unreasonable, I am happy to concede anything that legitimately cannot be reproduced or learned around, but I really do not consider “curved sword with X physical properties” to be on that scale.

Check out data/json/recipes directory. The JSONs are human readable. You're looking for an "autolearn" field. It can be a bit confusing since it has two syntaxes. One is simple: true/false - false means never autolearns, true means autolearns when you have skills equal to its difficulty. The second syntax is more explicit. Search for "welder_crude" - it has an array like this:

"autolearn": [[ "mechanics", 3 ], [ "electronics", 2 ]],

Each element in the array is a pair of [skill, level]. In this case, it means crude welder autolearns when you have 3 mechanics and 2 electronics. The actual difficulty of the craft is just 2 mechanics.

Awesome, thanks. I assume if I set Autolearn to false, and include the second syntax it would override the first one and learn at the given value?

Unless you think it’s worth exploring “learn recipes with Experimentation” further, which would make this sort of change redundant, I’ll try and put some through entries into my JSON over the weekend and see if I break anything, maybe do it anyway to get some familiarity with the layout.

[Pantalion]

Continued to both separate this from more “discussion” related parts of our conversation and because I wrote too much and the forum cut me off.

If you expect it to fix some problems with your ideas, you can say it like "assuming that we have skill training implemented, x feature would allow us to y".

I generally assume that my suggestions are iterative, particularly as part of a single discussion, so I generally assume anything I’ve proposed as a fix previously could apply equally to the same problem arising in future, and potentially go hand in hand with any other suggestion I’ve made to flesh it out. I do appreciate it’s easy to miss anything I do reference considering the length of my posts, so I’ll try and make clear any such assumptions I make in future, and if you want me to drop out of conversational style and synopsise something let me know.

So far off the top of my head, this list includes:

Consolidate skills to streamline gameplay. Particularly separating skills as mentioned in my suggestion on page 2, moving Mechanics into Metalworking, for example, to better define the difference in skillsets the different materials a player will work with and make the skill system more sensible than it is currently.
Remove grinding entirely, and possibly the autolearning of many non-basic recipes, with Experiment.
This logically proceeds to remove the bulk of crafting and instead make crafting only occur when the player wants the item they are crafting, either as an end product, or component in a future project.
Remove tedium from repair by giving it quick commands and simple automation.

Skill training would not completely replace crafting skill gain, unless crafting skill gain was disabled. For example, there could be skill levels where grinding is more rewarding. The whole idea of pseudo-crafting just for skill gain would need to replace, not supplement, crafting skill gain, to actually fix grind.

Please see my previous post before this, I’m very interested in your feedback on that, since that’s very much involving what you’re saying here and it’s much more central to the thread topic than our current tangent about crafting and repair.

And while I’m thinking on it, “Experiment” wouldn’t necessarily need to be restricted to a single skill - Each item could have a specific value to a specific skill to simplify it (for the player) even further. Scrap Metal Experiment trains Metalworking up to Level X, Y Exp per piece (rough example: 3 Metalworking exp minus player skill level, minimum 0, takes 3 minutes to use).

So in the context of Experiment/Book to be the only way of gaining Skill Levels/Recipes (except extremely basic ones, perhaps).

Risk when crafting difficult materials - Not tedious, but a necessary, calculated risk to gain early access to a resource that will not occur for “day to day” crafting or adventuring.
Repair materials being necessary for periodic gear maintenance - The player will be assumed to want to scavenge materials for experimentation and training, therefore they will accumulate these items naturally (again, assume our goal for all of this is SIF - Simple Intuitive Fun, so repair would be a few button presses, take the player (not the character) little time and effort, and would slot as smoothly into gameplay as possible.
Many recipes being moved out of book-locking - Since learning is abstracted into either reading about a topic or hands on experience “experimenting with materials in a number of undisclosed ways” recipes make more sense to learn than the current “Pickles and Vodka” method and mean that a player probably won’t know how to make Soy Sauce if they’ve never found a soya bean or read a recipe for it.
No grinding, at least for crafting skills. You find loot during play, you turn it into Exp when you’re back in your “safe place”. Doesn’t really change dodge or weapon grinding, of course.

What are the downsides, can they be worked around?

[Coolthulhu]

@Pantalion

Any change to increase item breakage frequency should be coupled with measures to lower item breakage annoyance, up to and including consolation prizes like rags and scrap metal - part conservation of mass (I forgot to repair my damaged Survivor Suit, now I am naked is pretty anti-realistic and unfun irself, no?).

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.

Rocks, in this case, would be spare materials to unrealistically make pots, rather than as hammers. But you're the one making this anti-realistic. There is no need to have the tedious, unrealistic binary you're proposing here between "No items ever break" and "all items break".

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.

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.

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.
Adding more details to repairs would certainly be significantly more tedious and would certainly be received as bad - if not worse - than all the recent badly received updates.

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.

I assure you, a katana is not significantly different from any other high quality bladed implement in terms of performance slicing unprotected flesh, and even the idea of needing to fold metal in the first place is to remove impurities that generally wouldn't exist unless you were using the low grade steel that traditional katana use, which is particular to Japan regardless and could not be reasonably acquired by the player.

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.

What we are talking about is a solid, functional weapon which may or may not be made using lamination, will not break, and will retain a cutting edge.

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.
And a sword isn’t “just a sword” anyway.

Yes, Steam Engines are a great example of "this is complex specialised knowledge about a device with an alarming property of EXPLODING MASSIVELY if you bollock it up even slightly, therefore you need a recipe".

It’s not even the pressure. For years, the designs wasted a lot of temperature and pressure by having an open cycle, misplacing the condenser, not reusing the heat where possible etc.
Even a low pressure steam engine would require an engineering crash course at the least.

but I really do not consider "curved sword with X physical properties" to be on that scale.

Even the “sword” part alone warrants book locking.

Awesome, thanks. I assume if I set Autolearn to false, and include the second syntax it would override the first one and learn at the given value?

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].

[Pantalion]

[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.

[Coolthulhu]

@Pantalion

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?

If sword is a bit of metal with a sharpened edge, then car is a box on wheels with an engine, engine is a piston with a combustion chamber, and rifle is a pipe with a hammer.

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.

No, just a really good metalworker. We don’t take ultrapowerful mutants/superheroes into account because this could break everyone else, unless done on a per-recipe basis.
Maybe you could come up with a really good sword in a lifetime or even just a decade, but not instantly upon acquiring knowledge of Really Good Metalworking, which is what “autolearn” indirectly implies.
If someone ever implements research system, that could be it.

[tarburst98]

i’d like to weigh in on this

I assure you, I've broken far, far too many items of cookware, and am in possession of several with a damaged plastic handle or damage to the non-stick surface

that’s a “i’ve done it so it’s common” fallacy, i have had pots and pans for years and they are not broken or damaged. just because something happened to you in real life does not mean it happens all the time to everyone.

[Pantalion]

@Coolthulhu

If sword is a bit of metal with a sharpened edge, then car is a box on wheels with an engine, engine is a piston with a combustion chamber, and rifle is a pipe with a hammer.

No, that’s an absurd comparison. There’s a reason why we’ve had swords for thousands of years more than we’ve had either of those things.

Swords: No moving parts, defined by gross physical properties.
Engines: Highly complex interconnected systems.

“Really Good Metal Worker” can make a better sword than a Community College Metalworker.
“Really Good Swordsman” who is a “Really Good Metal Worker” can make a better sword than a “Really Good Metal Worker”.

This is because making good swords is defined by two things:
How well you work metal.
How well you understand what makes a good sword.

But just look what you’ve said about steam engines - you do not radically and significantly improve the efficiency on a complex mechanism by making one part better, but by working from first principles and experimentation. A well-designed Steam Engine made out of bad materials will still operate better than a badly-designed Steam Engine forged by Hephaestus himself.

Maybe you could come up with a really good sword in a lifetime or even just a decade, but not instantly upon acquiring knowledge of Really Good Metalworking, which is what "autolearn" indirectly implies. If someone ever implements research system, that could be it.

Yeah, I do think it’s the autolearn system that’s causing the dissonance here. A research system would help make this feel a lot more organic, especially if recipes could have variable “learning chances” from that research (and maybe “skill points at creation” could give bonuses to that?).

The way it is now there’s as much of a case for disallowing the player from making any precision tool or weapon, and forging altogether, since even the “hammer” infers a strong, well made claw hammer made to pre-apoc manufacturing standards.

@tarburst98

that’s a “i’ve done it so it’s common” fallacy, i have had pots and pans for years and they are not broken or damaged. just because something happened to you in real life does not mean it happens all the time to everyone.

If I had made such a claim, then yes, it would be a fallacy. I did not. It is merely anecdotal evidence that at best shows “this never happens” to be false, and carries just as much/little weight as your own anecdotal kitchen experience.

But try a few of these:

I have never damaged a motorcar while driving.
I have never broken my bokken, nor even significantly damaged any other weapon I have used in training or sparring.
I have never never broken a bone.

All of these are rare occurrences in general until you step outside of cosy modern life and into an apocalypse. Much the same as bad things aren’t happening to my car because I am not careening through hordes of zombies to pick up fresh nachos, stuff is not happening to your tools because you are not hiking across New England exposed to the elements and using them constantly day after day to survive.

So blades get blunt, laces fray, the leather starts to rot, the soles of your boots get thin.
The shovel you’ve been digging with gets dented and scratched and dull as you clear aside yet more twisted wreckage.
The metal pan you’ve used every single day for a year to carry everything from pickled eggs to bleach (and at most rinsed out with some spare water from your canteen) is coated in soot and burnt food residue.
The trowel you forgot to dry off one time after using to mix plaster has now turned rusty.
The axe you use to cut firewood every day has a broken haft.
Your rope frays a little from tying your provisions to a tree branch for the hundredth time.
Even your katana, while it may never break, might need sharpening after the thousandth bisected zombie.

No, these are not anti-realistic, once-in-a-lifetime events that will never happen, but the inevitable result of a hard life without a modern support network you take for granted.

Entropy already exists in Cataclysm, food rots, things get worse, monsters get stronger, vehicles need repairing, and irreplaceable items get lost forever. It is fundamental to the game, genre, and setting, and in my mind deserves greater, more consistent, representation.

[tarburst98]

hmmm… that is about 1,000,000% more tedious then it is now. and tracking all that will DEVOUR processor power

[Thwap]

Am I seriously seeing someone talk about needing to oil guns and sharpen hacksaws? It’s asinine the way this game is being stomped to death in the name of realism these days.

The stupid boom cranes, filthy clothing, gun magazines, etc etc etc it’s just been getting worse for months now. The game now is just the game six months ago plus nerfs and tedium.

[WIndburns]

[quote=“Thwap, post:54, topic:12277”]Am I seriously seeing someone talk about needing to oil guns and sharpen hacksaws? It’s asinine the way this game is being stomped to death in the name of realism these days.

The stupid boom cranes, filthy clothing, gun magazines, etc etc etc it’s just been getting worse for months now. The game now is just the game six months ago plus nerfs and tedium.[/quote]

Shrug my shoulders

[Sheb]

[quote=“Thwap, post:54, topic:12277”]Am I seriously seeing someone talk about needing to oil guns and sharpen hacksaws? It’s asinine the way this game is being stomped to death in the name of realism these days.

The stupid boom cranes, filthy clothing, gun magazines, etc etc etc it’s just been getting worse for months now. The game now is just the game six months ago plus nerfs and tedium.[/quote]

I haven’t seen boom crane, but filthy clothing really isn’t that bad, and I actually like gun magazines: it’s nice to quickly reload from a leg pouch.

[Pantalion]

@tarburst98

hmmm… that is about 1,000,000% more tedious then it is now. and tracking all that will DEVOUR processor power

You realise I’ve already covered this, right? And that you could haved use the eldritch technologies of this “message board” to give you context beyond one, specific post?

Whatever, let’s review:

1: All worn equipment can already degrade, except boots, gloves and masks are pretty much immune since they’re targeted so rarely.

Changes suggested:

Make repairing gear easier by making it take 1-2 hotkeys instead of a menu.
Stop armour from disappearing when “broken”, but possibly give it sensible protection/storage/warmth penalties the more damaged it is.
Possibly tweak damage chances to increase wear and tear and damage on hands, feet and faces and the items protecting them.

2: Certain weapons, which should probably need the most maintenance, instead take the least. Katana are far more fragile than baseball bats, but only one of those can take damage.

Changes suggested:
Make repairing weapons easier by making it take 1-2 hotkeys, and remove things like “Basic Repair Kits” and “Gunsmith kits” in favour of just using intuitive tools and materials.
Make Sturdy weapons degrade slightly more frequently in combat.
Make wooden Baseball bats craftable from logs.
Make firearms have a chance of degrading when firing them, rather than effectively never.
Stop weapons from disappearing when “broken”, and instead offer opportunities to repair them.

3: Items currently spawn into the game world either: Old, rotten, torn, dirty, or broken (pretty much everything except certain inventory items). You will almost never see a damaged toolbox, even if it was being carried in the hands of a zombie where everything else was broken.

Changes suggested:

Make repairing weapons easier by making it take 1-2 hotkeys, and remove things like “Basic Repair Kits” and “Gunsmith kits” in favour of just using intuitive tools and materials - potentially including just “Duct Tape on its own” for simple items.
Make the majority of items appear in the game world randomly damaged to simulate wear and tear since the apocalypse started. - Just like food, increase the number of broken and damaged (rotten) items over time.

Bonus suggestion: Have more “already wrecked” map squares. A house where windows are broken, walls and roof collapsed, or it has been in a fire and items (and zombies) spawned are burnt, damaged, and buried. Have these “ruined” locations be more common as the game progresses to give the impression that the world does not revolve around the player.

4: Tools never degrade, unlike armour, weapons, electronics (through batteries), cars, food, or buildings.

Changes suggested:

Make repairing weapons easier by making it take 1-2 hotkeys and simple, intuitive tools.
Make simple tools like stone knives degrade over time, while advanced tools will effectively never degrade.
Make crafting beyond your skill level have the chance to damage tools and well-being of the player, so as to introduce more risk into a less restricted crafting system (covered elsewhere).

5: Items in inventory or in play are effectively invincible.

Changes suggested:

• When the game is changed to move items to specific containers, make fragile items take damage if the player experiences massive trauma to that container - Much like falling on your keys, punched into a wall by a hulk can break the glass bottle of hydrogen peroxide you hit with your backpack.
• Change animal behaviour so they will actively seek to steal food and resources from the player, rather than just being wandering meals and zombie distractors. - They will attempt to break into a dropped bag, damaging items in their way, and damage food items while they “eat” them, lowering nutrition etc until destroyed and consumed.

Done. Entropy is now in Cataclysm, Repairing items sucks less and uses the same tools and materials you craft with anyway, system is minimally intrusive and can be modular to allow parts of the game players dislike to be removed.

[quote=“Thwap, post:54, topic:12277”]Am I seriously seeing someone talk about needing to oil guns and sharpen hacksaws? It’s asinine the way this game is being stomped to death in the name of realism these days.

The stupid boom cranes, filthy clothing, gun magazines, etc etc etc it’s just been getting worse for months now. The game now is just the game six months ago plus nerfs and tedium.[/quote]

The game doesn’t have to be sacrificed on the altar of realism, but just because something is realistic does not mean it has to be tedious.

You already need to repair guns. The only difference is that currently you use electrical current and a rare item, and they spontaneously disintegrate if they reach 0 HP. If my suggestion was “replace ammo of firearm repair kits with oil instead of batteries” then this would be more or less identical, except it would still more tedious than what I am actually suggesting, which would make repairwork less of a chore across the board.

Filthy clothing certainly needs fixing because the whole thing is very clunky and instrusive. As I’ve suggested in this thread, it should just be incorporated into general clothing maintenance in place of “reinforcing”, which is pretty pointless now anyway.

Gun magazines are really quite inoffensive now they’ve started spawning in the majority of firearms. I don’t mind very rare weapons being “broken and useless”, which is basically what having no clip is, any more than I mind vehicles spawning without wheels, battery or engine. When you can get spare magazines it can actually be pretty cool being able to reload quickly.

“Jacks” would be honestly be fine, except most scissor jacks that cars carry can’t even be used to change their own tyres, and considering there are 50 ton capacity bottle jacks for sale on Amazon right now for under $100, the current 6t limit one “and then ridiculous crane” is pretty daft.

So you’re right. This is a game first and foremost, “realism” should take less effort for the player than boiling water. Let’s try fixing jacks:

Scissor Jacks: 2t. Very Common Item found in cars.
Bottle Jacks: 6t, 10t, 50t versions available in garages, heavy vehicles, hardware stores, gas stations. 50t one is 28kg, so it’s pretty heavy, but just keep it in your car?
Construction Menu: Pulley System furniture: 4t jacking/lifting, needs a tree, a steel chain, some rope, some rocks and some scrap metal.
Mechanical Crane furniture item: Found in most garages. Infinite lifting/jacking weight.
Removing tyres from vehicles does not need a jack.

Tow truck crane: Specialised vehicle part with lifting weight up to 10t. Tow trucks added to potential vehicle spawns, only works while engine is running and crane is switched on.

Done. No tedious crafting a boom, attaching it, removing it, etc, all but absurdly heavy lifting is handled by having a single tool in your trunk, which plays will probably find in the same locations as welders. Worst case and you can’t find a jack, you have options available around town or wilderness to improvise, just as you do with welding equipment (makeshift jacks are a joke).

It’s now effectively a technology gate that gradually opens up bigger vehicles to the player, just like better tools open up better crafting options.

And the final test?

Boiling Water: You must find heating implement, container, water, sufficient quality Boiling Tool.
Making Car: You must find welding tool, sufficient quality Jacking Tool, appropriate vehicle parts.

Success. This feature is less complicated than boiling water.

[tarburst98]

it’s the number of changes that make it seem more tedious. needing to stop and repair one thing a day? slightly tedious, needing to repair 10 things a day? annoying, needing to repair 20 things a day? just plain aggravating. people are fine with needing to repair their gear after a big fight because it was the cost of having the big fight, but giving a cost to just walking around would not be fun.

[Pantalion]

@tarburst98

it’s the number of changes that make it seem more tedious. needing to stop and repair one thing a day? slightly tedious, needing to repair 10 things a day? annoying, needing to repair 20 things a day? just plain aggravating. people are fine with needing to repair their gear after a big fight because it was the cost of having the big fight, but giving a cost to just walking around would not be fun.

Alright, let’s work with that. - but remember that the absolute foundation of my suggestion is “Easy Repair”. I can only assume I’ve not managed to explain it clearly enough.

Let’s say you have a busy day. You butchered five wolves in the morning, and now your knife is a little blunt (let’s say your knife gets blunt “once per season”, and today’s the day). You fight a horde of zombies in the afternoon, and now your gun is a little run down, some armour is torn, and your broadsword is bent from where you parried a Hulk. In the evening you found ten items you want to keep, five are damaged.

Worse still, you just checked your backpack and falling off that balcony has dented your atomic lamp, cracked your E-PC and crushed the eggs you were saving for breakfast bird mutagen.

Okay, throw away the eggs, they’re gone. Now let’s say all the armour, weapons, loot, and broken gear you do actually have twenty items to fix.

When you get back to your hideout, you turn on your light source and press:

%: Open quick menu.
R: Repair Items.

Prompt: Automatically repair all items to good condition, Y/N? (No brings you to repair a specific item in your inventory, you may also select Repair from the item information screen if you go to it in your inventory).

Y: You use 5 plastic chunks, 1 nail file, 1 rock, 5 rags, 50 solder, 1 cooking oil, 10 Duct Tape, 50 Thread, and 1 copper wire.
Your character stays still and “crafts”.

One hour passes automatically.
Game Message: “You have repaired all your items.”

You, the player, have repaired: One time. No matter how many items might be repaired, you spend five seconds pressing “%RY”.

Do you understand where I’m coming from here? Wouldn’t that be so much better than the current system? More fun? Less menus?

Let’s make our example as “tedious” as we can: Multiple items failed to be fixed, and repairing now takes different resources:

Yes, this would be a problem in the current system. you must navigate several menus twenty times, once per item, once again every time you need to repair something, and you must select multiple different options or items for each type of item you repair. But with “Easy Repair”?

Game Messages:
“You repair as many items as you can. Some items are still broken.”
“You are out of thread! You need x30 more thread to repair Shirt”
“You need 1 x Kevlar Plate to repair Survivor Suit.”
“You need 1 Cooking Oil to fix Automagnum.”
“You need one long string to fix longbow”.
“You need one scrap metal to fix Broken Frying Pan.”
“You do not have a good enough hammer to fix Nail Bat.”

I appreciate this is very rough, and could probably be refined to give this information across better, but to me this is not “tedium”, it’s gameplay.

Your gear won’t break if you don’t repair it straight away, you might repair once a week. It doesn’t matter how damaged something is, since “%RY” would fix every item as much as needed. So you can have several items that aren’t totally fixed, and some you might never bother fixing (Repair blacklist), but you will have a low intensity “need” to get those things to repair your gear when you can.

And when you do find parts to fix all the broken items: %RY, or wait until your next routine maintenance: Extra chore for the player: 0-3 keypresses.

So tl;dr, as I’ve hopefully made clearer now, this is not supposed to be a “gameplay suffers for realism” thing at all, the two are designed to work together:

“Easy Repair” makes the game faster and more fun for every player by removing as much tedium from repairing as possible (Well, you could make it a one-button hotkey, I suppose?).
“Entropy” gives the player more reasons to scavenge and adventure (does anyone disagree that these are the fun part?) by increasing resource pressure.

End result: Less time in menus, more time adventuring.

[tarburst98]

You use 5 plastic chunks, 1 nail file, 1 rock, 5 rags, 50 solder, 1 cooking oil, 10 Duct Tape, 50 Thread, and 1 copper wire.

nope, see, you just introduced a resource drain.