As of 42.7 you now get hammers breaking after driving 43 nails

[Sunderbraze]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dCO5HSaRcM

This wasn't a thing in 42.6 as far as I can recall? I built my entire base (two stories, 13x13) without breaking a single hammer. Either it was a subtle thing before and they've dialed it up to 11, or it was quietly introduced the other day.

I went up and down the patch notes and did not find a single mention of tool degradation or anything similar. Did I miss something? Feels like I'm going insane.

EDIT: I have come up with a (silly, but significant) workaround. Thus far in B42 the Stone Hammer has had the "Too unwieldy to drive nails" flag on it, like a Club Hammer, but as of this patch it no longer does, so I have been able to bypass the Claw Hammer breakage by making dozens of Stone Hammers and using them to build instead; they break even more quickly, but they are at least plentiful to make, as the prereq is only Maintenance 1 and you can always get yourself more of the required materials (Rags/Tree Branches/Stones) without going too far out of your way, unlike Claw Hammers which are otherwise very finite unless you have a massive stockpile from looting and/or Metalworking 4 with a full Advanced Forge/Furnace production pipeline.

[The Anarcho Nazbol Inquisition]

The only tool i ever broke using as intended was a rusty, ancient crowbar. Hammers breaking from nailing nails is baffling and has to be a bug from the new bone hammers that you can make messing with actual hammer stats. I would report it so they can fix it.

[Buwaro Elexion]

3rd line in fixes

- Fixed issues with craftRecipe and buildMenu interactions using Hammers and tool degradation

[Berallan]

Well they certainly fixed it, with lvl10 carpentry I went through 24 hammers laying down 1200 floors as paths. All i have left of them are broken handles, no heads. The heads must have flown off into the bush or something. I thought you would have kept them so you could put a new handle on them.

If I bought a hammer from the hardware and the head or the handle broke after hitting only 50 nails, I'd take it back. I have a claw hammer that I've had for over 30 years, the wooden handle is still fine and I've used it for more than hitting nails. Truth be known it's rarely seen a nail, it usually gets used as a pry bar or a small sledge hammer.

[Buwaro Elexion]

Originally posted by Berallan:

Well they certainly fixed it, with lvl10 carpentry I went through 24 hammers laying down 1200 floors as paths. All i have left of them are broken handles, no heads. The heads must have flown off into the bush or something. I thought you would have kept them so you could put a new handle on them.

If I bought a hammer from the hardware and the head or the handle broke after hitting only 50 nails, I'd take it back. I have a claw hammer that I've had for over 30 years, the wooden handle is still fine and I've used it for more than hitting nails. Truth be known it's rarely seen a nail, it usually gets used as a pry bar or a small sledge hammer.

the head of any weapon(that has one) normally lands on the ground(or possibly gets stuck in a zombie for sharp weapons), so you probably have lots laying around, if they are gone, file a proper bug report, as for durability i agree they are a quite under tuned when it comes to durability loss for building things(zombie combat damage should remain about the same)

[DrLamp]

It makes me question if these guys have ever used a proper hammer in their lives. I mean really used (and abused) one. The head is a lump of steel. Even with daily use that hammer head will last longer than you, and you'll need to replace the handle (again if you use it every day) MAYBE 2-3 times in your lifetime. I guess it's just so that the player actually GETS to use the mechanic of changing the handle.

I guess if you're swinging the hammer with all your strength every time you use it you would break handles more often, but that's not how you use a hammer. If you're swinging a sledge for examples and it's just not doing the job on this concrete slab, you don't swing it harder...you go get a bigger hammer.

[JediKnightSky]

While it does not really excuse this level of breakage, the fact is in that part of the country, the environment causes wood and metal to corrode and rot rapidly. You can find abandoned homes in Kentucky and Tennessee that had to be abandoned due to sink holes forming, and tons of stuff just gets left including tools. In all my years of exploring such places I have never found a tool I would bother to take home and use. Metal was always rusted and pitted badly and wood handles are crumbling away. And this only takes a couple years exposed to the humidity and bugs.

Now I am not trying to say every wooden handle should break rapidly, but plenty of tools in sheds or laying around yards half tended to would likely not last very long. Different story in say a mostly dry state like Nevada, there in some parts of the state you can find old abandoned homes that have not been touched in years or even decades, and find tools covered in dust but the metal will be good, even if the wood is all dried out and needs a good linseed oil soak to restore it.

[Sunderbraze]

Originally posted by JediKnightSky:

Metal was always rusted and pitted badly and wood handles are crumbling away. And this only takes a couple years exposed to the humidity and bugs.

My brother in Christ, the hammers I am using came straight from the Electromax warehouse. It's 8/16/1993 in my game so they were literally machined just over a month ago lmao

I get the point you're making, tools should degrade, but it should be several orders of magnitude slower than what we're seeing

[coraxery]

Definitely seems like a coding error, when using a hammer as intended handle degradation should be almost impossible and even head wear should be very rare. How many hammer heads wear out after maximum usage? Seems like combat degradation is creeping into their general usage

[DrLamp]

Originally posted by JediKnightSky:

While it does not really excuse this level of breakage, the fact is in that part of the country, the environment causes wood and metal to corrode and rot rapidly. You can find abandoned homes in Kentucky and Tennessee that had to be abandoned due to sink holes forming, and tons of stuff just gets left including tools. In all my years of exploring such places I have never found a tool I would bother to take home and use. Metal was always rusted and pitted badly and wood handles are crumbling away. And this only takes a couple years exposed to the humidity and bugs.

Now I am not trying to say every wooden handle should break rapidly, but plenty of tools in sheds or laying around yards half tended to would likely not last very long. Different story in say a mostly dry state like Nevada, there in some parts of the state you can find old abandoned homes that have not been touched in years or even decades, and find tools covered in dust but the metal will be good, even if the wood is all dried out and needs a good linseed oil soak to restore it.

While these are good points, we aren't talking about tools that have been left sitting out in the open abandoned for years. We're talking about tools that have been left sitting for...a few days, in a building, in a box. Then when the character finds them they're set in a box inside a building that is serving as the characters base.

The mental gymnastics people use to try to rationalize the game mechanics just baffles me. Picturing Kentucky as having a hostile corrosive environment with the ground opening up and swallowing buildings makes me think that people view it as another planet entirely. Stop and think for a moment...back in the olden days of...1950, when people didn't have air conditioners in their homes, when a refrigerator was a MARVEL of modern engineering. Back when the television was almost magical... Did tools sitting in people's garages rot away in a couple years? No. They sat on a shelf, or in a toolbox in a non-climate controlled environment for DECADES and they were fine. Look even further back 200 years ago when people didn't even have electricity at all. Did tools rot away in just a couple years? No.

[Berallan]

This may sound silly and i have to double check this, but I continued to build with a bunch of claw hammers in my inventory and there came a time where I wasn't breaking hammers. I thought this was odd and then realised that for some reason my character started to use my sledgehammer to belt in the nails. I didn't want to waste a good sledgehammer on nails so I checked it's condition and as far as I could tell it was still in perfect condition. So maybe if you were lucky enough to find a sledgehammer it might be the tool to use for constructing buildings.

[[Censored]]

Originally posted by Berallan:

This may sound silly and i have to double check this, but I continued to build with a bunch of claw hammers in my inventory and there came a time where I wasn't breaking hammers. I thought this was odd and then realised that for some reason my character started to use my sledgehammer to belt in the nails. I didn't want to waste a good sledgehammer on nails so I checked it's condition and as far as I could tell it was still in perfect condition. So maybe if you were lucky enough to find a sledgehammer it might be the tool to use for constructing buildings.

its their maintenance skill / mods - i just play vanilla and not having most of these issues lol

[Buscemi]

I have broken tools at work but usually because something goes wrong and you gotta improvise or use some brute force. I think breaking a hammer when hammering nails into a board is funny.

[Buscemi]

Originally posted by Censored:

Originally posted by Berallan:

This may sound silly and i have to double check this, but I continued to build with a bunch of claw hammers in my inventory and there came a time where I wasn't breaking hammers. I thought this was odd and then realised that for some reason my character started to use my sledgehammer to belt in the nails. I didn't want to waste a good sledgehammer on nails so I checked it's condition and as far as I could tell it was still in perfect condition. So maybe if you were lucky enough to find a sledgehammer it might be the tool to use for constructing buildings.

its their maintenance skill / mods - i just play vanilla and not having most of these issues lol

That should be marked as the answer.

[jefflee357]

I'm working on a pretty large fence in my new 42.7 run. I've gone through over 300 nails and I'm still on my first claw hammer. Granted, my survivor has a Maintenance level of 3, so that helps. Still might be some balance issues they need to tweak on tool durability though.

[Buscemi]

Originally posted by jefflee357:

I'm working on a pretty large fence in my new 42.7 run. I've gone through over 300 nails and I'm still on my first claw hammer. Granted, my survivor has a Maintenance level of 3, so that helps. Still might be some balance issues they need to tweak on tool durability though.

This was my experience as well. I am 6 months in and never broke a hammer that I didn't use in combat, but I didn't pay close attention as I have probably around 50 hammers lying around various crates in my base..