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[Soadreqm]

I have made a new form for 0.F

I answered the survey, but I also wanted to give proper commentary on these. Mind you, I don't really play the game much these days. I come back to it every couple of months, play it for a while and get bored again.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Automate more menial things like eating when I'm hungry, sleeping when I'm tired (if I want), maybe even the whole exciting practice of crafting/uncrafting to grind skills

   
Eating, sleeping and other menial things are a pretty big part of the game right now, what with the whole "survival" thing, so I'm not sure if this is a good idea.

Huge hordes of creatures moving around outside player vicinity

   
I'm not sure what the actual significance of this would be. It seems like it'd be boring if the horde reduced everything to rubble, as zombies tend to do if they spend a few days inside the reality bubble, but if they didn't, what's actually changing? Wasn't there already an option to fake overmap hordes, where the "horde" just spawns a bunch of zombies if you get close?

Rework transhumanism so that mutations and bionics are more equal and have more interesting choices

   
"More interesting choices" sounds vaguely ominous to me, since the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup devs tend to use it to mean nerfing things to the ground to make all the options equally not worth it. I guess it depends on implementation.

Let me have a proper power grid in my base instead of some hokey hack with a vehicle

   
Not really useful, since there aren't that many things you'd care about plugging into the power grid. There also isn't really a reason to have a non-mobile base. That would have to change first.

Improve the details and variety of monsters, so robots turn off when there's nobody around to fight, zombies hibernate int he winter, monsters mutate and evolve in phases more similar to the player, things like that.

   
This sounds neat.

Fix armour layering at long last, so armour can have weak spots and things, making it possible to have much more detailed and interesting equipment loadouts

   
You mean I'll finally be able to wear panties with stockings without an encumbrance penalty? Sign me the fuck up.

Continue working on "deeper" NPC interactions, allowing them to loot and explore on their own, and help me out in new ways

   
This sounds good too.

Make water take up a z-level so we can go under the sea (darling, it's better)

   
Swimming honestly sounds like a huge hassle, but maybe it'd be worth it if there was actually something interesting underwater.

Revamp laboratories to be more varied facilities of all sorts for more exploration, such as sprawling bunkers or weird alien habitats.

   
More map variety is always fun.

Make healing and injury more detailed, along with adding tons of interesting pharmaceuticals and the ability to stitch up your NPC's gaping scalp wound, or get cool scars.

   
Considering one of the last major changes was adding the chance of dying from infection even if you have antibiotics, I don't really trust you guys to make sensible design decisions in regards to this, but the concept sounds cool.

Overmap improvements: Allow different types of roads (eg railroads), multi-z-level roads (so your boat can go under a bridge), that kind of thing. Add biomes, starting with rural/urban/suburban biomes so that I can explore megacities or travel far from the horde.

   
Sure. Being able to actually visit the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area sounds great, if the map system was capable of supporting it.

Add skill proficiencies, gating specific subskills, like "sailing" as a proficiency of "driving". Helps to fix skill gain rates and also lets us include more things like neolithic knapping for people that want unlikely proficiencies.

   
Is this like that thing with being unable to fly helicopters without the helicopter pilot perk? I get what this supposed to achieve, but the system sounds really gamey. I guess I'd like to see more of an explanation for why this design is the best one, and what other alternatives have been considered.

Work out a system for exercise so I can get stronger over time (will probably come along with a new Endurance stat)

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I guess it'd make the simulation more complete, and I'm not opposed to it, but it's not something I've ever wanted while playing the game.

[Erk]

Automate more menial things like eating when I'm hungry, sleeping when I'm tired (if I want)

I don't automated eating/drinking per we (I especially always want to be choosing what to eat, even if it's as simple as a "use this for automated eating" flag/group), but I would really like to see is the ability to eat while doing other things, if that is what is meant by it. Such as for example setting items to be consumed while I spend a few hours crafting or reading or whatever. Or being able to choose what to eat during the process without having to stop and start everything up again. It's a lot better now that crafting has percentaged production thankfully but it's still something that's feels very boring and time consuming to repeat all the time.

I think that was a common misunderstanding, my bad for not phrasing it clearer. Automation means doing mundane tasks automatically either:
- in the background of a longer task, eg you're doing a day-long crafting session, so your character snacks and drinks from auto-eat and auto drink stockpiles when necessary so that you don't have to monitor and interrupt, and can afk or just let it buzz by quickly
- as a single action encompassing various mundane tasks like doing laundry and cleaning guns, so you just put stuff in a "maintenance" stockpile and enter a "do maintenance" command to do whatever is logical to fix that stuff up. Or maybe your NPCs do it for you. And if you get hungry while doing that, maybe you'll even eat from your auto-eat stockpile. Recursion!

With autosleep, eat, and drink, long term projects could be mostly done on automation mode over the course of a few irl minutes. This is a big goal that will improve qol and realism at once.

[ZebioLizard2]

    Rework transhumanism so that mutations and bionics are more equal and have more interesting choices

Could you explain this one? It's so vague that answering in the positive or negative is very difficult. As mentioned by Soad the DCSS devs tend to use it to equalize things downward so that choices end up being removed in terms of equality.

[Erk]

It's not really a straight nerf or buff, and the proposals are really big so it's hard to describe.

CBM rework proposal, which is somewhat more nerfy but would also open up future expansion possibilities
Mutation rework proposal, which is more of a flat buff I think, removing reliance on savescumming to become an awesome mutant.

In general it would reduce the power level of endgame supercyborgs, but add a lot more decision making and play to the buildup, hence the term 'rework' rather than 'nerf'. Similar to how the armour layering rework will make armour less overall powerful, but will also fix a lot of issues like hot pants conflicting with stockings and in the end make it a lot better and cooler, even though it also means having more weak points.

We have no qualms of admitting when things are straight nerfs around here.

Soadreqm: I'll reply to some of your stuff too but that is gonna take longer

[Greiger]

I just realized I never posted to watch this version of the thread.

I never did much messing with CBMs generally just sticking to a few batteries, a flashlight and maybe a bionic pocket, so I can't comment much there.  But the mutation changes look great!

[notquitethere]

I like the general push toward making interesting tradeoffs with the mutations and cbms- I have my doubts whether the end state of having different factions offer full mech surgery will ever be reached even if it were implemented (with all the chance of infection, nerve damage, surely the most likely outcome is horrible death, like almost all Cataclysm playthroughs).

[iceball3]

ptw

[Erk]

I answered the survey, but I also wanted to give proper commentary on these. Mind you, I don't really play the game much these days. I come back to it every couple of months, play it for a while and get bored again.

I already responded to the auto eat and transhumanism questions above.

I'm not sure what the actual significance of this would be. It seems like it'd be boring if the horde reduced everything to rubble, as zombies tend to do if they spend a few days inside the reality bubble, but if they didn't, what's actually changing? Wasn't there already an option to fake overmap hordes, where the "horde" just spawns a bunch of zombies if you get close?

The current fake hordes don't behave fairly, they ignore walls and overmap barriers. The main point of having wandering hordes is to have the zombies wander around, potentially finding your cool reinforced base, but the current level of abstraction means any distant defenses don't count and they can teleport through your walls. Proper hordes would follow overmap terrain, potentially give chase, and in the long run may even have zombie masters guiding them with a kind of malevolent intelligence, potentially even giving each horde some unique characteristics. The same code could be used for things like marauding mi-go slavers, or triffid hunting parties, also maybe random events like zombie hordes gathering and beseiging sites like your base or an NPC faction.

Not really useful, since there aren't that many things you'd care about plugging into the power grid. There also isn't really a reason to have a non-mobile base. That would have to change first.

I kinda disagree, and as this was one of the most popular options, I think a lot of players do too. using vehicles to make a home base power grid is already very popular, people have been asking for a non-janky version of the same thing for a while.

You mean I'll finally be able to wear panties with stockings without an encumbrance penalty? Sign me the fuck up.

   
total agreement. It will make encumbrance way more logical, and also mean that good armour won't be as game breaking. Eventually with better wound system it can also be used to represent how your armour covers your vitals, and while there are weak points they're not overtop of your softest bits.

Swimming honestly sounds like a huge hassle, but maybe it'd be worth it if there was actually something interesting underwater.

   
Don't forget, we have SCUBA gear and fish mutations.
Personally I'm picturing some new underwater factions eventually.

Considering one of the last major changes was adding the chance of dying from infection even if you have antibiotics, I don't really trust you guys to make sensible design decisions in regards to this, but the concept sounds cool.

   
That is precisely the reason I'm trying to motivate people to help me improve this.

Mind you, you'll still have a high chance of dying if you get a septic infection in the apocalypse. The fix there is to add more buildup stages, from swelling and pain to local infection to early systemic infection to full blown sepsis. That's part of reworking wounds and healing.

Is this like that thing with being unable to fly helicopters without the helicopter pilot perk? I get what this supposed to achieve, but the system sounds really gamey. I guess I'd like to see more of an explanation for why this design is the best one, and what other alternatives have been considered.

Only vaguely related to helicopters. Mostly it is for things like, say, blacksmithing. Under current plans you don't know blacksmithing by default and need a book or teacher to start doing it. With proficiencies, you could learn or start with blacksmithing proficiency, which means you autolearn more blacksmith recipes and have a much easier time working on blacksmithing crafts. The Fabrication skill would be the master skill for blacksmithing, and would level up as you practice, and your Fabrication level would affect how easily you learn fabrication related proficiencies.

The reason for this system is that it's the easiest one we've thought of so far that connects to our current skill system. It allows us to represent a wide range of skills but still also represent the cross connection, ie. being skilled at making things tends to make it easier to learn to make other things. It will open the way for tons of esoteric things we've currently nixed, such as neolithic stone tools, by gating them to a proficiency.

As we continue to slow down skill gains I see this as a way to offer more waypoints for the player to expand and improve, so that it doesn't feel like the game has stagnated when it takes a long time to go from fabrication 7 to 8. There will still be tons of stuff to learn, just parallel instead of vertical.

[darkhog]

Really FUN (in the DF terminology) game. Though not really my cup of tea as I think zombie survival games are overrated. If it was without zombies though, I would play it.

[Eschar]

Really FUN (in the DF terminology) game. Though not really my cup of tea as I think zombie survival games are overrated. If it was without zombies though, I would play it.

I believe there's some sort of "wildlife/NPC only" start option/mod?

[Egan_BW]

Really FUN (in the DF terminology) game. Though not really my cup of tea as I think zombie survival games are overrated. If it was without zombies though, I would play it.

How mainstream of you~

[xaritscin]

underwater content would be cool but as far as things go it would require changing the whole structure of the Cataclysm worldmapping to something similar to DF. in fact, i think it would have been best if the game generated a limited world with proper Z-lvls added to it. having an infinite New England map gets kind of boring, why not have a complete fictional world where the Cataclysm happens? i guess it cant be helped, its a fundamental part of the design document but i feel that part alone limits the possibility of having more places to go and explore. even now most of the additional biome options are basically WIP mods and its still a replacement of the New England biome.

[Erk]

Person I'd rather continue the real world thing, especially if it can be kept procedurally generated. I'm much more interested in driving my motorhome across a fictionalized US than I am driving it across North Vuvuzelia.

[duckman]

Person I'd rather continue the real world thing, especially if it can be kept procedurally generated. I'm much more interested in driving my motorhome across a fictionalized US than I am driving it across North Vuvuzelia.

Is there enough work being done on mountain and desert biomes for that yet?

[Erk]

Not much point in working on other biomes until the game can support them, at this stage. The biome system only needs two pretty simple additions before it can be implemented though, and from there a lot of stuff becomes sheer json work.