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A Renaissance Nerd posted:I didn't recall the mutagen just spawning, only a variety of samples to cook up your own but I'm likely just misremembering. In experimental at least, labs have no mutagen in normal rooms. Maybe 1 in 20 lab map squares has a "vault" that contain something awesome like a mutagen vault or a cybernetics vault. The mutagen vault has literal 30L barrels full of mutagen, 10-20 various primers, and 10-20 mutagenic catalysts. Also the best way to get most of the books is from zombie scientist drops, which are extremely common in labs. esquilax fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Mar 25, 2024 |
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Mar 25, 2024 17:52
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A Renaissance Nerd posted:I was more wondering how to get the books for cooking it up. I thought the notes only spawned in TCL, subway labs, and overworld labs, although looking at the Hitchhiker's guide it also looks like Retirement Homes have a decent chance of spawning them? Retirement homes have a hidden lab in them, very rarely. You'll have to knock over quite a few retirement homes before you find one. Prisons can also have these.
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Mar 25, 2024 18:21
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Gwyneth Palpate posted:Retirement homes have a hidden lab in them, very rarely. You'll have to knock over quite a few retirement homes before you find one. Prisons can also have these. Well that's some diabolical VaultTec poo poo
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Mar 25, 2024 18:27
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Arrath posted:Well that's some diabolical VaultTec poo poo They're not supposed to be XEDRA labs, they were designed as some entirely different thing that doesn't use sci fi tech. So if there are mutagen books down there, it's an error. IMO it shouldn't have been merged as it's confusing, or it should have just been made into a XEDRA lab, but 
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Mar 26, 2024 00:21
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To be clear, I've never found any of those personally. I just know about them because I look at HHG way too much.
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Mar 26, 2024 00:25
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Hi, yes, please adjust the criterias for heat slow down/overheating during summer because the thresholds for it now are obscene. Tia Or at least add an aclimination mechanic, but to be blunt your character should be mostly acclimated/acclimate quickly. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 03:29
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Telsa Cola posted:Hi, yes, please adjust the criterias for heat slow down/overheating during summer because the thresholds for it now are obscene. Tia As a Californian, I can confirm that it is entirely realistic for 75 degrees to desiccate a human in seconds and for 65 degree weather to be cold enough to cause frostbite.
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Apr 4, 2024 10:58
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Dirk the Average posted:As a Californian, I can confirm that it is entirely realistic for 75 degrees to desiccate a human in seconds and for 65 degree weather to be cold enough to cause frostbite. I just want to read books in my cabin whike wearing a t shirt and pants and not be told that it's too loving hot.
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Apr 4, 2024 18:08
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Telsa Cola posted:I just want to read books in my cabin whike wearing a t shirt and pants and not be told that it's too loving hot. Pants? In 70 degree weather!? You madman!
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Apr 5, 2024 11:16
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Is there a good early game crafteable weapon like the cudgel? I miss that and the weighted version that must have been removed. I tried knives on sticks that did decent damage but kept falling apart and the police baton I'm using isn't getting through swat zombies armor. I also tried making the two-by-sword, nail plank, and some kind of plank zweihander but they're all so slow I get hit three times for every swing. Resorted to just mag dumping groups of zeds using ammo from a police station but I'm playing a semi rural world so guns and such are kinda rare.
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Apr 5, 2024 16:27
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AmishSpecialForces posted:Is there a good early game crafteable weapon like the cudgel? I miss that and the weighted version that must have been removed. I tried knives on sticks that did decent damage but kept falling apart and the police baton I'm using isn't getting through swat zombies armor. A pipe mace (or great pipe mace if you can stomach the slower swing speed) is a very serviceable early game weapon. These are good because stuns no longer work on zombies. Both pipe maces have the sweep attack ability, which does a knockdown instead of a stun. The old cudgel used to rule because it swings super fast and procs stuns like crazy when using Brawling, which meant you could lock down a single zed basically indefinitely. This is no longer the case and stuns basically never proc any more. (Great) pipe maces are improvised weapons, so they do break fast. However, their materials are very available. If you find a radio tower, go bash down all the fencing and metal posts, you will get tons of pipes and pipe fittings. Alternatively, early-game spears are pretty good since they have reach attacks. A knife spear (read: not simple knife spear, though these are also okay) has the durable melee flag, so they'll last quite a bit longer. You want to use reach attacks with these, as a melee attack only does 70% of normal damage. They are fiddlier to use in combat, but keep you very safe, especially if you can skewer enemies from behind a fence or something.
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Apr 5, 2024 17:01
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Thanks! Stuns would explain why I remembered cudgels as being so good. Will tab targeting and staying still auto attack at reach or do I need to hit f to "fire" the spear?
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Apr 5, 2024 18:33
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Telsa Cola posted:I just want to read books in my cabin whike wearing a t shirt and pants and not be told that it's too loving hot. You're not taking any penalties to reading books in your cabin, except you might need a bit more water. The penalties are only to running around and fighting. Temperature in this game is hosed though. Tab works for reach attacks.
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Apr 5, 2024 19:22
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Temperature in this game is a great argument for why you should always be a cyborg. The internal climate control CBM and advanced nomad jumpsuit (or the nomad plate armor), each on their own, can handle about 330 days of the year, and you can combo them for the remaining 30. This lets you do essentially whatever outside in your full chainmail armor without penalty all year. Everyone else just has to stay underground. Might be a little more difficult now that Trickle Chargers have been nerfed directly into the trashcan, who knows.
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Apr 5, 2024 19:46
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I think it means you just plug a cable charger in or eat a couple of batteries every day.
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Apr 6, 2024 03:26
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I assume you can't just eat a few doors anymore?
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Apr 6, 2024 03:35
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Metabolic Interchange also does good work. I'll put in 24,000 kcal days clearing cities sometimes and a good portion of that is running the AC. You don't eat batteries any more, they go into a compartment. I also had the gasoline generator but took it out to reclaim 5 torso encumbrance.
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Apr 6, 2024 03:58
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Do the bench tools like table saw, hydraulic press, et al, have a specific use or are they tools to just have so you dont need to reload batteries into circular saws and power drills? i found some dudes basement workshop as well as a hydraulic press, so now i got 7 of the table tools set up, and i have no idea if i needed to drag them home at all, i just took them because goblin mode
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Apr 6, 2024 08:35
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One of the devs randomly decided that pain was too forgiving and now it's way more punishing than it already was. Now they're talking about how adding a fifth fatigue meter is going to fix it so we should just wait for that. On the other hand, instability got removed so there's no more waiting for weeks every time you want to mutate. worm girl fucked around with this message at 10:30 on Apr 6, 2024 |
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Apr 6, 2024 10:19
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worm girl posted:One of the devs randomly decided that pain was too forgiving and now it's way more punishing than it already was. Now they're talking about how adding a fifth fatigue meter is going to fix it so we should just wait for that.
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Apr 6, 2024 11:47
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winterwerefox posted:Do the bench tools like table saw, hydraulic press, et al, have a specific use or are they tools to just have so you dont need to reload batteries into circular saws and power drills? i found some dudes basement workshop as well as a hydraulic press, so now i got 7 of the table tools set up, and i have no idea if i needed to drag them home at all, i just took them because goblin mode There are a few recipes where you can get better yield or faster completion time by using the furniture variety. For example, a table saw or band saw will cut planks much faster than doing it with a wood saw. These are all special-cased, though. Look for items that have multiple recipes. Usually the harder-to-get tool will be better at it in some way. Other times, though, it's not necessary. In particular, most electric tools that take batteries can also be plugged into the wall, so there's no explicit need to have the furniture version unless it has a better tool quality or a special-cased dedicated recipe.
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Apr 6, 2024 16:05
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worm girl posted:One of the devs randomly decided that pain was too forgiving and now it's way more punishing than it already was. Now they're talking about how adding a fifth fatigue meter is going to fix it so we should just wait for that. I'm glad i just dev mode myself into a end state mutant on day one and power fantasy and its the really big gently caress ups that get me killed. like walking into the LIXA 2D laser room after getting knocked down the elevator shaft and not dying from the fall, but not being able to climb my way out.
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Apr 6, 2024 16:55
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Well time to edit the pain resist mutation to about double value I guess
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Apr 6, 2024 18:03
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worm girl posted:One of the devs randomly decided that pain was too forgiving and now it's way more punishing than it already was. Now they're talking about how adding a fifth fatigue meter is going to fix it so we should just wait for that.  I really don't understand these people. Their definition of fun is drastically different from mine I guess.
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Apr 6, 2024 19:00
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Galaga Galaxian posted:
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Apr 6, 2024 19:03
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winterwerefox posted:I'm glad i just dev mode myself into a end state mutant on day one and power fantasy and its the really big gently caress ups that get me killed. like walking into the LIXA 2D laser room after getting knocked down the elevator shaft and not dying from the fall, but not being able to climb my way out. That sounds absolutely awful. Galaga Galaxian posted:
They just don't play the game. They used to play it. They talk to people who play it. They think about it. They add stuff and debug it onto a day 1 character and run around for 5 minutes and go "hm OK that didn't crash the game" and mistake that for being a current and active player who knows a lot about the game. They'll argue that saying the devs don't play is "a harmful meme", but they didn't realize that there were ferals with guns in the game for like two straight years and flipped out when they found out about it. Someone complained that the Nuckalavee (an extremely common monster added months ago) was too strong, and the dev response was "hm, anecdotally it sounds like these guys might be overtuned" - anyone playing the game for any significant amount of time recently has encountered a nuckalavee thanks to the portals that are absolutely everywhere these days. That no dev noticed is just crazy to me. Then they sit on the dev discord and circle the wagons when players complain. A lot of player complaints are stupid or at least ill-informed, but the developers have also made some completely wretched decisions that do merit complaint. Insulating themselves from the former has caused them to insulate themselves from the latter. The guy who added portal storms openly admits that they blow rear end. He tried adding a mod to turn them off and the idea got rejected. The person who hosed up mutagen disappeared off the face of the earth. I tried implementing a better system than their half-baked one and it got rejected. A second major problem is that a couple of the devs have a habit of introducing sweeping changes to the game, except they just do the first part of it and then flutter off to do something else without ever finishing. This is why exodii are half-baked. This is why beaches are half-baked. This is why hunger is half-baked. This is why weariness is half-baked. That's all the same guy, and nobody's really allowed to argue with him. He's now trying to add a new kind of weariness which will slot in on top of sleepiness, sleep deprivation, stamina, and weariness, as if that wasn't enough to keep track of already.  As much as I agree with the recent moves the devs have made, it's still the best game around, and there are still people doing great work on the game. A contributor tore out the broken instability system and replaced it with a much better one. The terrible primer/catalyst split is still in, but the stuff is actually usable now. There's no longer any waiting involved to get rid of instability, and it's impossible to only get good mutations. Your chance to get good or bad mutations is simply determined by your ratio of good to bad (adjusted for the number of total good mutations in that line), and it goes up if you are mutating outside of the line you have the most mutations in. Robust genetics is no longer necessary to interact with the system, all it does is make it easier to mix different mutation lines. You were never meant to be able to avoid bad mutations, they're where most of the flavor and gameplay come from. But now there's a logical system where you can dip your toes in and expect to get some benefits, or you can commit hard and accept that you'll also get drawbacks. The drawbacks are cool and you should not be afraid of them. None of them make the game unplayable, even disintegration isn't that big of a deal, and they lead to most of the interesting gameplay. Just don't pick plant, because Kevin deleted photosynthesis again so it's impossible to feed yourself. Despite thorough documentation in the PR, he doesn't seem to believe that leaves dramatically increase a tree's usable surface area, and that's why plants have multiple leaves and not one big leaf like a solar panel (yes I'm still mad). worm girl fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Apr 6, 2024 |
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Apr 6, 2024 20:30
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quote:Just don't pick plant, because Kevin deleted photosynthesis again so it's impossible to feed yourself. Despite thorough documentation in the PR, he doesn't seem to believe that leaves dramatically increase a tree's usable surface area, and that's why plants have multiple leaves and not one big leaf like a solar panel (yes I'm still mad). lmao amazing
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Apr 6, 2024 20:51
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Worm Girl posted:Let's talk photosynthesis. Kevin Granade posted:Purpose of change He just literally looked at a pile of math with clear documentation backing it up and went "hm no I disagree" and reverted it instead of, for example, providing any kind of counterargument or adjustment. Was my math wrong? It's possible, but there's a clear double standard when devs can roll out any busted thing they want and it gets left as-is for years in defiance of any response from the playerbase. It's especially egregious in this case because plant mutants have to eat rotten food but can't eat mutants or zombies, which winds up being pretty difficult to manage, especially in seasons where it's not warm enough for stuff to rot. The mutation line is supposed to be about becoming able to ignore heat/cold/food/water/shelter because trees don't need to care about those things, but it winds up requiring more micro than a base human. Eating rotten food is pretty weird too, because even carnivorous plants don't actually do that. Fertilizer doesn't give them any calories, it just makes vitamins available in the soil. Like man how do you think an apple tree produces tens of thousands of excess calories to make hundreds of apples in a single season? The leaves occupy a vertical space that they're able to use very efficiently thanks to the fact that they can track the sun and are arranged to not get in each others' way. Are you telling me a six foot tree with five large branches can't produce 300 kcal on a cloudless summer day? And that's still only half of what the drat thing needs to survive. worm girl fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Apr 6, 2024 |
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Apr 6, 2024 21:01
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Simulation is about putting the player in the mindset of the character and the decisions they make, not just about ensuring that an MP5 doesn't have a top rail factory default. Trying to simulate absolutely everything ends up with a mess, plus let's be real, there's two obstacles to realism. One: This is a situation full of goddamn extradimensional wizard magic bullshit horrors, so they do whatever the author says because they're 100% fictional constructs (which is fine, but important to keep in mind). Two: Lots of people are simply wrong about whatever they think is realistic. At the end of the day something like a plant-person is so far removed from reality that whether or not they can photosynthesize is really entirely up to the author. Going for total 'realism' is kind of impossible in a situation where you have dramatic phenotypic change happening because you injected glowing goo made out of pieces of an autopsied animal and a space god. Same for someone deciding that a sapient AI like Melchior is plausible while earth-based cybernetics mostly aren't, etc. It's judgement calls by writers. I'd personally say letting plant people supplement their diet by photosynthesis is fine because it gives them an unusual, unique gameplay niche and a lot of mutation is about changing how the character experiences the world, plus their whole thing is supposed to be sustainment and durability. Also, I personally did take the advice to just stop playing. It just kind of hit a point where I wasn't especially interested any longer, though I certainly enjoyed my time with it and I've really enjoyed making a tabletop adaptation for my friends. So I'm still glad I played it when I did. Maybe I'll come back to it someday, but for now I'm pretty happy just running the Cardinal TTRPG adaptation I wrote up for friends.
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Apr 6, 2024 21:14
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Night10194 posted:Simulation is about putting the player in the mindset of the character and the decisions they make, not just about ensuring that an MP5 doesn't have a top rail factory default...a plant-person is so far removed from reality that whether or not they can photosynthesize is really entirely up to the author. I disagree. My favorite part about the game is that these details matter. No other game does this, and it adds so much depth to the micro-decisions. I don't want to play minecraft or dungeon crawl, I want to play CDDA. I also don't think we need magic to explain the plant-man photosynthesizing. The science clearly shows that man-sized trees produce hundreds of kcal per day. Night10194 posted:Lots of people are simply wrong about whatever they think is realistic...a sapient AI like Melchior is plausible while earth-based cybernetics mostly aren't, etc. It's judgement calls by writers. I do agree with this part. "muh realism" is a sloppy explanation for what the devs are actually doing, which is being confidently wrong in the face of empirical evidence and ignoring their own rules in others to justify their pet projects, which the community has no say in being subjected to. Realism is what makes the game cool. Adding a sixth fatigue meter, portal storms, half-finished exodii, and cranking up pain to the point where it becomes intolerable to actually try to play the game has nothing to do with realism as a design philosophy, it's just a series of bad calls. Several people asked me to start a fork. I'm sorely tempted seeing these pain and fatigue changes coming down the line, but there are a lot of obstacles. The "anti-realism" crowd are not people I would want to work with for reasons stated above, and I've seen multiple forks fail because they were seemingly started out of spite and that's just not enough to inspire people to come work on a thing. I don't make enough at my Youtube job to justify working for free, and managing a community of strangers working on a creative project sounds like a special sort of hell. Also, while I've become OK at C++, I don't have the low-level knowledge required to do proper maintenance work on a game like this. If you look at the commit history, a lot of what gets done is esoteric behind-the-scenes stuff to keep the project running properly. That's really important work. But man, imagining a version without the exodii, portal storms, pain changes, primer/catalyst split, or charge removal that actually had people working on it sounds nice. Remember when you could sleep in your base without having to hide from your items inside of a cardboard box?
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Apr 6, 2024 21:30
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Yeah, my going off to make the TT campaign for my friends was what I can do for making my own fork, effectively; I am hopeless with computers and programming but have been GMing and modifying things for years. I've thought about posting the rules/mechanics here once I'm fully done testing it in play in case anyone else is interested, because I do enjoy the specific apocalypse here and wanted to explore it more, I just can't program.
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Apr 6, 2024 21:36
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I'd be interested in that. e: tbh I'd also be interested in a fork being run by someone passionate about the game who's not going to be pushing half baked systems but I can't demand someone do something they don't have the ability to do without support. I can back on Patreon, for work reasons I can't commit design or code support. doomfunk fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Apr 6, 2024 |
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Apr 6, 2024 21:37
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For instance, I genuinely like the Exodii as a concept! A group of people fleeing across nightmare infested worlds, who explicitly aren't hostile or absolute dicks, but whose knowledge is incomplete and colored by the fact that they only go places this thing is infesting? Lots you can do with that besides just 'put all the cybernetics there and call it a day'. https://nighthams.wordpress.com/tag/heroes-of-the-end/ For anyone interested, this tag on my blog is where I put all the stuff for the CDDA campaign, though I ended up scaling back a fair amount of the 'strategy layer' stuff in play since it didn't gel with how I work as a GM. It's a very specific take on the setting, but we've been having a lot of fun; it uses Sanguine Games' Cardinal system as its baseline. Also, the first town being named Steuben in the campaign is a very explicit nod to Worm Girl's original LP here. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Apr 6, 2024 |
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Apr 6, 2024 21:48
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A fork is a lot of work, and would be cool. However, I don't blame anyone who isn't able, or willing, to make the massive commitment it would be to manage. Especially since there is every chance (and indeed is likely) it'll wither on the vine for lack of support from other established Cata people.
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Apr 6, 2024 22:07
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Night10194 posted:For instance, I genuinely like the Exodii as a concept! A group of people fleeing across nightmare infested worlds, who explicitly aren't hostile or absolute dicks, but whose knowledge is incomplete and colored by the fact that they only go places this thing is infesting? Lots you can do with that besides just 'put all the cybernetics there and call it a day'. Well there are multiple problems with them beyond just their incompleteness. The first is that they silo an entire branch of progression, so that any character who wants to get cybernetics (and all characters do) has to go through this group of named static NPCs. Named static NPCs are fine when they're just handing out stuff to do like the Refugee Center, but when you start making the story all about them, you're trading Daggerfall for Skyrim, and the game was never meant to be Skyrim. The fact that you have to go and deal with Rubik every game just to get your basic bionics going, and the fact that he demands so much screentime because the only way to get him to do stuff for you is to obsessively visit him every day for weeks makes him the main character of every run. He's the one NPC you have to deal with more than any other. This is compounded by the fact that their flavor is also really bizarre and doesn't fit with what the game was originally envisioned as. If he was just a weird guy from a weird world you could bump into that'd be one thing, but as stated he's like your primary point of contact with the game world across all games. Per the design doc, the game's stated inspirations besides zombie media are stuff like X-Files, (old) X-Com, and Fallout. The idea was always that the strange things in the world were either the work of shadowy government/military industrial complex forces, or that they were unknowable things from beyond. Suddenly having a friendly bizarro-cockney General Grievous who actually knows all about apocalypses throws a wrench in the works. A while back I pinged Erk asking questions about the faction so that I could develop some content, as just getting some extra quests would help flesh them out. I wrote up stuff suggesting that the player could go do dangerous jobs for them, and his response was generally "oh no, they have all the fighting force they could ever need and can overcome any threat in the cataclysm. They don't really need the player for anything." He wound up suggesting some minor fetch quests or one where you go evict an old man from a building they need to claim eminent domain over. The sense I got was that the faction is so big and so powerful that the player is kind of insignificant to them. In many settings be fine, but it's contrary to the fantasy of an apocalypse. Postapocalyptic media is popular partly because of the fantasy that it could allow an everyman to become a hero (or a villain!) by evening the playing field. That's why Rick Grimes and Joel Miller are able to do incredible things despite being average middle-aged nobodies. If there are unbeatable armies and governments who have everything under control and don't need any help from the rugged wasteland wanderer who used to just be some normal guy, then it's not a postapocalypse, it's just a different status quo. Imagine if in Fury Road, Furiosa was like "No I already have a hundred of you and don't need any help" and then Max sold her 10000 inhalers and went home. Also Furiosa looked like Chappie instead of Charlize Theron worm girl fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Apr 6, 2024 |
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Apr 6, 2024 22:08
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I certainly agree with 'they ought to need the player/help from locals', as my general impression of them was more that they're a group of terrified refugees on the run. That's the role they serve in our game, trading with the players, being deeply suspicious of the one who's becoming a Chimera, etc. They're a bunch of people on the run who try to offer some assistance to others (in return for parts and supplies they desperately need to keep functioning) while looking for a solution they've long since stopped believing exists, in my mind. My impression from Rubik and the single outpost was always more that they were a small group of survivors who are running around and tell other survivors 'oh we're all hosed' whether it's true or not, because that's what they've seen over and over. I never got the impression they had some organized, large military and it's bizarre that the developers claim they do.
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Apr 6, 2024 22:17
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Night10194 posted:I never got the impression they had some organized, large military and it's bizarre that the developers claim they do. What did you think all those quadrupeds were?
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Apr 6, 2024 22:19
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A symptom of being a first draft, mostly? I suppose I mostly ignored the ones out in the wild since there was nothing to actually interact with. Still, I think they work well as refugees rather than well-armed superfaction and the base concept can work, just not at all how they're implemented. E: Honestly, I think the 'oh they don't need you, they have everything' is a symptom of one of the general problems with many of the overarching plots: As you say, most of them have no place for the player to interact with them. Like how Portal Storms are mostly about hiding in a basement and not dealing with them. Or how you just go somewhere else if you find fungus.
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Apr 6, 2024 22:21
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I think the only content in the game that wants you to interact with portal storms is still Hub, for a reward of hub bux? Mind over Matter mod at least dangles unlocking psychic powers out in the mess, I think.
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Apr 6, 2024 23:00
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It's no coincidence that Hub-01, the faction with a bunch of quests where you are given actual incentives to go into and explore interesting and dangerous places and situations, is often regarded as one of the better implemented factions.
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Apr 6, 2024 23:20
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