Designing the ultimate survivor base

[quote=“Thwap, post:19, topic:11381”]Since I burned the cathedral down and cleared the rubble, the whole place is open to the sky. I can build my solar panels safely inside the walls. I can grow crops in there.

On the other hand, I’ve been doing more debug testing and while a hulk doesn’t seem able to smash metal doors, a large horde of brutes does. Nothing seems able to smash through the stone though.

Wonder how player-built stone walls stand up? Probably not that well, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen hulks go through concrete walls before.[/quote]

Use pits. Simply pits as incoming hulks will fall in and become immobile for a long while, enough for any vehicle-mounted turrets to shoot it into pulp.
Also, hulks are extremely inapt on destroying vehicles ( at least on the older iOS version), I’ve seen one stuck on a motorcycle for like 10 or more turns before I killed it with my RRB.

A reason to make them throw cars at the player. Or parts of cars.

@Kevin Granade i summon thee and plead thee to implement it whenever you are able. :wink:

Got an underground fort of my own. Intend to make it an underground city, similar to how the necropolis is set up, though that’s still in planning stages and I might make a new underground base.

Setting it underground really makes construction faster, since the base can probably be jackhammered into shape faster than making a reinforced concrete wall. It’s definitely peaceful as well, though sometimes zombies show up aboveground.

[quote=“Azrad, post:10299, topic:47”]Behold! The underground fortress (still under construction)

First up is the garage. Vehicle parts and seeds are stored here.

Didn’t want a palisade gate, so I made using several extra light frames, boards, wheels, and one saddle, food crank, and controls, I built a sort of mini vehicle that serves as a gate blocking the interior of the garage from the outside world. Not in the pic, but I removed one of the boards and turned it into a shutter door instead. Plan to also make a solar powered portable welding rig outside the garage. Farm will be somewhere outside as well.

The garage is connected to the room leading to the stairs into the fort, and the bar storage which is connected to the bar. That place is empty right now, so no point in showing it.

A corridor.

Nothing much to say about it, it’s a hallway. North of where my survivor is standing another hallway will be build that’ll lead to several bedrooms for my underground city.

General storage room.


Spare parts, books, tools, clothing, two by fours, pipes, rebars, logs, rocks, and pretty much almost every item in the other category is stored here.

Lab storage and main crafting area.

Chemicals, mutagen, bionics, drugs, blob globs, goo canisters, teleporter stuff are here. Crafting rig has storage batteries on all tiles that a storage battery can be placed, and they’re all maxed out without making much of a dent in the two external gas tanks. An NPC is on guard there until I feel like digging further to make rooms.

The armory.

It’s got all the guns, weapons, ammo, explosives, armor, gun mods and inactive hacks and turrets. I plan to make mini security rooms all over the fort, and some of the guns will be stored there. Mostly for decoration. Many of the planned rooms will take items from the storage areas to make them not empty. Every bedroom will come with a jumpsuit!

My survivor’s bedroom.

A bedroom. Door on the upper left is a small office leading to the corridor. On the bottom left is the vault of valuables; gold, diamonds, jewelry and artifacts.

Food storage. Three sections.


Non-perishable food storage; ingredients on the right, drinks, junk food, and several ready to eat food on the left. On the middle are bones, stuff foraged, and lots and lots of wax (about 14k wax).

The kegs. All alcoholic drinks. One keg for each booze with positive nutrition and quench numbers on the left. On the right are the ones with negative quench numbers; less types for that so one type can have multiple kegs. Some booze are stored on the first food storage room as well.

And finally, the perishable food storage. Cannibal cuisine is on the top left. Farm and foraged are bottom left. Butchered meats on the bottom right, as well as the perishable stuff from zombies plus pelts and mutated anatomy. Top right is under construction and the food that’ll be stored there are the perishable stuff my survivor will make. The portable cooking thing is there since my survivor was previously cooking. That room used to be the big room where you can use the black box, and I didn’t want to remove the console. Door to the left leads to the containment area where the shoggoth is.[/quote]

Considered starting a new topic but this thread is too perfect and already has great ideas.

The funnel:
This is one I’ve tried and it works EXTREMELY well:
1: arrange a line of traps: 0_0_0_0 …etc.
2: build a rock wall funnel:

…##
…##
…##
BAIT0_0_0
…##
…##
…##

The funnel can be big or small but the point is to have something the zombie wants at the other end. Following the path of least resistance means that zombies from a large area can be funneled into a very narrow area with bait.Stereo, beavers, ME, a guard, etc.

This idea can be miniaturized and repeated to form walls of many death traps around a compound.

The crematorium:

Build a thick wall of half built doors. 3-5 wide. seperate every 3-5 blocks with something non-flamable like rock walls:

&&&&+&&&&+&&&&
&&&&+&&&&+&&&&
&&&&+&&&&+&&&&
&&&&+&&&&+&&&&

Flame if zombies come near. The wood will catch and slow them down at the same time.

I also tried pouring gasoline on it an making a row of gasoline on the ground to ignite from a distance quickly but that failed.

Haven’t tried setting up a gasoline tank in the middle yet:
+&&&+
+&o&+
+&&&+

The partition:
This a utility booster.

Design the entire base from the ground up using metal doors. If every wall is a metal door then entire sections of the base can be opened and closed very easily. Need more lab space? Move your garage outward and open the meal doors. that used to seperate them. Close/build new partitons for the relocated garage.
++++++++++++++++
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+
++++++++++++++++
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+
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++++++++++++++++

I think the minimum room size should be 3 persoally.
For neat divisions the next largset would be 7 then 15, 31, etc. Each can be cut in half neatly for smaller areas.
+++++
+
+
+
+
+
+++++

Expand only as necessary and when materials are available. Any door will work of course.

An example:
http://imgur.com/a/CJNzk

Not too fond of this, it’s not very organic. More like a proof of concept.

I was raiding a lab in a recent build and broke into prisoner containment. I was unpleasantly surprised to see a hole in a nearby prisoner cell and hulk running around. Seems like an oversight to allow hulks to spawn in prisons supposedly left over from before the cataclysm with the ability to simply bash through the containment cell’s walls at will. Therefore, I wouldn’t be surprised if they could bash through a cathedral.

Those are zombie brutes who after enough time has passed evolved into Hulks. It’s defintely the least pleasant suprise a later game survivor can encounter in a lab by far.

I was raiding a lab in a recent build and broke into prisoner containment. I was unpleasantly surprised to see a hole in a nearby prisoner cell and hulk running around. Seems like an oversight to allow hulks to spawn in prisons supposedly left over from before the cataclysm with the ability to simply bash through the containment cell’s walls at will. Therefore, I wouldn’t be surprised if they could bash through a cathedral.[/quote]

Somebody put that to the test and found that even hulks can’t bash cathedral walls… but they can punch things THROUGH those walls, which makes no sense.

The only thing I know of that can’t have things knocked through it by hulks if steel walls (bank vaults, military bunkers).

i do think zombie tile damage stacks.
i tried with a reinforced boarded window, one zombie cannot even scratch it, but three destroyed it

[quote=“Gnorse, post:28, topic:11381”]i do think zombie tile damage stacks.
i tried with a reinforced boarded window, one zombie cannot even scratch it, but three destroyed it[/quote]

Yes, but that’s a horde mechanic, not cumulative damage to the tile. That is to say, there’s code to let groups of zombies do higher bash damage, NOT a mechanic that tallies up smaller hits and eventually breaks the tile.

A hit is either strong enough to have a chance to break the tile (such as a door) or it isn’t. Once you’re above the minimum, higher damage gives a higher chance to destroy it (up to 100%, I think), but hits that are too weak will NEVER destroy the tile, no matter how many times they hit.

[quote=“deoxy, post:29, topic:11381”][quote=“Gnorse, post:28, topic:11381”]i do think zombie tile damage stacks.
i tried with a reinforced boarded window, one zombie cannot even scratch it, but three destroyed it[/quote]

Yes, but that’s a horde mechanic, not cumulative damage to the tile. That is to say, there’s code to let groups of zombies do higher bash damage, NOT a mechanic that tallies up smaller hits and eventually breaks the tile.

A hit is either strong enough to have a chance to break the tile (such as a door) or it isn’t. Once you’re above the minimum, higher damage gives a higher chance to destroy it (up to 100%, I think), but hits that are too weak will NEVER destroy the tile, no matter how many times they hit.[/quote]
oh , my bad.
i understood the wrong thing then :stuck_out_tongue:

[quote=“BeerBeer, post:10, topic:11381”](sliding back to topic)
An underground vault of… beer. Barrels and vats as far as eye can see (reality bubble diameter). Better start digging. You’ll need a mountain of yeast, wheat, water… hop plant? Much to my shame, I’ve only brewed once in Cata thus far.[/quote]

Yessssssssssssssss.

All the possible booze that can be made, found, or mixed. That said, not all of them is full. Stuff like belgian ale, the non-brew-able wines. Basically anything that can’t be made by your survivor is a matter of finding a ton of them.

When you are in your sprawling underground fortress, did horde ever spawn in remote rooms?

Nope. However, on the surface level about a dozen or so zombies do show up from time to time, at the same general area, mostly due to the fact that below that area is the jail cell where I kept a shoggoth for disposal purposes.

So, basically, setting up shop underground is about as safe as you can get - though you have to clear out the area above once in a while. Furthermore, transporting items from one level to another can be somewhat time consuming, especially if you’re a hoarder like I am. That said, once you find your groove it’s relatively easy. I can move thousands of volume worth of items down and have them sorted in their appropriate containers in about 15 minutes.

That’s great set up!

The survivor lab-fortress would be a world heritage site should UNESCO exist after 2049.

Plus, if you set it up on an ice lab like mine, you pretty much have all the storage space in the world to hold perishable goods. Yay, hoarding!

I practically had thousands of human flesh stored in that base, nearly all of them in a pretty much fresh state since I harvested them during long winters, and that doesn’t even include already cooked dishes.

Lots of fruit and vegetables too.

[quote=“Azrad, post:35, topic:11381”]Plus, if you set it up on an ice lab like mine, you pretty much have all the storage space in the world to hold perishable goods. Yay, hoarding!

I practically had thousands of human flesh stored in that base, nearly all of them in a pretty much fresh state since I harvested them during long winters, and that doesn’t even include already cooked dishes.

Lots of fruit and vegetables too.[/quote]

I like that, but what I like best is actually digging my own stairs (and building my own steel walls, etc) right NEXT to an ice lab - you can have the benefits of an lab (noisemaker somewhere nearby to collect the zombies where they won’t break your stuff), but not be freezing all the time… but then, you jackhammer just BARELY into the lab in a room with double-thick walls, and you’ve got an infinifrigerator (you can easily make it several squares wide, but only one square deep) that isn’t freezing your whole base, AND isn’t actually connected to the rest of the lab (just in case).

[quote=“deoxy, post:36, topic:11381”][quote=“Azrad, post:35, topic:11381”]Plus, if you set it up on an ice lab like mine, you pretty much have all the storage space in the world to hold perishable goods. Yay, hoarding!

I practically had thousands of human flesh stored in that base, nearly all of them in a pretty much fresh state since I harvested them during long winters, and that doesn’t even include already cooked dishes.

Lots of fruit and vegetables too.[/quote]

I like that, but what I like best is actually digging my own stairs (and building my own steel walls, etc) right NEXT to an ice lab - you can have the benefits of an lab (noisemaker somewhere nearby to collect the zombies where they won’t break your stuff), but not be freezing all the time… but then, you jackhammer just BARELY into the lab in a room with double-thick walls, and you’ve got an infinifrigerator (you can easily make it several squares wide, but only one square deep) that isn’t freezing your whole base, AND isn’t actually connected to the rest of the lab (just in case).[/quote]

Yeah. My main base sat next to the ice lab, dug out with a jackhammer. The only things I store in the cold part of the ice lab is the perishable stuff, while the main base area is pretty much normal non-ice lab temperature. Also, the perishable food storage (and the shoggoth room next to it) is sealed off from the rest of that ice lab. Only entrance to my base is from the stairs I made myself, which leads up to the garage I made, which was more or less in a quiet spot in the middle of nowhere. Was actually planning to create a bar next to the garage, but I kinda lost my motivation for it due to not being sure on how it should look.

That’s generally my main goal when I go and play seriously again; create a base that satisfies my need to store items in an organized manner, but at the same time has enough flavor that it would look like a small town/fort. NPCs set on guard to make it look lived in, even.

I know this is somewhat theoretical but what about the graboid things from one of the quests or those things in the mines. Wouldn’t those be able to break into anything underground. Not sure about metal but rock/stone would be no issue. Fortunately for standard game play neither would show up yet right?