On Zombie Clothing Drops

So yeah, currently zombies are coded to drop clothing 100% of the time; I’ve brought this issue up as a bug, but it’s one of those “Feature, not bug” things.

Unfortunately, it’s really, really time-consuming to sort through all these useless clothes to salvage something useful. That being said, zombie clothes are very useful in the early game for sources of sewing fodder and for layering.

In that case, I suggest that zombies only drop clothing upon being butchered. Alternatively, zombies drop more rags/leather/whatever and fewer usable clothes as time passes.

Maybe add a third option for stripping zombie corpses?

Use advanced inventory management, apply category filtering and ignore all the clothing. You can invoke it with [/] and set sorting preference with [ s ], then [c].

Even without the advanced functionality Cataclysm offers it takes me no time at all to loot what ever useful zombies have on them since everything that’s not clothing is on top of the list in the tile.

Butchering corpses for clothing… well. Yeah.
Stripping them… That’s what you do when you take the clothes.

It’s really just perfect the way it is.

No, it’s not. It’s clumsy and spammy. It generates thousands of garbage items that clog up the shift+v list and render it practically unusable without filters, which don’t get saved from session to session, making it that much more annoying.

Butchering them for clothing makes no sense. I prefer to comment out the item generation code that creates all the rubbish, myself.

That coding is what generates cash cards on corpses; so they’re reluctant to remove it. And there’s no JSON edit so we can’t fix it individually.

I figured it would take a significant amount of time to take clothing off corpses; unlike looking at the bags they dropped or rummaging through pockets. Hence I mentioned butchering; which has similar functionality.


That list is 5 pages long due to leading zombies into chokepoint where I could pick them off.
And there’s 7 more tiles of that since said funnel had a blade trap.

I also agree that the zombie clothing can safely be moved out of the code and into the JSONs where drops for everything else are defined, so that people who don’t want to deal with it can reduce the amount of it appearing.

If there are some kind of missing features in JSON item drop definitions that prevent this from being fully possible, then I think it’s a good excuse to get those features added.


That list is 5 pages long due to leading zombies into chokepoint where I could pick them off.
And there’s 7 more tiles of that since said funnel had a blade trap.[/quote]And even with advanced inventory management, some miscellaneous useful things are at the very bottom of the list. And filters for shift-V take time to setup every time.

No, butchering? What if the player doesn’t have a knife? The clothing is very useful for the player, such as one game I stripped and jumped into the river and swam across, then killed 1 zombie with a stick to get some clothes.

Then perhaps attempting to butcher a corpse without a sharp implement would let you strip them instead.

Or add a new button to strip corpses.

Ideally, we’d be able to get clothing drops to work like every other JSON.

I too feel the clothing drops in zombies is a bit spammy. zombies sometimes drop like 3 bras, or 4 pair of pants and stuff like that… Maybe they should drop a more realistic amount of clothes instead.

That coding is what generates cash cards on corpses; so they’re reluctant to remove it. And there’s no JSON edit so we can’t fix it individually.[/quote]
As Sean mentioned the real reason is that currently the Monster drop item spawning json code only supports the dropping of a single item. Once that is fixed (a mock-up of a potential syntax is available here), then it should be no problem to move clothing drops into the json and would definitely be something we would want to do.

It’s very easy to remove the clothing drops but keep the cash card drops. Zombies in my game still drop cash cards.

I like it the way it is. Why?

Because if you’re having to stop and look at every darn zombie, your doig it wrong.

Eh?

I think what he’s getting at is that regardless of what we do with spawns, it’s going to be reasonable for there to be a lot of stuff around, and artificially reducing the amount of stuff just to make sorting through it easier is unrealistic and game-y, as is “butchering” corpses to get their clothes off them.

I think a more productive way to go at it is addressing why sorting through stuff is hard. For example stacking/sorting/filtering when doing pickup.

As far as shift+v goes, making filters persistent between sessions would help a lot, as would adding an easy way to filter out damaged items. In general, colouring the text of damaged items red or similar would make them easier to ignore, and so on.

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:14, topic:5753”]I think what he’s getting at is that regardless of what we do with spawns, it’s going to be reasonable for there to be a lot of stuff around, and artificially reducing the amount of stuff just to make sorting through it easier is unrealistic and game-y, as is “butchering” corpses to get their clothes off them.

I think a more productive way to go at it is addressing why sorting through stuff is hard. For example stacking/sorting/filtering when doing pickup.[/quote]I agree on that point, but it’s still a good idea to get rid of functions like the zombie clothing generator, if for no other reason than that it prevents mods from altering the kinds of clothing the zombies drop.

halberdsturgeon: all reasonable requests.
Sean: Certainly, I’m all for having an improved clothing/item generator.

Careful with text-colors: colorblind devs/players, etc. Accessibility is a Thing.

As long as I don’t have to search through tons of clothes; then it’s all good with me.

The game already uses this exact same functionality in the clothing layers screen.