My personal list of nice-to-have things.

[Blasphemous]

Hey people. Been playing A18 for a while and mostly like the changes versus 17.4.

However, I see room for improvement, though with this being an alpha, that should be pretty obvious.

I suppose some of the stuff below might have been mentioned before but I can't imagine sifting through triple digits of pages.

 

QUESTS: The variety is poor. Fetch, clear, fetch+clear and buried supplies. That's it?

Of course there are the challenges but their rewards are lacking so much that I never bother doing any of them. And they are boring.

 

Off the top of my head ways to improve:

a) Kill zombie bosses. Could be an intermediate between clear and fetch. The quest spawns several (5-7) green zombies with extra health and maybe higher speed or attack strength or block damage. They are on random, different levels of a POI, marked the same way that zombies in clear quests are marked. Instead of getting rid of everything that moves inside, you can focus on those crucial individuals and avoid/dispatch the rest in whatever fashion you like.

b) Dig a hole of specific size so a base can be built there. Subsequently, at some point another POI appears in that spot as the result of the quest, you get to keep all that you dug out. Perhaps the type of POI would be similar to existing abandoned refuges, like the car wreck/trailer ones.

c) Establish communication network. This would require the player to install antennas (say, 5 of them) on several tall buildings to create a primitive network for traders/survivors to communicate over. The quest would essentially be a climb-that-tower type. Once the antenna is placed, this triggers zombie attack against the structures, same as they are triggered when buried supplies are looted. Having to defend the building from zombies rather than yourself might be a fresh look at things.

d) Fortify a PoI chosen by the trader and defend it during a horde night. Higher tiers would involve more crampy locations. Quest would fail if the player dies or leaves the premises between 22:00 - 4:00.

 

I suppose there are many ways to improve quests without building an actual story.

 

GAMEPLAY:

 

a) Add perks that allow collecting spent casings. The amount would depend on the skill level, perhaps merge it with existing perks somehow. It's quite strange that after all this shooting, none of the shells remain. You can recover arrows but you should also be able to recover casings. After all, they are not fresh bullets and still require lead, gunpowder and time to turn into ammunition.

 

b) Improve physics. I understand this is a tall order but when I drive my 4x4 and hit an empty shopping cart, I don't expect my car to stop as if I smashed into a concrete wall. This should be easy to do and trucks should just plow through light/flexible/brittle debris without losing any speed or getting overly damaged. Wooden fences and small trees should count and I suppose compiling a list of things, which don't slow down an armored truck with steel frame frontal grill, should be easy.

 

c) More rigid and less overlapping stats for different level items. I've seen this mentioned several times that damage and/or other crucial parameters between tiers 4/5/6 items overlap too much. In my opinion they should not overlap at all and instead provide a tangible jump that you can actually feel right away. In my current game I'm running around with smg at level 5 and have already sold 3 smgs lvl 6 because they just can't compete.

 

d) Adjust the trader prices. At the moment, a lot of stuff the traders sell is just too expensive. I mean, polymer for 24 chips apiece? It's just plastic. Glue is marginally more expensive and so much more desirable. 9mm bullets are half this expensive. This applies to a lot of crafting ingredients. I'm not asking for them to be cheap, just reasonably cheaper than what they are now.

 

e) More alternative materials to craft stuff from. I liked how in A17 we had steel casings, which were easier to make and feasible to use, despite additional wear and tear on weapons. I'd love to see this feature return. Steel arrows/bolts should be craftable with either plastic polymers or feathers, not just the former. I have 1k+ feathers stored at the moment and I will probably never use them because that would force me to make sub-par iron projectiles.

 

f) Vehicles should be faster. I don't use mods but the first thing I do when a new version is out and xml files are overwritten is to edit the vehicle speed. Double it actually. Otherwise we're looking at a crawling pace that makes exploration a pain when it should be fun and enjoyable. I wouldn't mind if it was more difficult/expensive to make gas-powered vehicle if that meant they'd be faster but the current default speed? Come on. The truck makes sounds corresponding to driving 80 mph but it actually goes like 20. I think a decent way to do this would be to tie it with the grease monkey perk line, for increasing benefits, culminating with +100% speed at tier 5. Otherwise, this skill is completely useless once you get schematics through conventional exploration.

 

g) Rethink stacks of items. While I realize some of this is simply streamlining the game so you can run around with a stack of 6000 stones that takes exactly the same amount of space as any item schematic but seriously, some of the things are ridiculous. Pain pills should stack to a hundred at least, fortbites, steroids, seeds etc likewise should stack to well beyond the default 10. Schematics I think should not occupy individual inventory slots and instead have a single placeholder item like a binder and just go directly there. You could argue that a maximum of 10-20 of schematics should fit inside but that would still be a huge improvement over what we have now with individual items. This is just an example as nowadays you can instantly tell if you've read the schematic before and if not, just read it instead of carrying it. You can stack radiators in groups of 5 but not batteries? All mods should stack at least into groups of 5 as well.

 

h) Reevaluate skillbooks and related perks. For example, needle & thread, when all the books are collected, give you the "uber-amazing" option of crafting BDU items. Wow. By the time I get there, I have already gone through 10 of each randomly acquired and selected the pair that has the best stats. The supposed prize for collecting all seven books is utterly useless. Instead, I'd give the players something like the ability to extend extra pockets by one per clothing article; improve stats of existing clothing items by some percentage; make sewing kits craftable and so on. Another choice would be to add an extra slot to clothing (bandanas and coats on top of bottoms/tops) that accepts any of the typically armor-related mods. There are many unique ways to truly reward players for collecting all seven books. Night stalker could have not just added bonus for knives at night but also for bows/xbows, spears and machetes. Fully modded hunting knife at tier 6 has eleven regular damage. Baseball bat has 52. That eleven, even with 200% extra damage, is still below the bat. Change it instead to insta-kill or 50% chance of insta-kill. Most of the reward perks need at least some buff.

 

i) Prebuild blocks in different combinations. It would be nice to be able to craft like a 3x3 square of wooden blocks, already upgraded to some degree and just use that to build a base. This could apply to many blocks, including concrete. Sections such as these could be stacked to a lesser degree than regular blocks, obviously, but they would potentially streamline base building. Perhaps make it perk-dependent so it's not too easy.

 

j) Many people have already asked for some means of more efficient excavation. I can imagine at some future point an excavator that allows the players to quickly dig large holes and mine ores but in the meantime, an intermediary solution could be implemented – add a mod to auger that gives it a moderate AoE – digging the targeted block plus four blocks immediately adjacent to it. Players that prefer single action could still use auger the same way if the mod is not added. This may perhaps be exclusive to tier 6 auger to make it a late game feature but it could potentially really speed up and streamline mining.

 

k) Airdrops. Short story – they suck. I would suggest to change the quality and quantity depending on frequency and gamestage. Right now, I'm better off raiding a shamway or shotgun messiah factory for reasonable loot than bother with the airdrops and this is day 56 of horde every 3 days and survivalist difficulty. Airdrops should also be more relevant to the "story" if we assume there is such. So I'd expect food and meds as well as schematics of useful stuff. Things such as tools, workbenches, drugs… survival stuff instead of 3 junk turrets, a tier 1 iron chest armor and catfood.

 

l) Flamethrowers. 'nough said. We have gas, we have fire effects on zombies, we have molotovs. Why not introduce some form of continuous projectile napalm spewing tool of death? It would be really cool.

 

m) Make it worthwhile to max out skills. For example, Yeah, science is useless past level 2. All it provides are blueprints which can be obtained individually within reasonable time. Perhaps it should lower requirements in materials and reduce crafting time for stuff related to it? This is true for some other skills that just don't cut it past a certain point.

 

n) Numeric stack splitting – instead of just splitting in half, it would be nice to have a specific input number. Quite often I operate in threes – 3 forges or 3 mixers – and would like to split that fat 6k stack in equally even stacks of 2k. Right now this is very problematic, unless there is some obscure feature to do this easily, which I am unaware of.

 

o) Nail gun. In the absence of nails in the inventory, HUD should instead show the total amount of upgrading material in inventory, depending on the type of the last block that was upgraded. This is a neat little quality-of-life change but I think it would improve the GUI a bit with relatively little effort.