[2021] Repairing vs Building

Originally posted by HiPHoPiPoTaMuS: I have a solid 2409.2 hours logged in 7 Days. I can tell you about the grind in trying gain enough XP to get to level 100. Killing zombies becomes redundant very quickly and attributes very little to my climb through the levels. Unless I let a handful of screamers run amok - you fire a lot of lead during that fight.
I get the point of how LBD fails. But I have a couple dozen hours in Valheim and it seems to work fine. As long as it is used in the spirit of the simulation.

Valheim does all the good parts of LBD, and none of the bad. LBD works great for weapons, and for actions that the player is inherently intended to go do, such as mining or chopping. Even Blocking fits this category as blocking attacks is ostensibly something the player should be doing instead of getting hit should they be using a shield in the first place

However, Where it falls flat is in areas like crafting, or armor skills, Or medical skills, Or building skills.

And that was the main issue, 7DTD had all of the latter with a few combat skills mixed in. Crafting quality was determined by your crafting skill; Inherently incentivizing the player to spam craft to get better gear. Attempting to just 'craft what you need' would leave your crafting skill perpetually low for an infuriatingly long time.

Building also had a skill, which again, incentivized the player to build big hunks of cobblestone and concrete in order to grind skill because higher tier building materials were locked behind higher level building skill.


Leveling armor skills required the player to get hit- Which is the last thing you want to do in a survival style game. If you can dodge, you should dodge. In theory a great skill, but, in the hands of even a mediocre player this skill never reaches level 20- And so never actually does the job you want it to do, which is to save you in a pinch from a lethal blow. The skill never gained enough levels under legitimate use to make a significant difference.

Medical skills likewise required the player to heal actual damage taken; Which was kindof contrary to the entire purpose of the skill. So again a catch 22; You either do dumb things to take damage in order to level the skill, Or the skill is never going to reach a level that will actually matter towards saving your life.

The above two combined essentially lead to players standing on cacti in their chosen armor type and using bandages to level both simultaneously.


LBD absolutely CAN be good; And Valheim has implemented it pretty decently by focusing on making all the LBD skills the 'Active' kind of skills. But, Ultimately, TFP didn't want LBD to begin with; And ultimately, it is their game.

It was a temporary system to begin with, a skill tree pulled off an asset store and tweaked a bit before being thrown to the players as a temporary make-do while they worked on other parts of the game. In hindsight, It probably was a pretty dumb thing to do as it got a non-marginal portion of the playerbase to bond with that system which was meant to go away from the start; But what's done is done.

7DTD's LBD was a hybrid system which primarily revolved around perks to begin with; Yeah it had LBD elements, but, the effects of them were marginal in most cases except the crafting and building skills which had a significant impact on progression due to gating recipes and building material tiers; But each skill was intrinsically tied to a related perk and unlocked ranks of that perk.

EG: the Pistols LBD skill was tied to the Gunslinger perk, and unlocked a rank of the perk at every 20 level interval; 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100. You'd really only see a noticable change in your impact with your weapon damage at those breakpoints when you bought that skill.

But in the end, It likely won't be coming back to the vanilla game because it just isn't the kind of skill system TFP wants. And of course, Players are welcome to mod it in all they like.