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What are the **must-spend** uses of money in the game right now?
1. A small portion is spent on **respawns after death**.
2. Some is spent on **fueling vehicles**.
3. That’s it...
As for buying food, clothes, weapons, and gear—these aren’t essential because they can be found in the world. This raises another question: **Should trading zones even sell these items?** If they do, money becomes king. Why bother raiding when wealthy players can just buy everything and dominate "poorer" players? Raiding and combat then devolve into mindless violence or griefing. Of course, this assumes you have enough money. For players without money, it’s even harder to compete because they can’t afford gear—unless they kill other players and loot their bases for items to sell. But even then, it’s just a cycle of converting loot into money.
On the other hand, if trading zones don’t sell these items, money becomes even more useless. The game continuously generates items and money, but the money just sits in your account as gold bars. No matter how high prices are, it doesn’t matter because you can always find what you need in the world, right?
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So, the key to the late-game economy is **implementing a money sink**.
The idea of **buying skill points** was proposed for this reason. Maybe death temporarily strips you of everything, but you can spend money to recover or upgrade your skills. It sounds strange, but it makes sense. You want to stay powerful, and each death forces you to spend money to rebuild your skills. This means you can’t endlessly raid a player’s base—after multiple deaths, you’ll have to make choices because you can’t afford to keep all your skills at "perfect" levels.
The same applies to PVE. Each death forces you to decide how much money to spend on recovering or upgrading skills. Should you focus on driving, archery, or melee weapons? If you and your team have enough money, a new player joining your group might want to be a "medic," and you’d have the funds to support that...
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This approach not only **improves the game’s pacing** but also makes it easier for new players to find teams, even on new servers. The more money a group has, the more skill points they can afford, making them more attractive to newcomers. At the same time, deaths would **recycle part of these skills**—for example, losing 10% of your skills per death.
This creates a **closed-loop money sink** centered around death. It increases the cost of dying, recycles money, and makes scavenging more meaningful.
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The **guild system** and other ideas you mentioned are relatively complex systems. They’d be difficult to implement perfectly at this stage. As for the idea of **paying to access high-tier loot areas**, like needing enough money to enter certain zones, it’s similar to how you can currently buy a green card to access bunkers. This would require a complete system: stronger zones, more content, unique enemies, and corresponding loot and gameplay mechanics.
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The current problem is that most areas in the world don’t have **stronger enemies** or **unique weapons** tied to them. For example, to defeat the enemies at the naval base, you’d need at least a Barrett in your team, and the naval base could drop special gun attachments...
Without such a complete system, it ends up like the current bunkers—you don’t really need to go there because you can get most items elsewhere. The loot in bunkers isn’t "absolutely necessary," so you can just skip them. Building such a system would be a massive undertaking, and I don’t think it’s realistic right now.
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That’s why I proposed the **skill system**—it’s easier to implement from a coding perspective. It’s a relatively simple change compared to building an entirely new gameplay system.
From a coding standpoint, we already have skills. The idea is to **save them to the BCU** and clear them upon death. Then, at a doctor, you could refresh the BCU’s contents (not 100%). For example, if your driving skill was at Advanced 57%, it might drop to 30% after a refresh. To restore or upgrade your skills, you’d need to buy **skill points** from the doctor...
This creates a **closed loop** that’s easier to implement and significantly increases the importance of money in the game.
Oh, and I’m worried about translation errors, so if anything isn’t clear, please let me know!
And yes, the idea I mentioned above isn’t something that could be implemented in the next update. But I also wrote that the current cities won’t be enough for the "full map," meaning we’re talking about something that would come at least after version 1.0.
Tying the money sink to death isn’t a bad solution, but in the game’s current state, it would feel strange. I’m not saying it wouldn’t work later on, but if we’re talking about what would be easier to implement, I’d rather tie it to item repairs.
For example, right now, you can repair everything with a repair kit. Take cars, for instance—you can fix everything on them yourself, but if a part breaks off, you need to buy a new one. That’s how it currently works. I’d make this harder by not allowing every character to repair everything with just a random repair kit. It should require a character with the right skill. Even then, they shouldn’t be able to repair everything an unlimited number of times.
This would apply to all other items as well. That way, traders would be the most efficient at repairing, but even they wouldn’t be able to do it endlessly.
For example, if your weapon takes sudden major damage—let’s say you run into a horde of zombies, fire a lot, and it overheats—it could break. Or if it has been repaired too many times, it can no longer be fixed. At that point, you’d need to get a new weapon. The same would go for vehicles and other items.
This way, players would lose money over time while playing, not just when they die. And even if they find another weapon, if it’s not in perfect condition, they’d have to repair it right away, (if they have the ability) immediately reducing its remaining lifespan. You actually mentioned the non-repairability. This is just a lighter version of it.
Yes, I agree with most of your points.
I’ve always believed that **items shouldn’t be permanently and perfectly repairable**. This is a very difficult but important decision, and I personally love this kind of setting—not because I enjoy self-torture, but because it adds depth. For example, if you have a large backpack, it can still be repaired when its durability drops below 20%. However, the idea that items below 20% durability can’t be repaired at all (I forget which version introduced this) is a flawed design. Instead, you should only be able to repair it to **99%** the first time, **98%** the second time, and so on, until it becomes unusable (marked with red slots).
Similarly, when guns start malfunctioning due to low durability, you’d have no choice but to abandon them. This way, repair kits are no longer a perfect solution, and you’d need to buy new items from the trading zone.
I’ve mentioned this idea before—it would also help solve the issues of **"useless money"** and **"item hoarding."** After all, only **brand-new items** should hold significant value.
From a coding perspective, this would also be relatively easy to implement.
As for your point about **linking death, money, and skills**, here’s my explanation: In *SCUM*, we all have a **BCU** embedded in the back of our heads. This BCU can store your **skill information**—similar to how charged chips currently boost intelligence.
When you die, you’d need to retrieve your BCU and visit a doctor to refresh your skills. However, you wouldn’t fully recover your previous skills. At the same time, you could spend money to buy **skill points** to restore or upgrade your abilities.
You know what’s terrifying about the current PVP system? Players can place a simple bed near their base, die, respawn on the bed, grab weapons, and continue raiding. In PVE, players do the same thing by placing a bed before entering a bunker.
On low-loot servers, teammates without food might even kill and eat each other... All these issues stem from the **low cost of death**. Besides losing some money, there’s no real penalty. You might mention **reputation**, but let’s be honest—reputation is useless. You can just create a separate "reputation account" to buy items, and that’s it.
Implementing this system would:
1. **Increase the cost of death.**
2. **Recycle excess money in the server.**
3. **Encourage teamwork among new players.**
As I mentioned earlier, if you have a wealthy friend on a server, you can team up with them—they provide the money, and you upgrade your skills. It’s a win-win. You’d quickly integrate into the server and take on a specific role.
This is a **multi-problem solution** that can be implemented with minimal code.
So, what do you think?
As we've seen with when they added quests and if they end up adding the map to the phone, everything could be done on that phone, why not be done with the whole trader outposts and just add a SCUMazon app to the phone, have the drones drop or pickup our items, not sure exactly how it could replace the barber though, maybe drop some scissors that allows us to do it ourselves I don't know.
I don't know how do you mean this. I didn't wrote anything like that. Can you point out the part when you see this? Maybe i can rephrase or explain it.
You didn't, it's just in relation to your suggestion regarding traders, I'm just giving my unasked-for two cents since it's related and the devs apparently look at suggestions. I was just saying that when the devs added quests a few months ago, and because the map in-game might be removed and moved onto the phone, perhaps they could save time and just remove the trader outposts all together too and have it be done through the phone as well. Again, just my two cents regarding the mentioned traders and NPC suggestions.
I see. Sorry for my misunderstanding.
That would be something for a start. But just as I started the suggestion "I feel a city needs to be alive". So would love this.
Keeping with the phone theme, and your suggestions to keep a city alive, perhaps then the traders could also call us, or we could call them, add some sort of communication between the characters while we/they are away, and the call could depend on our karma/relationship with said trader, so if we are in good standing they could offer us a special quest.