Tysn

With the addition of the hatchet making wood piles a renewable resource, I was thinking it could also be an interesting way to improve the crossbow. On paper the general advantage that the crossbow is supposed to have is that you can retrieve the bolts from zombies, making it a silent, ammo efficient weapon. However, in practice this doesn't work too well. Bolts take up a lot of space and are found in small numbers. Because of this, slight aiming mistakes (common with the awkward sights) or glitches cause the crossbow to be too big of a liability, and most players replace it as soon as they find pretty much anything else. By implementing wooden bolts, the crossbow would be able to correctly fit the role of being an efficient but limited weapon. Bolts could be created one at a time via the context menu on the hatchet in forests, just like with the wood piles. And to keep steel bolts useful, wood bolts could be made non-retrievable (wood being not as durable) so players would still have an incentive to search for steel bolts. While effectively having unlimited ammo may sound possibly overpowered, the current limitations of the crossbow should keep it balanced. Even with a large backpack, players are likely to only have enough space for about a dozen bolts at a time, combined with the non-retrievable factor of wood bolts would make the "unlimited" nature not as helpful during exploration of cities. Not to mention the crossbow isn't amazingly powerful to begin with. Zombies already require a headshot to take down in one shot, and the crossbow is generally awful for PVP. On top of that players would need to find both a crossbow AND a hatchet to fully take advantage of this system. I searched other threads and most people seem to be in agreement that the crossbow is pretty underwhelming, so I think something like this would be a decent way to improve it. It would make crossbow appealing in it's own way, sort of how players will sometimes use the Winchester instead of high-end military weapons simply because of ammo availability. A system like this would make the crossbow a viable weapon like that. Any thoughts?

I agree, though honestly any sort of improvement at all (1-hit body kills, etc) would be good for the crossbow at this point. Considering how there's nearly universal recognition that the crossbow is redundant I'm kind of surprised Rocket hasn't thrown even a minor buff on it in any of the recent patches.

Sensible rain water collection would probably require the addition of some kind of plastic tarp item, which the player could use to set up a rain catcher. Though considering how common cans of pop are along with ponds & water pumps for canteens I can't imagine something like that being very useful.