Degradation

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Hi

Recently my brother moved out, he’s been getting into cooking, so I got him a nice damascus knife, the knife needs to be oiled to keep from rusting, and it needs to be sharpened after a while.

Acidic foods can munch through steel so it’s always a good idea to keep the blade clean and dry or better yet oiled.

This got me thinking, in CDDA there’s a point in the game at which food rots, and it becomes harder to source, surely the perks of good steel should come at some sort of a cost.

I think it might be cool to have the tag “filthy” and “wet” degrade items made from reactive/organic materials, wood becomes soft + rotten, steel and copper oxidase. Items like stainless steel might suffer no effect at all.

So on use a iron sword becomes “filthy”, that tag will degrade it 1 tick if left for (say) 3 hours, “contaminant has degraded item” is logged. The tag/mod “oil/oiled” will slow this process.

Oil might have a hierarchy in terms of how good an effect it grants, i.e; mineral-oil > nut-oil > beeswax > vegetable-oil > lard/fat

A rag(or any item of clothing) can take the filthy tag away from an item. Ideally drying/cleaning items/self would be available as a shortcut.

This is more important when it comes to suits of iron/steel, or an exposed worn weapon, that you will journey wearing for many hours.

I would have it so [Acid-slick] also becomes a tag that ruins gear even quicker, followed by [filthy] followed by [wet].

(A rifle might also require a special type of cleaning, for a tag it receives from firing to many shots like [powder-clogged] and require a rod and.)

A nice tag for blades also might be [sharpened] that buffs a number of uses, alternatively a wetstone could be a mod with low durability to simulate how its effects wear-off.

Just wanted to share my thoughts, perhaps that sounds a bit too intense, but when I play I always like the low-tech survival elements, baking off hardtack and rendering lamp-oil for expeditions.

All the best!

2

Imagine a melee-oriented character. He killed a lot of enemies with his melee weapon, got it filthy, so he decided to clean it up after the battle. He cleans it, and goes for another party of enemies, and again got his weapon filthy. And again he needs to clean up his weapon. And again, and again, and again…
All kind of repetitive actions like this will eventually make players sick of them.
Unfortunately, this idea is good only on paper.

3

Stuff like this has been suggested before, and always rejected because while its more realistic, and wouldnt be difficult to implement, but adds more tedium to the game than fun. Such things are likened to having to trim toenails and wash clothes (thank god this was only partially implemented.)

4

And it was made partially optional. (yes it doesn’t make sense for you to salvage clean materials from dirty clothes but I don’t really care)

5

You can use basic repair kit or soldering iron or welder to enhance some melee weapons, usually giving then another 1 or 2 damage or so in their primary attack skil, and i think slightly better to hit chancel.

Same for guns, but using the gunsmith kit or firearm repair kit. They both do the same, the smith-ing kits, except one costs less charges to use(gunsmith). When used on a gun it give it the ++ and adds a couple base damage, so without ammo some handguns go from -2 dmg to 0 or even into the positive slightly for some guns.

It also levels your skill (mechanics I believe) when using the kits and whatnot, so when I have the extra stuff I usually just reinforce all the guns and other weapons too for the skill boost/exp.

While it’s not exactly what your asking for, it’s kind of a trade off, because I believe some people aren’t even aware of that/those mechanics(no pun intended, or was it).

6

This kind of maintenance necessarily occurs outside of combat, has low materiel costs, and low time costs.
As such it’s reasonable to assume the player character performs thus kind of maintenance automatically.

The question then becomes, what is the benefit of requiring an explicit action to trigger this maintenance?

7

As kevin said, it would be implied that the characters at least try to keep their tools and weapons in working order.
Any big maintenance is, in fact, already ingame. Weapons can be damaged for example, and you can repair them. You can also, als Nug said, improve all your weapons and tools to a certain extend, making them more durable and better in the process.

As an idea so there iisn’t an explicit action for maintenance: Bind the maintenance to an item.
Basically, You have the item maintenance kit - if you have it in your inventory, the character automatically maintains his stuff, like before. if he doesn’t have it in the inventory, items and weapons have a small potential to get damaged or degrade in some way after usage. If you want to make it super realistic, add charges to it, which will slowly drop over time.
At the end of the day however, this ‘solution’ would just mean more clutter you’d have to keep on you all the time, without a real benefit, since it’s very easy to fix any kind of damage on weapons, at the most of some batteries and MAYBE a little bit of materials.

This doesn’t mean I’m for maintenance. I like how it is right now, I don’t see a reason why one should change it, as it would just add more busy work to the game for no benefits.

8

Yeah when I enhance my machete, I think it has the ability to block, so it goes from ++ to || to even |\ the longer I use it without “topping it off”. So I always thought using my welder/soldering iron on it was a form of sharpening.

I guess maybe a sharpening stone/whet stone or some sort of sharpening kit could be added to act like a repair kit, but it isn’t really needed would just add another item with a pretty much identical function.

It’s not too far of a stretch for me to just"imagine" that I am using one anyway when I have a a room full of a few thousands of pounds of materials around to craft up a plethora of items anyway.

As for the gunsmith/firearm kit, wouldn’t that have bore oil and whatnot anyway, I mean what is a gunsmith kit if not a tuning kit/cleaning kit?

Hey you could even take an extra soldering iron, use your knife to write “whetstone” on it, and only use that to sharpen your tools up if you want.

9

the only thing along these lines i could say would actually be fun is if sharpening bladed weapons improved them a marginal bit above normal.

basically assuming weapons fresh off the ground never used aren’t as well maintained (about average wear) as they should be and you’d be repairing the edge anytime you sharpened.

to be fair, i guess i could say adding extra weight to bashing weapons as well the more i think about it.

the main thing limiting the destructive force of a sledgehammer are the weight and how hard you can swing it.

10

[quote=“TooDAMNMuch, post:9, topic:14183”]to be fair, i guess i could say adding extra weight to bashing weapons as well the more i think about it.

the main thing limiting the destructive force of a sledgehammer are the weight and how hard you can swing it.[/quote]

This statement is wrong on so many levels that it hurts me. I could give you a pretty long explanation, but that would probably be too much since it’s not the main focus of this thread, so let’s make it short:
Blunt weapons are way more complicated than you think. To take your example with the sledgehammer, the overall destructive force would go down when adding more weight, because it becomes near impossible to hit anything with it properly, and you would probably fall down every so often due to the sheer force swinging the hammer would create on you ; On a more basic level, you’d more likely be dead before you’re able to kill a group of zombies with a sledgehammer with added weights.
If you are interested in seeing a more thorough explanation, send me a private message.

Secondly, this thread is about maintaining weapons. ADding weights to a blunt/bashing weapon isn’t maintaining it, you are actually changing the weapon itself, creating something new in the process. If adding weights is maintenance, you could argue that switching the one-handed shaft of an axe to a longer two-handed shaft (to create something like a Dane Axe from a handaxe) is also just maintenance.

11

didn’t mean to say that i thought that would constitute maintenance, the entire thing about bashing weapons was an offhand after though that i included before i forgot, sharpening a blade is maintenance, but modifying a sledge is not even remotely, unless you broke part of the head off and had to replace it or fashion a new one.

i honestly still disagree on your opinion anyway, it might limit my ability to exert destructive force with a sledgehammer, but not in general, it would still have more mass/weight to do damage with.
probably much more than i could handle if the amount of weight added was too great, but that’s entirely beside the point and not really worth discussing.

12

[quote=“TooDAMNMuch, post:9, topic:14183”]the only thing along these lines i could say would actually be fun is if sharpening bladed weapons improved them a marginal bit above normal.

basically assuming weapons fresh off the ground never used aren’t as well maintained (about average wear) as they should be and you’d be repairing the edge anytime you sharpened…[/quote]
Whether it’s a bonus or a penalty, it’s still something routine that shouldn’t require user intervention.

The only way I could see adding this kind of thing is if we triggered all actions like this when you have the necessary gear and skills. You’d check on any wounds being treated, clean and sharpen weapons, check clothing for damage, etc. That would at least remove the micromanagement and just require you to maintain supplies and occasionally spend time on it.
Even boiling it down to one set of “downtime activities” like that, I’m not sure it’s worth adding.

13

Wouldn’t it actually be worse if you did it like that, boiling a lot of those actions down to automatically being done?

For one, you’d have several skills on autopilot (->leveling automatically, without real player input), which is always a bad idea because it feels like the skill shouldn’t be a skill at all, if it goes up by you sitting around and ‘waiting’ for those automated downtime activities.

Then there’s the issue that sometimes you don’t want to treat a certain wound, or don’t repair clothing or a tool/weapon. Automating this would take away control from the player, which is, in general, a bad idea.

Lastly, when would you actually do those downtime activities? They take time after all, repairing a hole in a shirt or so requires you to stand still for a few minutes or you don’t repair it very well, maintaining a gun usually means you’d have to disassemble the gun at least partially, which takes time and makes the gun semi-useless for a while. Hell, even sharpening a blade would need your attention, or you run into the danger of cutting yourself. Wouldn’t you have to create 2 types of maintenance then, one which can be done very quickly without giving it much attention (putting a bandaid on a small cut, cleaning a blade with a rag, maybe cleaning the barrel of a gun with a small brush or so…?), and the more indepth ‘maintenance’, which is disassembling the gun to work on the parts, oiling and sharpening wepaons, treating wounds…

This feels like it gets chaotic real quick, especially because one can argue what action is so mundane that it would fall into the first categgory.