Well I understand what you're getting at; you'd think that the wilderness is safer than cities, but when it comes right down to it, wilderness mobs greatly overpower zombies BY LEAGUES.
Triffids have natural armor and are impossible to headshot. Fungaloids are similar but multiply and are almost impossible to melee unscathed due to their spore attack. Wolves move as fast (if not faster) than fast zombies, get multiple attacks per turn, and also come in packs. Wilderness mobs drop nothing useful that can't be found elsewhere (fur is only useful for fur clothing, which has no effect since temperature was disabled). Compare to cities where even the weakest zombie has a chance of dropping bullets.
Except that none of those, except wolves to some degree, are "wilderness mobs." They're randomly placed on the map, and your chances of seeing them in a city are as good as your chances of seeing them elsewhere. The majority of the wilderness has NO monsters whatsoever, save for the odd wildlife, which shows up in numbers much smaller than the zombies.
Sure we have the ability to build; provided you aren't driven away by wilderness mobs, melted by acid rain, and actually have the nails to make the walls away from the city, but then what? Queen triffids will tear down your walls by walking into them, and fungaloids can spawn infinitely while you're sleeping inside, forcing you to choose between starvation and being ripped apart. Not to mention you'll still need food and water (Which is limited to rivers and the randomly spawned flood event) that'll force you to leave your (relatively) safehouse.
Again, there's no guarantee that triffids or fungaloids will be encountered in the wilderness; if you don't see any while you're building your shelter, you'll probably never see any in that location. And yes, the need for food and water is meant to make living off the land difficult compared to living off the grocery store.
To top it off, there is NOTHING worthwhile in the wilderness. Bee/Wasp stings are now nerfed, royal jelly is the only cure for spores - which ONLY come from fungaloids which don't appear in cities - entering a slime pit without guns is suicidal with the dodge nerf (Not to mention they offer almost nothing worthwhile), Radio towers are useless, nukes are FUN but otherwise useless, by the time you're stong enough to face ants nearly all their food will have spoiled, and the list goes on. When faced by mobs in the wilderness you have two viable options for ranged weaponry, throwing (Which will be nerfed) and crossbows (Which require a rubber hose to make unless you take one from a trap field event). You also have NO way to heal yourself since bandages require superglue, which needs a hotplate even if you're fortunate enough to find ant eggs. God forbid when it's night and you can't see at all.
So the wilderness is nearly impossible to traverse, gives nothing worthwhile, and takes up 95% of the map.
I'm sure you have plans for the wilderness, but this is how it is now.
And this is how it's intended to be. Wilderness will probably receive a bunch more features in the future, but it is the "traveling area," meant to be experienced while moving from point A to point B, with minor distractions along the way for the player to investigate if they're interested. Spending the night in the wilderness is supposed to be relatively scary, and finding a safe place before sundown is meant to be a repeated major drive.
And again, fungaloids DO show up inside cities. Wilderness is the ONLY part of the map where it's possible to have no monster spawns outside of wild animals, which appear everywhere, cities included. And 95% of the map is an exaggeration; it's closer to 50-60%.
As for challenge, shouldn't the challenge be in surviving instead of going out and looking for trouble? If I wanted a real challenge I could always try a "No-Melee" run or some other hare-brained self-limit.
Actually, I've stated before that it's my intention to make the difficulty of the game "player-selected" to a degree, based on what areas they willingly explore. This concept is in its infancy and doesn't work out as much as I'd like, but I'm in favor of it.
Since the construction update has started, I suppose a few questions are in order, as well as some suggestions.
What are the walls currently made out of? When smashed with a jackhammer, you get 2x4's and rock. Does that mean stone, brick, sheetrock, or plaster and lathe?
Are there any plans for differences between interior and exterior walls? A typical interior wall could be dismantled with a hammer, a crowbar, and some wirecutters to yield maybe 3-5 2x4's, depending on how much a square represents. It would be smashable, but sturdier then a door. Exterior walls would be harder, perhaps impossible to smash if they are cinderblock or brick, though building such would be a pain.
Perhaps you should take a page out of Space Station 13. Pretty much the entire station can be torn down and rebuilt given the right tools and materials. I'm not saying it should be easy, but perhaps for dismantling walls it could take between x through x+y minutes, with x being a minimum and y getting lower based on skill in carpentry, for a couple of steps, such as "Hammer through sheetrock", "cut wiring", "Crowbar 2x4".
They're made of brick or stone or reinforced wood or something.
Dismantling interior walls is a good idea; of course, I'd have to go back through all my building code and distinguish between interior and exterior walls, and that's more trouble than it's worth to me right now.
Plus, enough people here clamored for construction, and I trust you guys 
Well we are fortress builders, kinda expect construction in games.
That said I actually think holing up makes the game less fun. It was already very easy to build safe houses where you can't be touched (especially in basement having houses) and in fact other than the one time lightning managed to set fire to my house so I woke up in a burning, smoky inferno having half my goodies melted and needing to run, I've found the whole moving around the world without building to be much more enjoyable.
I'm not saying that addition of construction is at all a negative thing, and I've love to have more because it's always nice to have wilderness forts to play with, but just that it's more fun to generally not bother with it.
I agree! And since my next major project will be NPCs, and hopefully workable missions, the player will often find themself under time or other constraints, and simply holing up for some time won't be a particularly useful option.
Author
Topic: Cataclysm: A Zombie-Survival Roguelike (Read 1263036 times)