Hi.
I decided to craft some survivor armor for my melee character. For some reason I can’t find survivor suits on the list, although I meet the skill requirements. Actually, I couldn’t force them to appear even when I fiddled around with debug menu.
If I remember correctly, they were still there last autumn. Couldn’t find anything recent about this on the boards. Is my save bugged or have they been intentionally removed? If so, why and which item would provide equal functionality?
Judging by views vs. replies, the answer is not common knowledge. I guess I’ll continue and just figure out something else to craft.
It appears the obsolescence of suit recipes is flagged true (although I don’t know much about the internal workings of the game). Even loaded a 5 months old save where I literally was wearing a self-crafted suit. The recipes weren’t on the list anymore for that character either.
What is interesting is that masks, gloves, and boots are still there. If the removal was intentional, it’d seem to make more sense to either take all the survival gear away or replace torso/arms/legs recipes with new ones.
I hope someone who knows can still comment this at some point. Survivor suits have many times been my to-go armor and I admit that working for hours to meet the prerequisites (as I remembered them) yesterday and then seeing the recipe is missing pissed me off a bit =)
I’d assume the reason you got no replies so far is due to people being on easter holiday, as well as the fact that 18h ago (date of your starting post) would be around midnight in GMT - so timezones also apply.
Also the fact you did not specify what your current Practical Skills are (Theoretical doesn’t matter), whether you have books near you or not. You also did not specify which version of the game you are running - is it Stable, is it Experimental? If so, which specific build are you running?
With that being said, I can only add a few things about that:
I will be using the Latest Experimental at the time of this post (2022-04-18-0551).
Started a new character with 10 in all skills in a test world with no mods at all. And I can confirm that Survivor Suits don’t seem to exist anymore.
This is the reason why.
Survivor suits were renamed to be more descriptive(light kevlar jumpsuit, kevlar jumpsuit, steel-plated kevlar jumpsuit). Light kevlar jumpsuit is slightly weaker, kevlar jumpsuit is stronger, and steel-plated kevlar jumpsuit is weaker compared to originals.
This is, essentially, yet another one of those cases where things get renamed and you will never notice if you don’t read the PRs or spend hours on Github looking at what was changed - especially when some of the names for the PRs are not clear about what the changes were or have more to them than the title.
EDIT: to clarify what I said above: the PR’s name is “Update Materials for Survivor Suits”, and that does not imply that an item was either made obsolete or had a name change.
Although I have no idea what these “PR’s” are you talk about, this information is very useful. So the items or their new versions are there, just hard to find.
Tbh, I didn’t even occur to me to search some other site (Github) for game information. I think stuff like this should be more easily accessible to the players.
Oh, and I actually wasn’t complaining about the response speed. Just noticed that despite multiple views, apparently none of those who read the message had known the answer.
Anyway, thanks for the information. Now I know what to look for =)
Been trying to get the heavy suit crafted all night. Seems the requirements have been complicated and making the armor is even more tedious than it used to be. Takes ages and I couldn’t find a way to pre-practice this new quenching proficiency.
If you ask me, too much realism is being added at the expense of playability. Each year getting your character into properly crafted gear and a custom vehicle consumes more and more real time.
I’m sure these metal processing stages, welding rod requirements, and all other weird new stuff is very accurate. It just isn’t fun to play.
Survivor heavy armor’s utility was questionable even before these changes because of the high encumbrance and lack of enough storage space. Now it is as much as a meme item as the even more useless than before heavy crossbow which deals the same damage as a composite crossbow but takes forever to reload.
Just use intact heavy ballistic vests and, barring that, rely on mobility and speed until your character manages to scavenge one. Scavenging is almost always a better option than crafting in DDA. Here is my 2 cents rule of thumb for DDA: something that takes more than 1 day to be made is rarely worth crafting.
If all the changes in the name of realism for realism sake bother you and make playing the game feel more like an exercise in frustration instead of fun, your only options are to either play older versions or try the Bright Nights fork.
I guess I was a bit harsh yesterday. Was quite tired and a little bit frustrated.
For me crafting has always been a fun and original approach. More so than challenging the enemy hordes more directly. I like being able to gather a set of stuff during a couple of daring runs and then bunker up. If done well, you could just spend a year safely reading and tinkering away and emerge as an unwinnable god-character. It was enjoyable to grow out of having to keep worrying about scarcity and craft yourself into infinite self-sufficience =) My end goal is getting to a stage where you don’t have to focus on being careful or playing well and still always win. And preferably with risk as close to zero as possible.
I am not really opposed to realism. There are many merits to that. And I enjoy the fact the game is constantly evolving. I’m just not too happy about the changes progressively undermining my approach. The more you have to do scavenging runs, the less viable my strategy becomes.
I’ll give it another try and see how I can adapt. Wouldn’t be very interesting to always redo exactly same stuff every time.
I should add that there is an “Easy Proficiencies” Mod available, which essentially saves you the time you’d waste trying to figure out which proficiency path goes where and then spending months trying to achieve a fraction of the progress because “ha ha XP is tied to focus which will always be pegged at 20 or less !!FUN!!” - I am not sure who made the mod or its repository’s link, but if you use the Catapult Launcher, it shows up there.
Just be aware that if you are using the “Normal” Launcher (ie the classic one), you have to always make a manual backup of your mods before updating the game because someone decided that whenever the game updates, any mods that aren’t the specific ones that come with the game will be deleted, because “reasons” I guess.
Thanks, I’ll check that out. If it changes the UI into a more informative one, it’s really welcome.
However, I don’t think I want to change the actual mechanics of crafting. For me 90% of CDDA play time is just crafting, so I guess there’s much in there I enjoy. My problem is mainly with such material changes that require me to raid and scavenge more, while I’m actually trying to use the crafting system to avoid having to explore or see enemies at all =)
I admit that is not the most typical approach and I don’t really expect to be catered beyond a reasonable point. Still, some of the recent changes just seem to be complexity for the sake of complexity. The balance between deep enough to be interesting and just silly detailed is precarious.
I mean… I guess it’s feasible car parts can perma-break so we need colorful boxes to indicate it now needs to be replaced with an entirely fresh one. Not sure if it’s fun.
Then, welding rods, different types for different metals… /sigh.
Yesterday I realized they’ve added steel types with different carbon contents. And crafting them is gated behind uncommon books.
I think someone has a metal fetish in the dev team 
They’re trying to flesh out crafting and complexity for a few reasons, afaik.
The greater design goal is they want an emphasis on looted gear being better than crafted gear. Bunkering down and making everything you need should theoretically be possible, the idea is that the complexity of building the skillset to rival a factory is immense, and the effort should be represented in game.
Crafting before proficiencies, practical vs theoretical skill, and more material detail lead to some weird situations where you could read books for a few days, make gloves 16 hours a day for a week and then know how to assemble complex jointed metal armor. Proficiencies and practical vs theoretical knowledge let them create a more realistic progression of talents, representing that doing things without actual experience is really difficult, and takes a lot longer. I know back when they were first introduced, I spent what must have been two weeks holed up just making some survivors boots I think it was.
This may be more happy accident over intended outcome initially, but with the game moving away from one survivor one life to “you are your faction”, with player persistence across members, the idea of making crafting more difficult and more involved actually contributes to that, making a crafter an extremely valuable factional resource, who needs to be fed and supplied from the less technically talented scavenging teams. Work durations can approach more realistic levels as the player is either supporting or supported by other characters, and complexity can grow to match while not stopping gameplay entirely - If your crafter is spending a week working on armor plate, swap over to someone else and go find some complex advanced materials in town, without worrying about losing all the progress the craftsman put in.
In your particular play style, I’d probably just recommend turning monster spawn rate down. Keep individual encounters dangerous to make the crafted gear worthwhile, but finding supplies should be more fun if its only a handful of threats as opposed to dozens. No shame in changing that if you wanna focus on building and crafting, it is a sandbox for our own pleasure.
This faction thing is actually interesting. I hadn’t read much about it, but maybe always going solo doesn’t give me the most out of the game. Will have to experiment with that.
I just completed another run yesterday. Seems the metal types, weldings rods and car part degradation were less of a problem than I thought. It went well in the end and I got more or less invincible in a reasonable time frame. It is more tedious than it used to be, but if these changes are done for a reason and not just to grief people, I can accept it.
I don’t think I even need to tune down the mob count. Doing the scavenging runs doesn’t seem to be that challenging anymore. I was just really pissed about having to take the effort to do some extra runs, when I hadn’t anticipated what I needed due to changed mechanics.
I think I’ll take a little break now, but now that I know there’s a goal driving the change of these things, I’ll read up before next run to be sure I know what to pick up the first time around =)