Filthy clothes?

Game Talk The Bunker
41

Considering what zombies are known to do (beat people to death, then dismember and/or eat them), I’d say you have that exactly backwards - the outer layer stuff is the stuff that should be caked in filth. The inner layer should have a chance of just being typical human worn - possibly a bit sweaty, etc, but not necessarily bathed in human entrails or anything.[/quote]

Except are we going to take into account how you kill them? Can we even do that? If you are bisecting zombies with a nodachi, of course all of the clothes should be dirty. Heck, in most of the games that I play (only counting the survivors I get off the ground really), zombies have the potential to still be around for months on end, shouldn’t all of their clothes be filthy? I mean, where does their poop go after they have eating something? What happened to their skin be sloughed off in the initial acid rain? The majority of their clothing is tattered, so I doubt that it would protect the clothing underneath.

I do agree with you guys though, about more soap being made available. Actually, I would go so far as to say that using a bar of soap to clean clothing seems weird at best when you have bleach available. Bleach is hard on stuff though, so we should have jugs of detergent available as well in various closets and bathrooms, and under kitchen sinks. There should be tons (or at least the potential for tons) of detergent at the laundromat, and some at clothing stores, grocery stores, and gas stations (the ones with buildings).

But I do think that filth should be a thing for the player as well. Not necessarily as a penalty, but as something that provides a moderately long last, small bonus to moral, and something that has the potential to reduce your scent (assuming you use a non scented soap to clean yourself, perhaps luxury soap gives a little better of a boost to moral but it increases your scent for a while instead of reducing it. Sneaky sneaky! =^_^=). I say this because it would be nice to have more small home making things along the lines of the current shaving and hair-trimming kits there are already available that your character can do the sort of recapture pre-cataclysm living a little bit.

42

I’ve been saying for a while that some changes lately (few months now) have added more tedium than anything. Lots of great new stuff too, it’s not been all bad or questionable.

It might be better to add some of these things as mods to let people optionally try them and if they become popular to the majority, THEN roll them into the game. Seems better than upsetting a lot of people and/or then having to create mods to undo questionable changes/additions.

This IS experimental too, and experiments don’t always succeed. Removing new things than many end up really disliking should be on the table, IMO, and seem to push more towards doing some of this as mods or options.

Options (and optional stuff via mods) is a good thing. One of the great features of this game is how much you can tailor/customize/use mods to suit your own way of wanting to play.

I don’t think the filthy clothes add much but to me it’s less of an issue than some other recent changes/additions (I just don’t use the filthy stuff or mess with it - so it’s kind of like playing with a lower loot setting I guess). I really dislike the clip thing for guns - would’ve been a fabulous mod that I would’ve never used. I think the vehicle lifting stuff is pure tedium and on top of that the ways we deal with it are even more ridiculously unrealistic (boom cranes on shopping carts kind of stuff).

Most of dealing with vehicles is highly abstracted - like being able to repair tires, gas tanks, electronics, glass, body work - everything - with just a welder. Did changing tires REALLY need to become a highly detailed pain in the backside that doesn’t match that level of abstraction? That kind of thing.

43

The main problem with the initial implementation was that almost no guns came with a magazine, making the vast majority of guns you found useless (except shotguns and revolvers). That’s fixed now, and as long as you one magazine for the gun, you can act almost exactly like you’re using the no magazines mod, anyway - you can reload bullets into the magazine of the gun you’re using one at a time, just like the old system.

At this point, it seems to me like a straight up improvement - the old way still works fine, AND you can find additional magazines to make combat reloading actually reasonable. Am I missing something?

I think the “boom cranes on shopping carts” thing is more of a limitation of the current vehicle system - the concept is a good one (sure, manually pick up that V12 engine block and install it yourself! ROFLMAO). The problem is that a real lifting tool/system is going to require some level of support more than just “there’s a vehicle tile next to this one”, but the current system has no ability to check for more than that. Maybe that means the whole thing should be put off until it can be implemented better, but that’s my only complaint, really.

(And if you want to get really silly, I haven’t tried it, but if you’re using the vehicle mod, you should be able to attach a boom crane to a one-tile vehicle that is… a single wire.)

44

I am for your opinion very much.
SOAP is hard to find

45

If vending machines can largely work while being left out in the open despite there being ‘no power’, I don’t see why we can’t have some laundry machines in the laundromat that take payment from a cash card to clean clothes. Maybe allow repairing of substations to restore power to an area if you’re super dead against the idea of things inside being powered? Explain it away by saying most places are solar powered these days and therefore should at least work when it’s light outside?

It’d be cool if the arcade machines ‘worked’ and let you play that silly game from the handheld game. You could say that only really businesses could afford solar power to avoid having to power fridges in houses? There’s lots of fun things you could do with it.

The filthy clothes system doesn’t bother me in the sense that I literally ignore it - it’s just sort of making a large chunk of things I find be completely ignored by me. If that’s what you’re aiming for then sure, it works.

46

I was being facetious.

47

Yea, that’s what’s happening to me. I barely look at what zombies drop anymore because chances are there’s nothing worth saving. If I understand correctly the main reason this feature was added, was because of realism. Realism is great, good game play is better. Since this feature is deemed realistic I have my doubts that it’s going away, so I want to address the elephant in the room. Let’s talk about realism.

The only thing you absolutely need to clean clothes is water. Soap is great. Soap makes things cleaner, faster, and so much better (I totally can get behind needing soap). Never used a washboard for cleaning clothes. I’ve always rubbed the clothes against themselves. A washboard might be very useful but it’s not “needed”. Of course to get stains out, you need soap or hardcore cleaning supplies. That said if those clothes really have blood and guts that they have been soaking in for hours or days, it’s just not coming out in any short amount of time, or probably ever. They will probably reek and be stained forever. A few hours soaking in a bucket of soapy warm water minimum if you get then out at all.

Not sure if we care about stains though. This is the apocalypse. Not sure if we care about smell either you’ll will have Olfactory fatigue dealing with the smells of death all day long from all the zombies you will run into whether or not the smell is on your clothes. Humans aren’t very sensitive to smell. Dogs on the other hand are and having clothes that smell like bloody guts should make you harder to tell apart from other zombies. Anything other than stains and smells are going to come off with water just fine. Ring them out in a bucket.

My basic point is don’t let realism hold up good game play. The new system is only marginally more realistic (if that) than the old system at least in it’s current 2x4 scrubbing, non water consuming state. Depending on your play style it’s only slightly annoying. There’s plenty of room to do whatever you want with this feature without having to feel bad for making things less realistic.

Under the current system people will only clean really stellar items, like uncraftable clothes or difficult to craft clothes. I’m actually curious if anyone has taken the time to clean lot’s of zombie clothes and if so why and which ones. Guessing it’s not a common practice. Especially considering that cutting up dirty clothes gives clean components.

Making clothes easier to clean probably doesn’t decrease realism. It would make this feature less annoying, but of course it would also make it more pointless to include in the first place. Having dirty clothes make you harder for zombies to detect would make them a lot more interesting as a mechanic without sacrificing realism. Most of the things we could do at this point with the dirty clothes feature wouldn’t greatly affect realism for the worse in my opinion.

48

Now this is a good idea. If, say, 50% of clothes are dirty, it makes zombies a reliable source of clothing while still making zombie clothes harder to get. Not to mention that it makes more sense for some zombies to have lots of filthy clothes and others to be relatively clean instead of everything being utterly caked in blood and guts.

49

What’s the latest version of the experimental builds without this filthy clothes ‘feature’ ? Also is there a mod that disables this?

50

Here’s my opinion, 'cause it seems like it’s a new feature and discussing it might help change it for the better (if it even needs it!)

From what I’ve seen, before the update zombies would drop items that were badly damaged and basically useless unless you could be bothered repairing them. If you had a tailoring kit/whatever they’re called you could cut some of the clothes into rags and use those rags to repair the others. If you didn’t bother repairing these clothes would VERY quickly fall apart on you/not be of much use. Basically, to make use of any of these items you’d have to invest some time and skills into repairing them - they weren’t useful out of the box.

Now, these clothes not only spawn in a damaged state but also ‘filthy’, which provides a debuff if you wear it without cleaning. So now, you have to do everything I just mentioned AND THEN clean them, which makes sense if you think about it - the clothes of something you just bludgeoned to death are probably going to be quite messy. People are annoyed because it adds another step to the process.

Personally, I kinda like the idea of clothes going dirty over time - it gives me a bit of a Sims 3 vibe. I’d quite like there to be some sort of freshness scale that slowly decreases over time. The precise numbers are always up for debate and I don’t really know too much about game balance. Imagine that there are distinct ‘levels’ dictated by a number behind the scenes, much like Hunger or Thirst. It’s possible to change the rate of hunger/thirst via traits so it should be totally possible to change the rate of clothes going dirty (or disable it outright) via the options screen or maybe even via traits. You could have a ‘clean’ trait that slows down the rate your clothes go mucky when you wear them!

Fresh - clothes are ‘fresh’ out of the wash/brand new from a store. Some sort of morale boost for wearing fresh clothes - NPCs react better you while you’re wearing them.
[blank] - clothes are a day or so old. They’re still good to go and smell alright, but there’s no real morale boost from 'em - NPCs don’t change their opinion of you while you’re wearing them.
Worn - clothes have been worn for a couple of days. It’s reaching the point where you might wanna change them, but still no penalty - NPCs will look down on you slightly, especially if you’re asking them to trade etc.
Dirty - clothes have been worn for a while and now carry visible stains/a bit of smell. Your scent is stronger while you wear these, you get a small morale penalty and NPCs will look down on you similar to if you had taken the ‘ugly’ trait.
Filthy - clothes are… filthy. The sort of things you really wouldn’t put on unless you had no choice at all. Scent is much stronger, morale penalty is notable and NPCs will look down on you similar to if you had the ‘very ugly’ trait.

Maybe if you clean clothes just by submerging them in water they go to the [blank] state rather than the fresh state, which is reserved for those who use soap/laundry machines!

Have it take a couple of days to drop between each tier. It depends on the clothes and the temperature outside but I find that hoodies and pairs of jeans and things can go for a week or so provided I’m careful and don’t spill stuff on them.

I can see this being a bit irritating to some players who are used to not considering it, but I think it’d be a bit of fun. You have the choice of bothering cleaning your clothes vs just looting more from houses and shops as you go. Washing machines in laundromats should work and accept cash card payment.

It might also be an idea to have a ‘wet’ property for clothes, so freshly washed clothes need drying, and also your clothes can become wet if you are out in the rain for too long. Taking them off and leaving them near something warm makes them dry faster, with wet clothing restricting movement slightly. Wet jeans are THE WORST.

51

Kind of a bummer to me that one, this kind of discussion comes up with some frequency lately and then disappears, and two, that nothing seems to change. Plow forward with the misery and tedium…

52

I think mugling has a branch where they are working on some improvements.

53

So, I love this game and lately I do a run, don’t play for a few weeks, do a run, repeat.

And every time I play lately there’s something new that sucks. (and sometimes there’s something new that’s cool but it rarely offsets the depth of suck)

I don’t like the magazines, I don’t like the filthy clothes (and don’t like the font color since I can’t read it, nor can I read the color they’ve made things like salt and pepper), I don’t like the lifting equpiment nonsense. I mostly see all of this kind of stuff as tedium - and that’s all - added hassle to formerly smooth gameplay. I deal with them - use shotguns, don’t use any filthy crap since doing laundry IRL is plenty for me - it’s like turning down the loot rate, and carry around a cart with a boom to assemble/break down every time I need to dink with tires - because that’s REALISM (and tons of fun too).

Last time I played they changed how the vehicle control menu works to make controlling your lights a complete pain in the butt. I have no idea what this is supposed to help. People who build cars the size of stadiums? People who abuse vehicles to light/power land bases? To me it’s just an absolute pain because all I want to do is turn my one aisle light on/off and/or turn all my floods on/off without having to fill out a ballot popup every time I need to turn something on.

Ok, so somehow this individual light control is amazing for some masochist - grand. So why not just add that as ONE new item to the vehicle control menu and leave the rest alone? Then everyone could be happy - no functionality lost - mystery use functionality gained.

Been doing a run the past 2 days and finally get some vehicle stuff going and I’m like, wow. I have one flood on my rover car (cop car for gathering vehicle parts for the eventual death mobile) and I just had it completely drain my car’s battery in the amount of time it took to remove 4 solar panels from another car. WTF. The battery had to have been 50% or higher (and fully repaired of course). All of a sudden car batteries seem to be draining ridiculously fast.

So I get the death mobile rolling with a high five assist from a shopping cart with boom crane attached because it’s totally realistic that jacks can’t be used to change tires but the shopping cart boomer can lift a 30 ton vehicle - no problem. I have the usual 10+ storage batteries and vehicle batteries in with a roof full of solar, charged up to at least 50% while building it all out. (Side note, dunno if it’s vanilla or dacka, but the newish insane density and weight of storage batteries also sucks and makes my typical builds about 2-3x heavier, thanks, that was necessary). Anyways. I’m driving around with my 5 floods on (and consider that I stripped most of those from fire trucks with weaker engines, fewer batteries and MORE floods) and I’m noticing that even with the engine running and leaving it running as I hop out that charge is steadily getting lower and lower.

I could be imagining things but it seems like floods draw a city block worth of power now. Or thereabouts.

Then, of course, if you try to be efficient and turn the floods on/off constantly to save juice, you promptly go completely insane due to the annoying as hell individual lighting control sub menu thing.

In the end, I sort of feel like I’m being forced to play the game the way a certain dev or devs think the game should be played, and that apparently involves using a static land base and not using “death mobile” mobile bases, because so many changes lately seem aimed at making the whole large vehicle experience a royal pain in the tuckus and/or completely miserable (not that the wtf-factor has been limited to just vehicle changes).

So after having one of my floods knocked out, because zombies are apparently all high jumpers and oddly do damage to floods and solar panels that should be 8+ feet in the air, on a regular basis, I replace it, and now…twitch my floods that used to be all grouped together on the individual lighting submenu, are now split up. The ballot sheet popup quiz got scrambled by having to replace a flood. No. Noooooo! Boom. Mind blown. And done. I had fun for several hours but I guess it’s time to flee and return in a couple weeks/months and see what new forms of dev terror have been inflicted on this game.

I realize some of the things I don’t like are opinion issues - and some folks do like them (but then, some people like to pierce their genitals and faces, korean grinder style gamers do exist). But some stuff is more of the ‘wtf why’ variety IMO.

54

I can t remember a time when i have actually taken clothes of a z and wore them. It was either things i found in shops or houses beause they where undamaged or things i could craft myself.

Damaged clothes from zombies could only be reliably repaired by me by the time i could craft them myself anyway.

They are a source of raw materials for me.

55

Welcome to incorrect laundry simulator 2016.

I stopped on experimental from about 1.5 months ago. I doubt I’ll change until the stuff is fixed. The mags are okay. I rarely used many guns anyways since they are inferior due to ‘sound’. I mostly use silent weapons.

I custom edited the jacks so they can lift a realistic amount, the current is not realistic. It’s completely wrong since the jack lifts the weight of the whole car.

I’ve actually edited a bunch of the annoying stuff out in the jsons.

I agree with most of this, the game isn’t a few hours of fun with a lot of these changes.

Give it another year .D ‘might’ be ready for release by then.

56

[quote=“Valpo, post:54, topic:12072”]I can t remember a time when i have actually taken clothes of a z and wore them. It was either things i found in shops or houses beause they where undamaged or things i could craft myself.

Damaged clothes from zombies could only be reliably repaired by me by the time i could craft them myself anyway.

They are a source of raw materials for me.[/quote]

FYI: Your playstyle should not be the only playstyle.

Re: filthy. I think it is being worked on, but not very actively.

And if anybody wants to help, feel free to do so. Even something as simple as some balance changes in json files can be uploaded to github, so they could be added to next release.

I know I can also be a whiny bitch at times. But I have been trying to help a bit.

57

There are so many problems with the filthiness system that I have no idea why it got merged.

  1. The amount of time and resource investment compared to the potential pay-off is awful. The amount of water required to do it is absurd (You could basically clean any article of clothing with half a pot of water), soap is almost non-existent for some reason, and other things that can be used either don’t exist (Detergent) or do nothing (Bleach). This result in what is known as tedium. A more elegant solution would be flexible such as:

A) Works with no soap and lots of water,
B) Works with bleach/soap and a pot of water
C) Detergent, washboard, and bottle of water

So as to remove tedium by giving the player varying degrees of efficency for differing start situations.

  1. It is far too simulational for most players. Some simulation components are core to the experience, like butchering corpses to get meat–This is foundational to key skills like survival that not only present the character with obstacles, but also present them with areas to improve. There is no progression built into doing laundry and no sense of reward for getting better at doing laundry. It’s just laundry. I mean, literally a menial chore.

  2. The system is redundant. It was strictly added, from a design point of view, to limit how much a player could benefit scavenging berks. Not a bad idea, since in doing so you emphasize the usefulness of tailoring and quality clothes stores–However, a system is already in place to do just that, and far more elgantly. All deader clothing comes with some degree of often significant wear and tear on it. So now it’s a double jeopardy system where, by introducing two systems to discourage players scavving zombies, you decreased the chance they’ll want to engage with EITHER system! Awful design choice in this regards especially, since more veteran players will just simply disregard and play around the system instead of using it to increase their enjoyment.

58

[quote=“PogoMarimo, post:57, topic:12072”]There are so many problems with the filthiness system that I have no idea why it got merged.

  1. The amount of time and resource investment compared to the potential pay-off is awful. The amount of water required to do it is absurd (You could basically clean any article of clothing with half a pot of water), soap is almost non-existent for some reason, and other things that can be used either don’t exist (Detergent) or do nothing (Bleach). This result in what is known as tedium. A more elegant solution would be flexible such as:

A) Works with no soap and lots of water,
B) Works with bleach/soap and a pot of water
C) Detergent, washboard, and bottle of water

So as to remove tedium by giving the player varying degrees of efficency for differing start situations.[/quote]

I agree that it isn’t the greatest of mechanics. But the points adressed in 1 could be easily fixed with json additions. Which I haven’t seen any off.

Yeah, it sucks, but it is currently in, and not being removed, so best we make the bad situation at least a bit better wouldn’t you agree? Not like we are a democracy, nor have the people wanting filth not heard already from more eloquent people why the mechanic is bad.

(Yeah, im just trying to get you to do work on json additions. :slight_smile: )

59

If enough sterilant is used. You can/should be able to clean any filthy item. X Water + 4 portions of disinfectant(full bottle) = clean item up to a winter jacket, for example.

Cleaning something that is messed up with rotting blood and guts isn’t exactly difficult. Just nasty lol

60

If anyone wants an experimental from late last year before they decided to torture the game to death with “realistic” tedium, PM me. No magazines, boom cranes, or laundry.