So I have been deciding to drop my rucksack (the 120 volume backpack) right before combat to avoid penalties. If you drop a backpack with items (by dropping all the volume it was carrying at the same time) it takes more or less one turn, if you don’t drop anything (just the backpack) you can keep carrying everything (while moving or fighting as well) with some penalties however, it now takes roughly a turn per item dropped to drop them. It even seems to take less time to pick them up, because stuffing 5x rags in something wouldn’t take long anyways… This even caused a death because of this inconsistency. It would also be nice if you could drop things in bulk faster, but I only tested dropping items where backpacks were involved so I don’t know the normal dropping behavior.
Scenario: I see a survivor zombie and want to test whether or not I can kill it, I know I can run if things go badly and retrieve my backpack later. While trying to drop my backpack a key was accidentally pressed before I could drop everything. I assume I can’t fight well while carrying stuff in (nothing?) “storage”… so I try to drop everything. I assume that it woudln’t take long to drop everything, since it never did before. It closes the 5 space gap and I stop dropping things, I’ve dropped almost nothing so far. I would die before I could drop everything, or have speed penalties from damage took. Either way I can’t fight it, and I can’t run from speed penalties from either damage or “carrying” things. I then found out that its armor absorbs most of the damage from my punches. A single key press equaled an unavoidable death, with the only other mistake being not that I did not know how strong a survivor zombie was before hand. Without this bug I could have simply ran.
This (exploit?) bug shouldn’t be allowed, and if it is then dropping a backpack with items should take the same amount of time as dumping them in bulk to avoid weird inconsistencies, because if it behaved the same way everytime that death would have been avoidable.
Ideally each storage should simulate holding items, so when you drop your backpack it would always drop the same items along with it rather than letting you switch items around in your backpack while dropping it. This would also make it a bit easier to handle large inventory lists if you could select an item’s storage individually. There would then be a prompt to (or an option to always) rearrange volume optimally if it would better use the item’s storage.
Alternatively you could just force a player to drop excess volume, although this method is a bit less realistic since you can rearrange what is in your other storage and backpack freely in that one turn. This is in 0.B.
This is exactly where we want to go eventually. That said this post would probably be better off in the Drawing Board board than the Bunker board.[/quote]
My mistake, I saw gameplay under the bunker and didn’t think to look at the rest of the list. Admittedly I was a bit flustered when I started writing that. Could a mod move it to the drawing board please if it belongs there? Thank you.
Edit: It seems like the garage would be more suitable, since this is more of a bug/ exploit report than a suggestion.
No, it’s more of a suggestion than a bug report.
This extra volume penalizes the player rather heavily, which makes it a rather bad exploit, and it can’t be simply fixed like a bug. It needs an entire system designed around it to fix it, so it’s a suggestion.
Consider backpacks getting ripped apart in combat. What should fall out? Biggest items? Random items including meds that probably wouldn’t be stored in the backpack but in pockets?
I imagine my problem with this “exploit” could be fixed fairly easily. If it isn’t possible to just not allow the player to drop something that gives storage that is storing something, then at least make it faster to drop things in bulk. To make the current situation make sense, you would have to be carrying all of this storage in a bundle with your arms so it should be possible to simply drop it which fixes the part that I find buggy. That dropping a bag with items takes one turn but accidentally pressing a single key can turn that into a 100.
I am assuming that the carrying penalties are already very severe so this could be a death sentence in some circumstances. At the very least a Y / N promt could be asked before dropping your bag (while carrying excess volume) to avoid the main problem entirely. Finally you could make dropping items above your carrying capacity take 1 turn rather than normal dropping behavior.
What currently happens when your bag is ripped open in combat by the way? Do items spill all over the floor, or does your character rush to grab the torn pack to keep everything from dropping? If its the former then I would expect both behaviors to be the same. If its the latter then I suggest it drops at random instead, and after combat you can sort through it, rather than being penalized in combat because a damage roll happened to hit your backpack. Although that isn’t as big of a problem if you could simply drop it afterwards…
The solution to this problem is going to have to be a major overhaul of the current inventory system, ideally allowing containers to separately hold items based on its capacity.
Thus when you drop a backpack, everything inside the bag is also dropped (as it would be in real life).
I don’t know how the current system works (I assume there is some “Character inventory volume” variable which determines total capacity for items and is itself, the sum of the equipped containers’ volume values.) but any system which attempts to do the above is very different from what exists right now.
I’m going to post some of my ideas on this on the suggestions, hopefully we can get the ball rolling on this one for the next release (if isn’t rolling already).
While we wait for an inventory overhaul for this, I’d appreciate just a dialogue box asking if the player is sure about dropping items if it concludes that the action puts the user at risk. Also, a bit more transparency as to how long a dropping action is going to take. I’ve read that dropping a backpack and 40 volume of items should take about the same amount of time as just dropping the bag. Is this true? I just died in my most recent game because I got ambushed around a corner, and I must have over selected the amount of items to drop with my bags (or under) since it decided to drop each item individually. Considering that I would have had zero chance in combat while carrying the stuff I was carrying, I just had to spam the y key for a while, and then watch the wall of text describing me dropping each item, and then take two swipes at the enemy before tombstone time.
If there had been a pop-up saying something like, ‘your current drop selection will take xxx turns to complete, continue?’, I could have said no and tried my selection again until I found a way that most approximated the dropping of a bag filled with stuff.
We’d very much like to switch to a system where items actually live in worn containers, but it would be a rather gigantic overhaul. it happens when someone able and willing to do it gets time.
Simply disallowing dropping worn items if it will take inventory capacity ‘negative’ is an option, and I might look into that soon-ish. The tricky part is what to do when a worn container is destroyed, right now it’d just have to drop items at random until you’re back under max volume.
I suspect the code for only charging you moves for dropping a container and not its contents* is broken.
*The player chooses the contents, so not really contents, but it’s a semi-reasonable way to handle it right now.