7 Days To Die Wiki:Community portal/Archive 2017-2020

Request for Comments
Army Pants has been created as a unique page but after looking up the stats in items.xml it's clear that they are simply another color or version of Denim Pants. Is a unique page needed for Army Pants or is it better to document them as a version of Denim Pants?

Post comments on on Army Pants talk page

Broken DPL tables
I noticed that various Category:List-Pages, such as Beverages, Building, Clothing, Door and other pages are having troubles with the DPL tables. I suspect this is a result of the extensive overhaul of the infobox items, which took place recently. I have no idea how to fix this, so maybe someone with more wiki knowledge can take a look at this? JonPardon (talk) 12:59, 29 May 2016 (UTC)


 * You are correct. The DPLs usually search based on category and Template:Infobox_item is usually responsible for categorizing items. I'll take a look. Thanks for the heads-up!


 * update 00:37, 31 May 2016 (UTC): The DPL tables are slowly being populated now. However there are a few things that eventually need to be addressed:


 * Do we need both of these wiki categories: Category:Building and Category:Building Material? Is there anything that would be in one category and not the other?
 * Similarly with Category:Gear and Category:Clothing. I'm personally not a big fan of the term "gear" for clothing as "gear" includes tools as well.
 * For some reason, the vault doors aren't getting auto-categorized by the "type" parameter in the infobox, despite having the type assigned for some time now.
 * The clothing list should probably be made a dedicated page: List of clothing. The list is long. I might get that accomplished later...


 * GrayBeard_Actual (talk)


 * These categories are almost the same and one of them would be sufficient. It would make sense to keep the category building as this is one of the item groups as they appear in the game. There are a few item, such as Sandbags that belong to the item group 'Miscellaneous' and are therefore not in the category building. I don't know if this is considered a problem.
 * Clothing sounds better and two categories isn't necessary
 * No idea how to fix that
 * Good idea!
 * JonPardon (talk) 19:01, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
 * I believe that all these list pages work now. Although I am not sure what the Building page is supposed to be, I am tempted to make the Building Materials page the same page. Another though that I have is why do we have a Category:Weapon and a Weapons (List of weapons) pages (and other similar page groups), shouldn't they be the same page, as far as I know there is no reason they could not be, unless it was to keep the list of pages on the Category pages separate and at the top. As atrial I have transcluded the Building page to the Category:Building Material page.
 * I agree that gear serves no real purpose, but things like goggles may not be considered to be clothes.
 * I have created a List of clothing page, I have added a scroll feature that I am not sure that I like. I would like the headings to stay at the top, but am not sure how to do that in a wiki. Would be better if the scroll was a part of the table, rather than a div around the table.
 * — Tilleen (talk) 11:02, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

Alpha 15 Icons
I've receive the new icons and will start uploading them. Also note that in future versions, it will be much easier for anyone to obtain the icons:

From Alpha 15 onward, you should be able to dump all game icons to disk by starting a local game and using the command 'exportitemicons' in the console.

This will place them in a folder in the root game directory in PNG format.

As I upload icons, I have been assigning them to the Category:Alpha 15 icons

Below are a few of the icons for pages that will likely be important/popular:

Articles in non-English languages
There are a few articles that are in non-English that have been marked for deletion. Our standard practice for article deletion includes using the talk/discussion page of the article to defend keeping the article.

If any of the following pages should be kept, please leave a comment as to why on the article's individual talk/discussion page.

Update, 23:57, 27 March 2017 (UTC): The above pages will be deleted after April 4th, unless someone speaks up either here or on the individual pages' talk/discussion page.

Update, 23:04, 17 April 2017 (UTC): The pages have been deleted. There were no updates on any of the talk/discussion pages nor here.

Template for loot lists?
Is it worth setting up a template system and associated dpl queries for loot lists? I was imagining something similar to the Template:Recipe, or possibly something closer to the Template:block Varieties templates. It would depend on how searchable the templates would be required to be. Would affect if they have named parameters (I miss SQL, something I never thought I would say).


 * Maybe a sandboxed example would help illustrate their use. If each lootable item/block/entity had an assigned Template:Loot (or whatever you call it), then theoretically it will make "found in" statements more accurate.


 * Are you thinking of replacing existing infoboxes on lootable items, such as Working_Stiffs_Crate?


 * GrayBeard_Actual (talk) 23:54, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
 * What I was thinking of doing was similar to what is at Working Stiffs Crate/Sandbox, but I am not sure that, that is the best way. What may be better is to just create a template for each of the "lootcontainers" in the XML and then just include that. These lootcontainers templates could then use the templates that I have created for the automatic calculations of probability of an item dropping.
 * This of course does tend to stop updates by random members, and would tend to limit it to higher skilled wiki editors.
 * Also may be it would be better to install and xml interpreter into mediawiki and just drag in the entire file.
 * — Tilleen (talk) 05:10, 30 March 2017 (UTC)


 * I like the table format and I think the information is useful, especially if on each item's page we are able to have DPL tables that show where to find the item. For example, on the page for Wrench, we could have a DPL that lists all of the containers that may drop a Wrench. That way if a player is looking for one, he knows which containers to loot for the best chance to find one.


 * The downside is that the table will be cumbersome to edit as-is, without some sort of xml parser as you mentioned (which would be hugely beneficial in many other ways). That is the key hurdle for this wiki; as the game is in beta, so much information changes and it's hard to keep articles up-to-date and relevant.


 * Do you know of an xml parser extension for mediawiki? I did a quick search and didn't see much, but I don't necessarily know what to look for. It may be possible to get an extension installed if it is safe/stable and we can justify its use.


 * As somewhat of an aside, there was some work done a while ago by an editor who is no longer active. He was documenting the XML of each loot container, as in Loot_Container_3. I was never sure where he was going with that work or if it's useful, though it may be useful to modders. What do you think? Can those pages be useful or otherwise rolled into what you are doing?


 * GrayBeard_Actual (talk) 00:08, 4 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, that would be the plan, to have further queries (dpl) that would extract the information for each piece of loot.


 * User:Hamhock666 has been doing some excellent work with extracting the prefabs information, out of the xml and creating a table of the information. We would just need one that created multiple templates (one for each loot container). One of problems is that the loot containers have loot groups which can have more loot groups ... so to get the percentages, correct we would have to take that into account. E.g The Working_Stiffs_Crate/Sandbox has as one of the items, nailgun+parts, which has a 4.75% chance of being selected, but that is a group of 5 items so, then there is a 20% chance that any of them are select, so the chance of getting a nailgun is 20% of 4.75% which is 0.95%.


 * I have also assumed that if a prob is not specified then it will be 1. Which may or may not be correct. The nailgun+parts group suggests to me that I am wrong since it specifically states that a nailgun is 1.


 * Even if we do not get an xml parser, it would still be better to update a 85 templates, than update the couple of hundred individual pages.


 * No, I don't know of a parser, this is the only wiki I have worked on. I am assuming User:Hamhock666 is doing it externally with some sort of script.


 * I have had a quick look, and it may be useful to have them as so we have a list of the loot containers, and they could then include the same template that we use for the individual items. It depends on if it is worth documenting the other stuff. I am not sure.


 * — Tilleen (talk) 13:48, 4 April 2017 (UTC)


 * An XML parser sounded like a really good idea to me at first, but then I realized that it would probably take a really long time to go through all of the XML to generate these dynamic pages. I don't know very much about how wiki templates work, but I did write a tool to parse through the XML, and it takes quite a while to run through all the generation of pages on my computer, longer than you would want to wait for a web page to load. Admittedly it is written in python which is kind of innefficient, but I can't imagine that a wiki XML parser would be much faster.


 * Generating wiki markup and copying and pasting it from the python generator's output to every page for every loot container, item, etc. would be almost as time consuming as just translating directly from the XML by hand. Perhaps we can use a python script to go through the XML and generate tables of information, then we upload those tables to the wiki, and the wiki templates parse the tables for the information. Would this be possible in a template? What would be the easiest way for a template to access information besides XML?


 * If we can get something like this to work, then whenever the game is updated, someone can just run the python script offline, copy the parsed data to a template page, and the template will parse the data on a per page basis. This was something I was thinking of when I first created the List of Prefabs page, because if the location template could copy information from the List of Prefabs table to each location page, they would always be up to date, no maintenance needed. I just don't know how a wiki template can take in data, as I know almost nothing about how to write a template.


 * Also I think you are right that the prob is default set to 1 as stated in the XML, what else could it be?
 * --Hamhock666 (talk) 19:24, 4 April 2017 (UTC)


 * I have updated my templates and test page, should probably create a test item to show the other side.


 * I am wondering how much the loot containers will change. At the moment I think I will get my templates working, but not start creating any of the raw pages until after Alpha 16 comes out. Still thinking about how to do the groups and sub-groups, may end up writing something, or just list the groups and have them sub-divide when clicked on (a page or template or something for the each group??). Would really love it if we could use a real DB.


 * Yes, I could not think of what prob else prob could be but 1 either. There is a container that has one item (cobweb) and its prob is 0.01, but since it is the only item I would expect that it would get normalized to 1, unless there is a special case for a single item container. Seems like a bad idea. Would be better if they had 2 items one of which was empty or nothing, especially since they do have an empty group. But may be it is faster.


 * — Tilleen (talk) 00:26, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Looks like how I wanted to do the loot containers will not work. I was going to have a loot container template that would included the individual LootList-item template table rows. I would then include that template into all the pages that used that loot container. but because the dpl actually does a string search on the page, it will never find a reference to that template parameter (the item) because it is not actually on that page. I was doing this so that we could update the container once, and all the pages that use it would auto-magically update. If the page changed containers, it would have been as simple as updating a single number for this to happen.
 * Does anyone have any ideas?
 * — Tilleen (talk) 05:24, 6 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I have come to the conclusion that I have no idea how they use the probabilities (prob field) in the loot calculations. It looks like from rereading the system, they have a probabilities template that is based on the level of the character, (baseProbTemplate). I do not know how this is applied. Is it applied to just the items that have no prob field, or all of them. If applied to all of them, it would have no effect on the probability of any item appearing if the list is normalized in the way that I thought it was. If it did just affect a normalized list, then things like the group militaryguns+ammo would be more likely to give you a sniper rifle early in the game than later.
 * — Tilleen (talk) 00:27, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I have an example that I think is working over at Working_Stiffs_Crate/Sandbox. Have a look. I think I have changed the way I think about how the "lootprobtemplates" works, I have not reflected this in the table.
 * — Tilleen (talk) 03:13, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Alpha 16
In preparation for the upcoming update, I translated the Release Notes into a few tables. The update is quite big and I hope this helps to smoothen the proces of updating the wiki.

I suggest we edit the comments to notify others if the changes have been implemented. Use if you created the page, but it needs content to be added.If I missed something, please add them to the right table.

A few things that didn't fit in the table, but are important changes:
 * New Game Mechanic? "Electric System" - If this is considered a Game Mechanic, it should be added on the front page and get a page similar to Stealth System.
 * New Game Mechanic? "Sleeper Spawning" - If this is considered a Game Mechanic, it should be added on the front page and get a page similar to Stealth System.
 * New Game Mechanic? "Painting" - If this is considered a Game Mechanic, it should be added on the front page and get a page similar to Stealth System.
 * Stealth System overhaul


 * I left out the complete Skills overhaul. There are plenty changes to skills which need to be implemented though.

I suggest we edit the comments to notify others if the changes have been implemented. Use  if you created the page, but it needs content to be added.If I missed something, please add them to the right table.

Entities (Zombies and Animals)

 * Alpha 16 is out and stable on 16.1. I've been working on filling in information about newly added mechanics. Can somebody fix up the Science Category page?

--Folcra (talk) 09:36, 26 July 2017 (EST)

Updated Page Names
As of Alpha 16, I have noticed that a lot of the page names on the wiki are inconsistent with the in game names. For example, Scrap Iron Frame is now called in game Scrap Frame, what used to be Poured Concrete Blocks are now called Wet Concrete Blocks. This is more a problem with the game being in Alpha and there not being great consistency in naming. Some blocks that need names for the wiki don't even have localized names in game because the player is not allowed to have them in inventory. For example pouredRConcreteBlock has no in game name but on the wiki is known as Poured Reinforced Concrete Blocks.

How do people feel about moving articles to their appropriate in-game name with a redirect, like move Scrap Iron Frames to Scrap Frames, Poured Concrete Blocks to Wet Concrete Blocks and so on? I just feel like the wiki ought to be consistent with the game, even if that means changing page names to accommodate the new versions of the game. --Hamhock666 (talk) 00:28, 25 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I believe that pages should be moved to their in-game names, and would have done that for the one you listed if I realized that the in-game name had changed. I think that the Poured Concrete Blocks are actually a rename (or slight change) to the blocks that used to be where the "Poured Reinforced Concrete Blocks" used to be, so it may be easier (depending on the content) to move it back and create a new one for that particular page.
 * I am currently going through and looking at all the blocks and seeing what their upgrade paths are, and which types (Block, wedge, ...) are in which materials (Wood, Reinforced Wood, ...) so that I can upgrade the tables in each of the "blocks" pages.
 * --— Tilleen (talk) 00:13, 26 July 2017 (UTC)


 * I agree with Tilleen ; articles should be moved leaving a redirect. Players will take note of the in-game name and search for it so the wiki articles should fascilitate that.


 * — GrayBeard Actual (talk) 22:43, 30 July 2017 (UTC)