First time posting, so please forgive me if this topic is done to death or incorrectly posted.
Playing through a longer game of CDDA I finally cleared out the bottom layers of a lab and was setting up shop to start installing the CBMs that I came across with the autodocs. I was halted by not having found a Power Supply CBM and, upon searching for how to find/craft them, was led to believe crafting is no longer possible in the experimental, only discovering them prebuilt or harvesting them from special zombies.
Dissecting scientist zombies has been a very tedious process, much less even finding the correct zombies in the first place. It got me thinking about the idea of CBMs in general and broaching into that level of the game seems quite binary at this point; you either get lucky with the CBMs you happen across or you donāt.
Iād like to hear what folks think about this, or if there are already plans, but I was considering how a more compromised path to CBMs might consist of home-made ājankā CBMs that are far more cumbersome, less efficient, perhaps even come with detriments like lowered hitpoint maximum for the installed location, but can be assembled by the scraps of CBMs from dissecting special zombies. More of a stopgap on the road to the really exciting ones, as I think restricting the ability to craft military grade CBMs is ultimately the right move, it keeps them feeling special and powerful.
Iād love to play around with trying to mod that myself, but Iām not at all experienced in doing so, and Iād like to hear what other folks think before committing what might be wasted effort on something thatās not wanted or goes against where the future of the game is headed.
EDIT: Realized I didnāt touch on installation like my title suggested. Oops! As for that my notion would be to have some kind of external installation system that added encumbrance or low grade occasional pain. Replacing oneās own eyes is obviously impractical without an autodoc, but installing flip down lenses on oneās forehead? With a bit topical anesthetic and a great deal of knowhow, could be a near-future thing!
My understanding of the game direction is that crafting makeshift CBM wonāt be thing in vanilla.
Itās a perfectly fine idea for a mod, however most CBM effect are still harcoded so the range of thing that can be done with CBM without touching the game code is still pretty limited sadly.
With a book you can craft the armor-plating CBMs. Other than that I think youāre out of luck. It might be possible to learn a moduleās recipe by dissassembling them but Iām not sure.
Would like the possibility of losing limbs permanently instead of just disabling them though, with the only possibility of getting them back being a complete bionic limb replacement. Of various degress of course, scrap level, industrial level, military level. Special medicine found in labs or doctor offices could work too I guess, that and the regeneration mutation. But Iām going a bit off topic so Iāll just stop here.
There is essentially a tier of microtechnology that isnāt accessible via crafting. Computers, precision machined firearms, energy weapons, CBMs, reactors and so forth.
Many of these things can be tweaked or modified by the survivor, but not created from scratch, no matter how advanced your crafting gets.
These sorts of thing can of course be added for crafting in a mod.
That certainly does make sense, at least provided there is no more functioning equipment to fabricate such things. I think the thing that struck me about the current system (as I understand it) is that you either find fully functioning CBM inside a zombie, or utter scrap. As I was butchering it began to feel a bit like Diablo, but with extra steps, just waiting for the proper āphat lootzā to drop.
If I ever get time to do so, I might try to dabble with a mod where no functioning CBMs drop from zombies, only partially working components that can be cobbled together into second-rate ones, but the really balance shifting ones are only found.
Nanofabricators can make power armour and other high tech goodiesā¦ should be good enough to manufacture CBMs. Eventually they might want to have two versions of each CBM, one harvested that only partially works or isnāt as effective, maybe 1/3 effective, and one found or manufactured via nanofabricator that works like CBMs do now.
As an aside. once you have a modest little pile of power CBMās it really isnāt worth the time to even cut up basic shockers any more. Their chances of dropping anything useful is very remote - you can just wait until real enemies like shocker brutes or incandescent hulks go down and theyāre much more likely to have a variety of mods.