New Crafting System & Looting Changes for A21 First Look

[Red Eagle LXIX]

https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/28129-alpha-21-dev-diary/?do=findComment&comment=486363

Originally posted by madmole:

Hi all!
We're very busy on Alpha 21 but I thought I would share the new crafting system and looting changes with you.

There are now tons of new skills that govern unlocking and the quality of items in the game.

A few examples of crafting skills are shotguns, pistols, cooking, armorer, medical, etc.

Perks no longer unlock recipes or govern crafting skills. Many perks are being reworked to add value where before the main value was a recipe unlock.

Books no longer unlock recipes. The ones that did unlock items are being reworked to do something else.



Crafting skill is improved by finding magazines in the game. Mailboxes, file cabinets, book shelves etc can all contain various magazines that improve your skill.

Perking into shotguns for example, increases the odds of finding shotgun magazines, shotgun parts, and shotguns in loot. This makes early specialization work, and you are no longer at the will of the random numbers to find what you are looking for. There is still a chance to find other stuff, but you won't be level 100 and still using a brown double barrel because of random drops. Everything is weighted that you perk into. Once you find all 100 shotgun magazines, you will stop finding shotgun magazines so stuff that is still valuable to you will be found instead.



Skill ranges represent their unlocks. Some skills go to 100, others stop at 50, so they require less magazines read to max out.

All crafting ranges now do not overlap. For example with shotguns, skill 0 to 20 allows you to craft a brown to a blue pipe shotgun. Skill level 21-40 unlocks brown to blue double barrels. Skill level 41-75 unlocks brown to blue pump shotguns. 76-100 unlocks brown to blue auto shotguns. These numbers are just examples, I don't know the actual ranges, but now you don't just craft blue everything.

There is a new skill menu that has a few pages of skills that tracks what skill level you are at and shows what the skill unlocks.

How does it play?
Everyone on the team loves it. The search for technology is fun and you are always finding magazines and unlocking stuff every day. The magazines are useful for a very long time too, where before once you read a single schematic finding another was a disappointment. Now you always find useful magazines.

I found myself crafting nearly every range of pipe shotgun, stone axes etc. Even iron I would craft through most of the range. I would find some stuff and skip crafting for a bit, then when my skill superseded my item, I'd be crafting again. I've never crafted so much stuff in years and it felt really great. You can no longer just sit around in your cave mining and level up and be crafting the best mining tools. You'll need to get out of the cave and search. However teams can still cooperate and share magazines with a dedicated crafter.

Traders sell magazines and offer magazines as rewards. I find myself taking those rewards quite often because it feels very rewarding to unlock things and level up your crafting skills.

Personally I love the new system. I've never seen a crafting system quite like this before, nor an intelligent loot system with deterministic random. It is playing very nice, and I'm really enjoying a long game. I like it because it feels realistic to read something and learn from it and the player can move through all the ranges of crafting and be making that choice... should I use my parts and craft a new gun, or wait another level? Personally I've always had enough parts to craft what I want because I find the parts for what I'm looking for instead of spear parts or whatever. So the new system weights the loot to what the player needs and it feels very rewarding and enjoyable to me and the testers.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2809755969
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2809755980

[Red Eagle LXIX]

https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/28129-alpha-21-dev-diary/?do=findComment&comment=486369

Originally posted by madmole:

Originally posted by Doomofman:

So would I be reading those screens right in saying that once you hit level 3 in Shotgun crafting you'll then be able to make a Quality 2 Pipe Shotgun and then when you hit level 11 you'll be able to make a Quality 1 Double Barrel?

Also, related to this. Will there still be the overlap in Weapon Tier vs Quality. Where a quality 6 stone axe could be better than a quality 1 iron axe?

Yes you move through the pipe shotgun skill pretty quickly. Each tier takes more magazines to move through.
We're removing any overlap. There is still the concept that a purple stone axe has 4 mod slots so it would arguably be better in that regard.

https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/28129-alpha-21-dev-diary/?do=findComment&comment=486394

Originally posted by madmole:

Originally posted by mstdv:

Will the new crafting system remain one of the paths forward and will better quality items still be found (loot stage) or bought (trader stage)?

Right now there seems to be some unity between the three, so I can't tell which is the best. Like it's random enough you never know the best way to get the best weapon, just keep playing, looting and looking at traders, and craft when you can craft something better than what you found. The harder biomes have better loot so go to the wasteland for the best possible loot, if you dare.

Oh and I forgot to mention, but you can find the type of magazines you are after also by looting an appropriate type of crate. For example gun crates have gun magazines, pop n pills crates have medical magazines, mo power has tech mags, etc.

https://community.7daystodie.com/topic/28129-alpha-21-dev-diary/?do=findComment&comment=486620

Originally posted by schwanz9000:

Just to be clear on a few points being discussed about the new crafting skill system:

It is the perk's loot probability boost that will drop off once a crafting skill is at 100%. NOT the magazines themselves. You can still find shotgun mags and give them to your friends, scrap them for paper, or read them for XP.

Tool and weapon parts are still required in recipes.

The only thing different for perks and perk books are the crafting unlocks. Everything else is the same. Some of them will have new perks added to them to beef them up a bit.

[cgwildwolf11]

can i play this build yet ?? and if so how do i get it ?? buy the way, love the game guys , i have over 1000 hours in it and cant seem to stop. thanks

[Red Eagle LXIX]

Originally posted by cgwildwolf11:

can i play this build yet ?? and if so how do i get it ?? buy the way, love the game guys , i have over 1000 hours in it and cant seem to stop. thanks

Not yet. madmole was just giving us a peek into some of the upcoming changes.

[Khissi]

Please say that you've seriously reworked the magazine/book count for ALL bookcases, file cabinets, etc, to be much, much higher? Otherwise... the pitiful amount we find now would certainly not be as fun as you're indicating.

Looks great! Fun and certainly game changing. Will give our overhaul modders a bit of a fit, I should think.

[cgwildwolf11]

that's OK ill just wait , any idea on when it will be available ?? it sounds like lots of fun.

[Mr Negative]

maybe time to give the community what they want? (MODS Folder) enable mods to be installed in a more optimised way. and think yourselves lucky that skilled modders want to work on this game. they do a much better job than the dev's anyway...

[Mad Scientist]

Sounds a lot better than the current system imo. Don't like perking up numerous categories just to be able to craft a few things.

[Shurenai]

Originally posted by f(-_-f):

maybe time to give the community what they want? (MODS Folder) enable mods to be installed in a more optimised way. and think yourselves lucky that skilled modders want to work on this game. they do a much better job than the dev's anyway...

First, Painting a house or car is a dramatically different thing from Building a house or car. Modders paint (Add content); Developers build (all the functions and mechanics that modders use).. Without the developers building the house/car to begin with, the modders have nothing to paint with, or to paint.

Second, When was the last time you played? 2015?

'Cause TFP LITERALLY bent over backwards and massively rewrote how the game works to read from exposed XML files to make it significantly easier for modders to mod many things in the game. They later wrote in a modlet reading system that allows modders to make mods without overwriting files; At that same time they made the game read from a literal mods folder users can install modslets to, which recently has been moved to reside in I think <userdata>\7 Days to Die

IE, "C:\Users\<YourUser>\AppData\Roaming\7DaysToDie\Mods"; If the folder isn't already there, just add it yourself, Or follow the steps in this post linked below to put it in some other location:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/251570/discussions/0/3272438119343867108/

[atom heart]

I always though that the current system was putting the cart before the horse. You can make a tier 6 shotgun, but you can't make a shotgun until you read the schematic. That makes no sense. If progress is in line with reading so that you can make a weapon from the start, it is far more logical.

[Ramar]

I didn't see any answer as to when it will be released. Any idea when it will at least become experimental? are we days, weeks or months away?

[FT]

Originally posted by Ramar:

I didn't see any answer as to when it will be released. Any idea when it will at least become experimental? are we days, weeks or months away?

I think this is an A21 starting feature. And A21exp is hoped to become available late this year, but probably still several months away (first will be dev-vlogs about it and an eventual notice about a cutoff date before A21StreamerWeekend...then the weekend itself). Stuff like the StreamerWeekend signup cutoff is usually a couple months before the exp release, so I'm guessing we're several months away.

[HybridGrizzlyTrenchGun]

I feel like this whole perk rework thing is a bit unnecessary. I like just grabbing a schematic, or book from the creative menu and reading it, but then again, it's not like they're changing it so that you have to read ♥♥♥♥ in the first place before you can use and build stuff. I'd personally like to see more vehicles added into the game, like a prison bus or one of those heavily armored Marauder trucks. That is of course, if the TFPs don't mind making much more armored vehicles that can withstand about 100+ trips before needing slight or even moderate repairs.

[Skullman8003]

Originally posted by Ramar:

I didn't see any answer as to when it will be released. Any idea when it will at least become experimental? are we days, weeks or months away?

This Question has already been answered go to the alpha 21 dev diary post and
at the end of the paragraph its says Alpha 21 release date: ITS DONE WHEN ITS DONE (insert Gods voice when you say it gives it more power) Loololloloolooll

[Bo0Mz]

i feel like this is completely pointless and a waste of development time and resources that could have been used on the bandit and faction system and other QOL / performance improvements

theres tons of things that could be added and improved like the weather and water, sneaking system, the UI, more weapons, zombies and vehicles, more audio for weapons, zombies and vehicles and more biome specific content
why must you keep changing the exact same core elements of the game with every alpha?

[Ramar]

Originally posted by 999:

Originally posted by Ramar:

I didn't see any answer as to when it will be released. Any idea when it will at least become experimental? are we days, weeks or months away?

This Question has already been answered go to the alpha 21 dev diary post and
at the end of the paragraph its says Alpha 21 release date: ITS DONE WHEN ITS DONE (insert Gods voice when you say it gives it more power) Loololloloolooll

LOL Ya, I saw that and should have been satisfied. But, I was hoping there had been further updates that hadn't been posted. :(