you're opening statement for the first 3 minutes is how i feel about this game and its current build. i've been trying to erect 4 walls to block off a passage, but i can't because there is a constant stream of zombies coming in from around the corner, attracted to the sound of my hammer. I gotten to one point where i erected 2 full walls out of 4, but due to the muscle strain mechanic, i had to back off and rest. When i came back, my two fully completed walls were destroyed, and thus, i had to repeat the whole cycle again, including, re-harvesting more planks for the two lost walls. I did this for about 4-ish in-game days, never able to complete the 4 walls, before i stopped and decided to cheese the game by blocking the passage with a car because the zombies kept coming and so did the muscle strain. it feels like the muscle strain mechanic is more of a chore than fun or interesting. it feels like the mechanic was to artificially slow the player down so that we don't get too far too fast. In theory, the muscle strain sounded good, and i did like it for the first few in-game weeks, but slowly found it to be more of a nuisance mechanic than a deep and interesting one. it really does unbalance the game considering the game was design for players to take on many grounds of zombies at any one time.
Glad we're in agreement, it took me a week or so playing B42 to solidify my thoughts. In a short statement, the effort versus reward/progress ratio is completely broken for B42 where everything takes many times longer than it ought to, making the reward for playing pretty low.
I so far agree, I have tried a few starts in larger cities, there are HUNDREDS of Zeds that spawn in and around your spawn location sometimes, and I don't know why. You can spend so many real life hours trying to keep the character alive, to need to go outside that starting home, and see hundreds more zed, unstoppable lol.
This is exactly why I encourage people to set their populations to low because the current balance of combat to survival in Zomboid right now is like all combat.
I've been playing 42 for a while now and it's worth noting I only discovered this game recently so my opinion isn't affected by being accustomed to the old meta. I actually like the muscle strain mechanics and I think after they nerfed it it's kinda balanced. I don't want my character to be able to slog through 500 zombies in a row like an automaton because that just breaks immersion. I like the realistic apocalypse vibes the game is going for. I also don't mind the pace of the game being slower. After all if people really want to speed things up for lack of time to play or turn their character into Rambo they can do it through sandbox settings. The one thing that sits outside of that is the dragging dead bodies fatigue. I like it but it needs a bit of nerfing and maybe a way for us to dispose of them more realistically since realism is the goal. Something like a mass grave or bonfire and maybe the ability to put them in a vehicular for transport would be cool. The crafting system obviously isn't properly complete or balanced yet and I'm guessing that will be addressed in further updates so I will withhold judgment for now. The calorie intake thing is very unbalanced too but I'm guessing that's not intentional and hopefully will be fixed. Same with being able to use the animal water and not getting xp from discarding foraging items and a few other annoying details like that. I do think the base loot settings are kinda unbalanced which makes things unnecessarily complicated. Like it shouldn't be hard to find an axe in a farming town for example or cigarettes in a trailer park and so on. Especially at the beginning of the apocalypse items like that wouldn't be hard to find. Of course that can be adjusted in the sandbox but I think it definitely needs to be tweaked a bit for the base difficulties and it would help balance out some of the game slow down that's been introduced in a realistic way. I've just started testing crop farming and I've heard some people say it's kinda broken atm as plants always end up dying without constant compost and fertilizer even if you plant them in the right seasons. I guess we will see about that one lol. Anyway that's my two cents on the state of the game based on my current experience. Really enjoying your content and looking forward to more episodes.
I don't dislike the muscle strain, the problem is the time it takes to clear a building now versus back in build 41 is massively lopsided. In B41 if you wanted to go to a hardware store it would take just an hour or two in game to clear the building. Now it takes an entire day. That means what you can accomplish in terms of looting and surviving in a given day is a tiny fraction of what used to be able to be done, and that's where the massive imbalance comes in.
@@Rhadamant Yeah there's definitely something to that. I've been messing around with the sandbox settings to see what I like and what I don't and I've found that I prefer one day in game to equal two hours instead of one I think that was it anyway. It's one up from the default. It suits the pace of the game better for me and you can still fast forward time.
One hopes that the devs are listening to the players and streamers. If the streamers are having concerns (for lack of a better word) and having issues (and they are conceivably extremely good players), how would a newbie feel
I worry when devs listen to streamers more than players to be honest. On average streamers have a lot more time logged and skills than the average player, so gearing the game towards streamers screws over the majority of the playerbase. ( Unless, of course, said streamer is actively advocating for the average player )
I agree with the calories assessment, to the point where I threw together a personal mod that increased the calories of almost everything, especially the new meat types. For some reason, one serving of rabbit was like 1600 calories, but pork and beef, etc were like 150?? It made no sense that my character was eating steak and eggs three meals a day every day and still losing weight even with the slow metabolism trait.
I had a feeling something was off in my first game of B42. In the 25 days I lived, I spent them cooking quite frequently and devouring what felt like an excessive amount of food just to not lose weight, even though I had no traits that would affect that. I've found coating meals with lard or margarine to pad the calories helps.
Not only has the loot and zombie population changed to make looting harder, now there's a default setting where if you travel to a location that isn't a starter town, there's about a 50% chance all of the stores and homes are already broken into and looted by other off-screen survivors. I get that the devs really want us to use the new crafting system, but I have my complaints about it as well. Stuff is often gated behind an item you can't make. An example is a fleshing tool to remove skin from an animal to make leather. You can't use any knife, you have to use a tool that can't be crafted and must be found. I get that the implementation of the new crafting system is not done, as it was the reason the devs stated B42 was delayed for so long in the first place. Probably my biggest issue with the current release though is plumbing doesn't work and now you can only clean your clothes in a river or pond. Why bother cleaning clothes? Well, if you took fear of blood as a trait like I did then you actually need to wash up. EDIT: I should've watched more before making this comment. You talk about the fleshing tool requirement at 12 minutes in.
Been having a few issues like this myself. Not being able to clean bandages with a full sink of clean water, or being completely unable to find an axe while also being unable to make even a basic stone hatchet feels bad. Of course I'm sure things like this will be addressed by the final version release.
@@Viriatha I ate an entire container of ice cream, like an entire quart and a half. A quart and a half of ice cream in real life is between 1500 and 2500 calories, not 220.
Yes. I have found that I basically had to run infinite traits mod and build a god level character to have the game feel like it did in b41. Not really enjoying playing in b42 tbh.
If you haven't been informed or discovered it in the comming episodes from this stream, you only gain foraging xp if you pick the items up now, discarding gives none.
In my opinion they also took the lighting too far. Sure in b41 it was unrealistically visible at night, but in b42 it seems they've taken it darker than reality, it's pitch black. And I checked, July 3rd 1993 was a full moon so it can't be blamed on that.
I'm wondering if it might be more conducive to burying zombies rather than lugging them around when they die in a pasture or other inconvenient outdoor location. It may strangely require less energy
Yes it is easier to bury them, which is extraordinarily dumb IMO. Dragging a body 30 yards versus digging a hole that can fit a corpse ... digging a body sized hole should be like 20x the effort, not less effort.
@@Rhadamantthey certainly can be, however they also seem to be a royal pain early on as well. I set up in my new run at a farmhouse next to the mauldrough trailer park because it had a well, some chickens, and a few crops already planted and ready to harvest. It felt like a nice early spot, unfortunately the chickens seem to be frequently drawing zombies in, forcing me to regularly fend off invaders, leaving my dude perpetually exhausted.
hiding from the helicopter is the wrong way to go about things you just hop in your car and drive to an empty field on the edge of town. let the chopper pull every zombie in the city out to that position and now the town is cleaned out
I totally agree with your assessment. Seems like they have tried to slow down those who have “meta’d” the game without consideration about the enjoyment of the game. I can’t imagine how difficult the game will be now for new players.
I've played a fair amount of b41 but still consider myself fairly new as I don't know any of the "metas" or know town layouts well. I definitely think b42 has some over corrections in how it's balanced as everything feels way harder. For example in order to get logs you need some kind of axe, but I can't find any so I try to make one, but the most basic stone one needs maintenance 1, but that requires you to fight a lot of zombies, but fighting lots of zombies makes your muscles sore and quickly lose effectiveness. It just compounds so heavily, that from what I've played in 25 days I was only halfway to maintenance 1 despite spending most of those days fighting zombies as much as I could, even into exhaustion to search tool sheds, garages and houses. By that point I'd lost water, tv, power, was underweight because of the new calorie rebalance, and finally bit the dust by over exerting myself and getting sloppy.
Overall it feel like the b42 wasn't even remotely ready for a public branch and they simply went on due to public pressure. To be honest, it makes one ask "what are they doing there?" when it's been literal years since the last major update. Either there is a terrible organization of work or things are really messed up in the code itself.
I can't help but to agree, while I have not actually looked at their code base I can only imagine its a massive pile of code spaghetti wrought with a lack of structure to allow them to actually update their game in an efficient way. Either that or they work like 3 months of the year and vacation the other 9
@ Maybe, but I don’t think the game sees it that way. Anyway, I agree with your statements about the state of the game. The grinding part is what gets me scratching my head. It’s a bad situation for people like you, who does this for a living: people watching over twitch or yt won’t have the patience to sit through you grinding to get almost nowhere. And for people like me, casual gamers that simply who don’t have the time to grind. I hope TIS finds the balance before releasing stable b42, for yours and mine sake 🙂
Yeah.. I'm pretty disappointed with the state of the build. It sucks that we waited so long, they tried SO HARD to give us something before the year was out, and we're left with something more janky than we started with. I'm fully aware it's unstable/beta/early look etc. to the crafting end-game overhaul they are trying to do, but my hopes are.. less high than they were before.
For me I can forgive the jank because its unstable branch, for me its the fundamental balance changes they've introduced with all of the effort to craft and kill zombies which makes playing this game an increasing slog without non-vanilla settings
Seem like they went to far. They didnt want to have the game be to easy but not its on the other complete opposite. Either they balance it before release of 42 or the only way to play will be with mods. Like one of the first mods people will get is something like "reduce needed calories 50%". Great content as always
Give them a chance to update things before you decide it's all broke. They've been clear crafting isn't complete. As for water in an animal trough... iew.
Without people like me voicing my opinion about why I think this build suffers they won't have the feedback to make it better, so telling me to 'give them a chance' is honestly counter productive.
you're opening statement for the first 3 minutes is how i feel about this game and its current build. i've been trying to erect 4 walls to block off a passage, but i can't because there is a constant stream of zombies coming in from around the corner, attracted to the sound of my hammer. I gotten to one point where i erected 2 full walls out of 4, but due to the muscle strain mechanic, i had to back off and rest. When i came back, my two fully completed walls were destroyed, and thus, i had to repeat the whole cycle again, including, re-harvesting more planks for the two lost walls. I did this for about 4-ish in-game days, never able to complete the 4 walls, before i stopped and decided to cheese the game by blocking the passage with a car because the zombies kept coming and so did the muscle strain. it feels like the muscle strain mechanic is more of a chore than fun or interesting. it feels like the mechanic was to artificially slow the player down so that we don't get too far too fast. In theory, the muscle strain sounded good, and i did like it for the first few in-game weeks, but slowly found it to be more of a nuisance mechanic than a deep and interesting one. it really does unbalance the game considering the game was design for players to take on many grounds of zombies at any one time.
Glad we're in agreement, it took me a week or so playing B42 to solidify my thoughts. In a short statement, the effort versus reward/progress ratio is completely broken for B42 where everything takes many times longer than it ought to, making the reward for playing pretty low.
I know you said unmodified, but i found putting the ammo/gun on normal loot helps balance things out tremendously.
Sure, but again, this is my take on unmodified apocalypse
I so far agree, I have tried a few starts in larger cities, there are HUNDREDS of Zeds that spawn in and around your spawn location sometimes, and I don't know why. You can spend so many real life hours trying to keep the character alive, to need to go outside that starting home, and see hundreds more zed, unstoppable lol.
This is exactly why I encourage people to set their populations to low because the current balance of combat to survival in Zomboid right now is like all combat.
There are aiming books. I found Aiming 1.
Yes indeed
@@frasercain omg it is the famous, the man the myth the legend Frasercain! 😁 Welcome to the channel.
Along with rocks you can also find logs, branches, heavy branches, and twigs to pick up on the ground now. Bit tricky to get the right cell sometimes.
Aye righto
I've been playing 42 for a while now and it's worth noting I only discovered this game recently so my opinion isn't affected by being accustomed to the old meta. I actually like the muscle strain mechanics and I think after they nerfed it it's kinda balanced. I don't want my character to be able to slog through 500 zombies in a row like an automaton because that just breaks immersion. I like the realistic apocalypse vibes the game is going for. I also don't mind the pace of the game being slower. After all if people really want to speed things up for lack of time to play or turn their character into Rambo they can do it through sandbox settings. The one thing that sits outside of that is the dragging dead bodies fatigue. I like it but it needs a bit of nerfing and maybe a way for us to dispose of them more realistically since realism is the goal. Something like a mass grave or bonfire and maybe the ability to put them in a vehicular for transport would be cool. The crafting system obviously isn't properly complete or balanced yet and I'm guessing that will be addressed in further updates so I will withhold judgment for now. The calorie intake thing is very unbalanced too but I'm guessing that's not intentional and hopefully will be fixed. Same with being able to use the animal water and not getting xp from discarding foraging items and a few other annoying details like that. I do think the base loot settings are kinda unbalanced which makes things unnecessarily complicated. Like it shouldn't be hard to find an axe in a farming town for example or cigarettes in a trailer park and so on. Especially at the beginning of the apocalypse items like that wouldn't be hard to find. Of course that can be adjusted in the sandbox but I think it definitely needs to be tweaked a bit for the base difficulties and it would help balance out some of the game slow down that's been introduced in a realistic way. I've just started testing crop farming and I've heard some people say it's kinda broken atm as plants always end up dying without constant compost and fertilizer even if you plant them in the right seasons. I guess we will see about that one lol. Anyway that's my two cents on the state of the game based on my current experience. Really enjoying your content and looking forward to more episodes.
I don't dislike the muscle strain, the problem is the time it takes to clear a building now versus back in build 41 is massively lopsided. In B41 if you wanted to go to a hardware store it would take just an hour or two in game to clear the building. Now it takes an entire day. That means what you can accomplish in terms of looting and surviving in a given day is a tiny fraction of what used to be able to be done, and that's where the massive imbalance comes in.
@@Rhadamant Yeah there's definitely something to that. I've been messing around with the sandbox settings to see what I like and what I don't and I've found that I prefer one day in game to equal two hours instead of one I think that was it anyway. It's one up from the default. It suits the pace of the game better for me and you can still fast forward time.
In one play through, I butchered and ate two cows and was still losing weight. It needs a……. slight improvement. 😂
Its .. uhh .. broken
One hopes that the devs are listening to the players and streamers. If the streamers are having concerns (for lack of a better word) and having issues (and they are conceivably extremely good players), how would a newbie feel
I worry when devs listen to streamers more than players to be honest. On average streamers have a lot more time logged and skills than the average player, so gearing the game towards streamers screws over the majority of the playerbase. ( Unless, of course, said streamer is actively advocating for the average player )
Yeah, it would be good if they loosen up on the tools with crafting and stuff, hopefully they get that feedback and implement to change it.
We'll see I suppose
I agree with the calories assessment, to the point where I threw together a personal mod that increased the calories of almost everything, especially the new meat types. For some reason, one serving of rabbit was like 1600 calories, but pork and beef, etc were like 150?? It made no sense that my character was eating steak and eggs three meals a day every day and still losing weight even with the slow metabolism trait.
I had a feeling something was off in my first game of B42. In the 25 days I lived, I spent them cooking quite frequently and devouring what felt like an excessive amount of food just to not lose weight, even though I had no traits that would affect that. I've found coating meals with lard or margarine to pad the calories helps.
The calories in this game make no sense at all and it makes eating frustratingly complex and time consuming.
My guess is that the Keelber Elves were living in that tree, and the cookies weren't ready, so they distracted you with a baking tray?
Hahah uhh .. if you say so!
Not only has the loot and zombie population changed to make looting harder, now there's a default setting where if you travel to a location that isn't a starter town, there's about a 50% chance all of the stores and homes are already broken into and looted by other off-screen survivors. I get that the devs really want us to use the new crafting system, but I have my complaints about it as well. Stuff is often gated behind an item you can't make. An example is a fleshing tool to remove skin from an animal to make leather. You can't use any knife, you have to use a tool that can't be crafted and must be found. I get that the implementation of the new crafting system is not done, as it was the reason the devs stated B42 was delayed for so long in the first place. Probably my biggest issue with the current release though is plumbing doesn't work and now you can only clean your clothes in a river or pond. Why bother cleaning clothes? Well, if you took fear of blood as a trait like I did then you actually need to wash up.
EDIT: I should've watched more before making this comment. You talk about the fleshing tool requirement at 12 minutes in.
Been having a few issues like this myself. Not being able to clean bandages with a full sink of clean water, or being completely unable to find an axe while also being unable to make even a basic stone hatchet feels bad. Of course I'm sure things like this will be addressed by the final version release.
I think it's like day 56 or so that the 50% prelooted comes into play. It's in the sandbox settings, so it can be changed and turned off I believe.
Its funny you mention the fleshing tool before you watched the video because yes, the stupid specific item requirements is .. well .. stupid.
A quart of ice cream only has 220 calories. You're just not eating enough!
The in game calorie count is so stupid broken
@@Rhadamant That's what I'm saying: it's not broken. The ice cream really isn't that many calories in real life. You just need to eat more lol
@@Viriatha I ate an entire container of ice cream, like an entire quart and a half. A quart and a half of ice cream in real life is between 1500 and 2500 calories, not 220.
Yes. I have found that I basically had to run infinite traits mod and build a god level character to have the game feel like it did in b41. Not really enjoying playing in b42 tbh.
Or, as I suggested, just turn down zombies ... way way down
@@Rhadamant yeah, that is a good option too, but I like the combat in b41
Thanks for the great content!!
👍🏻
Watching you play makes me want to play PZ, I found an amazing site for blacksmithing but I won't say where
Well thanks for not spoiling it!
If you haven't been informed or discovered it in the comming episodes from this stream, you only gain foraging xp if you pick the items up now, discarding gives none.
well that's a bad change if ever there was one
Well that's absolutely a terrible and stupid change, cool B42, cool. The skill is FINDING the item, not picking the f*cking thing up, what the hell.
In my opinion they also took the lighting too far. Sure in b41 it was unrealistically visible at night, but in b42 it seems they've taken it darker than reality, it's pitch black. And I checked, July 3rd 1993 was a full moon so it can't be blamed on that.
Oh god yes the lightning looks pretty but its stupidly unrealistic
I'm wondering if it might be more conducive to burying zombies rather than lugging them around when they die in a pasture or other inconvenient outdoor location. It may strangely require less energy
Yes it is easier to bury them, which is extraordinarily dumb IMO.
Dragging a body 30 yards versus digging a hole that can fit a corpse ... digging a body sized hole should be like 20x the effort, not less effort.
@Rhadamant I figured it was the kind of thing that could be overlooked when doing an update
is content creation your full time job?
Yes
Vote: Collect chickens, or make primitive tools.
Feel that was pretty obvious to go the way of the tools 😅
Given the hunger mechanics chickens are very useful
@@Rhadamantthey certainly can be, however they also seem to be a royal pain early on as well.
I set up in my new run at a farmhouse next to the mauldrough trailer park because it had a well, some chickens, and a few crops already planted and ready to harvest. It felt like a nice early spot, unfortunately the chickens seem to be frequently drawing zombies in, forcing me to regularly fend off invaders, leaving my dude perpetually exhausted.
hiding from the helicopter is the wrong way to go about things
you just hop in your car and drive to an empty field on the edge of town. let the chopper pull every zombie in the city out to that position and now the town is cleaned out
I disagree. Zombies are most dangerous in high density groups, so making high density groups on purpose isn't a great idea.
agree they made an over complicated game more complicated, double the effort for half the reward
Yup that about sums it up
Only the most hardcore gamers will like it, but like 95% of the playerbase is just going to be put off by it.
I totally agree with your assessment. Seems like they have tried to slow down those who have “meta’d” the game without consideration about the enjoyment of the game. I can’t imagine how difficult the game will be now for new players.
I've played a fair amount of b41 but still consider myself fairly new as I don't know any of the "metas" or know town layouts well. I definitely think b42 has some over corrections in how it's balanced as everything feels way harder. For example in order to get logs you need some kind of axe, but I can't find any so I try to make one, but the most basic stone one needs maintenance 1, but that requires you to fight a lot of zombies, but fighting lots of zombies makes your muscles sore and quickly lose effectiveness. It just compounds so heavily, that from what I've played in 25 days I was only halfway to maintenance 1 despite spending most of those days fighting zombies as much as I could, even into exhaustion to search tool sheds, garages and houses. By that point I'd lost water, tv, power, was underweight because of the new calorie rebalance, and finally bit the dust by over exerting myself and getting sloppy.
For a new player this update makes the game pretty unplayable I'd imagine
Overall it feel like the b42 wasn't even remotely ready for a public branch and they simply went on due to public pressure. To be honest, it makes one ask "what are they doing there?" when it's been literal years since the last major update. Either there is a terrible organization of work or things are really messed up in the code itself.
I can't help but to agree, while I have not actually looked at their code base I can only imagine its a massive pile of code spaghetti wrought with a lack of structure to allow them to actually update their game in an efficient way.
Either that or they work like 3 months of the year and vacation the other 9
Month 7 = July ;)
Yes, but its early July, so close enough
@ Maybe, but I don’t think the game sees it that way.
Anyway, I agree with your statements about the state of the game. The grinding part is what gets me scratching my head.
It’s a bad situation for people like you, who does this for a living: people watching over twitch or yt won’t have the patience to sit through you grinding to get almost nowhere.
And for people like me, casual gamers that simply who don’t have the time to grind.
I hope TIS finds the balance before releasing stable b42, for yours and mine sake 🙂
Yeah.. I'm pretty disappointed with the state of the build. It sucks that we waited so long, they tried SO HARD to give us something before the year was out, and we're left with something more janky than we started with.
I'm fully aware it's unstable/beta/early look etc. to the crafting end-game overhaul they are trying to do, but my hopes are.. less high than they were before.
For me I can forgive the jank because its unstable branch, for me its the fundamental balance changes they've introduced with all of the effort to craft and kill zombies which makes playing this game an increasing slog without non-vanilla settings
This is not the trough water you are looking for *waves hand* 😁
lol
Seem like they went to far. They didnt want to have the game be to easy but not its on the other complete opposite. Either they balance it before release of 42 or the only way to play will be with mods. Like one of the first mods people will get is something like "reduce needed calories 50%". Great content as always
10000% went to far.
First 👍
👍
Give them a chance to update things before you decide it's all broke. They've been clear crafting isn't complete.
As for water in an animal trough... iew.
Without people like me voicing my opinion about why I think this build suffers they won't have the feedback to make it better, so telling me to 'give them a chance' is honestly counter productive.