My suggestions after playing Experimental

[Bumpkin]

As a relatively new player playing the experimental version, here’s what I’ve noticed.

• Weapon/Meds loot seem too numerous in houses when compared to gunshops/pharmacies/bars. The risk/reward ratio, for Static Spawn especially, seems to very strongly favour ransacking houses on the outskirts of town until one finds a basement cache instead of making a dangerous run for a gunshop/pharmacy. Either awesome-loot house basements should be reduced somewhat, or gunshops and pharmacies should have bigger caches.

• Weapon Caches sure do have a massive amount of guns, usually with at least three or four high-end exotic pieces. Often there’s not a single bullet to go with them, even in a gunshop. I don’t mind the ammo scarcity, but finding multiple P90s and laser pistols and not a single .22LR round is a little grating, and it really makes the lower-end guns worthless from a gameplay point of view when you’re almost guaranteed to find them alongside much better weapons.

• Crossbow Traps mean that crossbows sure are easy to grab for every level1 character ever, aren’t they? They seem like far too powerful a weapon to be so easily-obtained by a little wandering around and a face-disarm. Maybe a distinction could be made between modern carbon-fiber hunting crossbows which can be found in sporting good stores, and homemade medieval style two-by-four and a rubber-hose versions, which could be a much inferior weapon and used for trap-loading? Continuing this, the shotgun traps could be replaced with “naked choke” traps, or at least “sawed pipe shotgun” traps, to make the regular sawed-off shotguns a little less everwhere.

• Homemade Batteries should maybe be distinguished from regular batteries, and require some kind of adapter to use them (similar to the rechargable battery mod). I know there’s no way you can fit a chicken soup can into a AA slot.

• Meth Recipe uses adderall as a potential ingredient, but adderall is already amphetamines. Instead of the adderall/caffeine/energydrink choice, I’d recommend going with the non-drowsy cough syrup, a choice of Gasoline/Lamp Oil/Disinfectant, a choice of Lye/Bleach, some ammonia and a stack of 5 or 10 matchbooks (unless you’re worried that’s accurate enough to get this game placed on a government watchlist?) The matchbooks would still ensure the player couldn’t make a limitless quantity of meth without scavenging, and you could adjust the amount required to make the ingredients more/less difficult to gather up.

• Crack Recipe turns 12 uses of cocaine into 4 uses of crack. Shouldn’t rocking up make your coke go further?

• Heroin Recipe uses salt. For realism sake, this should probably be vinegar (specifically vinegar that’s been distilled, but unless there are other crafting recipes that could use acetic acid sticking with plain old vinegar should be fine). Also, this might get in the way of game balance, but it would be more realistic to make the heroin from poppy products (or possibly even codeine) instead of oxycodone.

• Roaches and Butts should be possible to smoke individually through a pipe for a shorter-lived fix. I had a tobacky-addicted character with only three cigarette butts left, wondering why he couldn’t smoke them. Also, cigar butts currently seem to be unusable in any form whatsoever.

• Poppy Sleep/Poppy Painkiller If you wanted more realistic names for these, Poppy Painkiller could be Thebaine. It’s one of the opiates distilled directly from poppy latex (along with Morphine and Codeine), and despite working as a painkiller it’s said to have a mild stimulant effect, so it could potentially produce pain relief without lowering a character’s stats (it’s also the precursor of Oxycodone, which doesn’t currently have a recipe). Poppy Sleep could be plain old Morphine, or Polish Heroin (a very crude type of heroin distilled directly from the latex and used as a folk remedy in rural parts of East Europe).

• AK-47 should be called the AKM. AK-47’s have been out of production for decades and are virtually nonexistent nowadays.

• Antiemetics could be a decent addiction to the current range of medicines. You could use them to keep from losing hydration so quickly when you’ve got the flu, or as a precautionary measure when going up against giant spiders or the like.

[FunsizeNinja123]

The minor things that people somewhat care about are stronk here.

[KA101]

Huh; the OP’s point on gun basements seems valid. Anyone else want gun-basements knocked down a peg? (They’re the ones with the horizontal/east-west shelves.)

[FunsizeNinja123]

Well I haven’t seen one in forever, so…

[vache]

I think they need to be a combination of more rare, and less filled.

[kevin.granade]

- Weapon/Meds loot seem too numerous in houses when compared to gunshops/pharmacies/bars. The risk/reward ratio, for Static Spawn especially, seems to very strongly favour ransacking houses on the outskirts of town until one finds a basement cache instead of making a dangerous run for a gunshop/pharmacy. Either awesome-loot house basements should be reduced somewhat, or gunshops and pharmacies should have bigger caches.

Probably a bit of both.

- Weapon Caches sure do have a massive amount of guns, usually with at least three or four high-end exotic pieces. Often there’s not a single bullet to go with them, even in a gunshop. I don’t mind the ammo scarcity, but finding multiple P90s and laser pistols and not a single .22LR round is a little grating, and it really makes the lower-end guns worthless from a gameplay point of view when you’re almost guaranteed to find them alongside much better weapons.

You missed the suggestion part, that’s a complaint. The rarer stuff should be rarer, that’s true.

- Crossbow Traps mean that crossbows sure are easy to grab for every level1 character ever, aren’t they? They seem like far too powerful a weapon to be so easily-obtained by a little wandering around and a face-disarm. Maybe a distinction could be made between modern carbon-fiber hunting crossbows which can be found in sporting good stores, and homemade medieval style two-by-four and a rubber-hose versions, which could be a much inferior weapon and used for trap-loading? Continuing this, the shotgun traps could be replaced with “naked choke” traps, or at least “sawed pipe shotgun” traps, to make the regular sawed-off shotguns a little less everwhere.

Traps and stashes need a bit of an overhaul yea, the whole concept of the stashes scattered around all over the place surrounded by traps is a bit hinky to be honest.

- Homemade Batteries should maybe be distinguished from regular batteries, and require some kind of adapter to use them (similar to the rechargable battery mod). I know there’s no way you can fit a chicken soup can into a AA slot.

Seems reasonable.

Don’t have much of an opinion on the drug stuff.

- Roaches and Butts should be possible to smoke individually through a pipe for a shorter-lived fix. I had a tobacky-addicted character with only three cigarette butts left, wondering why he couldn’t smoke them. Also, cigar butts currently seem to be unusable in any form whatsoever.

If they were in a state where you could still smoke them, why’d you stop? I assumed the point was that you smoked them all the way down, and you’d have to take them apart and re-roll them to get any more out of them.

- Poppy Sleep/Poppy Painkiller If you wanted more realistic names for these, Poppy Painkiller could be Thebaine. It’s one of the opiates distilled directly from poppy latex (along with Morphine and Codeine), and despite working as a painkiller it’s said to have a mild stimulant effect, so it could potentially produce pain relief without lowering a character’s stats (it’s also the precursor of Oxycodone, which doesn’t currently have a recipe). Poppy Sleep could be plain old Morphine, or Polish Heroin (a very crude type of heroin distilled directly from the latex and used as a folk remedy in rural parts of East Europe).

It’s not an opiate, it’s a drug based on a mutant flower that started growing after the cataclysm that somewhat resembles a poppy.

- AK-47 should be called the AKM. AK-47’s have been out of production for decades and are virtually nonexistent nowadays.

A bit over-specific for our purposes.

- Antiemetics could be a decent addiction to the current range of medicines. You could use them to keep from losing hydration so quickly when you’ve got the flu, or as a precautionary measure when going up against giant spiders or the like.

Sounds like a plan.

[Zireael]

I think I agree with the entire OP.

[acehawk]

I also agree with almost everything here, especially the part about houses being too op and stores being comparatively worthless. Something that galls me is how I’ve only found a bow type weapon in one out of maybe 5-15 sporting goods stores and I’ve never found arrows or bolts in them…

About the batteries, maybe we could have used batteries as part of the homemade battery recipe, that could make them compatible? I don’t know much about the science behind it though.

[Zireael]

You don’t need to find bow type weapons, you can make them yourself…

[acehawk]

The point being, it’s not realistic, and there are a few that you cannot make.

[FunsizeNinja123]

You don’t need to find bow type weapons, you can make them yourself…

But reflex, recurve, and composite can’t be crafted.

[Cat09]

despite how much I do find it irritating, not finding much ammo is a bit realistic… but only if you consider NPC looting, after all, what do you do when you find a huge stash of guns and ammo? maybe take a gun upgrade here or there… and take almost all the ammo.
it stands to reason that an NPC would act somewhat similarly, if only taking ammo for their current weapon, perhaps.
that being said, should this activity be emulated before working NPC activities are in?

[acehawk]

Except compare the amount of ammo found in sporting goods stores(pretty much all of which carry arrows in reality) to the amount found in gun stores. Also, how many people would loot arrows? Most people wouldn’t even think if it as an option, since it really isn’t for anyone who isn’t skilled in their use, which isn’t many. They would all be going after gun and bullets.

[Blackopsman9999]

Except compare the amount of ammo found in sporting goods stores(pretty much all of which carry arrows in reality) to the amount found in gun stores. Also, how many people would loot arrows? Most people wouldn’t even think if it as an option, since it really isn’t for anyone who isn’t skilled in their use, which isn’t many. They would all be going after gun and bullets.

Some people don’t even know what a bow is…
So yeah, arrows, almost no-one would take them but like 1 out of 10 people.

[Khrysanth]

Some thoughts:
In the event that the shit hit the fan, everybody would be going for some place to get a gun.
This causes some problems:

[ol][li]The people who get there first will take them.[/li]
[li]The people who get there next will try to take them from the first group.[/li]
[li]Lots of ammo will be expended. People will be killed and injured.[/li]
[li]Lots of noise, lots of new zombies. Very little ammo left.[/li]
[li]The survivors will take their haul to someplace “secure”.[/li][/ol]

Thus, having most of the guns and ammo in houses makes sense. Signs of “something having happened” might be nice though - brass casings on the floors, for example.
Bows, on the other hand, would be virtually left untouched.

As an aside, I’d like to see more signs of stupid looting: Electronics, alcohol, jewelry, etc. The luxury things that have nothing to do with survival, but that are always taken in the event of riots and emergencies.

[Bumpkin]

Good point about people wanting to loot as much ammo as they can carry but only a couple of guns. That could also explain why exotic/rare/speciality ammo is about as prevalent as common calibers.

From what I’ve seen so far looking into the game files, the best way to create “pre-looted” buildings might be in the mapgen files ; making carbon copies of already-existing buildings but then smashing up the windows and exchanging the loot for spent casings, dead bodies, and whatever items looters would probably ignore. Would I be wrong about this?

[Zireael]

[quote=“Khrysanth, post:15, topic:6059”]Some thoughts:
In the event that the shit hit the fan, everybody would be going for some place to get a gun.
This causes some problems:

[ol][li]The people who get there first will take them.[/li]
[li]The people who get there next will try to take them from the first group.[/li]
[li]Lots of ammo will be expended. People will be killed and injured.[/li]
[li]Lots of noise, lots of new zombies. Very little ammo left.[/li]
[li]The survivors will take their haul to someplace “secure”.[/li][/ol]

Thus, having most of the guns and ammo in houses makes sense. Signs of “something having happened” might be nice though - brass casings on the floors, for example.
Bows, on the other hand, would be virtually left untouched.

As an aside, I’d like to see more signs of stupid looting: Electronics, alcohol, jewelry, etc. The luxury things that have nothing to do with survival, but that are always taken in the event of riots and emergencies.[/quote]

This is a great idea.

[KA101]

[quote=“Khrysanth, post:15, topic:6059”]Some thoughts:
In the event that the shit hit the fan, everybody would be going for some place to get a gun.
This causes some problems:

[ol][li]The people who get there first will take them.[/li]
[li]The people who get there next will try to take them from the first group.[/li]
[li]Lots of ammo will be expended. People will be killed and injured.[/li]
[li]Lots of noise, lots of new zombies. Very little ammo left.[/li]
[li]The survivors will take their haul to someplace “secure”.[/li][/ol]

Thus, having most of the guns and ammo in houses makes sense. Signs of “something having happened” might be nice though - brass casings on the floors, for example.
Bows, on the other hand, would be virtually left untouched.

As an aside, I’d like to see more signs of stupid looting: Electronics, alcohol, jewelry, etc. The luxury things that have nothing to do with survival, but that are always taken in the event of riots and emergencies.[/quote]

Depending on the electronic, it may well have value post-apoc. Atomic coffeemaker as perpetual electric stove, anyone? Booze and jewelry would likewise have value as trade goods as well as appearance/recreational gear.

Agreed that they’re not the most immediately practical grabs, but if everyone’s holding a shooting match around the outdoor-survival stuff, having tradeable stuff might not be a bad fallback.

[kevin.granade]

[quote=“Bumpkin, post:16, topic:6059”]Good point about people wanting to loot as much ammo as they can carry but only a couple of guns. That could also explain why exotic/rare/speciality ammo is about as prevalent as common calibers.

From what I’ve seen so far looking into the game files, the best way to create “pre-looted” buildings might be in the mapgen files ; making carbon copies of already-existing buildings but then smashing up the windows and exchanging the loot for spent casings, dead bodies, and whatever items looters would probably ignore. Would I be wrong about this?[/quote]
Very close, we can write a few templates to apply on top of existing buildings like ‘looted’, ‘firefight’, ‘last stand’, ‘overrun shelter’, and apply them to the existing buildings. Probably we’d want to either whitelist or blacklist the template/building combinations since some might interact badly.

[acehawk]

There could be a weighting for likely combinations, like firefight and gun store. A low weighting example would be firefight and fast food or coffee shop.

Also, why aren’t gun stores better fortified? Don’t they typically have at least retractable gates over the windows and heavy metal doors? This would be an excuse for why some gun stores aren’t looted.