And the other things...

Hello folks!

We've been hard at work and redesigning the core of character builds. This has led to a significant rewrite, merge of perks, and implementation of S.P.E.C.I.A.L.

Below we will talk about changes to the character system, and mention our build manager that lets you conveniently change and share builds and features of unsafe towns.

S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system implementation

We’ve spent a long while redesigning the character system to allow more impactful, varied builds. With our new design, we’ve found a place for S.P.E.C.I.A.L., it is now is implemented into the game and provides small stat benefits, like a carry-weight bonus from strength for example.

But the most important task of S.P.E.C.I.A.L. is that it dictates the max perk level of its child perks.

Every S.P.E.C.I.A.L. has 4 perks assigned to it and the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. value divided by two is the max perk level you can pick.

For example: To pick level 5 Lifegiver player has to invest 10 points into endurance.

Marathon runner 5 requires 10 agility so to just have those two maxed perks, the player would already spend 30 out of 58 points. This encourages us to approach character building from a different perspective, trying to reach level 5 of perk is not anymore the main way to go.

The player begins with all S.P.E.C.I.A.L. being at level 1. The initial level of S.P.E.C.I.A.L. costs no points.

Perk points changes

Because of S.P.E.C.I.A.L. implementation, we’ve adjusted and changed how perk points work. Now instead of 15 perk points, the player has 58 total character points, with 2 gained per level up until level 30. The now-named Character points are used to increase both your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and the level of your perks.

Perk changes and new perks

To make all the perks more impactful. Some of the perks were merged, we’ve additionally added new perks to the list. New and modified perks can be found below.

Perks in bold font are not fully implemented yet. Features related to them are still a work in progress.

• Cybernetics - Increases implant benefits by a percentage.
• Immunity - Increases resistance to poison and radiation and gives a small amount of threshold value.
• Party Animal - Used consumables stay active for longer [%] and have stronger effects [%].
• Engineer - Unlock Sandbags, Sandbags stacking, Flamer Turret, Sniper Turret, Burst Turret.
• Thick Skin - Increases resistance to Electric, Fire, and Explosion damage.
• Man Of Steel - % Chance to negate Knockback, Knockdown, and Knockout effects.
• Penetration - Lowers total enemy resistance [%] from your attacks.
• Relentless - Lowers active perk cooldowns [s].
• Squad Leader - Group gains benefits [%] if you're the leader of the party or travel group.
• Rancher - Allows you to have an animal follower. Your animal follower is stronger [%] with every level of this perk.

Build Manager

Build manager allows the player to simply load & save build presets, build presets are files that players can share. You only need to have enough points for the preset.

This is a huge Quality of Life feature, as instead of meticulously selecting S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and perk values and traits from someone, you can download a file from him, and without even restarting the client you can load the build into the manager and apply it to your character.

Browser-based build manager is also in progress and it will allow you to load/save build presets just like the in-game version.

Town Control Event

The old Town Control type is changed into Town Raid, where players can raid the town treasury after finishing the raid.

New Town Control is focused on winning by score by taking control of individual randomly picked control points all over town. There will be two sides in each town conflict. Town control fights are between these two NPC factions. For players to participate in town control for either side, the faction leader/officer needs to choose the side that the faction will support for taking control of the town. Factionless players and factions that didn’t pick a side can join the fight as individual 3rd parties, but they cannot take over control points and won´t be able to gain rewards related to loyalty to one of the sides.

Below we will try to simplify how town control mechanics work.

Every 10 seconds a Tick happens.

During the tick, players within control points will shift the influence over the point to their team. Every player increases influence by one, and the max influence over a point team can have is 6.

Based on influence, the score is distributed, for example:

The blue team gains 2 points per tick and the Red team gains 4 points.

Killing enemy team members and NPC will award some score but it will not be as influential as the control point score.

Players will get individual rewards based on their participation score on top of faction rewards.

If there was a significant difference in team balance, the underdog will receive a reward multiplier.

Factions get allegiance reward that provides permanent bonuses to their factions if they remain loyal to one of the town teams.

The winning team takes over the city, other than the visual difference, the factions that sided with them will have benefits in town.

Town Raid

Raid is similar to our classic town control system but is turned into a quick skirmish instead of rewards for 24 hours.

Raid and treasury is completely unrelated to Town Control Event.

The town’s treasury will keep generating stackable loot every specific amount of time. Players can decide to try to raid the town which alerts the guards and announces it to the server. The town Raid triggers when at least half of the town guards are dead.

At the end of the raid if the town didn’t manage to defend itself for a set amount of minutes, the treasury will open and whatever rewards were there, can be looted by anyone, even by some unrelated sneaking thief. The treasury will remain unlocked until more loot gets generated.

The town can be raided as soon as there is generated loot and the treasury is locked.

In a case of guards recovering to full power because of players being unable to beat them, or resigned from assault, the raid fails and the treasury will not open.

Rewards system

To ensure the player is accurately rewarded for his effort and can secure his rewards from PvE and PvP activities, as well as some matchmaking events and achievements - They are not directly sent to his inventory, but instead to player rewards storage, while being in a safe location, the player can request and receive all of the rewards he has collected. This helps us to ensure that the player doesn’t lose his reward at the end of the event and allows us to implement challenges that completing wouldn’t bloat the player's inventory before he gets out of the unsafe location, it will also allow sending basic items to offline players.

Quality of Life and fixes

Since our last Open Testing, we’ve improved some smaller things that players mentioned to us. There were hundreds of fixes and AI tweaks as we strive for as polished as possible experience, those smaller changes you will find out yourself. Below we will find the most often discussed QoL features.

• The outdoorsman was fully implemented; you can now detect and skip encounters. Detecting encounters levels up the skill.
• Cooldowns now have timer text on top to allow players to glance at the cooldown. It also mentions the effects of cooldown on mouseover.

Item descriptions were updated, and players will now find all the information on what items do if it’s a drug or a mod.

• The mouse movement was slightly rewritten to make the character react instantly to a right click, it will now also play animation on a picked hex.
• Previously broken, now previewing maps from entrances were implemented.

This concludes our news. We will hope you like the improvements and we will keep on polishing the game until satisfied. We will see each other on open world PVP beta with the faction system implemented!

Hey Wastelander, 

here you will find the link and mirror to download the client for today tests.

Google Drive 

Dropbox 

Beta Test is scheduled for 03.06.2023-04.06.2023 Starting around 18:00 GMT+2

The game client will be released before tests.

Hey, Wastelanders.

We are going to organize a small beta test to pinpoint any bugs and find the issues with balance, beta test will offer both PvP and PvE elements,

Players will begin the game at the tutorial and then receive the following on completion:

• level raised to 30.
• skills increased to 100.
• all crafting recipes up to Tier 3.

Players will find three dungeons, Necropolis, Warehouse, and Glow.

- Necropolis is a PvE-only dungeon during this Beta test. So don't be shy about grouping up with strangers to get past the dungeon.

- Glow is slightly complicated and requires players to think smart to not get locked in and die from radiation. Radiation resistance drugs will allow Players to stay there for longer.

- Warehouse is full of deadly Deathclaws, it's a quick get-in, get-out type of place.

Players can create their outpost inside an encounter by crafting Tent Backpack and using it. Most of the base features are disabled but Players can use it as a storage and crafting place. Players can also invite others with the “#addmember playername” command.

There will be two towns available that players can regroup and trade-in.

Plenty was added since the previous post and we'll run down some of the features quickly, you will be able to test them out in the upcoming beta test. Below you will find information about some of the mechanics.

Encounter System

The world map is separated by biomes. The encounters are randomly generated with structures and resources that are available for the specific biome player is in. Players might encounter two separate NPC groups at once that scale with their travel group count. Having 3 players in the travel group doesn’t exactly triple the enemy count. Each specific groups have its scaling so it’s balanced depending on enemy type.

Worldmap Group and Party

Players can have up to 8 party members totally in Party, this means if one party member leaves, everyone else can follow them onto Worldmap. There is no limit or disadvantage to traveling in a group, as long as people travel on foot or the vehicle has enough seats for everyone.

If a group enters an encounter, everyone from your party will be able to see it.

For example, if you will enter an encounter, a party member in the hub can leave the town and join you as it’s visible to him on Worldmap.

Tutorial and Starting Location

After registering, the game puts you in Northcrest Ranch, a semi instanced location with plenty of quests that teach basics to the player. The tutorial follows a couple of rules:

• On death, you will spawn again in the graveyard.
• You do not lose loot.

Players can follow the quest line to find out what to do or leave the location early by heading to a camp that is located northeast of the ranch.

Respawn

When you die after the tutorial your loot will be dropped and you will respawn within an encounter somewhere 3 zones away from where you have been killed.

Quest Log

The player can find all his ongoing quests inside the quest log accessible by pressing “j” or opening it from the inventory/multipanel menu

Destructible structures

Players might run into destroyable structures, it can be a rock pile, cracked wall, or just doors.

Destroying them could open passage to extra loot in dungeons, or secret shortcuts. One example can be found in Vault 15, where destroying rockfall with dynamite lets players into an extra loot room.

Suffocation

Suffocation is an anticamp feature, if players remain in a closed loot room that requires a certain task to be opened, they will begin suffocating. Suffocation takes a % of max health, so the result is a quick death if the player attempts to exploit secure rooms.

Outdoorsman

The outdoorsman skill is not yet active although it will work in a way that the highest party member outdoorsman skill will be used for traveling calculation.

Bug Report System

You will now find an in-game bug report system after accessing the menu, there you can describe the issue. Your location and name will be automatically reported, so just include the information.

Optimization And Improvements

Since the last pvp beta, we’ve spent months optimizing and looking for things that might cause performance impact. The result is a far smoother game even if there are a lot of players running in combat.

Hey there!

I'm excited to share some news with you. We've been hard at work since the PVP beta testing and have made some amazing progress in implementing features for PvE and the core gameplay loop. Our team has been super productive and we've been making great strides in checking items off our to-do list. While a lot of the work has been on the code backbone, we're thrilled to give you a sneak peek of how some of these new systems will work.

We've got so much to share that we've decided to split it into two articles. In this first article, we'll cover the basics of player skills and the essential economic systems.

The gameplay elements presented below were created from scratch and are explained in a way to introduce them easily to new players. Stay tuned for the second article, where we'll dive into some major gameplay content. Thanks for your support!

Barter

Barter is a skill that allows players to trade for goods at better prices. The higher the Barter skill, the better prices a player can get both when purchasing and selling goods. Barter is a progressive skill, meaning that as a player's Barter skill level increases, they will be able to access even better prices.

To level up Barter, players must trade for items. Specifically, purchasing items from traders will improve a player's Bartering skill, while buying bottle caps will not increase it. This encourages players to engage in trading and acquire a diverse array of items, rather than simply accumulating large amounts of currency.

With this redesign, Barter has the potential to become one of the most important skills and features of the game. By investing time and resources into improving their Bartering skill, players can gain access to better prices and a wider range of goods.

Traders

Some traders specialize in specific types of goods and offer better prices for those items compared to general stores. For example, a skin trader may accept Brahmin and gecko skins and offer a better price for them than a general store. In addition, the trader may allow players to barter for specific items in return, such as ammo and other resources, at a fair price.

To make it clear which items a trader accepts, the items that the trader does not accept are faded and colored red. This allows players to quickly identify which items can be put on offer to that particular trader.

Traders also have different skill levels depending on their location and the goods they offer. For example, a bar in Klamath may offer better prices for alcohol than a bar in Hub, while a gunsmith in Hub may sell guns and ammo more cheaply than a general store in the same town. This incentivizes players to explore different areas and interact with different traders to get the best prices for their items.

To prevent infinite resource trading, no item will be able to be bought infinitely by caps through the dialog window. Instead, a fair amount of balance will be required to accommodate supply and demand. This encourages players to manage their resources carefully and to prioritize certain items for trading over others. Overall, the trading system adds depth and complexity to the game, requiring players to think strategically about how they acquire and use their resources.

Item Pricing & Value of caps

All item prices have been based on item real value, with resources priced at a low point and all weapons, armor, drugs, and other craftable items priced according to the cost of their base resources. This has significantly lowered the overall prices of items, with some items now costing as much as ten times less than they did before.

As a result of these changes, the value of a single bottle cap has significantly increased. This means that although players will earn fewer caps from activities compared to the previous version of the game, they will be able to purchase significantly more items for the same amount of caps. For example, instead of being able to afford only one combat armor with a certain number of caps, players can now purchase up to four combat armor for the same amount of caps.

Crafting

Resources are divided into 4 Tiers, with each Tier containing a specific range of resources. This allows for a more organized and streamlined resource system, making it easier for players to identify and manage their resources.

The crafting system has also been debloated, making it simpler and more intuitive for players. The overall amount of resources has been adjusted to balance the game and ensure that players have access to the resources they need to progress without overwhelming a player with too many options.

• Tier 1 resources are your raw ingredients, gecko skins, iron ore, and junk.
• Tier 2 resources are mostly the outcome of processing raw ingredients, e.g. gecko skins and brahmin skins turn to leather, iron and junk turn to metal, Broc flowers and Xander roots turn into chemicals.
• Tier 3 are a group hard to gain resources used in more advanced crafting recipes, those are available in limited amounts from shopkeepers, rarely gained from dismantling, and lootable in dungeons.
• Tier 4 are the rarest materials, used in endgame weapon recipes.

Most crafting recipes require one of 4 types of workbenches: General, Ammo, Chemistry, and Gunsmith. Crafting basic items does not require any workbenches.

The player needs to be near the workbench to be able to use it. The distance is more than 5 hexes, so good workbench placement means the player can use all workbenches from a single position.

Workbenches can be found in towns, or be built in player bases.

More advanced crafting recipes require a specific profession level. The number of profession levels can vary between 4-6 depending on the profession type. Profession levels can be gained mainly by completing specialization quests or being taught by NPCs.

Repair

Repair is a skill that allows players to restore the condition of their items. The mechanic works by requiring players to spend a resource material to repair an item that has been damaged or degraded through use, low tier items are exceptions to this rule. The material required for repair varies depending on the item being repaired.

Items are divided into tiers, with higher-tier items being more complex and difficult to repair than lower-tier items. This means that repairing higher-tier items requires a higher skill level than repairing lower-tier items.

When attempting a repair, players have a chance of success, which can be increased through the use of specialized tools. If a repair fails, the item being repaired will suffer additional damage, and may even break completely, rendering it unusable.

Broken items can still be repaired, but the cost of repair is doubled. It's important to note that item deterioration does not decrease the performance of an item. However, if an item becomes completely broken, it provides no benefits and must be repaired before it can be used again. In such a scenario, sometimes it is just better to dismantle an item.

Successful repair increases skill progression.

Dismantling

All craftable equipment can be dismantled, providing players with a chance to obtain resources used for their crafting. When an item is dismantled, it has a chance to yield up to half of each resource amount used in its creation. However, the chances of obtaining these resources decrease with each additional ingredient, and the third ingredient, which is often a rare resource, has a low chance of being returned.

Players can improve their chances of obtaining resources from dismantling items by using tools.

Dismantling chance is not affected by any skill.

It's worth noting that completely broken items have the same chances of yielding as many resources as brand-new items, so players are encouraged to dismantle broken items rather than simply discard them.

Traps

Traps are a significant hazard in the game, and players must be careful to avoid them or risk taking damage. Traps can be part of a lock or as a hazard on the maps, and players can also use traps like mines or dynamite for leverage in combat. Explosives can open secret pathways or extra loot rooms in the dungeons, providing players with additional rewards for mastering the use of explosives.

There are several types of traps in the game, each with its own unique challenges and dangers. Players can use a variety of explosives, including mines, C4, and dynamite. Each explosive has a different use, allowing players to experiment with different strategies to gain an advantage in battles or to uncover hidden areas.

Disarming traps increases the player's skill progress, but the trap itself gets destroyed completely.

Lockpick

Players will encounter two lock types: electronic and mechanical. Both lock types can be lockpicked, but electronic locks require an electronic lockpick to attempt lockpicking, while mechanical locks can be picked by hand.

To aid in lockpicking, the player can use lockpick sets, which come in two types for each lock type. For electronic locks, the player can use an electronic lockpick or its mk2 version. For mechanical locks, the player can use a lockpick set or an expanded lockpick set.

Using lockpick sets significantly increases the player's chance of successfully opening a lock. However, even with the right tools, lockpicking can be difficult with a low skill level.

Each lockpicked door/container increases skill progress.

Skill Timeouts

Cooldown is applied on failure, which means that players can attempt to repair, lockpick, or disarm traps as many times as they want as long as they succeed. However, if they fail, there will be a cooldown period before they can attempt it again. This cooldown period can be affected by the Tinkerer perk, which can reduce the amount of time players have to wait before they can try again.

Thank you for reading,

we hope this gives you a taste of what's to come, and we can't wait to share more about the other features we've implemented. Stay tuned for our upcoming updates, and thanks for your continued support!

[ The test has finished, Season 4 is not yet available. ]

- Tests are scheduled for:

December 22, 7PM - 10 PM GMT+1

December 23, 7PM - 10 PM GMT+1

The time might be extended if neccessary.

- Players will be in instanced locations. Every starting location can host up to a specific amount of people.

- You can join any arena or spawn instance by using commands and typing id

- For interested groups with player amount bigger than 12 we can host private arenas that require access code to enter. For such request please contact me on discord.

- We're hosting S4 on same host server as S3, if you're IP banned, you're IP banned, we're not lifting it.

- It's still an early beta test, we did our best to polish it and implement QoL features, yet do not expect for everything to be perfect.

- You will find all neccessary info in game after pressing F1 key.

- You can't change the cosmetic look you will begin the game with.

- There is no saving during testing. We wipe the game every game restart, so it means you will need to register again after a restart.

- Registration puts you in the game instantly, build is done after registration phase.

- We will provide google forms for feedback and bug reporting.

Hello folks!

It has been a short while since the last post, but during this time PVP arena has been created and quite an amount of balancing has been done on character perks & traits, and weapons. Most crucial balancing is somewhat done and base mechanics were tested. We’ve established an initial balance point but a lot more testing will certainly be needed. Open PVP arena will provide us with data to make adjustments along the way. Now is up to players to invent all kinds of crazy builds and combinations and see how they play out in arena PVP matches.

Open Test Session Date

The tests will happen on the 22nd and 23rd of December, this year. The client link will be released on discord and patreon before the test phase.

Players that join test sessions will find themselves at level 30 with all increased skills.

Upon Registering you will find yourself in a starting location with the rest of the players, here you can set up your perk and traits and grab gear from replenishable containers nearby. There are NPC targets around the place for you to test out your builds. The graveyard might be locked, depending on player flow.

After the set-up phase, the arena will be unlocked, and entering it will assign you to the first available unfilled Arena. You can readjust your builds during a match and will find more loot in containers on spawn if you need to swap.

Perks & Traits

Perks values were changed in a way that some of the first levels give more benefits than the following levels, which aims to increase the build diversity.

Below you will find a list of perks with stats.

PVP Arena

Ready players are able to join the arena with their own gear and be placed in 10vs10 matches.

The matches by default are Team Deathmatch with the first team to score 50 becoming a winner.

Over the span of matches, different game modes can launch.

Game modes:

• Team DeathMatch - Team vs Team, respawn enabled, the first team to get 50 kills wins
• Team Elimination - Team vs Team, no respawns, and the last team, standing wins.
• FFA - Free for all, the first person to score 10 kills wins.
• FFA elimination - Last man standing wins.

You will be able to change your build anytime during combat by either typing commands or accessing characters by pressing C.

You will see your team members all the time.

With each death your gear will repair itself and ammo will replenish for equipped weapons, drugs will also spawn. Depending on the game mode, you will respawn during or after the match.

Smart Cursor

We’ve decided to stray from the classic mouse controls, The control scheme is:

Right Click to move

Left click to interact/shoot

Pressing A on the keyboard toggles between attack and default cursor

Alt + right click resets the cursor back to default.

Right-clicking closed doors in attack mouse mode will open the door.

Cooldown Visuals

All cooldowns are displayed as circles above the combat ui, cooldowns on the mouse over display time remaining for drugs. Cooldowns also display debuffs caused on you like bleeding and poison and show the level of the debuff.

Hotkey System

The hotkey system is a flexible tool to customize the client to your liking, you can slot drugs, ammo, weapons, armor, and skills in there to use it with keyboard hotkey or left click, By default consumables and skills are used on self but holding ALT enables USE ON mode, letting you pick the person you want to, for example, heal.  The hotkeys are also expandable so you can customize the amount you need.

AP Costs

Weapon attack costs are balanced depending on weapon type. Most weapons follow the universal rules listed below, but there are always a few exceptions.

Attack Cost:

• Big Guns - 60 AP
• Small Guns Burst - 50 AP
• Small Gun Rifles Single Shot - 45 AP
• Small Gun Pistols Single Shot - 35 AP
• Melee Weapon - 25 AP
• Throwing Melee Weapon - 35 AP
• Grenades - 50 AP

Reload Cost:

• Miniguns and Rocket Launcher - 50 AP
• Other Big Guns - 30 AP
• Shotguns - 40 AP
• Other Small Guns - 20 AP

Aiming

Aiming for eyes adds 10 AP extra cost, and 5 AP for the groin, legs, arms, and head.

There are a few ways to reduce the AP cost of shooting:

Fast Shoot trait 10% reduction

Gunslinger perk up to 20% reduction

With a total of 30% AP reduction to shoot excluding weapon modding. This means that by default you can burst once with BG weapon and have 40AP remaining, but with enough AP reduction, a double burst becomes possible. This also means that a small gun can burst 3 times in total.

Max AP reduction unaimed attacks mean you can shoot 4 times on pistols. This trait and perks do also work on melee and throwing weapons, so it means you can get low as 18AP which means 5 unaimed attacks.

Weapon redesigns

The weapons were designed in a way to provide certain weapon type benefits and be different in more ways than just damage stats. Below you will find an in-depth description of what was changed about your wasteland weaponry.

Shotguns

Shotguns are designed to be effective short-range weapons, shooting cones of 5 hexes wide shots. It has the option to burst and single shots.

Shotguns can be used for point-blank 1hex to cause massive dmg to single targets nearly, almost reaching the damage output of minigun weapons.  All shotguns have a chance to knock back targets, so shotguns can be used to knock back multiple targets at close range. Shotguns cannot use aim shots, but unaimed single shots are a viable option for close encounters. Shotgun shots also pierce targets up to a certain amount. To sum up shotguns have a 5 hex wide line of fire, pierce targets, cause a knockback effect, and have a high dmg hex but limited range, which makes it one of the best short-range weapon types in the game.

Miniguns

Another 5 hex wide burst weapon type. Weapon range middle range makes it an ideal crowd control tool and flanking weapon against multiple enemies. It has the highest 1hex dmg of all weapons and decent range dmg. It is costly to reload.

Big Gun Burst Rifles

LSW and M60 weapons have better range compared to sg rifles of the same tier. They deal a bit more dmg than sg rifles but at a higher AP cost to shoot and reload.

Big Gun Aimed Shot Rifle

Only Bozar is currently in this category. It is the highest-range weapon in the game and also deals very high damage. The shots cause a knockback effect on targets and the shot can pierce through multiple targets.

Small Gun Rifles

These rifles are the most versatile weapons and can vary between burst and single shots depending on need. Burst is 3 hex wide, it can deal pretty good concentrated burst fire on few enemies in distance, and burst dmg on the range is higher than miniguns. On 1hex dmg is quite far behind compared to miniguns, but still quite effective. Rifles can do a variety of things but do not excel over others in any of those.

SMGs

Similar to small gun rifles but offer a much shorter range. Instead, they deal more damage. SMG weapons have a really good damage/AP cost ratio, which makes them a preferred close-quarters weapon. With just a few AP reduction perks it can do 3 bursts, It is a much more agile weapon on close-range fights than big guns, which shoot fewer times and require much more to reload.

Small Gun Sniper Rifles and Pistols

Pistols and Snipers are good for middle and long-range correspondingly. Players could focus on the number of shots or set up for the critical build. Those weapons have lower AP costs than big guns, which makes these much more effective in terms of damage per used AP. Although damage-heavy, those weapons lack a burst option, so they become disadvantaged at close range. Sniper rifles have a higher range than pistols and a bit more dmg, but higher AP cost.

Laser Rifles and Pistols

The laser damage type performs best on low armor targets. Well-armored targets or enemies wearing tesla armor reduce the effectiveness drastically. One characteristic of laser weapons is that laser pierces targets in line and is able to hit multiple targets with the same shot. Lining up multiple targets perfectly might be hard to pull off but every hit target receives the same amount of damage. The downside of this feature is that friendly fire is harder to avoid and positioning becomes a key. Laser rifles have a higher range, AP cost, and dmg than laser pistols. Aim shots with lasers are also possible but the effect is applied only on the main target, the rest of the hits are counted as unaimed shots. Laser Rifles deal more dmg than a sniper rifle, but have a little bit less range.

Plasma Rifles and Pistols

Plasma weapon shots cause a small Area of Effect (plasma blobs) when the projectile hits the target hex. Since the projectile has speed, it means it also is dodgeable by movement. The Aim shot is possible on the main target and the rest of the hits are unaimed. Just like with other weapon types, Rifles have a higher range, ap cost, and damage than pistols. Plasma weapons are middle and short-range weapons. With plasma, one possible use is that you can anticipate spamming corners and chokepoints.

Pulse Rifles and Pistols

Weapons with electric Damage type cause a stun effect on the target. The stun effect disables running for a few seconds. This type of weapon can be aimed and is not using a line of fire, so it will only hit its main target. Metal armors provide no protection against pulse weapons, so if you see metal on the enemy, switch to pulse type if you have one.

Laser Bursting Weapons

Gatling laser, Phazer, and Solar Scorcher are Laser bursting weapons. 5 Hex wide burst and laser type damage provide that it pierces targets and is good vs low resistance players. Phazer and Solar Scorcher are lightweight 1 handed laser weapons with a smaller range and decent dmg. The Gatling Laser causes total destruction unless the target has enough resistance.

Flamers

Flamer deals initial fire-type damage to targets and causes burning debuff. Each fire-type attack stacks more burning debuff. Higher fire resistance helps against flamer damage and reduces burning debuff damage. A Flamer attack affects all targets in the line of fire. Flamers are ideal as close-range mass AoE weapons but are easy to deal with friendly fire.

Rocket Launcher

Rocket Launcher has a high range, high dmg shots. Rockets now have projectile flight time, allowing targets to run off the rocket course before it hits. Rocket Launchers reload cost of  50 means that these are more like shock weapons on the very first moments of clash. They aren't so good at dealing with constant dmg in a longer fight because need to reload after each shot. It is thought the best weapon for pulling targets or pushing targets away. There are also some new traits related to rocketeer gameplay that makes explosions more deadly and bigger AoE. Few ammo options AP rockets and Explosion rockets, for dealing more dmg or dealing bigger AoE.

Grenades

Grenades are more of a secondary weapon than the main one. Grenades now have projectile speed and delay on the ground before they explode. This makes them easily dodgeable. There is a Trait Demoman to remove the delay on the ground, but still, with this trait, projectile speed still gives some time to dodge the grenade. Frag grenade now has a chance to cause a knockback effect from the explosion. Plasma Grenades got a chance to cause a knockdown. Molotovs have no delay on the ground because they break right away when hit. Molotovs cause small initial fire dmg and burning debuff on targets.

Melee weapons overall

Melee weapon's effectiveness based on damage/Action Point cost is the highest of all weapon types and has various different effects (knockdown, knockback, bleeding, poison) based on weapons and attack types. Also, perk bonuses for melee weapons give more value in percentage than similar perks for ranged weapons. There are also critical effects as in aimed shot-range weapons.

Subtypes of melee weapons bring different results:

• Knives: Swing attack causes bleeding on targets, Thrust attack pierces 35% of target DR.
• Fists, Gloves: Knockdown targets.
• Hammer & Club weapons: swing attacks cause knockdown, and Thrust attacks cause knockback.
• Spear weapons: Trust and Throw attacks pierce 35% of target DR.

Criticals

Critical and Critical effects are now calculated based on just critical chance stat.

The higher this stat, the higher Chance and Roll.

There is no separate critical roll stat anymore.

Default Critical Chance is 10%

If the Player aims there is a critical chance bonus added depending on a body part:

• Eyes +30%
• Head&Groin +20%
• Legs&Arms +10%

There are perks, traits, and a drug that increases this value further.

Bonus Damage and Critical Bonus Damage are separate values and one excludes another, so if your goal is to deal with crits, you should invest in the latter.

Default Critical Damage Multiplier is dependable on what body part was hit:

• Eyes +100% Damage
• Head&Groin +75% Damage
• Legs&Arms +50% Damage
• None +25% Damage

Critical Effects

Critical Effects are calculated once per attack and they are dependable on your critical chance, the higher critical chance the higher possible crit roll.

Possible effects depending on the aim target:

• Eyes: Knock out, Blinding
• Head & Groin: Knock out, knockdown
• Arms: Arm cripple, weapon drop.
• Leg: Knockdown, leg crippled.
• Unaimed/Torso effects: Random body part cripple

Non-critical aimed shots still grant some damage bonus:

• Eyes +30% Damage
• Head&Groin +20% Damage
• Legs&Arms +10% Damage

Critical Resistance can be increased to avoid criticals being dealt to you and reduce the chance of crit roll effects happening.

Drugs & Consumables

Drugs are divided into 3 types: Soft, Hard Drugs, and Instant Drugs

Soft Drugs work for 30 minutes and Hard Drugs work for 3 minutes

Soft drugs give minor benefits and no negatives.

Hard drugs are more situational and build-specific drugs with maluses.

Using a soft&hard drug resets the drug timer instantly, There is no need to wait for the drug to stop working and no addiction drawbacks are implemented as of yet.

You can take 1 of each drug, so if you want you can take all in-game drugs at once.

Soft Drugs, which bring only positives for 30 minutes

• Any food item - Health regeneration time decreased by 10 seconds.
• Any Alcohol - 10 Carry weight + drunken master trait
• Cigarettes - Chance to hit increases by 20 points
• Cola - Ap regens slightly faster (5 points of AP regen)
• RadX - Rad resistance increases by 50% resistance

Hard Drugs come with negatives and work for 3 minutes

• Mentats - Increases Critical damage stat by +20 crit dmg modifier, but all damage done against you is stronger by 10%
• Buffout - Increases critical resistance by 10 but you run slower.
• Jet - Lowers your total ap by 20 but increases ap regen speed.
• Psycho - Adds flat 20 DT but decreases your sight significantly. DT is damage reduced at the final step of the calculation.
• Cookie - Flat max 50 ap increase, extremely rare item

There are various ways drugs can be used for your benefit. For example, mentats could be used for critical bursters and aim shooters. Buffout could be used by front-line tanks to soak critical hits. Jet can be used for everyone, which reduces initial impact by lowering AP, but in extended fights, AP gain overshadows the bigger ap pool. Psycho is for close-range melee/hexers/flamer/shotgun builds or when the place enforces purely close-quarters combat. A cookie is a very rare consumable that can be used by any build and comes with no other negative effects than its scarcity.

Healing Drugs:

Healing drugs trigger instantly and share a cooldown that is applied by some of the instant healing drugs.

• Healing Powder + 15HP
• Stimpack + 50hp and 3s cooldown
• Super Stimpack + 100 hp and 5s cooldown
• Hypo + 250 hp and 3s cooldown
• Antidote - 50 poison
• Rad-Away - 50 rad
• Antitoxin - Resets all drug timers, disables effects

There are also new healing mechanics for healing by shooting healing cartridges on targets (Needler pistol).

Healing bonus traits increase the effectiveness of all healing drugs, including Antidote and Rad-Away.

Skill books increase Skill Gain and Exp gain by 50% for 30 minutes.

Consumables cost 30 AP to be used.

Option Settings

The current option setting allows you to switch window resolution and Music&Sound volume. It is accessible by pressing ESC and choosing settings. It is still in development and ultimately it will allow you to configure the game, pick your preferred settings, and set up all keybinds.

Keybinds

Keybinds will be ultimately remappable through the settings menu that is currently in development. Currently though here are the keybinds

A - Toggle Attack mouse

H - Toggle Sneak

C - Open the Character screen

In character screen:

T - Traits Selection screen

P - Perk selection screen

I - Inventory screen

P - Crafting

M - Weapon Modding

U - Building

K - Friends

F5 Show Player Names

F6 Show overhead HP

F7 Overhead HP toggle between CURHP/MAXHP and CURHP

F8 Disable scrolling

R - Reload

Ctrl+G - Loot ground (Opens looting screen if there are more than 1 item)

Ctrl+D - Drop inventory to the ground

Alt+Q - Aim Eyes

Alt+W - Aim Head

Alt+E - Aim Reset

Alt+A - Aim Left Arm

Alt+S - Aim Groin

Alt+D - Aim Right Arm

Alt+Z - Aim Left Leg

Alt+C - Aim Right Leg

B- Swap weapon

N- Swap weapon mode (Single/Burst)

, and . - Rotate

Numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0 - Use the corresponding fast slot

ALT Numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0 - Alternative fast slot use e.g. alt+5 will let you use FA on someone.

Hello everyone, first off, thank you for the positive feedback we received during the last article and the Livestream, your doubts were compiled as Q & A and posted on discord. We’re now ready to talk about the initial character design.

We’re here to talk about Traits and Perks and Build System combat-wise. So this will be mentioned just after the basics.

From character creation, only race will have an impact on your initial stats, currently, there won’t be anything else that alters them.

The exact values for Perks and Traits are still being shaped, they will be available in-game during the PVP test phase. 100% of perks are implemented, and 90% of traits are implemented.

Level Cap

The player's soft cap is up to level 30, after level 30 no extra is gained from leveling up.

Trait Points

Players will gain a trait point every 10 levels, so at levels 10, 20, and 30, amounting to max 3 trait points.

Traits do not have multiple levels, you pick a trait, and gain a full effect.

There will be no traits at character creation.

Perk Points

Players will gain a perk point every 2 levels, ultimately ending with 15 perk points total.

Perks will have 5 Tiers/Levels each, which means you can invest 5 perk points into them.

The perk tiers are respectively unlocked at levels 0, 5, 10, 15, and 20.

Perk points are gained on 2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24,26,28,30 level.

While perks are mainly stat improvements, the traits change your approach by modifying combat mechanics in an interesting way, you’ll see what I mean with the list:

Current Traits&Perks

Below you’ll find a list of Traits and Perks, please remember, those are initial ideas and it all depends on the testing outcome to find out what is kept and what is being removed.

List of traits:

• Armor padding Armors break slower when receiving damage.
• Bigger Booms All explosions caused by you have a bonus radius.
• Bloodthirsty  You do extra damage to already bleeding targets.
• Bloodymess  Humanoid enemies die instantly below 0 HP, but also you do.
• Bonehead  You have a lower chance for critical effects to be applied to you but your own critical chance is lowered.
• Boomer  Rockets deal extra damage but they rarely hit the exact position.
• Bruiser  Your melee damage is increased but the melee critical chance is reduced.
• Chem Reliant  Your drugs work longer but not being drugged lowers your total Action points.
• Demoman  Grenades explode without delay after reaching targets.
• Drunken Master Your dodge is increased while drunk but your ap regeneration is lowered.
• Empathy  First Aid cooldown gets reduced by half of the current value when a party member gets knocked below 0 HP.
• Fast Metabolism You have no poison or radiation resistance but your passive regen is quicker and you have a higher chance to reduce bleeding.
• Fast Shot  You cannot do aimed attacks but attacks cost fewer action points.
• Final Bullet  Last Bullet in a magazine does extra damage.
• Finesse  You have a higher chance for a critical attack but your critical attacks apply no effects.
• Guerilla  Your action points generate faster in encounters.
• Kamikaze  You deal and receive bonus damage.
• Light Step  You have a high chance of not springing a trap.
• Ninja   You can run while sneaking but your overall running speed is lowered.
• One Hander  You can use only one-handed weapons, but you gain bonus damage.
• Pacifist  Your base damage is significantly lowered but your healing is far stronger.
• Prepper  Weapons break slower when fired.
• Pyromaniac  Your targets take extra burn damage but you also put yourself on fire.
• Quick Recovery You get up faster from knockouts.
• Rad Child  You lose passive health regeneration, but radiation heals you.
• Sawbones  You have a higher chance to fix broken limbs.
• Serial Killer  Each kill gives you bonus AP but your AP regeneration is slower.
• Short Sighted Your vision is significantly lower but you can hear others nearby through solid obstacles.
• Small Frame  Enemies have a harder time dealing critical attacks to you, but successful attacks have a higher chance to apply effects.
• Stone Wall  You have a small chance to avoid knockback, knockout, and knockdown from any source.
• Tamer   You can tame an animal to follow you until death.
• Tank   You gain damage reduction but move slower.
• Team Player  Damage you deal to party members is halved.
• Tribal   You get no bonuses from armor and cannot wear them but you have more action points.

There are some interesting perks that players can choose from, with 3 traits on level 30 a player can make quite the explosive mix.

The perks do not exclude each other, which means even crazy combinations like Rad Child + Fast Metabolism can be applied. As a result of taking Fast Metabolism player has zero radiation resistance so he takes all radiation damage, which now heals him thanks to Rad Child.

Some other traits like Empathy, change how you approach the game, Empathy player with a healing weapon can be an amazing support in a full crew, but his own damage is quite lacking.

List of perks:

• Accurate Punches Your chance to hit with melee is increased.
• Action Boy  Your action points regenerate quicker.
• Bonus Ranged Damage Your ranged damage is increased.
• CQC Training  You deal bonus melee damage.
• Dodger  Increases the chance to dodge an attack.
• Far Sight  Increases your sight distance.
• Fire Eater  Increases resistance to fire damage type.
• Ghost   Increases your sneak capability.
• Gunslinger  Reduces Attack AP cost.
• Hunter   Your ranged attacks have a higher chance to score a critical attack.
• Insulated  Increases resistance to the energy damage type.
• Junkie   Used drugs stay active for longer.
• Lifegiver  For every level of this perk you gain max health points.
• Lucky Bastard Reduces the chance for a crit attack to be scored against you.
• Marathon Runner This perk increases your running speed.
• Medic   Decreases your First Aid cooldown
• Melee Critical Chance Your melee attacks have an increased chance to score a critical attack.
• Melee Critical Damage Your critical melee attack deal more damage.
• More Criticals Your overall critical chance increases.
• Natural Healing The amount of HP passively regenerated is increased by this perk.
• Pain Killer  Increases the healing you do.
• Quick Hands  Reduces AP cost of actions.
• Quick Regeneration Increasing this perk reduces how often your health is regenerated.
• Radroach  Increases radiation resistance.
• Rock Solid  Increases resistance to the explosion damage type.
• Sharpshooter  Your chance to hit with range is increased.
• Snake Eater  Increases poison resistance.
• Tinkerer  Decreases cooldowns for lockpicking, repair, and traps.
• Toughness  Increases resistance to the normal damage type.
• Weak Point  Your critical ranged attacks deal more damage.

With a bigger amount of perks to pick from, and more perk points overall, we are able to create a lot more different combinations, and let players experiment on what does work, and what doesn’t. They can allocate all their points to specific perks or spread them around. It’s up to the player to decide, we’ll just attempt to balance it all out.

An interesting mix can be spotted, like taking a short-sighted trait and max level of far-sight perk will end up with default sight range as malus gets negated but as positive outcomes, you can now see through nearby walls in 3 hex range.

Perk And Trait info

The build UI pulls the perk&trait statistics from the code responsible for setting those changes, so it will reflect numbers that modify player stats. No more outdated descriptions!

One Account Approach

As mentioned before, the goal is for a player not to be forced to have multiple accounts, the build system will be flexible and can be tweaked combat-wise, and the rest, which is utility, achievements, and such will be separated from the combat build and provide beneficial bonuses.

Race

As the rest, the race needs to be something that can be exchanged as they offer different gameplay perspectives. We will implement an in-game way to change your race.

Action Points

By default a player will always have 100 action points, this amount can be increased by drugs or certain traits. Action points regenerate only when idle.

Character stats

Every player will begin the game with 100 hp and gain 2hp per level and 3 carry weight.

The default sight is 35 hexes, which can be altered both positively and negatively by traits.

Skills

Everyone will begin their adventure with all skills undeveloped, first levels are very easy to increase, it gets tougher the higher the skill is though.

Every skill will have a corresponding skill book that will provide a skill gain multiplier for an amount of time.

Experience Gain

Experience gained from kills won’t be the main source of XP income, doing quests and events will net you significantly more XP.

The Experience is rewarded party-wide, if your party member kills an enemy you see, you will gain an equal amount of exp as the killer.

Cover Mechanic

There’s a simple cover mechanic, if the target stands behind an impassable hex or someone, the hit chance will be reduced.

Overhead HP

There was a question about enemy hp information above head, this is implemented and you do not need any perk or a trait to see it.

You can toggle between

• No hp over the critters head
• HP/MaxHP visible
• Just HP visible

Achievements and Masteries

All non-combat traits are separated from combat builds and will be gained by completing achievements or bought out by mastery points. Masteries will be a way to reward players for continuing to gain experience and will be implemented after everything else build-wise is balanced and implemented.

I've got a surprise for you. The most crucial article since the beginning of the project.

We've finished the first version of the Combat System

Since we were developing it from scratch. I've put the original concept on the workbench and reviewed what was good, what wasn't, and where to improve. We have redesigned everything related to Damage, Weapons, and stats.

Armors, Ammo, and Damage calculations were made more understandable, without stripping depth for possible builds and changes.

The weapons have changed to offer different tactical niches instead of just having different damage/range stats, during the article, we will list some but not all examples.

Keep in mind that all of this is subject to change, we can't see what works and what needs tweaking until we will do some more testing, some things might require a value change, and some need to have the feature reworked.

With that in mind, let's have a rundown of weapon attributes, with them I'll use some weapons as examples of how they work.

The weapons use Attack Lines to define how their attack targetting splits, they also can have a piercing that allows them to hit more than just one target per line. With some weapons, we’re combining those 2 to create different weapon types than the rest.

Through the article you will find small gifs showcasing the mentioned feature or weapons, they will be tested on a rather friendly family of spore plants. 

Attack Lines

Some weapons have an attack cone that decides how the weapon will perform. Bursts will split bullets evenly on each line, leaving the remainder for the main target. Single Shots are hitting targets in the cone with even power.

• Assault Rifle: rifle has a 3-line burst shooting 12 bullets, and every target gets hit with 4 bullets.

• Minigun: has 5 line bursts, 30 rounds split to 6 bullets per target hit.

• Flamer: hits everyone in its area of the fire, spreading damage to 5 lines on a short range and applying a burning debuff.

Target Piercing

Weapons can hit more than 1 target per line depending on their piercing stat.

• Laser Rifle: This single-line weapon goes straight and hits the first 4 targets in the path, upgraded version hits up to 6 targets, allowing for a great tactical damage multiplier on groups.

• Shotgun: Every shotgun has its piercing stat, with most shotguns being able to hit 3 targets per line, and having 5 lines, a shotgun choke mod allows one to extend weapon range but lower the number of lines to 3.

Explosion

Weapons fire a projectile that travels to the target location, upon reaching the target, it explodes.

• Rocket Launcher: It launches a rocket that flies towards the target at a slower pace than the rest of the projectiles, upon reaching the target it explodes, knocking everyone back from the center of the explosion.

• Plasma Rifle: Plasma weapons deal small AoE damage, upon reaching targets small splash damage is applied to everyone near.

• Grenades: grenades explode 1 second after reaching the target.

Pulse Weapons

On top of electrical damage, the attacks will subtract a small amount of target action points.

Melee weapons

The weapons have perks, some can pierce armor, some cause knock-down, and knock-back, and some cut and cause bleeding.

• Super Sledge: The hammer can do a wide swing, hitting multiple targets in front of the attacker, or thrust and knock back a single target.

• Sharpened Spear: Can hit 2 targets in a line, dealing piercing damage, or you can throw it.

They bite hard.

• Wakizashi: Thrust it for piercing damage, or try to cause bleeding with a swing.
• Cattle Prod: Damage enemy while dealing electric damage and lowering enemy Action points.
• Ripper: Cause bleeding with every attack.

Range Bursts

Bursts have been reworked and depending on the weapon, they split the attack between 3 lines of fire or 5 (minigun). They are more of a havoc-wreaking tool than accurate killing weapons.

Aimed Shots

As long as a weapon can aim, the main target hit will be resolved with an aimed body part, if you shoot a laser rifle, aiming for the head and hit 3 enemies including your main target, the main target is hit in the head while the rest count as body shots. There is now also flat aim damage, so even if you don't crit, hitting someone in the head is going to deal additional damage.

Current damage numbers are:

+30% for eyes

+20% for head and groin

+10% for hands and legs

The extra damage is going to close an annoying gap making aiming builds have to crit or gain nothing from aimed shots.

One Hex

One hex still exists, if targets are lined up for one hex and the attack is using more than one bullet, instead of Attack Lines the burst will be soaked into a single target, hitting with a maximum of 50% bullets of the attack.

With changes on Armor DT and bullets, the damage is similar to the Season3 damage dealt, despite only 50% of bullets hitting the target. 

Hex Targetting

Every attack that can hit more than one target, including melee,  can be used with targetting hex instead of critter. You can shoot a laser rifle toward an area outside of your vision, or burst forward when blinded. You can carpet-bomb the area with plasma spam.

Healing Shots

Some weapons and ammo will allow you to do healing instead of damage. A zip gun loaded with syringe needles provides quick health bursts to your target.

Criticals

The crit roll table is hard to read and Crit Roll itself is an unnecessarily complicated additional stat after calculating critical chance.

For initial tests, criticals will deal extra damage based on the targeted part of the body. The additional effects will be caused by crit success using the remaining critical chance points.

In the result, the more critical chance, the bigger chance for additional effect to trigger, without crit roll stat being involved in the calculation. The system will make crits more evened out, making critical results like knockout or breaking limbs a sporadic event, not the core goal of the critical attack.

Weapon Skill Requirement

Every weapon has now a skill requirement and weapon skills are leveled up by use. A skill requirement does NOT stop you from using a weapon, it only makes it harder to hit the target. The weapons have different skill requirements, with a pipe gun requiring nearly no skill will make it easy for new players to score hits with the weapon, but giving Gauss Rifle to a newbie will result in most of the shots being missed.

Ammo

Ammo was reworked, instead of having DR, DT calculations, % lowering weapon damage, or increasing it, it will now simply just have nothing or one of those 4 perks:

• Piercing - Ignores 33% of target resistances.
• Poisonous - Damage is converted into poison damage instead.
• Shredding - Has a chance to cause bleeding effect, lowers total damage.
• Healing - Damage is converted into healing damage.

That does not mean that every weapon type will have its ammo equivalent, there won’t be a healing minigun or shredding flamer ammo. The ammo types will be added to weapons that make sense, and some weapons in the future might be added that specialize in using healing ammo for example.

Armors

Armors have been also changed and damage calculation is different. Most importantly Damage Threshold is a single value applied just once, not per bullet, and armors share DT for every damage element. Having no Weapon Ammo in calculation and simplifying Armor stats makes the system clear for the user. Differences from the DT will be adjusted within resistances that will remain separate per damage element.

Debuffs

There is a variety of debuffs in the game, all of them are new calculations and some of them are new status effects.

• Poisoned

Poison stacks within your body and some of the amount depending on your resistance will damage you every minute, before fading completely. Antidote lets you heal the poison damage. Poison stops passive heal regen.

• Radiated

Similar to poison, it's a damage that stacks up and wounds the player every minute, it is passively gained in irradiated areas so using RadX is important.

• Bleeding

Bleeding can be caused by monsters, weapons, and bullets. Bleeding has 3 levels and every level triggers an equal amount of damage per second.

Level 1 bleeding causes 1dmg/s

Level 2 bleeding causes 2dmg/s

Level 3 bleeding causes 3dmg/s

Bleeding stacks up to Level 3, after reaching this level it causes no additional benefit to the attacker.

Bleeding has a small chance to heal by itself, lowering the bleeding level by 1 up to a fully healed bleeding state.

Bleeding can also be fixed by First Aid skill, reducing the amount of HP healed by the process, more on that below. Other healing sources won't be affected by bleeding.

• Burning

Burning is a strong damage per second caused by fire attacks, it will trigger from 15 to 30 damage per second until it all fades. Most of Flamer's damage is moved into burning stat and off the instant damage of the weapon.

This results in initial damage from the flamer not being strong enough, but repeated attacks build up the number of ticks per second, which, if not managed, will end up badly. 

One Account Approach

What we want is for the player to grow attached to his character, this entails that the player will have multiple classes/builds on the account which he will be able to swap, while character skills will be shared between the builds and be passively gained.

Having Perk presets you’ll be able to change your role in safe locations and experiment to see what hits home for you, without the necessity of creating a new account and leveling it up separately or going through reroll process.

Skills

The skills are now passively gained by use, For example, using first aid will slowly level it up, and scoring kills will increase the skill of a particular weapon. Repairing items will increase repair skill, disarming traps will level up traps, etc.

Currently, all skills are planned to be progressive.

Skill books will multiply the skill gain rate for a given amount of time.

The cap will remain at level 300, although in the early season we might limit it to lower numbers to ease up progression.

First Aid

Doctor and First Aid are merged into a single skill that Heals HP, repairs broken body parts, and removes bleeding stacks.

• Injury Heal

If the player has multiple injured body parts it will try to fix all of them, lowering the chance with every successful heal until it attempted to heal every injury.

• Hp Heal

First Aid heals target hp depending on player skill with a minimum of 30 HP per action.

It will fix the bleeding, subtracting 50 HP points of heal every bleeding level. So using bleeding weapons or bullets might prove useful to deteriorate enemy first aid abilities.

Both Injury heal and HP heal trigger together

Sneaking

It’s worth noting that sneaking will be gained by perks, not skills, forcing you to choose between perk points allocated into sneak instead of other combat/utility perks.

Those changes will be altered/modified by the perks that the attacker and target can have.

Hey folks!

It's been a while! Happy new year everyone, I'm excited to see plenty of familiar faces still supporting this project. Hats off to you folks. I hope what you'll read below will be satisfactory for at least some of you.

Below I'm going to list the most vital features developed since the last time we were bold enough to write down an article. What we'll go through is quite a chunk of milestones and the most vital features being implemented into the game.

Base building

The Player now can build his base. The base system was designed in a way that a player has full control over location. By putting up a tent in an encounter, the player takes over the map and can place buildings, containers, workbenches, furniture, and defenses.

The player can also salvage resource nodes and clutter in an encounter to free up more space. You're able to set up car parking lots, player spawn points, and quicker exit points from the map.

In the future, we can use the same system to create public player towns or player-driven events like PVP Arena. This is a core change we've been working on and improving the engine to support live tile (floor and roof) placement.

Crafting

Crafting was designed anew, we wanted a clearer, less cluttered crafting system.

The main goals of the new crafting system were:

• Max 4 crafting components per recipe.
• Reduce the amount of crafting resources, for example, require leather instead of gecko skins or brahmin leather.
• Crafting resources consist of ~8 basic materials and ~3 advanced materials.
• Remove randomness from crafting, which means getting rid of the re-crafting process for better rolls.
• Allow players to craft in bases, let the player build workbenches.
• Provide recipe-specific workbenches and detect them nearby during crafting.

A new in-game system was made from scratch, involving completely revisited resources and recipes.

The Player now can craft inside his base by building a workbench, workbenches do not have to be interacted with, they just have to be nearby. A recipe shows if the required workbench is available. Currently, there are 4 types of workbenches. General, Ammo, Chemistry, Gunsmith.

A manageable worksheet lists all the recipes, and we can convert them to game data with a click of a button.

Quest-based crafting. The system also supports unlocking quest-related recipes, giving us another tool in storytelling.

Randomly Generated dungeons

A flexible dungeon generation system is developed to allow constantly evolving, never-ending dungeon delves. Similar to Sierra Caves, this dungeon generates loot, enemies. More importantly, it randomly generates whole floor layouts, generating rooms, corridors, lighting, traps and quest-related NPC's, interaction spots.

The dungeon system is composed out of 2 types of structure, corridors, and rooms, with a little chaos involved, no dungeon floor will ever be the same, rooms will be filled with enemies or treasure, or occasional neutral NPCs, while corridors might be a simple walkway or a treacherous puzzle/trap.

Without getting into too much detail, a party of players can delve into a dungeon, first preset we've made is early game city sewers, the player can continue going lower and lower with his party, the deeper he goes, the difficulty improves, it's up to them to decide when to leave and use one of the exits that appear now and then.

The randomly generated dungeon system, like most of the things we're creating, is fully versatile, So with some balance tweaks, scenery changes, and new room modules, we can create new types of dungeons easily or even PvE challenges. A Temple of trials challenge was brewing in my mind for years by now.

Randomly Generated encounters

Worldmap encounters now go through multiple layers of randomization. The Biome is picked based on player position in the world. Every Biome e.g. Mountains, Desert, Forest contains a list of premade maps and available resources. Resources and structures and loot are generated onto the preset map, giving a fresh feel every time a player spawns in.

We also do plan a grid-based traveling between encounters, allowing the player to just keep on wandering without the need to exit to the world map, who knows, enhancing things on longer consecutive delve sounds like a good plan.

Resource Gathering

Randomly generated encounters and some of the dungeons contain resource deposits. The system is open-ended and allows us easily create Resources and assign them to game locations.

Resource nodes might require tools, e.g. Pickaxe for minerals, some items support more tools than just one.

Some resource nodes are replenishable, like computers in vault 15, some are limited and can be harvested multiple times before permanently fading.

These changes rebalance the approach to scavenging, harvesting, in the current season it is far better to scrap gear than to gather raw resources. Amount of items per encounter and weight, ability to have own Resource Node farms in the base should tweak that gameplay standard a bit.

Friend list

A friend list allows you to add players when both sides agree.

Added players can see each other's location depending on their privacy setting. Players can also chat and invite each other to a party.

This adds necessary support for solo players, currently, an often scenario happens where players separate before sharing contact information and one random death might lead to a split. Staying at the party and adding each other to the friends list makes it less necessary to be involved within a big group.

Ping system

The player can notify his party members with a ping system. Pings can be placed on the area, critter, or even the player himself. This allows for far more tactical coordination.

Pings placed on critter or player follow and update position as long as it remains within player's sight, upon reentering player's sight ping reappears on the target.

The player can place three pings - Attack, Move, Defense. Pings do not overlap between players. For example, Player A and B can both place attack ping and both will be visible for everyone.

New World

We are improving locations to provide a more intricate and tactical approach on PVP maps and extra convenience to community locations. A lot of work went into redesigning in-game cities and dungeons. The final goal is to modify every core location with improvements based on both our and player experiences.

The unprotected towns need to support a new guard system, new planned PvP game modes and feel less linear. Map layout for combat is something that the community knows better and we're working closely with experienced contributors, trusting them with the redesign process.

Retro artstyle aim

We've been experimenting with rendering in the game. We have improved some shaders and changed the way how engine rescales sprites. We've settled on a more old-school-like system, which additionally gets rid of all the artifacts like the checkerboard floor and makes 3D critter renders feel better merged with the environment.

Minimap

A player can launch the minimap button to see surrounding buildings and NPCs. The minimap can be dragged, resized, and zoomed.

In the future, we wish to recreate this to show quest markers as well as color players based on name/faction colorizing. For now, that'll do.

That's not all!

There are plenty of minor improvements to list down, but there's no point in making this list look like a changelog or digging deeper into engine reworks and tweaks.

Most of the major gameplay loop features were designed and implemented into Season 4. We're drawing closer with every month and some features require just a small polish. The game feels more and more complete with every passing feature.

I could say that we just need to finish up the combat system and character development and release Beta, but I don't want to throw any promises or feel rushed, so I'll keep my mouth shut!

Thank you for reading through. I'm very happy to share the Season 4 progress, especially since some of those features were in development for over a year with no display to the wide public. I feel relieved that the community could finally witness some of our collaborative efforts. Even if it leads to a post-apocalyptic desert.

Hey there! 

After polishing, improving, and resolving any jarring issue mapper had that came to our minds, we have finally finished our release version of mapper. It contains a lot of improvement, including a search bar, tile brush, and lighting editor. Find out more by watching the video!

You can get mapper from discord channel:

Discord link 

Or from this link:

Google drive link 

If you'd love some example maps to make it easier where to start, here's plenty of them compatible with the new mapper:

Map pack link 

With mapper out of the way, we're going back to gameplay features we're working on, more on it in our future post!