Death Penalty and Multiplayer progression

[Max Shadow]

I'm new to the game, and I have two questions. What's the death penalty in the game currently? I've heard some posts online of people saying you lose everything, but then someone said this was changed later. So what happens now? And is there any difference between dying and losing your base?

The other question is: how does multiplayer work? Can you play all modes in multiplayer? And how does the progression work for other players? Do they get loot?

[Max Shadow]

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation. I find it to be quite weird that dying has a harsher punishment than losing your base, as it's quite easier to die. You can even die in the exploration maps if you're not careful and a hidden bot kills you from behind. I think losing your base should be the ultimate game over, but oh well. I kinda feel like I'll end up uninstalling it out of frustration after a couple cheap deaths.

[Max Shadow]

Ok I just died in exploration to a stupid small spider and lost everything 2 days away from reclamation. That's an instant uninstall for me. I love roguelikes, and I've enjoyed Escape from Tarkov, COD Warzone and Hunt: Showdown, but those games have short matches, dying is not a big deal. The looter shooter risk/reward gameplay doesn't work at all when dying makes you lose an hour of progress.

Luckily, I found out you can simply load a backup save. Yes, it's cheating, but I don't really care since the game forces me to play in Ironman mode and makes it very easy to die in the most stupid ways.

[Hund]

Was curious about this game but losing everything i got is not my cup of tea, thanks for the heads up.

[Max Shadow]

Originally posted by Rob:

Was curious about this game but losing everything i got is not my cup of tea, thanks for the heads up.

Well, I don't want to discourage you, as I think it's a pretty fun game, and I've been playing it non-stop for the last few days, so I want to clarify exactly how things work:

- When you die, you lose 2 things: The loot you collected during that tour, and the equipment you brought to the tour

- Losing loot means wasting time. A tour has multiple days, and can last around half or one hour. Dying at any moment during that tour means losing everything you collected.

- Losing equipment is a bit more annoying, as equipment with high stats are rare. You can avoid this by starting a tour with low level equipment (or no equipment). Since you rely mostly on your outpost defenses instead of your weapons, starting a tour with low level gear is not that bad.

- The main problem of the game is that you don't know if your base is good enough to finish a tour until the enemy is stomping you. There are numbers to compare the power of your outpost, but they don't help much. You may have enough turrets to kill all enemies, but if you can't craft ammo fast enough you're going to lose anyways.

- The difficulty of the story mode is "fair". So far I've only died twice: once to a random small enemy (I was being careless), and once in a reclamation day I had to retry multiple times because my base was clearly not ready (I attempted one difficulty above the one the story was suggesting). There are other modes where you can farm stuff with less risk, but playing them too much can make the story too easy.

- As I said above, if you don't like losing everything, there are ways to "cheat". If you ALT+F4 right when you die or lose your base, the game will quit and the most recent save file will be right before the last in-game day you played. Even if you forget to do that, there are backup saves you can use to go back in time.