So, while I have seen a few traps in game, such as the bear trap and landmines, I think we can do better. There are plenty of military munitions you might find laying around, such as the M18 Claymore mine, or the M16 Bouncing Mine, the US version of the famous German “Bouncing Betty” mine, which might be used or replicated.
In addition, there are lots of home made traps and defensive devices that a survivor could construct. Dead-fall traps to drop rocks or other heavy objects on enemies, guns hooked up to trip wires, grenade bouquets (similar concept to the spring-gun) are just a few simple ones.
You could even make sophisticated permanent or semi-permanent traps. Gas or electric engines hooked up to large spinning blades (like in Half-Life 2 Ravenholm mission) would work well on zombies, they are too stupid to avoid them and would be attracted by the noise.
Hook a steel or copper floor plate up to a power source and the appropriate voltage transformer/rectifier circuitry, and you have an electrocution trap.
These are just some examples of the numerous possibilities for improvised defenses and traps.
Various kinds of landmines and explosives will be very effective at killing, and frequently pulping, zombies.
The down side is acquiring them.
Finding them at armories, disarming them from minefields.
Building your own from: gunpowder (pipebomb), or RDX (there’s a crafting recipe now). I’m not sure bouncing mines would be craftable, Claymores definitely aren’t. OTOH, you don’t really need bouncing mines, because with zombies the explosive can be out in the open.
Deadfalls would be interesting, but in the current game would require an adjacent building for elevation.
A spinning blade could work since zombies are oblivious to the danger. Actually there is already one in the game, but it’s terribly oversimplified.
I’m not sure of the electrical trap, need some research into how much power one would consume.
In general, an idea dump isn’t going to get us any closer to adding a feature, you need to dig into how these traps would work, how many resources they would consume, etc.
Well that doesn’t seem so hard. Always kinda figured most traps would be easy enough to code. Just gotta take an existing trap and tweak the numbers a bit. Probably the hardest part is knowing where all the references are in the files.
Are directional traps currently possible? I don’t use traps, so I only know the few I’ve seen (shotguns and landmines), which, as far as I know only trigger when you cross that tile.
So, for, like, a Claymore mine, which is designed to be a cone. . . are there other cone effects in the game? Most of these ideas seem really simple, like the grenade bouquet or the spinning blade trap. I’m more interested in the cones (for both the claymore and it would be nice for the shotgun trap, if it’s not already like that) and whether you are currently able to tie the trigger to different tiles, not just the one the trap occupies.
Stone Fall Traps? Or even the ol’ paint can on the door trick. It would be useless but the idea of ‘pranking’ zombies would add some amusement, like Oblivion’s Finger of the Mountain spell. I mean, dropping a paint can full of paint, or petrol, on a zed or two would be funny and let you know if something walked through that area. Oh also, my brother was a demo expert in the Reserves, if anyone wants some hand-me-down first hand knowledge of traps and explosives I can relay the insight
Also fun fact about claymore effective range, it’s very nearly the radius of the reality bubble, at which distance it has an approximately 30% chance of hitting even a prone target. I’d have to do some math on top of that to get zombie hit rate (since they don’t take cover), but lets just say it’s high.
In a sufficiently target-rich environment, one claymore could concievably cause 300+ fatalities.
Considering it would be a field of walking/shambling, mostly unarmored soft targets who are ignoring cover, this doesn’t seem terribly unrealistic. Zombies may be damage resistant, but ~700 steel pellets are going to do some serious shredding.
Holy heck, just looked it up and those things have a near football field range. Man, Rainbow Six seriously undervalued those things.
Could there possibly be a CBM like the thing in DE:HR in the future? That would totally be an end game cybernetic and so so satisfying to use. Unless there are coding/technical hurtles in the way I’m surprised Claymores haven’t been implemented. I can see myself herding zeds into a group, running ahead, planting a claymore, laughing in triumph, and then cleaning up. Just in time to see another horde running to the sound and wishing I had more
True, but I like to propose something first, and see what people think before digging into it much. Not worth investing time in thoroughly developing an idea just for it to be shot down immediately, or if the idea doesn’t gain enough traction in the community to make a mod worth it. Also, you never know what other stuff people might propose to make it better. Now that I can see this concept in general is probably a welcome addition, at least in concept, I can start thinking about the mechanics, resources, etc.
Claymores would definitely be something you would have to disarm or find stashed in an an armory or something.
The advantage of bouncing mines is not concealment, it is that they are designed to detonate at chest/head height, which would be significantly more effective for pulping/dismembering zombies than a regular mine, as well as being more effective at destroying entire groups rather than having the majority of the damage occurring to whatever stepped on it.
Bouncing mines are also not really much more sophisticated than regular mines. They just have 2 delay fuses , one to allow the victim to move off of the mine and the other to allow it to detonate at the right time, along with a small explosive charge to propel them upwards. If you can craft fuses and regular landmines, you have the expertise to manufacture a bouncing one.
For the Recipe I was thinking:
Traps Difficulty 5
Tool With Screwdriving 1
Time: 10 Minutes
(1) Landmine
(3) Scrap metal or (1) Tin Can
(20) Gunpowder or (200) Gasoline or (200) Diesel
Could you point me in the direction of that? I don’t recall ever seeing one.
For my proposal I was thinking it would be a furniture item or construction. 3x3 area. Center would be motor surrounded by blades. If anything moves onto the tiles with the blades, they take damage.
Recipe:
Mechanics Difficulty 5
Tool with Welding 1
Welding Goggles
Tool with Bolt Tightening 1
Tool with Hammering 1
Tool with Sawing 1
(1) Electric Motor
(2) Blades or (2) of any large sword
(2) Pipes
(10) Scrap Metal or (4) Chunks of Steel
(50) Copper Wire
(3) Scrap Electronics
(2) Power Converters
(4) Solar Panels
(1) Storage Battery
As for the Spring Gun & Grenade Bouquet, I’m thinking they would come in various flavors so you could use actual guns & grenades to make them, or even just a pipe or something. You would start with a recipe for a “simple trap kit” , and then a second recipe for combining the kit with a gun and compatible ammunition, a few grenades, or something simpler and homemade, like a pipe with a shotgun shell, nail, and spring. The final product would be deployed as furniture, and the game would give you an option to place the ends of a tripwire or to rig the trap to a door or window.
Recipe for the simple trap kit:
Trapping Difficulty 2
Tool with Hammering 1
(4) wire or (2) short rope or (8) long string
(1) Two by Four
(4) scrap metal
(5) Nails
I would configure it as a grating or planks rather than a solid plate. Whatever steps on two grate or plank sections will complete the circuit, frying it. Power would not be consumed until the circuit is completed by something stepping on it.
The power supply itself would not really be much different than what a regular electric fence for cattle, pets, prisons, etc use. Input power would be somewhere around 220v 13 amps. The only difference a lethal fence would have would be the amperage. The amps are what kill. Common electric fences use high voltages, say 8-10k, but at around 120 mA or less. 100mA can potentially stop your heart, but you won’t actually be seeing that when you are in contact with the fence because of skin resistance.
My question is this: What effect of electrocution would kill a zombie? Has the blob restarted their heart? If that is the case, 150-200mA should be enough current to stop it. If not, and you are trying to put enough current through the zombie to boil the water in the blob cells or outright cook the body, you will need a bit more. The good thing though is that on contact with the current, their muscles will lock up, they will be unable to move and stuck on the plate until they fry.
Given how there are skeletons (and skeletal dogs), I think you would have to remove/boil the blob to prevent em from getting back up/to “kill” them.
I just got a idea for another possible trap: A wire trap designed to cut the victim to pieces. It would be a slack wire attached to two (metal) posts (or a window/door frame) with a small electric motor (the motor could also be just to pull up a weight) and a pressure plate on the ground to trigger it, once someone/thing step onto it the motor starts/the weight drops instantly pulling the wire taut, cutting the victim
I’m not entirely sure I’m correctly picturing what you are describing.
I’m not sure how well it would work, if at all, without ultra strong mono-molecular wire, or something like that. Just walking into a taut wire isn’t going to cut you. For regular materials, it would have to be fairly thick to be strong enough not to snap from the load of whatever is walking into it. As it gets thicker, its potential for cutting drops.
Now, a whiplash effect or similar might work, but you would need a large cable, and enormous amounts of tensile stress on the wire before one end is released.
Well there are some cases where people nearly or outright got decapitated by piano wire (esque) traps, tho in most cases those wires were already taut at neck level to cut anyone DRIVING along a certain path (ofc in open vehicles, like bikes, quads etc.), I don’t see why a survivor wouldn’t try and put that to the next level (just google piano wire trap)
That is exactly my point. The victim has to be moving quite fast for such a trap to be effective with normal materials like piano wire or steel cable. For example, you can only garrote someone with piano wire because YOU are applying the pressure. For a wire trap made of real life materials to hurt someone, the victim or the wire must have significant velocity to exert enough force on the wire for it to cut them. Simple walking speed would provide insufficient force for someone to cut or decapitate/dismember themselves, unless the material of the wire was both CRAZY SHARP (ie, monomolecular cross section) and very strong.
That being said, you could set up a trap similar to a giant weed trimmer, using steel wire or cable spinning at high speed to decapitate or maim anything that gets close.
That is why I talked about having the wire slack at the beginning with some (really heavy) weights that then pull the wire taut in (nearly) an instant coupled with a motor to reset the weights after that.
On a different note: I think those super wires aren’t also that far fetched given how there are already super alloy platings ingame and you can bet that the military would really like super thin and sharp wires for whatever (morally wrong) reasons
