Hey Bumfuzzlers! This week we have a reduction in Z Levels, charcoal production changes, a Night Lantern fix, leveling the respawn cooldown playing field, Raidable Bases stability changes, loot weighting, and 10 new bases, recycler fixes at Dome, and more. Read on!
Z Levels
It’s time that the impact of Z Levels was minimized on Bumfuzzlertopia.
I’ve been threatening to disable Z levels for a while now. Well, I’m not going to do that right now, but I did lower its effects.
Veterans get a gather rate advantage over new players that is simply too much and while I want to reward veterans who play on the server, I don’t want to make veterans kings who rule over other players. When someone is level 50 in Z Levels and a new player is level 1, that’s a hell of an advantage given how much the levels multiply gather rates.
This wipe, I’ve lowered the effects of Z Levels by 20%. Going forward, I’ll review how things go, but may lower its effects by up to an additional 20% as we approach the base 3x gather rate. The ultimate goal is to disable Z Levels and go with only the base 3x gather rate. I love how Z Levels rewards veterans, but it makes it too easy for long-time players to handle newer players and I want to avoid that situation. It’s important that the server attract and keep new players.
This lowering will affect night, but it should be proportional to gather rates during the day.
As I lower this, the way charcoal burns will be restored closer to normal. Right now you get a fraction of the charcoal when burning wood – hence the furnace farms.
Charcoal Production
As I said, when Z Levels go down, I’ll raise charcoal production up a little on Bumfuzzlertopia.
I went ahead and changed charcoal production in the following ways:
- Increased how much is produced per furnace tick by 10%
- Increased chance of a furnace tick successfully creating charcoal by 10%
- Decreased furnace speed by 8%
So furnaces will be slightly slower, but they should produce more charcoal than before.
I am hoping to eventually have furnaces two times faster than default Rust settings with default charcoal byproduct.
Various Errors
There were a couple of issues that were found and resolved.
The following issues were resolved on Bumfuzzlertopia:
- The in-game Discord economic event provided the wrong Discord channel name
- The /vote command provided a misspelled website address
Don’t forget to vote for the server to get rewards in-game!
Thanks CaramelApple for pointing out these issues.
Raid Shield
There was an issue in Raid Shield that could result in serious rollbacks.
It appears the data file would only save when the plugin was reloaded. This means all the data was kept in working memory. Problem is, if the server crashes, there could be a significant rollback. For instance, a crash at 2 pm could cause Raid Shield charges and statuses to roll back to 4 am when the last restart took place.
Now the data file saves every few minutes to avoid this.
Thanks Matt for the feedback.
Night Lantern
It appears there were some timing issues between Night Lantern and skipping night via vote.
Sometimes on Bumfuzzlertopia, voting for night or day would turn off a player’s lights unexpectedly or vice versa.
I’ve changed it so lights automatically turn on just before 18:00, the vote happens at 18:00, and Night Lantern turns off just after 7:00 while a successful vote sets the time to 7:00.
Thanks CaramelApple for noticing this and confirming the issue was resolved.
Respawn Cooldowns
On Bumfuzzlertopia, at Level 26 (/loyalty) players receive a perk that allows them to avoid respawn cooldowns.
After some thought, I think this might be a bit too overpowered and it gives too much of an advantage over new players.
It’s true sometimes the instant spawn works against players as this causes them to rush back into the fight without preparing, but overall it’s more of an advantage.
Thanks CaramelApple for your feedback.
Raidable Bases
I’ve made a couple of changes to Raidable Bases that will hopefully beef them up a bit.
Here’s a couple of changes:
- The stability of Raidable Bases is now fixed. Originally they were all 100% stable.
- The loot in Raidable Bases will now be weighted. This means certain items will be less likely to spawn instead of everything being exactly as likely to spawn. Obviously chicken and C4 should not spawn at the same rates.
- I’ve added 10 new Raidable Bases to the lineup of the medium and hard variety. I’ll be trying to add a lot more. I have about 90 in the queue waiting to be touched up and added.
The loot will need some balancing. My goal is to make the loot more realistic and not allow the Raidable Bases to be the one and only source of loot for players. In recent times, players would only hit Raidable Bases to get what they needed. While this is good since it takes the pressure off player bases, I’d rather not have people feast on them due to crazy loot because it makes the rest of the game useless.
Give me feedback about the loot, but be fair and honest.
Monument Recycler
In the past, I added a bunch of recyclers to various monuments that didn’t have them on Bumfuzzlertopia.
The problem is the one at Dome was broken due to the HDRP update. It was floating out in space without any way to reach it.
This should now be fixed.
There’s a chance that other recyclers could be affected at other monuments. Simply let me know if you find anything wrong and I’ll review them.
Thanks CaramelApple for your feedback.
Wipe
On Thursday both servers wiped as Facepunch released a Rust patch.
Both servers, Bumfuzzlertopia and Bumfuzzlernilla had their maps and blueprints wiped as well as an economy wipe where applicable.
Bumfuzzlertopia’s map, was chosen from a poll in Discord! We’ll try to do that each wipe going forward. Make sure to check it out and weigh in.
As always Bumfuzzlers, I appreciate all the feedback and support. It’s a big deal and truly helps me out. Please keep it up and as always have a great time playing!
