It’s been a little while since our last Just Survive Producer’s Letter, so we wanted to take a few minutes and give you an update on one of the things the team has been actively working. It’s been a regular topic of conversation for many of you and we have some good news! It’s about Bullet Conversion.

First and foremost we want to thank everyone for their feedback. While most of you agreed the previous bullet conversion mechanics could have potentially created a glut of ammunition, many expressed you’d still like this mechanic to return in a different way. So, Bullet Conversion is coming back, but with some big changes.

We really wanted the process to feel similar to how other item salvaging/creation works in H1Z1: Just Survive. As such, ammunition can be salvaged with a right-click interaction for a variety of materials -- Gunpowder, Lead Alloy, Brass Shards (and Plastic Scraps in the case of shotgun shells). Also important is ammunition recipes can be discovered with these materials. Once discovered, they can be crafted at the new Weapon Workbench, which will be coming in a future update. The Weapon Workbench is a brand new crafting table (recipe must also be discovered) which can be placed once crafted Note that all weapon-related workbench recipes will be moved to this table as well.



Ammunition crafting costs have been balanced, so you will have to make some decisions about whether it’s worth the cost of breaking down a round to create a new one. You will lose something by disassembling and re-assembling bullets. (It’s the apocalypse, after all.) Additionally, more powerful ammunition (based on DPS) will cost more materials to craft. There will be no 1 to 1 bullet conversion.

With respect to bulk, we want to make sure you weren’t doubling your carrying load (or worse) when salvaging bullets, so we’ve reduced the bulk cost on Gunpowder to 1. Brass Shards, Plastic Scraps, and Lead Alloy will cost 0 bulk. This will ensure that all ammo can be broken down without dropping any parts. In fact, from a carrying point of view, it will be advantageous to break down some ammo (such as shotgun shells or .44 rounds) as they will end up costing less to carry when broken apart. Just remember it will cost more to re-assemble them later!

To give you a more detailed idea of how this will function, let’s take a look at two rounds: a low end bullet and a high end one. For the low end we’ll use the .380 Round, as it possesses the lowest DPS at 230.35. For the high end we’ll use a .44 Round with a DPS of 1351.5.

.380 Salvage Yield:

1 Gunpowder
1 Lead Alloy
1 Brass Shard

.380 Assembly Cost:

2 Gunpowder
1 Lead Alloy
1 Brass Shard

.44 Salvage Yield

1 Gunpowder
3 Lead Alloy
1 Brass Shards

.44 Assembly Cost

2 Gunpowder
3 Lead Alloy
1 Brass Shards
1 Metal Shards

As you can see, all ammo salvaging has some level of loss. Higher end bullets yield more materials, but also require more to assemble. We feel this system gives the right level of decision balance to the process, and is a more consistent way to deal with ammo as a resource in the world.

Salvage Tied from Ammo:


Ammo Recipe Cost:


These changes are still in process, and we look forward to getting them in your hands soon so you can provide specific feedback. In the meantime, let us know what you think about the ideas presented here. I know everyone is eager to hear more about longer term plans and roadmaps. Our immediate goal is balancing the core of the game that is there now and then moving into new ideas. As those solidify, we will talk more about them at the right time.

It has been quite some time since I have taken the time to talk about Just Survive and where we are headed with it. I realize there will be some vagaries below in terms of details, but that is not because I am trying to be secretive and more due to us going through a lot of discussing/planning to get things lined up.

Let’s start by talking about the short term. When I reference the short term, I am talking about the next 2 months or so and our focus is on cleanup and bug fixing. We’ve seen your feedback on things like the zombie resurrection and dying in bases and other recent bugs and want to get those fixed up. Other changes are being revisited as we look at the feedback and reaction to recent changes to see if those still hold up. We also are examining any positive changes that we did not bring over from King of the Kill such as the ability to flip vehicles over. From a new feature perspective, we have some cool functionality which will add goals to the game by giving a score for how well you are surviving in the environment. This score will accumulate over a set period of time before the server is wiped (including the scores) and then it starts all over again. You’ll be able to compare with others and see if you can best your previous score. This is well in progress internally, but we need to spend some time playtesting and tuning it before it is ready to go out to all of you. Once we get closer I will provide a lot more detailed info on how the scoring works, the trade-offs, and decisions that you will need to make as a player.

That takes us into longer term planning and what our thinking is in terms of focus for at least the foreseeable future. This work is beginning now, but they are some large endeavors and will take some time to implement, tune, test, and deploy. This is why they end up in the longer term bucket. We are getting back to the core of the experience; re-examining and re-balancing all of those elements of the game. From melee, wildlife, zombie AI, base building, recipe balance, body sim, all of it.
Bullet conversion is also back on the table and we are going to look for your feedback to help decide how you would want it reimplemented if at all. We are committed to raising the quality getting it to a place that we are proud of by making it distinct and enjoyable. It’ll get back to some of what I talked about when I first joined the team. I want the experience to be challenging and really drive towards making you feel the tension of having to survive in a brutal world. Along the way as we group this work together for updates, we will be sure to talk about the details and timelines. Your takeaway should be essentially no corner of the game is going un-examined.

Special note on Z2. We are still wrapping Z2 up to be ready for King of the Kill, bug free and fully optimized. Once we hit that milestone, we need to do some work to prepare it for Just Survive. It is hard to give you a timeline until we really dive into the work, but as soon as we have an idea of when that lines up, I will be sure to talk about it and our plans to start getting the new map into Just Survive.

Our team lost a few great team members this week. This is normal in game development, as they had a great new opportunity to explore that really spoke to them. I know they will do great there, as I know we will fill in and continue to drive forward with where we ultimately see the game going.

More than anything, I am really excited. The discussions and plans that we have been putting down are really going to result in a great experience. As usual, we have more ideas than we can possibly handle, but we are getting the priorities straight and I am really optimistic over where the game is going to go.

Servers will be coming down at 9:45PM PT for approximately 4 hours on Thursday 8/11. This publish requires a player and world wipe due to bug fixes regarding base tampers and durability.

New Features

A set of unique zombies have been seen roaming the area. These zombies hold the secrets to a new set of exotic and powerful weapons.

Players who succumb to the harsh realities of H1Z1 will now come back as one of the horde. These zombies will appear wearing the same gear they had when they died.

Quality of Life Changes

Respawn selection has had some improvements added

You will no longer be able to respawn within an area around where you died.

This area is a 9 grid diameter around your corpse

You cannot respawn within that grid for 5 minutes

If you die close to the grid any overlapping grid will inherit the lockout time form your previous death

Text chat is now enabled. Press enter to open chat bar

Made the following changes to the limited base building rules

Bases can now be built in the Villas

Campfires can now be placed anywhere

Flares can now be placed anywhere

Added limited base building to the Krakow server

Performance Enhancements

Improved server performance to reduce lag on high-pop and zombie intensive servers

More parallelization of core game and graphics systems for better performance on multi-core cpus

Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue the prevented Zombies from damaging vehicles

Fixed an issue which allowed tampers to be stacked

Fixed an issue that allowed players to prevent the loss of durability on certain tools

Players now start with a basic compass instead of an improvised one

Combat Feedback

Reticle now indicates that firing is disabled and character will enter a passive stance.

Thrown weapons now display a tracer, only visible to the person throwing them, making their path of flight more apparent.

Vehicles

Vehicles handling has been improved

Vehicles are less susceptible to flipping

Vehicles have been modified to have varied characteristics:

The police car is the fastest.

The off roader has the best handling.

The pickup truck is the toughest.

Passengers in the rear of the pickup truck can stand up to shoot forward and crouch to take cover and shoot behind.

Flipped vehicles have more realistic friction, won’t be drivable using turbo

The following vehicle sounds have been improved:

Engine and turbo

Tire squeal when turning on pavement

Braking sounds.

Vehicles also now have horns [Default: J].

We’ve made some physics tweaks that should have vehicles exploding unexpectedly far less and doing the correct amount of damage when they do explode.

All Just Survive servers will come down for maintenance beginning at 1:00 AM PT (8 AM GMT) for maintenance. Downtime is anticipated to be approximately 3 hours. Players can note the following changes:

• The new Ronin Crate is now available
  
• Loot bags & items inside them have been marked tradeable.
  
• Unlocked crates can no longer be traded or sold on the Steam Marketplace.
  
• The R380 pistol is now available again with improved stats!

On July 25th, 2016 we will be removing the ability to sell certain older H1Z1 crate items on the Steam Marketplace. Crate items have been marked trade only since Mercenary Crates were released last year. This change brings the older (pre-Mercenary Crate) items in line with the rest of the crate items in the game. Please note that crates themselves can still be traded and sold on the Steam marketplace.

Hey everyone!

It’s been a while since I posted one of these. Although I do apologize for the extended dry period, I do want to clarify my update cadence going forward. As you noticed last update, our current build was on the Test Server for a good amount of time. This supports our general philosophy that publishes remain on test until they reach a quality level we are comfortable with. I know some of you are thinking, “Yea, there were still bugs in that publish”. Fact is, H1Z1 has been receiving a lot of changes under the hood and we just adopted some of the combat improvements from KOTK which we feel are relevant to JS. This includes many bug fixes and performance adjustments. As much as we would love to avoid a single issue, as soon as we publish an update to the masses, issues tend to show themselves more rapidly. We are happy that we could turn a lot of these around quickly and we want to thank all of you who helped us out by reporting issues.

Moving forward, you can expect an official updated from me AFTER we do a live publish. This way, you get the new stuff and you see what’s coming next. Pretty straightforward!

So, what’s happen in development?
As usual, no guarantees for release date of the following topics. They’ll go live when they’re ready and they will hit the Test Server first!

Weapon enhancement recipes
You’ll now be able to kill rare zombies to find prototype weapon parts. You’ll combine these prototype parts with normal weapons to discover a recipe. The newly crafted weapon will have special abilities and stats. They will also have finite lifetime and cannot be repaired. So, save these for a “Special” occasion.


Upon death
You player will now rise as a zombie. So you or your friends will have to….um….kill you again to get your stuff back. Should be fun!

Boss zombie experimentation
I don’t want to spill the beans too much on this one. As we continue growing Just Survive, we’re always looking for ways to introduce new play loops into the game. Having boss encounters plays well with many of the things we want to do going forward. So, don’t be surprised if you run across a more vicious situation sometime soon. And you thought bears were scary! Hah!

Survival Score Servers:
We’re putting together another server ruleset. This one is designed around the notion of “How well did I survive?”

It’s going to work something like this:

A few designated servers will be on an auto wipe system. Every XX weeks (1, 2 or 3 possibly) the world will end. The server will wipe itself and give a final score to each player. This score is accumulated and displayed in the UI as you are playing. You’ll get points for things like zombie kills, recipe discovery... Etc. Think of it as a more advanced version of the death screen when it presents your end stats. Past scores will be available for some undetermined length of time also.

We are still designing and working out the kinks with this one and you can expect to play it on the Test Server first to provide your own feedback.
Expect to hear more about this in the future.

Limited Base Building
Couple fixes:
The Villas are being opened for base building
Campfires, torches and flares are no longer restricted from the rule
Sorry Krakow players….we missed you in the rule update. You are getting the rule also.

Exploiters
We are fully aware of the current exploits going on. We do not speak publically regarding steps being taken when dealing with this sort of thing. But I will say, if you are caught exploiting, you will be banned. Please pass it along

Loot
For a long time now, loot has been in a state which wasn’t on par with a survival experience. We’ve read all your posts; we’ve gone invisible and observed many players. We’ve checked high, low and medium pop servers. We spoke to many players live in chat.

I’m sorry if we’ve given you the easy life in the past but times need to change a bit. In a nutshell, the current loot drop rates are intended. Building a base was never intended to be a simple task btw…

That’s all I have for now.
Peace out and see you all in game!

@ShockDev

All servers will be unavailable beginning at 1:00 AM PT (8 AM GMT) for maintenance to introduce a game update.  Downtime is anticipated to be less than 4 hours.

Players may note the following changes:

 

• Fixed an issue where IED's were not damaging bases
• Fixed an issue with arrows doing execessive base damage
• Adjusted the drop rate of the Patriotic Mask skin
• Fixed an exploit for sit command preventing falling damage
• Fixed an issue with the Skinning Knife not de-spawing when dropped on ground
• You should now be able to harvest blood from Zombies
• You can no longer chop trees with a hunting knife
• We have a potential fix in place for the invisibility issues introduced in the last update. 

All servers will be unavailable beginning at 1:00 AM PT (8 AM GMT) for maintenance to introduce a game update.  Downtime is anticipated to be less than 4 hours.



Note from the Team:



Combat Update Notes:

For those that don’t know me, my name is bronstahd (Garrett Fern), and I’m a combat and gameplay designer working on H1Z1: King of the Kill. Tomorrow we are releasing an update we’ve internally termed “the combat update” which is the result of a focused push toward improving combat and related gameplay systems. I wanted to spend some time talking about several of these changes in greater detail to give some insight into what’s changed and why we’re excited about this update’s release.

Shotgun

We’ve continued working to improve the consistency of the shotgun. Our goal is that the shotgun should be a powerful, up close threat. This update further tightens the shotgun’s spread of fire, making it more powerful up close. In addition, the shotgun’s damage will fall off over distance, so it isn’t too powerful at range. The feedback we’ve seen has been positive so far, so we’re really looking forward to seeing these changes on the live servers.

Cone of Fire

Recently, we added Cone of Fire adjustments based on your character's movement state. We did this because, put simply, guns were performing far too accurately when running and jumping. Philosophically, our belief has always been that aiming down sight should be the most accurate method of aiming; this change made sure that's the case.

However, it was also possible to aim down sight while jumping, which also allowed for tremendous accuracy in a way that didn't make sense. This update addresses that issue by preventing ADS while jumping or falling. This has also allowed us to ease up on some previous combat restrictions around movement and it will now be possible to shoot and ADS directly from sprint. You'll no longer have to wait for your character to slow down and suffer a delay when trying to shoot.

General Weapon Polish

This update also contains a lot of general weapon polish. In no particular order, here's what you should expect to see:

• Historically, melee weapons have been underwhelming and of little use. As a first step toward addressing this, we've increased melee weapon damage across the board. This won't entirely fix melee weapons, but it should be a noticeable improvement:

• Fists: 4.5 damage -> 9 damage
• Combat Knife: 10 damage -> 21 damage
• Machete: 12 damage -> 25 damage
• Wood Axe: 16.5 damage -> 34 damage

• Since our last change to the AK-47 we've been listening to the community and the feedback has been pretty clear: it's not powerful enough when compared to the AR15.

We've been internally testing a faster fire rate for the AK-47 which we'll be rolling out with this update. Here's what you should expect to see:

• The AK-47 should be faster than AR15 in full auto fire, but more difficult to control.
• The AK-47 should be closer in speed to the AR15 when tapping.
• Specifically, the delay between shots has been reduced from 160 ms -> 145 ms.

We think this change will create nice some trade-offs between the weapons and make the AK-47 a compelling choice once again.

• Increased the damage of the R380 from 15 -> 17 to reduce the number of shots required to kill with it by one.
• Decreased the damage of the M9 from 19 -> 18 to allow time to apply healing after taking five shots. Previously it wasn't possible to apply any type of healing before bleeding to death.
• We've made some adjustments to the M47 Gas Grenade that should make them far more viable as a thrown weapon option:
  • Damage increased from 1/tick-> 3/tick.
  • Duration reduced from 60 seconds -> 20 seconds.

• Depending on the weapon, it used to take anywhere between 0.5 seconds to 1 second to change from one weapon to another. This time has been reduced to 0.15 seconds for all weapons.
• Weapon slots will always be assigned the same number, regardless of whether or not there are weapons in other slots.

Damage Log

We believe that when a player dies it should be very clear to them what killed them. That’s not always the case currently. As a first step towards remedying this, we’ve added a damage log to the death screen that will display how much damage the attack that killed you did and whether or not it was a headshot. Moving forward, the plan is to re-work the death screen so we can display even more information about cause of death.

Body Armor

We've also made some changes to the way Armor works that should improve the reliability of body armor:

• The entire body (chest, arms, and legs) is protected by Body Armor.
• Helmets still protect the head.

Hit Reactions

Hit reaction animations would cause the other character's head moved, often preventing a quick follow-up shot from registering as a headshot when it should. Other characters will no longer flinch out of the way when shot.

Camera & Reticle Improvements

• We've made a couple of improvements to the reticle.
• We’ve added a new element to the reticle that increases in size to display Cone of Fire information based on player movement.
• Improved color saturation and added clearer outline which should make seeing the reticle, even small reticles, much easier.
• In most cases, projectiles now originate from the camera rather than the weapon model. This change significantly reduces projectile collisions with medium-height cover like fences, rocks, cars, and similar objects and also improves projectile performance when fighting uphill or against players on top of buildings.

In some cases, it was possible for one player to have clear line of sight on another player, due to the camera being offset above their head, while actually being obscured from the other player’s view. We felt this would be unfair, and in these cases (generally, when your character is very close to medium-height cover) projectiles will still originate from the weapon model. We’ve added feedback to the reticle to make it clear when this is happening.

General Gameplay

 

Respawn:

Select a respawn region upon death: Now upon death, you'll be presented with a spawn selection interface. From this interface you'll choose a grid square to respawn within. Your actual location will be random within chosen grid.

Vehicle Anti-Hoarding measures:

In an effort to combat vehicle hoarding and to give more players an opportunity to obtain a vehicle we’ve made the following changes.  The changes are intended to make vehicles a little more transitional so that you can find one, use it up, and then more easily find another one.

• Vehicles now decay their condition slowly over time.  They will fully decay in a little over two days.
• Wrenches spawn in the world but are much rarer.  They will always spawn with full durability.
• Wrenches will lose 100 durability per swing on a vehicle.  Wrenches have 2500, so when repairing a vehicle they can only hit 25 times.  Each hit will repair 2% of the vehicle’s maximum condition.
• Wrenches can no longer be crafted.
• 25% more vehicles concurrently spawn in the world.
• Vehicles now spawn procedurally in random locations around major points of interest.

That’s our first pass at the solution.  We will now observe and make adjustments as necessary.

Nomad server: This is a new ruleset in which you cannot build bases in the world. We will be standing up two US worlds and two EU worlds initially.

Bullet conversion is being removed from the game

The in-game map now shows your current world position. If you're in a group, you'll also see indicators for each group member

Limited base building ruleset is now be instituted across all worlds

Zombies are now be more abundant. We fixed a lot of issues with the zombie/wildlife spawning system which was degrading the experience over time.

Characters are now equipped with a skinning knife. This knife is necessary to harvest wildlife and zombies. You can now target the dead NPC and press “E” to harvest. This replaces the old method of attacking a dead corpse with a hunting knife. 



Interaction Responsiveness

We’ve long had problems with delays in picking up items. It isn’t really a combat related thing, but it was a big enough deal that we wanted to pursue a fix for this update. The time it takes to pick up items, open doors, and perform other interactions has been greatly improved and is now nearly instantaneous.

Additional Patch Notes:

• Items should be more consistently highlighted during looting
• Removed dynamic weapon slot numbers from the UI
• Fixed a bug where hit-markers would occasionally get stuck on
• Fixed a bug where players could not melee others on ATVs
• Fixed a bug where explosions could damage players through structures
• Fixed a bug where the Molotov’s fire effect would sometimes be invisible
• Corrected Molotov behavior so that they damage vehicles but do not cause them to burn
• Fixed an issue where players would render incorrectly if they exit a vehicle at certain distances
• Fixed a bug where thrown grenades could go through players
• Fixed a bug where equipping a weapon while inventory is full could cause the player to lose the weapon
• Fixed an exploit where swapping backpacks a specific way could create infinite bag space
• Fixed a bug where the UI would make it appear that multiple hits were registering at once
• Fixed a bug where character would appear to be falling when strafing against concrete barriers
• Fixed a bug where the reloading the AK-47 while firing could prevent the reload animation from playing

Servers will be coming offline at 3AM Pacific for apporximately 2 hours. This a performance and stability update; no patch notes required.