Items you find in the game are often all or nothing and I think making the items more granular could help.
Some examples:
Armor. You find one full suit of armor and you suddenly go from dying from bites to being able to take on a small horde of normal zombies.
Ammo. You find ammo in large stacks. So you go from being unable to shoot at all to being able to shoot a lot.
Books. Many of the books contain very large number of recipes and the skill books often allow you to train several levels.
(melee) weapons. At lower levels the self made weapons kind of suck. One well made real weapon found and you are good for combat.
In all of these you can easily go from zero to best normal in single lucky find. I think it would be better if all of these had more steps in them.
Armor. Split all full body suits to pieces (like the chain mail already is). Remove full sets from drops or make them very rare. To counter the need to find many pieces the ammount of armor you can find should increase too.
Reduce the size of ammo stacks that you can find and make it more comon to find ammo.
There should be more smaller books. They would have only small number of recipes and they would train max one level (and many of them wouldn’t train at all). Also increase ammount of books in the world.
Melee weapons are a bit trickier to split into pieces. Some of them could be replaced by “partially good” weapons. Like an awl pike that has a low quality shaft on it. Disassemble to get the awl pike blade and craft a new shaft for it (much smaller skill requirement than making the awl pike from scratch).
The result would be more consistent experience. Instead of relying on getting one jackpot item you would be fairly confident that every now and then you would find an item that gets you one stop closer to the good item.
Ammo in particular is something I’d like to see have a bit more variance. It seems like currently you only find ammo in full “boxes” of something like 20 or 50 depending on type. When you find guns they are either fully loaded or empty. It would take some work to balance but it seems like it might make sense if zombie cops and soldiers (and similar) had a very high chance to drop small amounts of ammo and/or partially loaded guns and magazines.
Pretty much instead of occasionally finding a full box of 50 9mm cartridges from various random zombies, I might find that most zombie cops drop a badly damaged handgun with less than half a magazine and possibly a few loose cartridges. Sort of like how normal zombies recently started dropping partially charged cell phones and stuff; instead of hoping to get lucky find full stack of batteries, you can reliably scrape together a small supply of batteries by unloading cell phones.
Now that Ammo granulity I like the sounds of. Finding a few bullets or a partial magazine on cop zombies especially. Making guns a little more than an all or nothing. It’s kinda weird everyone only carries fully loaded boxes of ammo. Though I would hope the total ammo amount wouldn’t drop too much, it can be tough for gun toting characters and I’m yet to find a way to make more ammo though I am still rather new compared to most people on here.
Partially loaded mags are indeed cool, since they also make it look like whatever dropped it went down firing. It’s hard to imagine single pieces of medieval gear considering the situations where they spawn (exposing a single chainmail leg on a museum/mansion is not really cool) and please, no more recipe books. Sucky medieval weapons already exist, but you still need to craft a good one from scratch.
May come as a surprise to people not being familiar to firearms. But most folks actually do keep their ammo in very tight groupings and in special areas to avoid A)being arrested by dumb mistakes B)having anyone screw with it.
I found the ammo to be rather well done. If a tank for example were deployed. They maybe in the last stage of the apocalypse and most would have been a last ditch effort. The ammo supplies being abundant makes sense.
What doesn’t make any sense is the police cars not having several items: Random low chance of a shotgun in the front(loaded or no) 8-12 shells for the shotgun in the passenger side(simulate glove compartment). A few road flares in the trunk with a random assortment of a: wrench, hammer, screw driver, jack(any kind) and possibly small amounts of 9x19/12 gauge ammo. Oh and a first aid kit. All random. Did I mention random? xD
Wouldn’t mind a few modular pieces in regard to suits. But many already are. I don’t think I ever played with suits. I just hate how much crap encumbers me over 10 lol
(I REALLY hate having any stats/skills lowered from encumbrance)