Crafting System and Skill Leveling System Does Not Make Sense and +Rant

[NotSuss]

Unless I am completely wrong, but PZ has some of the weirdest crafting system ever.

for example, level 2 carpentry will allow you to make a door frame, but you need lvl 3 to make an actual door...

and then to make an flint axe head, you need a spearhead. let alone, there are some crafting that requires insane levels of a certain skill just to make some of the most basic items.

here's another one, clay are found mostly along roads while tree and rocks are hardly seen in grassy areas even though there are literal tree and rocks in the grass - but you cannot harvest it.

spears are also another thing that does not make sense. you can use rakes to make spear handles, but you cannot use mop or another other type of long wooden handles to make spears. AND then, when you do end up gathering those precocious duct tape or zip ties to craft spears, it breaks so easily. You know whats better than spears? Crowbars, wrenches, and iron bars - and those things last much longer and easier to find.

if i am wrong, can someone care to explain to me how to craft as even some of the most basic items needs some wild requirements. im about to give up and just go back to the crowbar at this point.

side rant: Was PZ not design to be sorta a rouge-lite game where you spawn in and if you die, you just start another char? right? then why is leveling up ANYTHING so long? its counter-intuitive to have a slow leveling system game designed around a rouge-lite element only to have some of the slowest leveling progression ever in any rouge-lite game. i know you can set your own exp multiplier, but just think about it - the design of the game is fundamentally backwards at this point. death comes so swift, and leveling up comes by so slow.

here's another example of weird design decision: Muscle strain. For a game that throws hordes of zombies to the player on any settings that the dev put, it does not make sense that your character will fatigue out so quick. this forces players to run, but if you run, you may come back home to hordes of zombies outside of your safehouse and the only thing to do is to fight in most cases - or abit, you find a new place to dwell for a while, but even that has zombies in it sometimes which requires fighting. i understand why they put in such a mechanic, but at the same time, even on survival, muscle strain fundamentally breaks the balance of the game. now you have to choose your fight or coward away after 20 or so hit (default settings).

The more i play this game, the more i realized how flawed of a design this game is.

[Armagenesis]

You don't need a spearhead for axe head. You can click on the button on top of the frame to look at the tool options.

You can harvest fallen logs and rocks by right clicking them.

Muscle strain can be dealt with by fighting smarter. After the first few games, I really don't have any issues with muscle strain.

[Shylock]

"and then to make an flint axe head, you need a spearhead."

You don't. Any knife will suffice, the crafting menu is just suggesting a spearhead for some reason when you don't have any feasible tool in your inventory. You can check out which tools are feasible in the crafting menu.

"while tree and rocks are hardly seen in grassy areas even though there are literal tree and rocks in the grass - but you cannot harvest it."

You can harvest rocks. Smaller ones can be picked up by hand (use right-click, can be a bit tricky to hit the right spot), for bigger ones you need a hammer (stone hammer/club hammer) to smash them.
For big boulders, a pick axe is needed.


"side rant: Was PZ not design to be sorta a rouge-lite game where you spawn in and if you die, you just start another char? right? then why is leveling up ANYTHING so long? its counter-intuitive to have a slow leveling system game designed around a rouge-lite element only to have some of the slowest leveling progression ever in any rouge-lite game. i know you can set your own exp multiplier, but just think about it - the design of the game is fundamentally backwards at this point. death comes so swift, and leveling up comes by so slow."

I never felt like PZ was aiming to be a rogue-lite game. Still, leveling important skills can take way too long if you don't:
- watch TV in the first week
- find VHS tapes (rare)
- find skill books (rare)
With the design choices for B42, this feels like a bottleneck and I don't really want to "meta-game" by rigorously watching TV in the first week.


Spears: Yeah, I feel they are way to flimsy right now, at least until you have enough spear/maintenance skill.
Muscle strain is manageable for me, this may come down to personal prefernce.

[Zaidah]

You're speaking about the unstable B42 build here, that came out to public just last month, so I'll start by saying that there will be a lot of balance/tweaks/additions to these new things.

To try to answer some of your questions :

-Spear : yes fragile, and probably not often worth using duct tape to attach something to it (especially if your maintenance is very low), but it's fine to me that crowbars, wrenches and iron bars are better, because these are technically limited and not craftable. The early crafting (hammer, axe, knife and spear) are makeshift weapons : easy to find the material to craft, but won't carry you very far unless you have a bunch of them ;

-Skills requirements are wild for some stuff, will probably be tweaked for some of them. I'm also pretty sure many craftable items are missing (for example, it seems you can't craft any kind of saw without a looted item, and the devs said they want to make it possible to craft every important items/structure from just foraging in the wild, with no human structure to rely on) ;

-Leveling is long because it's one of the main late game thing to look forward in my opinion. Your bonus skills (paired with the related books) will lvl up fairly quickly, but other will take much more time, which is also a good thing for multiplayer as specializing becomes a thing. It can also makes player pick different skills at the chraracter creation depending of which skills they want to explore ;

-The game isn't left 4 dead and you don't have to kill every zombie on sight. Sneaking works better in this update, but fighting (and thus the game in general) is overall harder. If it's too hard you can always change the sandbox settings (you can even remove muscle strain altogether). Since you can change all these things, it's not an issue that the preset difficulties became harder.

[Tabby]

Originally posted by Zaidah:

You're speaking about the unstable B42 build here, that came out to public just last month, so I'll start by saying that there will be a lot of balance/tweaks/additions to these new things.

To try to answer some of your questions :

-Spear : yes fragile, and probably not often worth using duct tape to attach something to it (especially if your maintenance is very low), but it's fine to me that crowbars, wrenches and iron bars are better, because these are technically limited and not craftable. The early crafting (hammer, axe, knife and spear) are makeshift weapons : easy to find the material to craft, but won't carry you very far unless you have a bunch of them ;

-Skills requirements are wild for some stuff, will probably be tweaked for some of them. I'm also pretty sure many craftable items are missing (for example, it seems you can't craft any kind of saw without a looted item, and the devs said they want to make it possible to craft every important items/structure from just foraging in the wild, with no human structure to rely on) ;

-Leveling is long because it's one of the main late game thing to look forward in my opinion. Your bonus skills (paired with the related books) will lvl up fairly quickly, but other will take much more time, which is also a good thing for multiplayer as specializing becomes a thing. It can also makes player pick different skills at the chraracter creation depending of which skills they want to explore ;

-The game isn't left 4 dead and you don't have to kill every zombie on sight. Sneaking works better in this update, but fighting (and thus the game in general) is overall harder. If it's too hard you can always change the sandbox settings (you can even remove muscle strain altogether). Since you can change all these things, it's not an issue that the preset difficulties became harder.

when do you think build 42 will be stable?

[NotSuss]

Originally posted by Zaidah:

You're speaking about the unstable B42 build here, that came out to public just last month, so I'll start by saying that there will be a lot of balance/tweaks/additions to these new things.

To try to answer some of your questions :

-Spear : yes fragile, and probably not often worth using duct tape to attach something to it (especially if your maintenance is very low), but it's fine to me that crowbars, wrenches and iron bars are better, because these are technically limited and not craftable. The early crafting (hammer, axe, knife and spear) are makeshift weapons : easy to find the material to craft, but won't carry you very far unless you have a bunch of them ;

-Skills requirements are wild for some stuff, will probably be tweaked for some of them. I'm also pretty sure many craftable items are missing (for example, it seems you can't craft any kind of saw without a looted item, and the devs said they want to make it possible to craft every important items/structure from just foraging in the wild, with no human structure to rely on) ;

-Leveling is long because it's one of the main late game thing to look forward in my opinion. Your bonus skills (paired with the related books) will lvl up fairly quickly, but other will take much more time, which is also a good thing for multiplayer as specializing becomes a thing. It can also makes player pick different skills at the chraracter creation depending of which skills they want to explore ;

-The game isn't left 4 dead and you don't have to kill every zombie on sight. Sneaking works better in this update, but fighting (and thus the game in general) is overall harder. If it's too hard you can always change the sandbox settings (you can even remove muscle strain altogether). Since you can change all these things, it's not an issue that the preset difficulties became harder.

TLDR:
The designed is flawed and confusing. The game wants to be a long term survival game, but also wants to be a 1-life system like a rouge-lite, but also has a long and tedious leveling up system, but also has mechanics that attracts groups of zombies to your location (sound. sight, meta events), but also now encourages you to "pick your fight" because of muscle strain, exhaustion, panic, etc..., all while populating a cell with hundreds of zombies at any given time which forces you to fight in most events?

First off, thanks for everyone responding.

Second, Its just not a B42 thing. I've been playing PZ here and there since it first came out as i was a very early adopter. And while many things changed by a metric ton for the good, i always had this feeling of unbalance-ness and game designed flaw when it comes to PZ.

and while people above have remedy some issues like the spearhead or picking up rocks and sticks, there are still so many other things that fundamentally goes against what PZ is in my opinion.

Like you said, this game is not a L4D game, i get that. But hear me out: Even when i put zombies at the lowest hearing and sight possible in sandbox mode, whenever i build a fence, streams of zombies comes towards the sound of my hammer. And because i am at base, i have to fight them off, or else they'll just break down the wall that i just built. and then, because i have to fight them off, muscle strain starts to set in, exhaustion is now a problem, my guy is panicking, all while another 5 zombies comes from behind because smashing their brains in also makes audible noise.

So what i am trying to say is, I am NOT playing it like its L4D. I am trying to play it the way PZ is design, by fighting only when i need too - well, when you have a stream of zombies coming at you, you HAVE to fight them in most cases - i know we've all been there, especially when all we want is to get our character to bed and NOT fight.

And then, on top of that, the zombies will sometimes come at the most inconvenient of times when you are mired in many different debuffs. Exhaustion, sleep deprived, muscle strain, nervousness, panic, etc... and so at this point, one thinks: okay, I need to run and hide and find a temporary shelter. well... what happens when you leave your overrun base, to find a temporary shelter just to sleep? more zombies walking about in the streets. just opening doors can attract one zombie to your position. okay, so you deal with that zombie. the smashed in brain is loud enough for another one to hear. and then another one, and another one, and soon a group of zombies are banging at the door of your temporary safe house (we've all been there before) and then we either run again, or fight while sleep deprived.

you see, its not me trying to play PZ like its some Dead Rising game. Its the game and the way it is designed to be played. you are supposed to be met with zombies at every turn, you are supposed to attract zombies with the slightness of sound you make, you are supposed to fight off hordes of zombies, trying to get into a library that has the books you want, you are supposed to be that one lone survivor faced with hundreds of thousands of zombies that resides in Louieville.

I'm not saying for PZ to become a dead rising game. No, as i find that kind of zombie game extremely boring. but, due to the way its design, you sometimes HAVE to play it like its a dead rising game. like, how else are you supposed to clear an apartment building or louieville mall? You have to fight waves and waves of zombies right? there is no way around it even if you try to lure them out with the sound of your car horn - which sometimes makes things even worse. so when devs keeps adding in debuffs to players, restricting combat, making it artificially longer to clear a building, it unbalances the game and makes the game design feel off.

Now, i know we can switch things on and off in sandbox mode, and there are many mods out there that makes the game easier or harder, but that's not my point. My point is, PZ overall, is a fundamentally flawed design game that does not know what it wants to be - and im not saying this from a B42 perspective - I am saying it from a perspective who has bought the game in the first three months of alpha release when Steam Greenlight was still a thing. and i always have that feeling since PZ started adding these longer term mechanics. The game is basically like this: a short lived, fragile life, were any moment is death, but a long and extremely tedious leveling up/crafting system that players HAS to engage in at some point in time.

it just doesn't make sense. Or how the team now wants to artificially make combat slower by "picking your fights", but throw groups and groups of zombies at you with any sound you make? Again, do they want us to fight? Do they want us to run? Do they NOT want us to clear buildings from massive hordes anymore? should we now avoid louievillemall? should we only stick to low zombie density areas?

maybe b43 will clear up the direction in what PZ wants to become, but currently, i've been feeling this way of unbalances-ness and flawed game designed for a very long time and was hoping by now, the direction will be a bit clearer - but with the added addition of new mechanics, it just muddles the direction even more (from muscle strain to the more in depth crafting system). Again, i know i can turn off these features, but thats not the point. the point is, the designed decision of PZ is confusing. its like watching a movie that has a great storyline, but is mired by bad direction and editing that leaves viewers confused on what it wanted to be.

[Animalman]

i know it is really rough to even try many of these things, you raise many good points. To consider a spear is insane. imo. to consider carpentry is insane unless you deliberately travelled to an out of the way part of the map. To consider it is insane. But you can escape with quiet application of metal sheets for defence. i guess this is the main advantage of metal that its quiet to do. While in b41 that did not matter so much that it was quiet, it matters a whole lot more now. Afterall carp can be done anywhere deep forest or just in the suburbs. and can progress in a gradoise manner.

I have similar gripes with furniture now.
that furniture is entirely useless. and cannot be combined with fences or cubicles being entirely useless items. a cubicle is an absolutely useless item nowadays. and makeshift junk barricades are also useless items but theres also no exp on dismantle. So the furniture is only good as work bench.
Which is kinda lame. I liked to be able to create walls to divert zombies but it does require vehicles now. Vehicles up against barriers where zombies normally jump over or through like windows is the only way to tame the flux. ANd doors cannot be blocked at all
in any circumstance

any door.
so before

the door could be attempted to be open but barricaded from the other side
but now no items at all block doors. which is unrealistic. completely.
like the character is not even allowed not even to put a table infront of a door to block it from being opened. Which yah.

there is basically never any safety in anything now. Every night sleep is a risk.
the only safety being run to a less populated or empty part of the map. and that not really convenient. especially since you are only forced to do this to curb the ability to block door, and door navigation. which IRL i would move a bookcase and cupboard up against a door and window, and zombies would be too stupid to get thru.
tahts the fact.
it attack a window because it see thru sure.
never attacks a brick wall because it hear thru.
but character cannot block a door with anything at all

make the only strategy to build a cage out of pole fences which is a massive grind and book fest. and then just fight through the fence.

By the time that fence erected all local zombies dead anyway. what vehicle transport a mobile pole fence maker? to set up a pole fence in a useful situation? i mean its crazy what is expected in many ways

[96sawa3]

I agree with the opinions regarding the crafting system.
No one has touched crafting. Because there are iron pipes there.
I have doubts about the current system that makes you take a detour when there is a shortcut that allows you to get stronger weapons more easily.

I taught myself and devoted myself to carving, and was disappointed when I was finally able to make only a knife handle.
I wonder if there are people who have spare knife blades at the beginning of the game. I have never seen a single replacement blade.
If it had been a hammer handle, it would have been very useful in overcoming the current situation.
There are plenty of hammer heads lying around at bases.

In the future, when I finally manage to make a hammer handle, I will say,
"I don't need a hammer handle anymore, I can fight with animal bones."

[NotSuss]

@Animalman i honestly did not know they nerfed all of that. it does feel like the PZ team wants you to build in the country side or find some remote place far from the urban areas in this patch if you want to avoid fighting. Im not sure which direction they want to go with this game.

@96sawa3 I've been watching some Youtubers play, and a lot of them has the same sentiment as you; no one really touches the crafting system in a real play through. Like me, a lot of them rather find batons, crowbars, wrenches, pipes, baseball bats, and so forth as those are just so much easier to find even if you don't know where to find them. most times, you can just run up upon those really good weapons and some of them will last for a long time (baton and crowbars).

And like you, with this new play through for B42 i struggle to find use of the crafting system since this time around, i really wanted to go all spears, but finding zip ties and duct tape is rare, and by the time i found enough to make a few spears from zip-ties and duct tapes, i've already have access to batons, wrenches, and crowbars without even trying. And then, even upon crafting those spears, the life span is so bad, that you have to carry multiple of them just to kill a group of zombies. the design decision does NOT make sense whatsoever. its exactly what you said, "I have doubts about the current system that makes you take a detour when there is a shortcut that allows you to get stronger weapons more easily."

Again, the design of the game is fundamentally flawed and PZ does not know what it wants to be.

[Zaidah]

When first talking about this incoming crafting system, the devs specifically said it will be more of a late-game thing that wouldn't be mendatory to use in a playthrough. As you said, because there are many and durable weapons in the cities when you start a game, you will likely spend monthes before you start running out of some things that crafting could help with, unless you decide to live in the wilderness from the start.

Originally posted by Maphew404:

it does feel like the PZ team wants you to build in the country side or find some remote place far from the urban areas in this patch if you want to avoid fighting.

I'm not sure what else you're expecting from living in a city, it's obviously where you'll find the most zombies, and thus might have to fight them (or stealth through).

It's also strange that in one hand, you say it's too much fight in the cities and easier to live in the wild instead, and in the other hand complaining that said loot from cities is better than what you can craft. There are upsides and downsides for both playstyle.

It's a (hard) survival game at the end of the day, that tries to keep you on the edge at all times. If it's too overwhelming for you, you can always change the sandbox settings to have less zombies, make them squishier/less aware, as well as change XP gain rate, etc.

[Akintos]

Agree with this. I expected the crafting update to make things more enjoyable, yet there has been ZERO change towards it. In what other survival game are you sitting and spamming random skills just to be able to build a door? Also why is knapping and carving even a separate skill??? wow i can split flint modules for an hour? This will make the game unplayable to anyone who has a job and anything to do in their life, because i will not be spending the few hours i can play in a week to knap rocks?

[NotSuss]

Originally posted by Zaidah:

I'm not sure what else you're expecting from living in a city, it's obviously where you'll find the most zombies, and thus might have to fight them (or stealth through).

we'll again, before the muscle strain, you COULD deal with zombies. But with muscle strain, you can't effectively deal with them atm. it took me 3 in game days to sort of clear out a medium size building in this current build because i would get muscle strain. you cant STEALTH a building when you are clearing it - get it? Everyone keeps saying "stealth this, stealth that". are we not playing the same game? as i said in my post, there are MANY mechanics in the game that are supposed to engage you with zombies eventually. there are really some people in hear acting like you can stealth everything when in reality, you can't. i mean, if you can tell me how to clear a building by stealthing, then by all means, please tell me. but for now, you are FORCE to fight in many occasions if you want to get into that bunker, that pawn shop, that gunshop, the mall, etc. there are many tacitics you can employ to help lure out zombies, but its not always 100%, let alone, you still have that 30 zombie spawning in a room that you haven't looked at mechanic. so, you ARE forced to fight in many occasions.

Originally posted by Zaidah:

It's also strange that in one hand, you say it's too much fight in the cities and easier to live in the wild instead, and in the other hand complaining that said loot from cities is better than what you can craft. There are upsides and downsides for both playstyle.

well again, there are a lot of fights in cities, and the muscle strain is artificially making those fights tougher, therefore, in my eyes, unbalances the game. I am not saying to get rid of muscle strain entirely, as i do think its a good mechanic with some more work, but it does unbalance playstlyles. currently, like i said above, it takes me about 3 days to sort of clear a building now because i have to rest more/go back to base due to all of the debuffs that our character has. and i just find it odd that for a game to throw you so much zombies, they are ARTIFICIALLY limiting your combat ability by saying: "oh hey, you're tired, muscle strain, exhaustion, nervousness, panic, sleep deprive, you should go back to base and come back tomorrow and try again, MEANWHILE, we'll keep pouring zombies into this cell with our many other mechanics that attracts zombies and you can do it all over again." you see how that sorta has a weird design philophy? imagine playing COD zombies and the devs only gives you 3 clips worth of magazine throughout the whole game and expect you to knife a majority of the zombie and then add in stamina that restricts your knifing potential all while spawning zombies in every doorway. like, what is the developer trying to tell us as players to do?

Originally posted by Zaidah:

It's a (hard) survival game at the end of the day, that tries to keep you on the edge at all times. If it's too overwhelming for you, you can always change the sandbox settings to have less zombies, make them squishier/less aware, as well as change XP gain rate, etc.

again, i know you can turn on and off things, but you are missing my point. my point is, the design of PZ is going into weird places. its as if it doesn't know what it want to be. it throws you hordes and hordes of zombies, but its artificially telling you to run away from it. it gives you one short swift life to live, but throws you overly long and grindy leveling system. it tells you to avoid zombies at all times, but they put in meta events like gunshots and helicopters to attract zombies to your location. and YES, again, i know you can turn these things off, but you must admit, the design of it is confusing, esecpaully when everyone keeps saying, "just stealth it".

And i must say, i do not mean to complain about the game or asking for PZ to make things easier - what i am asking is for PZ to make some sense in their base design. because currently, as a player who is trying to play the game as the developer intended it to be (which i prefer that play style in my non-sandbox playthroughs), its just confusing in how they want us to handle certain situations (and no, you CANNOT stealth everything). i encourage a lot of players to disable their mods and play PZ vanilla, and maybe then you'll see what i am saying when it comes to the fundamental design of the game.

I actually love this game a lot, and that why i am bringing this up.

[Zaidah]

To sum what you say, you find it too hard and frustrating to handle the challenges the game send at you (mainly fighting zombies because of the different maluses). I guess it's a matter of taste, but I like it that way, as the intended way to play.

I agree that you can't fight everything at every time because of muscle strain and exhaustion, having to take break to rest and also take care of other things. The game indeed encourage you to not fight all day long, as you combat capabilities will become so low that it will become risky and a waste of time to keep going instead of resting.

That's also the main thing about this game : the time. It will take time to clear an area from zombies, to sort your loot, to cook and craft, etc. Your tiredness, hunger, thirst and weight are all ticking down, and there are only so much you can accomplish within a day, so you must set your priorities. The game wants you to die in the end, and managing your character's main needs isn't very hard if you can loot the cities without trouble. Zombies are the main threat so fighting is quite frequent, it's not exactly stardew valley and more like walking dead (and since human NPC's aren't there yet, the zombies gotta be a good challenge).

I didn't expand yet about the increased zombie perception range when fighting, attracting more and more of them. I personnally like it as it spices encounters, but I get that it can become frustrating when you try to be stealthy but end up getting many zombies on you because you just killed one that wasn't even next to the other. Some previous strategies still work though : wait for zombies to come to you instead of coming to them and risking attracting the other ones nearby. It can take more time to wait for them, but you won't have to fight many of them at once and to rest right after. Going more careful and slower is more rewarded in that regard, as you won't get as much exhaustion/muscle strain that will need you to rest. It plays a bit differently from B41, and it's indeed slower to clear zombies overall (especailly early game).

I love the game as well for sure. I don't think the design is flawed in practice, but like I stated above, some changes will need for you to take a slighly different approach when it comes to fighting (just like it drastically changed from B40 to B41). It's harder overall for sure, and killing zombies will take more time overall. Clearing an area from zombies is now an actual investment.

[NotSuss]

Originally posted by Zaidah:

To sum what you say, you find it too hard and frustrating to handle the challenges the game send at you (mainly fighting zombies because of the different maluses). I guess it's a matter of taste, but I like it that way, as the intended way to play.

no, you are wrong. Here is a Youtuber who said it much better than i can in 3 minutes. I implore you to watch up until 3:35 mark. He basically said everything that I agree with. So its not about PZ being "too hard and frustrating", its about the design and balance of the game. Right now, at default settings, the design is out of whack and therefore, unbalances the core game mechanic. and again, i know you can turn off these settings, but we have to think about the future PZ. Will they just artificially make it slower and slower like they are now so that people cannot rush to the mid and late game? Are they going to introduce another mechanic that makes clearing zombies not hard, but slower? You get what i am saying? its not about the difficulty, its about the DESIGN of the game and how its going against the core mechanic of the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzLNHbvdCns

[katsuragi]

Originally posted by Maphew404:

Originally posted by Zaidah:

To sum what you say, you find it too hard and frustrating to handle the challenges the game send at you (mainly fighting zombies because of the different maluses). I guess it's a matter of taste, but I like it that way, as the intended way to play.

no, you are wrong. Here is a Youtuber who said it much better than i can in 3 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzLNHbvdCns. I implore you to watch up until 3:35 mark. He basically said everything that I agree with. So its not about PZ being "too hard and frustrating", its about the design and balance of the game. Right now, at default settings, the design is out of whack and therefore, unbalances the core game mechanic. and again, i know you can turn off these settings, but we have to think about the future PZ. Will they just artificially make it slower and slower like they are now so that people cannot rush to the mid and late game? Are they going to introduce another mechanic that makes clearing zombies not hard, but slower? You get what i am saying? its not about the difficulty, its about the DESIGN of the game and how its going against the core mechanic of the game.

There is no "mid or late game".... there is no endgame. There is nothing to "rush" to. You can fully control the pace at which your character levels to suit your own tastes but there is no artificial goal you are progressing to.
The default settings are hard. They are meant to be hard. If you can grind level 10 anything at default settings you can pat yourself on the back.
That is your endgame, a pat on the back.

The game is a series of moments where you live or you die. There isn't a destination that the devs are trying to keep you from reaching.

[MrMinMax]

IMO, b42 survivor is what apo was in B41. Apo in b42 is similar to 6 months later in b41.