emuthreat

Like Whyherro said, anywhere next to water will give you stony ground. The small stones can also be used to sharpen the axes, though only one level of status improvement seems to be allowed. I'm still watching and waiting to see if my fire axe can be sharpended back up to pristine after becoming worn.

Brains. You must make a slurry from the animal brains and apply it to the pelt in direct sunlight.

Ummmmm, Zucchini.

Please excuse my kinematics wood; afterall, I must rest this slide-rule on something.

Lack of reading of developer roadmap+lack of general understanding about game development specifics=inability to comprehend why your complaints are irrelevant at this time. Did you hear that they are trying to upgrade the engine while the game is in early-acces, as well as adding in a renderer. Ask a mechanic to change your oil while you are driving around town. When he tells you that you are crazy and that it can't be done, try relating that to how the developers of DayZ are practically doing a transmission swap and updating the fuel delivery system while letting us cruise around. I'm sure they will worry about sprucing up the upholstry and cleaning the windshield before they write up the invoice.

I'd love to see mechanics added where the quality of an edged tool would determine which "fine" tasks it was suited for, e.g. badly damaged splitting axe opens canned food with similar results as pristine sledgehammer. Maybe a pristine hatchet could be used to skin an animal, but splitting and firefighter axes should have no chance; maybe good enough to shred raincoats or burlap into strips, but definitely too unwieldy for skinning.

But how to tell the difference???

Even a kill log that existed outside of the game's information ticker would be helpful. There should be some personal data tracker that records your life for each character: zed kills, KM traveled, dL drunk, food consumed, shots fired, and cause of death. Even if cause is simple; like fall, or shot by "*******", beaten by zombie, drowned, hypothermia, or possibly hacker. When a game is in alpha, and players have no way of knowing how they died, how effectively can the developers expect them to provide accurate debugging feedback? Is the ATC 2nd floor still broken, or did I just not hear a gunshot from hangars, firehouse,etc. Not having the game relate cause of death to players is responsible for much confusion, to the point that my legit death count has a margin of error of about 50%. I am happy with the progress since I bought in early January 2015, but the random unexplained deaths are wose than both KOS and parlance gone bad.

I might just wait for the boats to show up. Seems like a terrible idea to swim out there on a populated server

Raincoats, brooms, flare guns, ice axes and lead pipes have displaced many of the items you are used to finding frequently. I have also noticed many more books, and fewer weapon cleaning kits. Seems like defibrulators have also seen a spike.

It looks like 90% of the splitting axes have been replaced with brooms. Has anyone else had to constantly mine small stones to keep your axe from degrading too far? In my experience, you can only sharpen the axe up to the next condition from the worst state it had been. Meaning once badly damaged, it can only be repaired up to damaged condition. I'd like to see the wire for rabbit snares be craftable to a broom to make a zombie snare--imagine the fun that could be had.

I voted hitboxes, but it is the larger issue of FPS, server lag, and zombies walking into and up from floors, through walls and doors, as well as fairly common desynch. Compuond that with the random stairs and upper floor deaths, and it results in a fairly debilitating overall experience. Hitboxes and walls/floors/closed doors need to be separated at all times. It isn't really that common, but it is never fun to have your pants and shoes ruined because of a floor shark. It also might be nice if they could get the items to stop dropping off the map; I've lost about a dozen first aid kits by setting them down to swap items out, and dropping any gun I have had equipped while switching to a melee weapon, just disappears into nowhere since .53 came out.

I've had bad luck with interactions so far. After playing over 110 hrs, and on my fourth character to make it through a few larger cities and military sites, I am now sitting on top of a pile of drybags with an MP5K, extra SKS, extra sawed-off, and a pistol grip MP-133; as well as random attachments for AK's, and various pistols / mags / ammo that do not match. Given the current state of server resets, and since my character with the military tent got KOS'd; I'd like to trade. Anyone interested can reply here and I'll set up a scavenger hunt and we can swap server info. It is kinda frustrating that it is so difficult to find people in-game that won't kill me before I can tell them I'm just giving away decently rare gear.

Maybey if you happen to come into a town I control, you could be head-bagged and led at gunpoimt to a stash in the woods; call it generous banditry. Just because I clean out a town, it doesn't mean I gotta keep it all. Justdon't kill without saying hello, or you will never know what happened to all the loot.

If only I had more beans to give...

I have also found axes, as well as triple hatchets and hacksaws. Something funny is going on with the brooms though, they are by far the most common spawn, like glowsticks in the 0.51.

Sure, but the small sheds with the lean-to that usually have axes and sometimes hacksaws don't really seem like a place one would find a broom.

And why the heck did they trade out all of the splitting axes for brooms? Those things are useless as weapons, maybe they are just for the hackers who fly around the map?

I wouldn't exactly call it crying, just acknowledging that it diminishes the unique experience offered by this game, while suggesting that there are many alternatives to just killing indiscriminately out of boredom, malice, etc. in a zombie apocalypse game. I also noted that there are many other games to play where one can run around and kill people, whereas there are not many good options for an open world multiplayer zombie apocalypse scenario. Where the desired outcome for many players is to survive as long aspossible, it seems clear that the practice of camping with a rifle and indiscriminately killing other players diminishes the overall experience of the game. When someone shoots without saying hello, they may never know that the guy they took out just finished cleaning out the area they came to loot; the pile of gear discretely stashed in the woods is now of use to nobody. Even if the shooter doesn't care about the loot they caused to be lost and ruined, it just shows that they only play the game to waste other people's time. It gets very boring when interactions have been forced into the few options of KOS, watch from a distance, or run away. It makes the game pointless to play for many who aren't solely interested in playing it like any other PVP shooter. The important thing to note here is that there are many games that one can roam around a huge map and hunt other people, but very few games where people can band together to survive a hostile world. Maybe with basebuilding implemented, the problem will solve itsself. People can already lock up small villages and set up tents in protected warehouses, maybe with a little bit of creativity we can see the emergence of a much more stable and vibrant world. So I'm not so much bitching about KOS, but rather advocating for the full utilization of Chernarus' potential. I'd be much happier to see a death screen when I knew it was because of my black armband and being in the wrong section of the map, than if it was just another "GET REKT!" The game has had features added so far, that new playstyles are possible, and I'd really like to find a good group of around ten people to control a swath of map from Mogli to Gorka. There is sooo much more to do in this game than simply repeating the same shit every other game has to offer, and I think it's time we see DayZ become the unique experience that it was made to be.

You may have missed a large part of my point. The playstyle you described is very much in the spirit of the game, but I have never encountered anyone who plays that way. My current frustration is that I must play alone and stick to raiding the small villages and such to keep a charachter alive for more than a couple days, it gets boring fast. I would much rather have oportunities to team up with random people in the world and share vehicles and stashes, but the fear of KOS is so severe that even people with good intentions run at the first sign of life. Sitting on a hill or rooftop shooting everbody who crosses FOV adds no value to the game, and is basically just trolling. If those players never even interact with the players aside from killing off their character--not even to check the bodies, they may as well be in a PVE server that overlays actual player positions from other servers to give them their target practice; unless their enjoyment is based in cutting someone else's enjoyment short. Maybe go check out some of the promotional materials for the game and see if they focused on confederation and basebuilding, or avoiding pointless sniper fire. I still play the game and have fun at it, but the poor state of relations between the players reeeaaaalllllllyyy limits the options for fun. I'm trying really hard to stay busy and enjoy the game without turning to the dark side and opportunistically stealing other people's time for no good reason.

I guess people will play however they want, but it doesn't change the fact that the Arma games are perfefctly good for that kind of playstyle, where the Standalone is trying to facilitate a much different experience from the many different run-and-gun games and sniper simulators. I've never played the mod, and only bought Standalone in early January; it was from reading about the large world, many enterable buildings, and plans for in-game radio stations, that I decided to try it out. I may have delayed my purchase, had the positive review I read mentioned that there is an asshat with a sniper rifle on every other hilltop, using other players as target practice. I still have fun playing the game now, just exploring the map and learning the loot and survival mechanics; but it has forced me to outright avoid what should be the most rewarding part of the game--meeting other people and cooperating. I know it is still early alpha, but if the playstyle of exclusively hunting and killing other players persists through full release, the existing community of players will ruin this game for all the people who buy it for what it was advertised as, and built to be. There are plenty of other games where you can gear-up and hunker-down, waiting for your next unwitting victim to poke his head out of the treeline. DayZ is now DayZ Standalone, Arma is still Arma; I don't see why people don't understand where to go to have the kind of experience they are seeking. It is fine to play PVP military style games and kill anyone you see, but just because DayZ spun off the Arma series, does not mean that the Arma experience has to come with it. Just as water ballon fights are okay, but people generally prefer that it is done in an appropriate location; I am fine with people honing their PC game sniper skills, just not so much in DayZ. Imagine you just bought new carpet for your living room, would you want a water balloon fight happening there? Probably not, just the same as people who have paid for a zombie survival simulator might be upset to learn that it is largely the same type of meatgrinder as the Call of Duty games-- just with a bigger map and a period of about an hour spent getting re-equipped after each death. Does it make sense to you that people looking for an open-world zombie survival experience, with an emphasis on cooperation and base-building, might be put off by not being able to have the experience they paid for? H1Z1 is a heap of crap, already tried it; still pissed that it ran in the background for two days after I quit playing. For the players who wish to KOS as policy, there are other games that will provide just as satisfying an environment for doing that (reads Arma 3). For people who bought DayZ to play this great zombie survival game they had heard about, there is nowhere else to go. This is the resason that I think the KOS playstyle has to go to private servers, rather than forcing the people who bought the game as a zombie survival title, to go to all the extra hassle of whitelisted servers--just to be able to play the game as it was advertised.

I think they are in the process of reworking State of Decay into a multiplayer game on the Xbox One. At least that game had the zombie mix down right; lots of relatively harmless ones to mob you and cut off escape routes, and more than just a few faster and more dangerous zombies.

As long as you are willing to deal with rampant KOS, disappearing dropped guns, insta-deaths by hackers, and stairs/upper floor insta-death bugs. There are a lot of playability issues still, but I feel satisfied enough with the purchase. My main goal in buying the alpha at the beginning of January was to learn the map and controls early, so I won't have the full learning curve to overcome when the full launch is ready. Even with the current issues, I still find DayZ to be more enjoyable than H1Z1. Just make sure you understand the disclaimer.

The lockpick just lets you lock a door so people can't break them down. They still need to update the zombies, so no smashing through doors. You should be happy enough if they don't just run through the walls. They may never make windows passable for players. If climbing through a window is that much of a priority, might I suggest modifying Splinter Cell to create your desired zombie experience of hopping through windows.

As of today, the barricading mechanics are limited to using lockpicks to secure doors. Once 0.53 is released, we will see if boarding up is implemented. But as it stands, they have not done anything resembling barricading windows; nor have they made mention of passable windows. From a players' standpoint, I am glad that they would not make windows passable before implementing barricading. Imagine if the windows were made to be passable, but the barricade functionality was not there yet, or not yet working properly. It would make the buildings much less secure than they are now. Once again, and likely for the last time, I must say that this would be akin to putting the cart before the horse.