[2022] Give shopping list to traders

Well, maybe… if you had to wait several days for the trader’s unseen band of scavengers to scrounge one up for you, and you paid a premium for their time.

I already feel like traders should have a small fraction of what they have now. They can have the full range from early game to late game items, but very spotty selection at any given time. This is the apocalypse, not a Walmart!

Originally posted by MiSFiT77: …This is the thing. The game doesn't understand or predict my play style (or yours). So while I'm tearing places apart looking for that one item that I need for the way I play. The game doesn't think "oh this guys looking for xyz because clearly he is playing in a certain way" because the game doesn't think, it just gives me random stuff. Where as having the ability to tell the trader what exactly you are looking for could help to push the game along in the direction that you want to go in.

I don’t actually think that’s automatically a good thing, though. I still think of this as a survival game, which means taking the hand you’re dealt and making it work. Improvise, adapt, overcome and all that. It is more interesting to me if there are some unforeseen roadblocks making it so I can’t be set in my ways, always making the same moves.

When the traders serve as the great equalizers that ‘fix’ RNG luck, as I think they already do, it’s less surviving and more just ordering what you need from Amazon. This is often a hard concept to get across, but too much choice is a luxury, which can poison survival gameplay.

So if the root complaint is e.g. it takes too long to get a beaker - even when you’re smartly, actively trying to get one - then I would prefer the game address this by still ‘rolling the dice,’ but putting the path to a beaker on a few more sides of those dice, so that you’re more likely to have an opportunity to get one. I’m not opposed to directly ordering the thing you want, but I would be very wary of it becoming the safe, can’t-lose, default option.

Originally posted by MiSFiT77:

Originally posted by Crater Creator:
I don’t actually think that’s automatically a good thing, though. I still think of this as a survival game, which means taking the hand you’re dealt and making it work. Improvise, adapt, overcome and all that. It is more interesting to me if there are some unforeseen roadblocks making it so I can’t be set in my ways, always making the same moves.

When the traders serve as the great equalizers that ‘fix’ RNG luck, as I think they already do, it’s less surviving and more just ordering what you need from Amazon. This is often a hard concept to get across, but too much choice is a luxury, which can poison survival gameplay.

So if the root complaint is e.g. it takes too long to get a beaker - even when you’re smartly, actively trying to get one - then I would prefer the game address this by still ‘rolling the dice,’ but putting the path to a beaker on a few more sides of those dice, so that you’re more likely to have an opportunity to get one. I’m not opposed to directly ordering the thing you want, but I would be very wary of it becoming the safe, can’t-lose, default option.

Valid points, but I think they are still linked to a certain playstyle. If your thing is total rng unpredictability, getting the luck your given and learning to deal with it then I would argue, why have traders at all ? To be clear I sometimes play the style you suggested. Just recently I really wanted scrap turrets, but had no luck finding them or schematics, so come horde night I was frantically making more spikes, sincce the rng gods were clearly not gonna allow me anything more hi tec for the level of horde I knew would be coming. So yeh I adapted and went plan B.
But as I said if that's your style (and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that style) then why have traders exist at all ? Conversely if you are going to have traders in the game, then you've already opted in to buying the stuff you can't find anyway.

But I do absolutely agree that just ordering stuff in and having it gifted on demand would be a game killing concept.

To go back to what I said earlier, I think traders can still be compatible with a survivalist playstyle, but they should have much more limited selection: like a page or two, almost more like a vending machine. In fact I’ve been thinking if I get back into xml modding, that’s the first thing I’ll nerf. That way, it’ll be more of a case of making do with what’s available at the trader, similar to how one makes do with what’s available elsewhere.

Ordering anything you need on demand would work directly against that. And I frequently see OPs make an argument that the devs should add a new feature, and people that aren’t interested can just not use it. But I want to make the case that the survivalist playstyle (which I do think is an important one, in “the survival horde crafting game”) depends on not being able to get just anything you’d want. So if your desired style depends on a reliable counter for RNG scarcity, I don’t want to belittle that style. But I personally wouldn’t like playing the game with that feature as much as I do without it.