I’ve seen before that the devs don’t want the situation where the game starts to play itself, but there are a handful of things that I believe could both fit with the setting, match the theme, and also take a bit of tedium out of the game itself.
As I slaved hours upon hours making specific parts by hand for my stationary base, only to wind up failing after 8+ hours of trying to make this one stupid part I’d need 3 more of, I imagined to myself how much easier it would be if there was a chute of some kind that I could just dump my bounty into and a series of pipes or something would handle the rest for me. This, of course, falls straight into the lap of that whole ‘game plays itself’ thing, but the more I thought about it the more I started to come up with some little things that would be useful:
-Chutes
Yes, straight automated sorting systems are out, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a little device that delivers items dumped into a specific container spot into another container spot - a massive storage chest in the center of your base, perhaps. You can just drive up, shove everything into the chute, park your vehicle of choice nearby, and then go inside, lock up nice and tidy, and THEN sort out your haul. It would help to organize how one goes about managing their inventory so you don’t have to physically drag 50+ pounds of crap back and forth through the door (that might not necessarily fit it all!).
It wouldn’t be anything sophisticated; basically a conveyor belt made of like sheets and plastic dividers or something powered by the base itself. There should be a delivery time but basically it could all teleport to its destination when you’re done unloading. Keep it simple.
-Basic Auto-Crafting
I just felt the devs’ brows furrow (if they read this), but hear me out: I’m thinking metal. Scrap, chunks, lumps. You dump all your crap into chute A, and then go inside and filter it yourself, shoving all your specific goods where you want and then dumping scrap metal into chute B, which then goes forward to a welding station of some kind. I realize you can build turrets and basically cars from scratch but lets say the fanciest thing the survivor can scrounge up is something that takes metal pieces and welds them into specific forms - or, cuts them up, depending on what station has been built.
It can’t make tools or anything that requires any kind of dexterity whatsoever, but it can cut up pipes and sheet metal and it can fuse pieces of scrap metal together automatically, using the ‘process will be done in x hours’ mechanic used by the charcoal kilns already in the game and deciding the time based on the process being asked of it. This is for someone that wants to make a lot of scrap and hates sitting there and doing it all one piece at a time, and someone who doesn’t enjoy having to set an entire day aside just to make a single length of chain. It’s not automated enough to take power away from the player, but it’s enough to be kind of nifty AND to save them some serious grind work that they might find frustrating.
This would work particularly well for metal, where you could induce penalties for using what is essentially the lazy alternative to doing it yourself: the process uses a considerable bit more power than if you were to weld by hand, and maybe a time multiplier of some kind to the crafting recipe. Not a big one, but enough to provide something of a downside: you don’t have to sit there and do it by hand, but it’s going to take longer and you might end up waiting for it to be complete anyways. That and if the power runs out, the whole process is botched.
Log splitting in particular would be a wonderful function for this. No more picking up every single log by hand and doing all that clicking. Just shove them all in a big bin and it’ll slowly chop itself.
Like I said: nothing too fancy, but definitely convenient. That and robotics are fun, even when it’s nowhere near as complex as a murder tank robot or a flying pair of flailing scissors.
