Fairly new to the game - only 43 corpses or thereabouts so far - and I haven’t been in the forums that long: what are all the basic ways to interact with NPCs so far? I know about conversation with [C], but what else can you do?
Afaik, everything you can do is through the ©hat menus.
I was actually going to ask about NPCs. I never really bothered with them because I heard they were glitched and the wandering ones always just try to rob me, but now I feel like being mayor of a little encampment of survivors. There is virtually nothing about them on the wiki.
Will NPCs really steal your stuff? How does that work? Will they follow you down stairs? Is it possible to properly equip and arm them? Do they eat food? Do they do anything besides stand around and machinegun small animals?
Any advice for keeping them alive and healthy?
Best advice I can offer, from my limited experience thus far, is to leave them alone.
NPCs just seem like more trouble than they’re worth. They don’t seem to pick intelligent weapons from the ones they have (My current main, Amelia, had an NPC companion who decided to keep throwing away her knife spear in order to kill zombies with a gallon of bleach), they don’t seem to ever heal over time or use medical supplies of any sort, and interacting with them is a constant chore. The ©hat menu is a nightmare, too. The options change wildly from one selection to the next. Tell an NPC to guard an area, and suddenly you can’t trade with them or ask them to train you things. Tell an NPC to follow you again, and suddenly it’s all ‘Hang on a second, I want to grab that thing over there’ and they’re looting your safehouse.
It’s sad, because I think NPCs are a really compelling part of the game for a lot of people.
Thanks, I’m still interested in gotta-catch-them-all and collecting every NPC I meet into a sort of immoral, incompetent militia inside a power substation or something. My only real concern is them crashing the game which is why I always avoided them. I don’t intend for them to do anything besides stand around and maybe defend the base.
My style of gameplay typically produces an overabundance of stuff since I depopulate entire towns and loot absolutely everything of value from them to bring back to my base.
What sort of things do they steal, exactly?
they love long strings SO much. Best way to interact with an NPC is to communicate via flachete shotgun rounds.
They will steal anything valuable they notice - they’ll pick up so much stuff they get overburdened.
They can’t use stairs, but if you play with random NPCs they can spawn outside 0 z-level.
Arming them is hard, but sometimes possible.
They do eat food, but as far as I know they can survive without a supply if you aren’t close to them.
They can want to rob or kill you or flee from you, but that’s pretty much it.
Un-spawned survivors can somehow generate large amounts of smoked meat, but spawned ones can’t cook even clean water.
I tend to use them with basically every character that makes it into the late/endgame.
To have a functional militia, all you need to do is build a billboard/sign somewhere at your base and then you can tell NPCs that are friendly to wait there when you are near it and they are following you.
You are able to do this whether they trust you or not, all you need to do is get them to follow you.
The most reliable NPCs are ones that are already armed with a good weapon, as they tend to carry a good amount of ammo for weapons they spawn with. If you can complete a task for them (they’ll tell you what it is if you as) then you can get their trust, which gives them a 100% chance to follow your orders.
If you get two or three of these guys, you have yourself a solid raiding party.
I will say to make sure you leave all of your valuable gear hidden in a locked room, a safe, or a basement that is difficult to reach for them so that they won’t randomly come in and steal EVERYTHING VALUABLE THEY CAN CARRY. It’s terrible, and it’s happened to me quite a few times.
Building wooden walls is a good way to zone them out and fortify a small base. I tend to build wooden walls around a small area of houses (2-4) with connecting wooden walls and then board up windows and doors that I’m not using for entry and exit to make a small survivor’s town. It’s cool to demolish the internal walls too, so you have a large indoor area inside your base.
NPCs will use wooden doors for entry, but if you mess up the angle of entry, they can try to smash through windows, doors, wooden walls, cars, ect. If they are following you, it’s good to keep an eye on them and not leave them just roaming around outside to get killed while you sleep.
Also, NPC running speed varies by a lot, so if you do have a party with you, you may need to wear some kind of armor that encumbers your legs and therefore slows your running speed so that they can keep up. For me, unfitted hard leg guards and knee pads on top of my pants usually do the trick, but holsters, sheaths, scabbards, and drop leg pouches all work for this. This prevents them from getting lost, or from you having to run ahead and wait every few minutes for them to return to you.
Also, always change NPCs engagement rules as soon as they join your party. Setting them to engage enemies that you attack is usually the most reliable setting, so that they don’t go attacking every squirrel that they see.
It is possible to arm them with weapons that you find in the world, but for projectile weapons, they don’t have a tendency to use ammo wisely and they fire a lot of shots. Generally, I only do this if I have a huge armory, and even then, I usually just arm all of my general NPCs with .22 rifles and ammo, which isn’t that great, but will suppress zombies when everyone is shooting.
For NPCs that have skills in marksmanship or a particular branch of firearms, I try to give them weapons that suit their skills. You can find this out by asking to know more about them and then examining their skills on the left. This is best used with NPCs that trust you 100%, otherwise you may get rejected and then lose some trust from them.
I generally don’t give good gear to any NPC that doesn’t trust me 100%, as they are the most reliable NPCs and the least likely to do stupid s*it or try to leave your party.
NPCs in your party will pick up gear in the world, and any gear you leave lying around your base in the open. They don’t consider it stealing, apparently.
Having an NPC party helps a lot for robbing other NPCs. NPCs are a must-have for raiding military outposts, FEMA camps, and for attacking roadblocks, as there is a bug that makes NPCs invisible to turrets, and if you fire a single rifle round at a turret, all of your NPCs will attack it. This works also for high level zombies, robots, and basically any enemy that you would have difficulty fighting alone.
NPCs take less damage than hostiles from molotov cocktails, which is useful as they can pretty reliably run through fire to attack an enemy, which helps for defending your base and also zoning zombies when clearing out a town.
A well-armed NPC will expend all their ammunition before attacking with a melee weapon (when they are set to use firearms), and NPCs that have skills in melee will attack with the best weapon in their inventory, so it’s a good idea to give a secondary weapon like a sword or a baseball bat to an NPC in your party with high skills.
NPCs are pretty buggy, but I’ve never had problems with a 100% trusting NPC crashing my game or doing something crazy that killed me, and when used correctly, they can be a valuable tool in your arsenal.
Go conquer!
Also, the highest number of NPCs I’ve ever had in a base was about 20, and the game was still running fine, so I don’t know the cap for the number of NPCs you can have without experiencing problems, but the high number of NPCs creates more problems for trying to talk to individual ones in the same area, as you need to select their name from a list.
I tend to keep the 100% trusting NPCs with high skills indoors or in a separate area away from my general population. These are the best you have, and I reserve them for serious endeavors and missions. If I just need warm bodies to help zone out a town or to be cannon fodder in an attack on a group of hostiles, I just grab four or five general NPCs and let them get destroyed while I pick off threats from a distance.
One last thing, NPCs are the absolute best way to increase raw skills, as they have a tendency to occasionally have a high skill (6-8) in a random category, and 100% trusting NPCs will teach you skills in exchange for goods and gear. When you have an militia of 10 trusting NPCs, basically all their skills are openly available for your character to learn, and this is significantly faster than reading books grinding for increasing skills.
Cool - thanks a lot, Straume21! Things like the way to use signs/bulletin boards with NPCs were what I was wondering about.
That’s somewhat encouraging, Straume21. I was considering arming my militamen with the crafted pneumatic assault rifles/ bolt launchers, which I think are considered ‘silent’ weapons but I haven’t tested this theory. Probably go with the bolt launchers (whatever they are called) since NPCs like to burst-fire too much.
Somewhat off-topic, after a long game using an LMOE shelter for a base, I want to try living above ground for the convenience of solar panels charging all the time, I’m concerned about NPCs running off with my tools.
How do you make locked doors/containers?
If you store your tools in a vehicle (even a frame and a single box will work) then NPCs won’t go out of their way to get what’s in it.
Once they enter the vehicle, they can steal your items, but they usually don’t step into random cars.
I think that the ice cream cart and the hot dog cart all work the same way, but I’m not entirely sure.
Also, be careful not to lead a following NPC into the side of your car. They’ll smash through it like they think they’re the hulk.
They will steal anything valuable they notice - they’ll pick up so much stuff they get overburdened.
They can’t use stairs, but if you play with random NPCs they can spawn outside 0 z-level.
Arming them is hard, but sometimes possible.
They do eat food, but as far as I know they can survive without a supply if you aren’t close to them.
They can want to rob or kill you or flee from you, but that’s pretty much it.
Un-spawned survivors can somehow generate large amounts of smoked meat, but spawned ones can’t cook even clean water.[/quote]
Ah yes, once on the 6th level of a Lab, I saw a random NPC with about 30 units of fresh, cooked meat.
[quote=“TheStoryteller, post:3, topic:8874”]Best advice I can offer, from my limited experience thus far, is to leave them alone.
NPCs just seem like more trouble than they’re worth. They don’t seem to pick intelligent weapons from the ones they have (My current main, Amelia, had an NPC companion who decided to keep throwing away her knife spear in order to kill zombies with a gallon of bleach), they don’t seem to ever heal over time or use medical supplies of any sort, and interacting with them is a constant chore. The ©hat menu is a nightmare, too. The options change wildly from one selection to the next. Tell an NPC to guard an area, and suddenly you can’t trade with them or ask them to train you things. Tell an NPC to follow you again, and suddenly it’s all ‘Hang on a second, I want to grab that thing over there’ and they’re looting your safehouse.
It’s sad, because I think NPCs are a really compelling part of the game for a lot of people.[/quote]
I’ve always played with npcs turned off, because they were a work-in-progress and were glitched. I haven’t interacted with npcs since I’ve turned them off but I didn’t knew that NPCs are glitched to this extent. I decided to turn dynamic npcs on to learn martial art styles since my character has only learned brawling even after getting unarmed skill 7. But now I guess I’ll keep them turned off till they’re fixed.
If you’re going to turn on NPC’s just turn on static ones, not dynamic ones. The majority of the bad problems in NPC’s are for dynamic NPC’s, statics have the majority of their basic problems already nailed down.