Increasing loot rarity

[Ferodaktyl]

What about an option in the menu to increase the loot rarity by x times? I think there is too much loot as it is, also the drops are quite a lot, making survival much too easy. Not to mention cooking with rotten ingredients… or the ridiculous amount of ammo the turrets drop ( it should be destroyed mostly in the explosion).

Edit : also reduce the car’s durability to maybe 1/4 of what it is currently, normally 1 tree is fatal to most vehicles when hit at medium to high speed.

[AerialK7]

Meh, I think things are fine as they are. Especially the danger with turrets, you might not see one and bam, its all over.

[Ferodaktyl]

it should be an option, as in optional

[AerialK7]

Thatd make it more interesting, like a ‘hardcore’ (too mainstream name) mode, we could call it safari survival and theres no trees and theres hardly any food/clean water around. (except animals) And the only gun is the AK47. (im saying this mainly as a joke)

[i2amroy]

The current dev mode has added a “hardcore” trait (-6 point cost) that decreases the life of all of your limbs down to 25% of what they were before if you find normal mode too easy.

[Ferodaktyl]

The current dev mode has added a “hardcore” trait (-6 point cost) that decreases the life of all of your limbs down to 25% of what they were before if you find normal mode too easy.

this would make any melee styles unpractical. I am talking about the HUGE amounts of everything available to player from the first house to the countless bodies found lying in the middle of the road with caches of goodies.
After all, what is the point of survival if everything is for granted? After cleaning half of the first town (and not necessarily killing the zeds) the player has what he needs for the rest of the game, making further exploration redundant. I’d rather treasure a weapon i found a handful of ammo for, instead of not even bothering to pick them from everywhere.

As it is now, the game is a hoarder’s paradise (and nothing wrong with that, me being one of them), but, as i was saying, it is too easy after 2-3 days. So, a hardcore mode would be more than welcome.

[Hyena_Grin]

The world sure is full of stuff. Go figure. =P

There’s enough stuff in a town to satisfy the needs of thousands of people. If you suddenly take away the thousands of people then you have enough stuff to keep one person going for quite a while. It’d be weird if suddenly the houses and stores were suddenly empty. Where did all that stuff go?

I’m all for making survival more challenging but I think that’s best done by making the elements more unforgiving, improving monster AI/abilities, and making safety in general harder to achieve.

[Weyrling]

I would prefer increasing the difficulty of looting rather than decreasing the amount of loot, such as having a chance for any given building to already have some zombies inside.
Why are all the zombies congregating in the streets anyways?

[Hyena_Grin]

Yeah, more zombies in buildings (maybe even make some that don’t rush outside the moment there’s a noise). More locked stores (and alarm systems on stores). More locked doors in general. Windows with bars on them. Good gear like guns and ammo should sometimes be locked up in chests or closets or whatever.

You could reduce the number of residences by having more destroyed/burned out buildings, thus reducing the amount of gear in the outskirts of towns where people usually start looting.

Tools could break with overuse making it less a situation where once you have one hammer you never need to worry about hammers again.

There’s a lot of ways you can increase the value of loot by making it harder to get to, and making it something that needs to be replenished occasionally. But I dunno if I like the idea of just flat-out not having as much loot in buildings.

[dawnFinder]

Improving loot rarity is nice to give the game more of a survival horror feel where everything is precious, but what about when your character dies and future characters literally have nothing left for them? Aside from going Bear Grylls/outright regenning the world, of course.

I’m more for making each individual zombie more dangerous, perhaps giving ALL of them an actually immobilizing grapple to make up for their lack of speed, allowing them to wail on you until you break free or kill them. Having them more actively swarm you would also be nice, they should try to surround you rather than line up one by one through a window to be beaten down. I know they’re zombies, but seriously. Maybe take a page from Rogue Survivor and have zombie AI improve over the days/weeks?

There’s enough stuff in a town to satisfy the needs of thousands of people. If you suddenly take away the thousands of people then you have enough stuff to keep one person going for quite a while. It’d be weird if suddenly the houses and stores were suddenly empty. Where did all that stuff go?

In this case the buggy NPCs took them and moved to Glitch City to live the rest of their game-breaking lives.

Seriously though, it’s not like everyone just up and turned, leaving you to the rest of the town/village/city/City of Townsville. I suppose this would be less of a problem once NPCs are fixed and survivor groups are properly implemented.

[kevin.granade]

Good points, the excessive 9mm from turrets is definitely an issue, and that in particular should be reigned in.

What’s happening there is it’s pulling from a “robots” spawn list (scrap, power cells, etc) and a “turret” list (just 9mm) in a 4:1 ratio. Robots in general have a very high spawn rate to reflect the fact that the scrap they leave behind is what’s left of their bodies (where with other monsters there’s a corpse), and when robot spawn lists were augmented, I don’t think the sheer number of items generated was realized, hence the overload of 9mm. There are a couple of options for this, ranging from just adjusting the scrap/ammo ratio, to spawning (a semi-random amount of?) ammo with the turret and having it actually use it when it fires, and possibly have it have a chance of exploding when dropped.

In general I agree with the scarcity issue, as in things aren’t scarce enough. Going forward as we keep adding new necessities, (like craftable basic weapons) we need to make sure to push out the really good stuff (like some of the advanced guns) down in spawn rate so that there’s actually something to keep looking for. Item spawning in general needs looking at, as currently spawn rates are tied to the item itself, but then that rarity is relative to the other items on whatever spawn list the item is on, so balancing it is very non-intuitive.

There are lots of things we can do to maintain scarcity, lowering spawn rates is one, wear/breakage is another (either in-game, or before spawning items), and junk versions of things is a third (e.g. vehicle hulks instead of working vehicles). We’ll be looking at all of these.

[Slax]

Decrease ammo box (or whatever they may be) capacity to 25 or 30? 50’s a bit much.
Or have alternate turrets. Arcing, creeping electricity and such. Perhaps even non-lethal (stunning) ones and up the amount of zombies in labs and military installations. Don’t wanna get hit by a beanbag cannon while slashing zombies, eh? Tear gas sprayers. Eh, I dunno.
Lots of parts, no bullets.

[Austupaio]

Someone mentioned making gunstores harder to get into and someone else said bars on windows.

Just wanted to point out I’ve never seen a gunstore that didn’t have burglar bars.