BleedoutBill

Apples provide quite a lot of moisture and enough energy to keep you alive (if you aren't running all over creation). I wouldn't want to live on them exclusively, although it is entirely possible, but they are a great food of last resort, in the event that things don't go your way. I lived on apples exclusively for my first several hours in 0.56 Exp. They enabled me to get far enough inland that I could secure all of the food, weapons and gear that I needed. Tedious, yes, but useless ... I would have to disagree. If you don't have the patience to wait until the CLE is fully implemented and tuned, or if you truly believe that the game is FUBAR, then you definitely need to take a break and check back in, in a few months.

Stable is down for routine maintenance. I didn't see any info about why Exp was coming down. Perhaps they have a new build for us to look at?

Candles? Can you light them?

Things still spawn on the coast, but there is such a high density of players there, that it's just nowhere near enough. This is precisely why a more granular control over loot spawns is necessary and why regional control will be added.

That appears to be the plan.

He probably involuntarily stood up to eat. I friggin' hate that! Still ... nice shot. Well done.

I feel ya. I traveled all the way from Skalisty to Novy Sobor on apples, before I saw my first can of food and scored a working firearm (found a Winchester early on, but no ammo). Once I got North of Novy Sobor, the loot was considerably more plentiful. In all of that travel, the closest thing I saw to a lootsplosion was two pair of boots, a land mine and two shovels, sitting on top of a radio tower.

The CLE, while a superior solution, is still very much a work in progress. Eventually, it will be able to control loot spawns regionally. Until that happens, high traffic areas of the map will likely have very little usable/desirable loot. For the time being, it is necessary to use apples/berries/theft/cannibalism to get away from the coast in order to find "the good stuff." Once you have the necessary provisions, by all means go back to the coast and shoot your buddies/bambis/zeds, or whatever trips your trigger. I don't expect that survival will ever be trivial again, but once the CLE has regional capability and is properly tuned, I think that apples will become a supplement, rather than a staple.

OK, I'm on my way to Prud tonight. The haters can vent on both of us and then I'll give them my .357 response.

You completely read my mind. I can't wait to see if I can distract the zeds with a radio, while I loot their town.

SepticFalcon has fun with the radio:

Yes, I definitely had to work to find a working firearm. So far, I've been lucky enough to find a Winchester, two repeaters, a IZH18 and a pump shotgun. I'm surprised that I haven't seen any hand guns, though. The other side of that coin is that the ammunition is scarce. It's out there, but it's not exactly plentiful. I haven't seen a barrel yet. Has anyone noticed a pattern to the spawns?

Sounds good; count me in!

Is this a timeshare tent?

Yeah, white guys can't jump!

I hear ya. I humped a Winchester all the way across the map and I never did find any ammo for it. I finally traded it in for a repeater. Naturally, I found a box of .308 about an hour later. I still haven't found any long gun optics, though, just a red dot.

Indeed! I didn't think to check for loot, hiding among the rubble.

Obviously, I hope that you are right. Unfortunately, I suspect that the devs have bigger fish to fry at the moment. They are elbow deep in the engine modules and until that is largely sorted out, I think that we will have to contend with a lot of rough edges. Too funny! Even I found a red dot scope last night, so you know that they must be spawning on every street corner!!!

I don't want to brag, or anything, but I just found a pristine can of tactical bacon! Screw you, apples!

Yes, I'll have to agree with that. I went to some known zed haunts and there wasn't a single one to be found. Someone also mentioned animals. By the end of the night last night, I saw a black goat a black and white cow and I heard at least one chicken. Tonight, there was no sign of wildlife. Perhaps that accounts for the better server performance? I still had a couple of hiccups, but it was dramatically better than last night.

I haven't had any zeds scare the shit out of me yet, so I'm still wearing the same jeans that I spawned with, three days ago. I've still only found one other pair of pants and those were shorts! The garment workers union must be on strike! Oh, I did find a snazzy little dress, so what's not to like?

I've been on for the past hour. I had to jump off for a scheduled server re-start. I'd have to agree, everything seemed much smoother. I didn't have any of the violent, jerking/stuttering desync, that I had last night. At one point it was so bad, that I thought that my character had a seizure. I glitched right through a door and I got stuck there, half in and half out of a room. It was very inconvenient! It was so violent that my character dropped the sledge when he fell. That's when I found out for sure that my pseudo-duped sledge was actually a real sledge. Things were so crazy last night that I didn't feel confident that if I dropped either sledge, both of them wouldn't disappear. Looks like I'm going to get banned for duping! Why couldn't I have found something worth duping????

Do the servers appear to be any more responsive, as a result?

The folks at DayZ Wiki are reporting that the zed count on build 666 was 1240, while 0.55 stable had 1100. Anecdotally at least, they do now seem to be clustered together in the more developed areas of the map, whereas they were more evenly spread out in 0.55.

I'm more that OK with that, so long as they keep iterating on EXP. Keep 'em coming boys; a zed is a terrible thing to waste!