Tweak block-placing protection in dungeons

[DrManatee]

I recently beat the first story dungeon, and it was very atmospheric and interesting, great job on that! The block-placing protection needs a bit of work though, it made inventory management a nightmare in a non-immersive way.

Being unable to break or place solid blocks makes sense, but if an item doesn't have a hitbox I should be able to place it down. Let me place items in display cases and bookshelves or shift-click non-solid items like bowls onto the ground. I wanted to read the lore books and inspect the doohickeys but I was discouraged from doing that because I knew it would either clog my inventory or I'd have to throw them on the ground to despawn. There was so many cool things to grab like the bird statue and the glider schematic that my inventory got filled really quick! 

Edited January 4 by DrManatee

[LadyWYT]

33 minutes ago, Ben Thompson said:

Also if you bring a lantern you're kinda screwed at the boiler since you can't place a torch down to light it. I liked how dark the dungeon was so I think a compromise would be to have some way of lighting torches nearby, like an oil lamp.

Welcome to the forums! If you poke around in the library, you should find some candles stashed in a box in one of the alcoves. The candles can be placed onto the empty chandeliers in order to light the place up without needing to fuel the boiler.

[DrManatee]

44 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Welcome to the forums! If you poke around in the library, you should find some candles stashed in a box in one of the alcoves. The candles can be placed onto the empty chandeliers in order to light the place up without needing to fuel the boiler.

Gotcha, thanks for the tip! I figured it was likely I was just being dense and missed the puzzle haha

I'll remove that section now so that it doesn't derail the topic of the post

[MKMoose]

Part of this is probably already solved with the storage vessels that you can find in a few rooms, at least two of which are in the library itself, which you can use to safely store some items are return for them whenever convenient (don't confuse them with cracked vessels, and note that collapsed chests, unlike the ceramic storage vessels, don't allow to place items back into them). I think it's also possible to place items into display cases, though I recall that there were some related shenanigans as well.

Regardless of all that, I do broadly like this suggestion, as it would be a global solution impacting all story locations including future ones, avoiding the requirement to deliberately place specific items in other locations for gameplay reasons. And I have to appreciate that you've immediately pointed to what is largely the crux of the issue in items which have hitboxes.

 

What follows here is more of a general discussion. A few adjacent topics have bounced around the forums quite a bit recently, though with less focus on inventory management. I think that this summary of various ideas by @Bruno Willis is a pretty good outline of roughly where we landed (my apologies for kind of throwing a bunch of text at you like this, please don't feel like you have to read through all of it to contribute).

My personal suggestion on this topic (closely related to the recommendation at the end of that summary) was to introduce a small class of "portable" items which could be placed in claimed areas, with some restrictions (implementation-wise it would probably just be a simple behaviour). They could be automatically broken if in the way of some machinery or otherwise blocking or obstructing something (could be made temporarily temporally unstable when enemies get too close), and they may get automatically collected back into the player's inventory when they walk too far away.

This category of items may include some light sources like torches and lanterns, bags (i.e. backpacks and so on), the firepit or some sort of a portable stove, maybe a bedroll of sorts, optionally ladders (though they may make access to some places too easy), perhaps bombs and other traps (griefing would have to be addressed). The goal in the original discussion where I posted this was to allow the player to perform some basic survival activities and implement intuitive problem-solving methods that they're used to from outside of claimed areas, without giving complete creative freedom.

It would make a lot of sense to include most if not all ground-storable items (e.g. bowls as you've mentioned) in this category of portable items as well, especially since there's a bunch of them already present in claimed areas and they can be freely collected but not put back.

The difficulty for the devs comes mainly from the fact that this could require placing a bunch of extra checks and conditions in various places of the code, to ensure that the items don't disrupt anything within the story locations, which may heavily complicate some logic if not done carefully. There's also a few potential risks depending on the functionality of items that could be placed in claims, like inadvertently allowing to skip some mechanics or bypass barriers, or encouraging some sort of cheesy combat strategies. In certain cases it may also be necessary to allow clearly distinguishing between items integral to the claimed location and those placed by the player which can be picked back up. Those issues are all solvable, of course, but nonetheless require a bunch of work on implementation and playtesting that the devs may or may not want to undertake.

Edited January 4 by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

There's also a few potential risks depending on the functionality of items that could be placed in claims, like inadvertently allowing to skip some mechanics or bypass barriers, or encouraging some sort of cheesy combat strategies.

Maybe there could be a variation of claim that covers dungeons and similar locations specifically? For example, there are no NPCs to object to the player messing around with pottery or knick-knacks or otherwise leaving a trail of garbage littering the place, but there are NPCs in other locations that would absolutely object to the player tampering with stuff. Not that it's not important to protect dungeon claims, but the inhabited claims are more critical in order to stop players from robbing the NPCs(or each other, for that matter) blind.

[DrManatee]

21 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Part of this is probably already solved with the storage vessels that you can find in a few rooms, at least two of which are in the library itself, which you can use to safely store some items are return for them whenever convenient (don't confuse them with cracked vessels, and note that collapsed chests, unlike the ceramic storage vessels, don't allow to place items back into them). I think it's also possible to place items into display cases, though I recall that there were some related shenanigans as well.

To be honest I played in a server with latency issues, and it turns out I can actually place items in the vessels, lockboxes and display cases when I'm not lagging. Should have tested in singleplayer first, oops! I suppose my only remaining issue is with the book shelves and bowls then.

21 hours ago, MKMoose said:

And I have to appreciate that you've immediately pointed to what is largely the crux of the issue in items which have hitboxes.

Went back and tested this one too and it turns out that all items have hitboxes when shift-clicked, even bowls! (even though it's very shallow) So it wouldn't be as easy as I thought to categorize items as with/without hitboxes. Maybe it's as simple as allowing shift-clicking but not the infinitely stackable items like firewood, peat, ingots etc to prevent them from being used as blockades or step-ups.

21 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I think that this summary of various ideas by @Bruno Willis is a pretty good outline of roughly where we landed (my apologies for kind of throwing a bunch of text at you like this,

please don't feel like you have to read through all of it to contribute).

Thank you for linking me to this thread, it's definitely got some interesting ideas. I'm more in the camp that the spawn-protection is mostly fine besides being unable to place things back where you found them. That's the only thing that took me out of the immersion.

21 hours ago, MKMoose said:

The difficulty for the devs comes mainly from the fact that this could require placing a bunch of extra checks and conditions in various places of the code, to ensure that the items don't disrupt anything within the story locations, which may heavily complicate some logic if not done carefully.

Yeah this is definitely a valid concern, and not just from a coding perspective but also a clarity perspective. If there are a bunch of exceptions to what can and cant be placed then I can imagine it would be confusing for players. 

Edited January 4 by DrManatee

[DrManatee]

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Maybe there could be a variation of claim that covers dungeons and similar locations specifically? For example, there are no NPCs to object to the player messing around with pottery or knick-knacks or otherwise leaving a trail of garbage littering the place, but there are NPCs in other locations that would absolutely object to the player tampering with stuff. Not that it's not important to protect dungeon claims, but the inhabited claims are more critical in order to stop players from robbing the NPCs(or each other, for that matter) blind.

Yeah that was my idea, for dungeons to have slightly different rules since the player will be in them for a lot longer and are incentivized to loot stuff. For traders keep it as-is but dungeons allow shift-clicking stuff onto the ground that's not stackable (peat, ingots, etc) to prevent cheesy barricades or tower strats.

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Welcome to the forums! If you poke around in the library, you should find some candles stashed in a box in one of the alcoves. The candles can be placed onto the empty chandeliers in order to light the place up without needing to fuel the boiler.

Wanted to revisit this since I did some in-game testing. Can the boiler in the engineering room be activated without a flaming torch? I don't see how to get a torch on fire without bringing one into the dungeon. The candle doesn't work and you can't place an extinguished torch into a torch holder.

[LadyWYT]

8 hours ago, Ben Thompson said:

Wanted to revisit this since I did some in-game testing. Can the boiler in the engineering room be activated without a flaming torch? I don't see how to get a torch on fire without bringing one into the dungeon. The candle doesn't work and you can't place an extinguished torch into a torch holder.

A firestarter is the only other method I can think of to light it, currently. Extinguished torches can't be placed in torch holder, but lit torches will stack so it's easy enough to bring a few with you and place them in the torch holders scattered throughout the Archive.

[DrManatee]

6 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

A firestarter is the only other method I can think of to light it, currently. Extinguished torches can't be placed in torch holder, but lit torches will stack so it's easy enough to bring a few with you and place them in the torch holders scattered throughout the Archive.

Ah yeah I forgot about firestarters since I haven't used them since I got one of those torch holders haha. Did some testing though and it can actually only be lit with a torch.

My problem is that even though it's easy to bring torches with you, if you don't know you'll need them and bring an alternate light source then there's no way to correct that mistake without backtracking all the way to non-claimed territory to place a torch on the ground and light it. It just feels less like problem solving and more like being punished for not reading a wiki beforehand.

I have been thinking of a solution to this (and I'll probably make this into its own post), but what if you could light an extinguished torch by holding a fire source in your off-hand and shift clicking with a torch? Edit: like an oil lamp, candle, lamp, etc 

 

 

Edited January 4 by DrManatee

[Bruno Willis]

3 hours ago, DrManatee said:

My problem is that even though it's easy to bring torches with you, if you don't know you'll need them and bring an alternate light source then there's no way to correct that mistake without backtracking all the way to non-claimed territory to place a torch on the ground and light it. It just feels less like problem solving and more like being punished for not reading a wiki beforehand.

This is a perfect example of why it would be worth re-visiting the claim system, to me. Actions like lighting a torch can become huge puzzles in claimed territory, when they really shouldn't be. 

22 hours ago, MKMoose said:

The difficulty for the devs comes mainly from the fact that this could require placing a bunch of extra checks and conditions in various places of the code, to ensure that the items don't disrupt anything within the story locations, which may heavily complicate some logic if not done carefully. There's also a few potential risks depending on the functionality of items that could be placed in claims, like inadvertently allowing to skip some mechanics or bypass barriers, or encouraging some sort of cheesy combat strategies. In certain cases it may also be necessary to allow clearly distinguishing between items integral to the claimed location and those placed by the player which can be picked back up. Those issues are all solvable, of course, but nonetheless require a bunch of work on implementation and playtesting that the devs may or may not want to undertake.

I think it would be a good idea if the devs tried to make claimed areas a bit less restrictive as early as possible, because it has such an impact on future area design, whether they decide it has to stay as is, or if it changes. I feel like playing in claimed areas is a different game with different rules to the rest of gameplay - a fun game, but a different one. My concern is that this issue gets forgotten because you can get used to it, learn the rules of how to function in claimed areas, and it no-longer feels like an issue. The thing is, it can be really off-putting to new players, and still makes gameplay less immersive for everyone, even if you've gotten used to it.

3 hours ago, DrManatee said:

I have been thinking of a solution to this (and I'll probably make this into its own post), but what if you could light an extinguished torch by holding a fire source in your off-hand and shift clicking with a torch? Edit: like an oil lamp, candle, lamp, etc 

This'd be a lovely little fix. I feel like V.S. does a great job at saying "yes that'll work" when you try something that seems logical but sort of niche.