3D printers, auto fixers or modifiers

Game Talk The Drawing Board
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I had in ideia today

Because CDDA takes places on a near future and we are seeing more and more Advanced 3D printing technology why RIVTECH never made an 3D printer that prints their Guns/advanced products

Basically there would be 5 types of 3D printers

1 SMALL: An 3D printer that prints anything that has less than 5 Liters and isn’t an fire arm

Needs schematic USB or SD card plus materials

Can be powered by UPS or vehicle power

Always takes 2+ hours to make any item

Rare on open electronic stores,common on places that have CBM’S and very common on LABS it has the same weight and double the volume of an car battery.

2 Medium 3D printer:

Functionality is the same,it can print large Melee weapons and even survivor gear,

Takes 6+ hours for more complex work

Vehicle power only 3 times the size and weight of the small 3D printer

3:Large 3D printer/experimental printer:

Large as an a
Fridge and two times as heavy,can manufacture high end gear,almost any item in the game , exceptions to biological materials,chemical stuff,plasma/fusion weapons and anything larger than an fridge

Vehicle power only

Any kind of power armor can take up to 35 hours of printing,the RM13 takes about 20 hours to be done.

The auto fixers have the same size and weight as the large 3D printer they fix,refit and/or reinforce any gear stored on them,the process takes about 5 hours and only require the base materials and a bit of power,they also can change the configuration of the L523 and convert some weapons like turn an clasic mosin naggant into an EBR mosin naggant

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  1. It’s not near future, it’s alternate reality present day.
  2. 3D printers have major problems that mean they’re suboptimal for industrial manufacture, they’re typically only used for prototyping. This isn’t expected to change any time soon.
  3. Being able to find a thing that produces copies of extremely rare items is terrible for game balance.
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I don’t know if Bionics count as present day, especially not stuff like fusion blasters and the like. Regardless of whatever the cannon year is I’d say future or near future is a safe category to put Cataclysm in.

As for the thread, 3D printers would have to be carefully balanced if they ever were added as a more common feature. I can assure from irl experience that they are spectacular at printing components, repairing items with replacement parts and the like. Anyway we already have nano replicators ingame to create fully functional items and those are cool rare finds that print stuff like powerarmor, mininukes, stealth cloaks and the like so part of what you want is already here as a lategame find for making lategame items.

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There are sci-fi things in the game, they appeared because of alternate reality sci-fi reasons. But that does not mean that things like how industry works or how day-to-day life works has been impacted.

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I dunno police robots sound like they’d alter day to day same with stuff like integrated toolsets, atomic coffee makers and lights. Hell just power armor existing means stuff like exoskeletons for workers are probably around. Heck just having machine intelligence to a level enough to work for riot control and arrests independant of human supervision has a cascading effect on what day to day life and how industries would likely look. Seriously I break into a store setting off an alarm, an eyebot comes down to assess the situation automatically, catches me in the act and robots self deploy to arrest me. No human, no operator calling any of those shots, they’ve automated the police! That’s some day to day life changes right there. Countless thing in Cataclysm would have similar cascading effects like that one would. It’s one of the things that make Cataclysm so interesting, just imagine how these people probably lived considering their technological achievements. Makes Cataclysm much more interesting over the sea of generic zombie games. Once you get that type of tech the alternate reality, which most any fiction is realistically really is, it’s classified as near future if not outright future. Doesn’t need to be star trek to be future, it’s just a more grounded variety of future.

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:face_with_raised_eyebrow: Coming soon to a game near you: Police robots moved to Aftershock mod, because people were inadvertently arguing they were too sci-fi for the setting…

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They arn’t too sci fi for the setting at all. You’d have to remove like half of cataclysm for that to be the case. That was the point I was making above, there is nothing Modern Era about Cataclysm. If they actually did decide to strip Cataclysm of everything sci fi and turn it into yet another generic modern era zombie game it’d probably be the dumbest thing anyone ever did in gaming though. If there is one thing the world does not need it’s yet another Modern Era zombie game to get tossed on the pile.

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The point is that the intended setting is an alternate reality modern day, where most things pre-Cataclysm were vaguely similar to our world, but there was some crazy sci-fi stuff largely found in secret labs, and a few other “new technologies” being rolled out from those labs.
Saying “there’s some stuff that doesn’t fit the intended setting that Kevin wants for the game, therefore we should cram even more in” is just not going to work as an argument.
Besides, if you hate the idea of modern day and want more sci-fi, the Aftershock mod is right there, and moving along nicely.

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It is like my old rpg party where some people started to arguing against the “stupid old sw technology”, where everything is bulky and while there are intelligent droids, there are no “smart” items (from phone to weapon) and 3D printers.

The technology is not for realism, the technology is there for the fun. The world is like that, alternative. If technology would be real, after the first suprise the cdda monsters would be killed by drones, ncb protected tanks etc. etc and people would be informed via smartphones etc., the casualties would be much less severe.

Gamewise i think we could have 3D printers, it could be a necessary tool for crafting. It would be slow printing machines with huge energy consumption, so only end game character could use it.

But on other hand, metal 3D printers are bulky, slow, precise machineries with laser. The material for the 3D printers are also premade, you can’t just fabricate them. Even if there would be a 3D printer in the game, they should work on a stationary flat surface only, there is no precise printing in a speeding deathmobile. :slight_smile:

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You could alternatively place the printers in labs, with the largest one being a finale floor, unable to be moved and such; the medium being a rare room on lower levels but never the finale floor, and the small one being on the surface and such…

Since most products that are made by a 3D Printer are made from special plastics, most items printed from it should be given a “Fragile” flag, and firearms would constantly jam, especially since the plastic on the gun would just melt into itself…

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Aren’t nanofabricators a high tech version of a 3d printer? why would they bother with a low tech version?

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What people intend and what ends up happening don’t always coincide and that’s okay. Cataclysm is a great game with a great world and a lot of depth and I’d hate to see the game get an axe taken to it and butchered just because the setting got a little away from Kevin. If it works, makes things interesting, and gives Cataclysm a unique flavor why not just stick with what’s working? Not to mention stuff like police robots being both infuriating and extraordinarily useful makes them probably one of the most impactful enemies in the game due to the amount of gameplay they have around em. They offer a heck of a lot and it’d be a shame if them and a ton of items got slashed because the setting got the clock hammered back by force.

As for the printer stuff I’m surprised it’s still going the way it is. Nanofabricators are already cool 3D printers in the game and pretty much cover it. Having some basic ones that can make small component items could be cool though I don’t think stuff like gears are even in the game which is probably what they’d mostly be used for along with the making stuff for items in the electrical tab. Could be a nice addition and these things are slowly becoming common household items anyway.

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one could perhaps 3d print guns that have a decent chance to degrade on fire, or 3d print say, a folding stock or other simplistic weapon mods like ironsights (that are a bit worse than standard ones due to accuracy of printing being imperfect), but nothing remotely futuristic, think stuff we can do now, think usb drives with designs.

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