-the emergency terminal in shelters could begin with a mission when you start(some are broken and you need to repair them)
-survivor notes could have coordinates for stashes and LMOE shelters
-terminals could (depending on your computer skill and some USB software) be connected to survivor/science/military networks and occasionally generate missions
-radios that get amplified by a long-range antenna from radio stations(that you need to repair/build) can also give missions
-dead military squads and scientists could sometimes have orders that lead you somewhere(infested areas/portal expeditions)
-heist plans: found in a basement where someone planned how to break into a bank/doctors office/police station/jewelry
-antique stores and cathedrals could have ancient tablets that lead you into a deep mine or a portal in search of an artifact
-visions/dreams - when infected by fungus, blob, or wielding an artifact, during feverish dreams, something commands you to destroy another artifact, clear a triffid grove or remove/deactivate some gadget left by scientists that hurts the “faction”
If a player say, repairs a broken console in a home and then hacks it using computer skill, it should give them useful information, like filling in a random section of the map, locating survivor NPCs, stashes, important event locations, etc.
Edit: Specifically, we need to add more stuff for computer skill. Seems like having the ability to acquire special knowledge about the whereabouts of certain things. Maybe computers could be combined with GPS usage to find geocaches with actual supply caches around the map?
Doing a mission for the military and having them airdrop you supplies is probably the best idea here. You could get the mission at the terminal in your starting shelter. This would be cool as it woulc show two things. That the military do have some kind of a presence, and that they are desperate enough to need random survivors to help them. THe missions shouldn’t be easy, as neither plane fuel nor supplies are cheap for the military. In fact, many of the missions shouldn’t have a supply drop reward at all, instead rewarding you with free things, like information and software. The first mission might be to kill 200 zombies, and it would reward you with a map of the local area, and a valuable E-book of your choice that you can read of the terminal.
It’s a real joke. We uh. Have a number of those. But yeh, a kill mission besides “my zombie mom” and “THE FUCKING JABBERWOCK GOOD LUCK LOL” would be fantastic.
Well, I always did like the silly random encounters in the Fallout series of games.
There definitely needs to be a few more basement layouts. I can think of several different archetypes: Basement infested with giant roaches. A room filled with junkfood, fantasy novels, comic books, empty wrappers and bottles, a broken console and a fat zombies.
Now that we have hordes, a mission to eliminate a horde could be cool. Or a mission to get data from the bottom of a lab. Or a mission to find a valuable book and scan it into the terminal. Any of these missions could be gotten and rewarded through the terminal, with no NPC interaction required. SImply allow books to be stored and read on the terminal(possibly with the help of a scanner to scan them in, and a printer to print them out) and have the military reward you with various maps and valuable books, locations of stashes, and the rare airdropped supply.
just FYI, getting rewards from ‘military airdrop’ isn’t happening unless there’s a faction system robust enough to have such a faction. They can reward you plenty with information, such as telling you about a cache or pre-existing airdrop, or the location of an overrun bunker.
While we’re mentioning factions. Couldn’t you just make the rewards like scrip or credit with the faction? Basically you have an account you can go over on the radio and request certain things to be deducted from your account. Then you add I dunno, dead-drop locations for your “purchases” ala Watch_Dogs or GTA. Say you actually purchase supplies and items over a trade interface which are dropped at a location somewhere outside the player’s “reality bubble.” As you do some missions for a particular faction they can grow stronger or expand their radio support coverage and the kinds of support they can offer over time. Help a faction take over garage, their dead-drops and spawned NPC vehicles get better. Help them take over a relatively pristine hospital and they can now do medical supply drops. Take over a CBM-chopshop and you can get the faction doctor to install CBMs you find.
More example missions: Dead-drop courier. You are one link in a supply chain of relatively trusted runners. You’re asked to pick up a dead-drop in a location, and then place it in another location for someone else to get. It would be relatively simple, find an area, discovered or otherwise outside the player’s “reality bubble” and place the delivery drop, a quantum loot container, like “a box of medical supplies”,“crate of military rations”,“static bag of high-end electronics” that drops random loot when opened. To complete, you take the dead-drop item to a specific location as instructed by the mission-giver, leave it and then move away from the drop so it’s no longer in your reality-bubble, which will trigger mission completion. Failure to complete in time will signify mission failure, either because you took too long or you opened the container, stealing the supplies. Basically the quantum loot item is a key item that can be destroyed to steal the supplies yourself.
Variations on this particular mission are plentiful: You could also intercept radio chatter between a faction operator and runner and ambush the runner or steal the dead-drop after it’s left. Alternately you could pick up distress chatter and intercede on the faction’s behalf, completing the dead-drop after their runner is killed in some way or another (car crash, zombie horde, cop-bot murder for jay-walking, etc.) netting the player lots of bonus favor with the faction.
QFT’d. I think factions, NPCs, and missions all need a huuuuge buff and this is definitely a step in the right direction, especially with everyone’s amazing suggestions.