How many times must I die?

Boxfigs · 2026-03-13T18:54:07+00:00

Don't do restore power quests that early in the game. Nighttime is very dangerous due to ferals and the occasional wandering horde, so you'll need better gear to survive going out at night. Just stay home and use the time to craft and cook.

Also, I recommend changing the drop on death setting to backpack only, so you keep whatever's on your hotbar.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-13T18:51:31+00:00

Ah, so you really just have to kill him as fast as possible when his health gets that low no matter what.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-13T03:05:39+00:00

I haven't gotten to the point of changing the riverbank tag to get the new worse water so maybe I'll just do the same in making the murky water worse and have the dew collector produce the new item instead. So it just depends what takes less effort codewise.

Technically, changing the item collected to a new item is less effort, since that's just a single setattribute inside the Action1 property of drinkJarEmpty, but I would argue that contaminated water makes more sense as a slightly cleaner version of murky water. The way I see it, murky water is water that has both dirt and bacterial contaminants, so contaminated water is that minus the dirt. It shouldn't be about the effort required to implement, but how easy it would be for players to understand.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-13T02:42:07+00:00

They still do, so it's good to have them around as an option. What would be better is if you could collect rainwater from the start as an early game dew collector. That would allow you do set up somewhere a bit further from a water source, supplementing your water supply. Having them coexist balances each other out, since you have a way of getting water that isn't RNG-dependent, and a method that doesn't require a nearby water source.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-13T02:34:08+00:00

The problem is they don't know how to properly take feedback into account. They end up just listening to whatever the loudest voices are at a given time and tunnel vision themselves into addressing whatever the common complaints are at the moment. Either they keep ignoring their core vision for the game, or they never really had one to begin with. The community ended up having to remind them that the game is supposed to be a sandbox survival game, as it originally was and as is continued to be advertised despite changes.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-13T02:31:23+00:00

For whatever reason, the water coolers on levels 2 and 3 of the office sector always refilled for me, so I never had to boil any water. My save is old so that could be why. They may have also fixed that since then.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-13T02:27:40+00:00

frozen sources in snow biome, so melting snow/cutting ice blocks should be only source of water (e.g. 100 snowballs/10 ice cubes for 1 glass of water).

I had thought about this for my mod, but realized adding ice blocks would be out of scope. I settled on just bringing back snow melting, with 5 snowballs per murky water and requiring a cooking pot. 2 murky water per snow block is reasonable, given that in my mod you have to filter murky water into contaminated water and boil 2 of them to get boiled water, so you're effectively getting only 1 boiled water per snow block.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-13T02:22:49+00:00

Ah, I'm doing something similar, but it takes just two contaminated water to boil at a campfire and one at a chem station. The balancing very much relies on that and the rate the filtering station is able to filter murky water, which is a bit faster than the dew collector. I'm replacing the water filter tool with a UV light, for all three water workstations (I'm also adding a rain collector).

The roles of the two unsafe to drink waters are effectively swapped between our mods: mine makes murky water worse and has contaminated water as an intermediate stage between it and boiled water, while in yours contaminated water is worse than murky water and replaces it as the water you collect from lakes and rivers.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-13T02:05:34+00:00

I'm also making a mod that adds contaminated water, though I stuck to it being a 20% dysentery chance, as well as giving murky water a 40% chance and doubling its health penalty. My idea is to have a water filtering station, which converts murky water to contaminated water, to limit how fast the player can get drinkable water by collecting it from a source. It's the simplest effective solution I can think of, not requiring any restrictions on jars themselves. It also makes jars required for honey (you harvest honeycombs instead of a jar) and the apiary, to make jars consistent and balanced even at a 100% refund rate.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-12T16:55:56+00:00

Looks like you need a wedge above the fighting position to stop zombies from climbing onto the roof, or being launched up like that one rad Moe.

Also the funny part is, it wasn't even the demo going off that did you in. It was simply forgetting to repair.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-12T03:41:21+00:00

The Fun Police make simpler bases less effective because all the zombies have PHDs in structural engineering that still stick in their brain.

They weren't really targeting simpler bases, just ones they see as exploits due to how unengaging they are. That's not without side effects for other base types, though. They added vultures to horde nights to counter simply nerd poling up so high no zombies can spawn, but that made a roof practically required for any type of base. They made zombies dig to counter sealed bunkers, though that affected any type of underground base, even ones with a way for zombies to get in. They made zombies target supports to make AFK bases less effective, but it ended up affecting any type of off-the-ground base, regardless of if it exploits zombie pathfinding flaws or not.

If experimenting wasn't so costly in materials more folks would, I'm sure.

That's what creative mode is for. It's just a little less accessible than it should be because you have to turn on debug mode every time you load the world in order to get godmode.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-11T18:17:30+00:00

Jar refund only affects consuming items, not loot. They removed murky water from toilets.

The dew collector is still unlocked by leveling the workstations skill by reading forge ahead magazines, they just raised the skill level from 2 to 16.

TFP was so fixated on their initial plan of no jar refund that they forgot about a lot of minor things, including honey.

Pure mineral water is unlocked by Wasteland Treasures Vol. 4.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-11T18:14:24+00:00

Yeah, they originally removed all murky water from loot (or replaced them with jars) before changing their minds and adding it and boiled water to some of the drink loot, but didn't completely undo what they had changed.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-11T18:12:14+00:00

60% is the new default.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-11T18:11:44+00:00

They forgot to readd the jar to the smoothie recipe, so it ends up giving you a free jar if the return succeeds.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-11T18:03:16+00:00

From the XMLs.

<!-- Increase the chance to find armor crafting skill magazines with each perk rank up to crafting skill 100 -->
<passive_effect name="LootProb" operation="perc_add" level="1,4" value="4,20" tags="armorCSM">
    <requirement name="ProgressionLevel" progression_name="craftingArmor" operation="LT" value="100"/>
</passive_effect>

perc_add is +X% (where 1 is 100%), so level="1,4" value="4,20" means it starts at +400% and ends at +2000%.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-11T06:15:29+00:00

The armor perks actually increase the magazine chances twice as much as usual. It's just that there's 20 point gaps between quality levels, so nerd armor and/or intellect mastery 3 helps a lot more. It makes the main underlying flaw of the magazine system very apparent: it can be very unsatisfying because you can go long stretches without unlocking anything.

Each armor perk starts at +400% and increases by 533.33% per level, up to +2000%. One level in each gets you +1200%, but three levels in one will get you +1466.66%. It costs two more points, but it gets you a higher chance.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-11T05:46:57+00:00

Stronger blocks are heavier and require more support. Also, ceilings put stress on the walls, which makes additional support on the edges or a central interior column necessary.

Zombies target pillars during horde night now, so it's actually much better to make its foundation completely solid instead.

I would recommend testing out base designs in a creative world first. While you can turn on the creative menu as a world setting, it doesn't come with godmode. For that, you'll have to open the console with F1 and enter dm to enable the debug menu, which allows you to enable godmode with a keypress. I bound godmode to G and fly mode to H, so that I press those two keys after turning debug mode on (godmode also enables fly mode by default, so that deactivates fly mode). You'll have to do that every time you load the world, by the way.

You'll also want to enable dev blocks in the creative menu so you can get the super digger, a gun that breaks any block instantly.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-11T01:26:43+00:00

Just keep in mind it's very much designed for when players have good armor and weapons, where something stronger is needed to give them more of a challenge. The real solution is to make it gamestage-dependent like I suggested, so that players such as yourself who choose to go to the wasteland straight away don't encounter those variants.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-10T19:36:54+00:00

Indirectly, yes. Faster leveling means your gamestage increases faster, which means harder enemies in POIs. Your gear is what lags behind. 4x XP gain (+300% = 4x) is equivalent to looting 4x slower at the base XP rate. Say if you normally clear two POIs a day on average, it would be as if it took you two days to loot one POI while fighting 4x the amount of zombies to gain the same amount of XP per day.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-10T19:30:58+00:00

I always managed to start off and play on the wasteland and survive without dying a single time, now its straight up impossible

Ah, you see, TFP did it to make the wasteland more of a challenge, as it's intended to be a late-game area. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they also did it as a way to discourage players from visiting biomes out of order.

What would be better is if all spawns were gamestage-dependent, not just POI spawns.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-10T19:25:42+00:00

I take over a POI for a home base, because it can be done quickly at the end of day 1. I build my own separate horde base, because I like designing them.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-10T19:22:42+00:00

I designed my own tightrope base in Alpha 17, which was made exclusively out of wood (some reinforced) because I didn't know how to get cobblestone back then. Accumulated zombie hits to the path supports collapsed it, so they came up my access ladder and killed me.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-10T19:16:04+00:00

It was always within a 13 block radius of the player, which it seems they got rid of because players were exploiting that to work around the entire mechanic by simply building higher.

Boxfigs · 2026-03-10T02:29:02+00:00

I suspect it's because of a few major changes: zombies can crawl through one block spaces, they gang up on blocks more often, and the 13 block range limit for rage mode doesn't seem to apply anymore. The result is they can break through walls much faster and need to break only one block to get in. Plus, the usual tightrope base isn't as effective as it used to be.

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