[2020] loot table realism

Originally posted by Waldorf_Happenstance:

Originally posted by The_Pastmaster: I always assumed that what shows up in the inventory when looting is any useful items you find after sorting through the junk. Thus why there's a loot timer.

that kinda makes sense. but if that is the route the devs wanna take then they need to find an immersive way to convey that fact. not everyone will assume that.

I don't think it's much of an assumption. More of a deduction...There is no way in hell that soooo many containers and objects and cupboards and boxes have literally NOTHING in them. It's far more logical to conclude instead that there was just nothing of value to you there.

Originally posted by Waldorf_Happenstance: in an apocalypse wouldn't it make sense to find a lot of trash in containers instead of just empty boxes? for example, if you go through an abandoned house's kitchen you would find maybe one or two cans of food and mostly rotten food, plastic or paper packaging and empty cans. it just seems weird to me that there are so few npcs and yet the containers you loot are mostly empty. also, sealed boxes should guarantee something good, no one is going to seal a box with cans of sham and a piece of paper, just like a sealed hardware store box and hardware store shelves should not have stone tools in their inventory. I'm not trying to be whiny, i know this game is in alpha but isn't this point in the dev cycle the time for these discussions? also there need to be more junk type items added to the game for immersion's sake. in fallout 4 for example, you don't just find scrap plastic, you have to find the junk items that contain plastic.

Yes, it's always time for these discussions, until the game goes gold.

One may conclude that this game doesn't take place immediately following the apocalypse. There was time for supply chains to break down, for scarcity and widespread looting, before almost everyone turned into a zombie. That would leave you in a world with almost no humans and most places picked clean even of trash-level loot. That's admittedly retconning the story to match gameplay, but... gameplay first and all that.

Yes, crates shouldn't be factory sealed with trash inside them. The dev's strategy has been to remove items whose only use is as scrap, or transitory (that is, if you craft A->B->C, and B isn't good for anything else, remove B). This helps keep your backpack from becoming cluttered. So rather than find a "stack of towels" in the linen closet, it's just generic cloth fragments you can use directly, which stack in one inventory slot.

But there may be cases where a new item or new art is needed to communicate a new idea. For example, I think a lot about loot & realism for my mod, ComSenMod. I enable things like harvesting brass from zombie dogs. If you read the change list, you can see I do this to represent the dog's collar and/or dog tags. But if you don't make that logical leap, you might think it doesn't make sense. In which case changing the item icon art for scrap brass, or even making a separate dog collar item, could help that immersion.

As for all the stone age tools & weapons, the devs recognize this is odd, and they're planning to add new junk/scrap weapons to fill at least some of the gaps.