Tools should be way more scarce

[TWM]

I remember starting playing this game in february 2015, green as they come: boy, was I glad if I found a hatchett or a knife, let alone a rifle.

And then, when you found a toolbox, boy wasn't that exciting: it meant prolonging the life of your tools. Of course scrap metal was hard to come by, so that forced you to make hard choices: do I repair the knife or the hatchett, how long is this rifle going to last? Maybe I should scrap the lantern so that I can do all three, but then what do I do when I find myself out at night?

Over the course of the months, I've been finding axes and hatchetts, toolboxes and even rifles all over the place.

As a consequence, there's no real need to maintain my equipment, just let it drop down to 12% or so and scrap it for the parts, 'cuz I have six or seven more axes lying around here and there across different maps anyway. There's no real sense of shortage, or pride in your tools.

If the developers want to stimulate nomadic behaviour, then cutting down on the amount of tools a player will find in the game would be key.

Ideally, the environment would respond dynamically to what has already been discovered, toolwise. So if I have found an axe, the chance of an axe appearing at any number of spawn locations would drop. If I have found two axes, the chance would drop even more.

In any run, you should find one or maybe two rifles. So once the player finds a rifle, he shouldn't expect to find another one. You betcha's he's going to take care of his prized rifle, axe, knife that way.

Also, this would make forging hatchetts and knives somewhat more appealing, whereas now with the number of axes, knives and tool boxes around and an unlimited supply of scrap metal, it's pretty redundant.

[Naut]

I cannot agree more.

my longest game is 220 days into Stalker now...and life is boring. Most exciting parts of gameplay? When something breaks, or gets scarce....

Every new patch i continue playing for a few days, and then ask myself, why?

[Hotzn]

OP's observations are correct. Not long ago, the game was a bit like chess, with the different items being the pieces. Each piece was important. Now there is such an abundance of items that any single item is a lot less important. It is obvious that the possible survival time has gone from somewhere around 100 days to endless as a consequence. However, that does not necessarily have to be bad. In a real life survival situation, there would also be some necessary items in abundance, while others would be scarce. Other challenges may arise, from the weather to animals to infections and so on. The current problem in sandbox is that your equipment is progressing, but the difficulty stays the same. They should introduce a dynamic which increases difficulty over time, to compensate for the better equipment. Like deteriorating weather, more aggressive wolves (packs), dangerous NPCs etc.