Disable electric devices

[halberdsturgeon]

The point is to add an extra obstacle for the game. Something new. Not to make high tech equipment useless.

Adding a tedious obstacle to the game is not a good idea. This is basically on the level of issuing random dictates to the player, like only wearing red for a week, or only using words without the letter ‘e’, or only skipping instead of walking.

[PoeSalesman]

[quote=“Belteshazzar, post:68, topic:5561”]Operate underground?

Schedule a couple days for reading and equipment upkeep?

Preserve a lot of food and craft a lot of batteries and ammo for when the ion storm passes?

Repair or expand your fortress?

Pack a spare crossbow, or ‘any’ of the majority of non-electronic firearms?

Smoke a bowl?

Move out of the storm?[/quote]
So be a troglobite? There’s no wiring, everything would be reliant on non-recharging battery power, and you’d basically be forced into a lab base.

You’re done with using skill books very quickly. You’re not going to have a week of skill books to read except maybe the first time you find a library, and only that first time. Repairing your gear is also an hour at most.

So boring craft grinding? And with what power since all my electronics are busted? Not very fun in the least.

Why would I need to? And what could I defend myself from bears without if all my gear is broken? Be forced into playing a caveman?

Why should I be forced to play primitive for a quarter of the year when I have perfectly good, charged, and kept up electronic equipment I SHOULD be able to use for my playstyle? Why would I even have archery skill?

Not a serious suggestion, and not something that takes a week.

Impossible, you just turned my carbase off or it’s hovering over my homestead. That’s assuming it worked like a weather too, and not the instant magic everywhere effect the proposer wants.

[Blackopsman9999]

Why not use the hydrogen reactor thing for a vehicle? Get a plutonium powered flashlight and everything? Make some more of your infinite battery supply? And also I am fairly certain people would have said acid rain is just an obstacle in the game for no reason, but after enough work it seems ok, if you people actually helped with this instead of “I want to use my laser thingy and be a god that nothing can touch and no difficulty” then maybe this could already be worked out to seem fair.

[JimQuaid]

Quote from: halberdsturgeon on Today at 03:43:16 AM

Are you kidding? You're saying that high tech equipment is too powerful compared to its low tech counterparts and proposing a game change that will fix this by completely taking anything even remotely electronic out of commission for an extended period of each month. That is the point of this thread, yes?

If the meat of your OP had been something like 'modding household electronics to be solar powered makes them too powerful' I'd have probably agreed - I don't generally do this, or use vehicle rigs, for more or less that exact reason. But what you're proposing doesn't just penalise people who abuse high tech objects to their fullest, it abuses poor idiots bumbling around in the dark with a battery-powered flashlight. Why do you think implementing a (literally) cosmic backhand to all use of electronics is a reasonable solution to the problem you describe?

If USING a hotplate gave you severe radiation poisoning each time every time then just USING it would be INHERENTLY bad.
If USING a flashlight umits noise than can be heard three map tiles away then just USING it would be INHERENTLY bad.
If USING a water purifier gave a permanent +10 strength buff then just USING it would be INHERENTLY bad (for game balance that is)

Rephrasing for clarification:

Where did you get the idea that I thought that using electronics is or should be inherently bad?

For simplicity’s sake, can you find quotes of me that support these statements:

1. JimQuaid thinks that using electronic equipment (just once/at all) is a bad thing.

2. JimQuaid thinks that being able to rely solely and completely on electronic equipment and electronic equipment alone without any drawbacks is a bad thing.

3. JimQuaid hates powered tools and thinks no one should ever touch them and his suggestion will make players abandon high tech once and for all.

4. JimQuaid is a High Tech player who often uses powered tools to make nice big vehicles with everyhing inclusive. His suggestion does not force other players to adopt his (JimQuaids) playstyle of using powered tools to make a mobile home with lots of gadgets.

(Did you read me talk about rechargeable batteries?)

Which 2 of these positions do I actually hold?

Quote from: PoeSalesman on Today at 03:54:32 AM

[size=14pt]There's no mitigating it[/size], there's no resource manage element, [size=14pt]you can't use your tech at all[/size], period, [size=14pt]no matter what you do[/size], because you dared to move past using your nailbat as your primary weapon.

Excuse me?

Quote from: JimQuaid on March 25, 2014, 03:53:55 PM

I would have thought a rare lab final reward could be a shielding against Purple Sky effect.
"This is an experimental electronic fortification device. It shields one small object completely from outside radiation. You don't know what the scientists here were going to do with it, but you are sure you will find a use for it".
It would either mod one tool "hotplate (rechargeable, shielded)" or protect a tile in a vehicle ("heavy duty frame, storage battery, rv kitchen)

That or drag your stuff deep underground to use it without failure.

Quote from: Blackopsman9999 on Today at 05:10:10 AM

Well then they need to lower the chance batteries and remove the recharge station, because I went through one electronic store and had almost 1K batteries when I left it.

I have ~8500 in my trunk that i will probably never use, now that I’ve modded all my important tools with rechargeable batteries.

Quote from: KA101 on Today at 12:36:35 AM

I have a very difficult time accepting a fixed-in-space planar problem.  Portals and such are relative to Earth; gravity effect or somesuch.  GlyphGryph laid that out a while ago.  If the Labs managed to rip a rift open, then by rights the portals should be "disappearing" only to tear through the Earth in a little less than a year's time because they're fixed points in space.

Then think of it as a ring. Another circle not centered on the sun, kinda like Pluto’s orbit, it is kept around the sun by gravity.

Quote from: KA101 on Today at 12:36:35 AM

We covered the "bleak grimdark low-tech survival whatever" outlook in passing, in the design doc: that derives from things like the wiki mainpage.  The wiki mainpage is not canon, and if you want to play a game where you're jumping for joy because you found a backpack, that's your game and you can play it that way.  But you've no right to make me play my game that way.

I wasn’t suggesting making people go “yeah-haw” over low tech stuff. If you were transported from your home to an extremely cold or hot place without running (clean) water, phone or internet or any electricity at all and you find a nice book to entertain you, would you jump for joy because you found that book? Or would you think “bummer, I wish I was still at home were it’s a lot cushier.” Why would my suggestion make anyone jump for joy over a backpack? By the time Purple Sky would be a problem you’d have plenty of storage and another backpack wouldn’t matter at all. If anything it makes you appreciate high tech stuff more, right?
EDIT: It was a suggestion, not a demand. I didn’t invoke the ghosts of gamers past, present and future to give me the power to bend this game to my will.

[quote=“KA101, post:69, topic:5561”]Hey: how will this affect bionics, especially the passive ones?

bionics that require power can’t be used (so bionic armor will still be effective)[/quote]

EDIT: It’s supposed to be a nerf. If someone nerfed the long bow to 2/3 of it’s range or increase strength/dexterity/perception requirements and a few people started screaming “Oh! That means you absolutely HATE bows and want to force us to use guns right? You want everyone to be guntotting maniacs like you and your little friends who agree with the nerf. But this goes against all the founding fathers stood for. You are an enemy of democracy, freedom and baby Jesus!”

Alright, the last part was exaggeration but I kinda feel like the guy who nerfed bows to 2/3 range.

Sorry for the formatting, going back and forth the find the quotes screwed up what I already wrote.

[KA101]

Yeah, fixing that formatting would make it much more legible. Ease up on the colors, please.

(Especially as red is action, whether RPing outside the Rec Room or moderation/devspeak.)

Regarding the bionics, thanks for pointing that out. Unfortunately, that’s still open as “powered” bionics has two definitions: bionics that you formally activate and pay bionic power for, and bionics that are passive but would involve electronics. (They’ve negligible drain, possibly powered by piezoelectricity or internal batteries.)

For example, take the fingertip razors. They don’t require power to use, unlike the claws or blade, but they do specify that they retract. Will they jam in one position (perhaps on?), or be defaulted away?

That page has a handy table of augs. How about the Internal Chronometer? That’s electronic, most likely. Diamond Cornea and the Anti-Glare Compensators aren’t electronic, though. Internal Storage doesn’t define how it operates.
If my power systems are acting up, I don’t even want to think about what Metabolic Interchange, Expanded Digestive System, or the Recycler Unit would do. Muscle Augmentation would stick around, but Wired Reflexes might or might not.

That’s a lot of if-statements there, and even simply disabling active augs invalidates a lot of people’s work. (Getting and installing augs isn’t a joke.) 5 days is easily enough for a fungal infection to incap or kill if you can’t get royal jelly and someone turned off your Blood Filter. (IIRC, 5 hours is almost to the arm-breaker stage, and you’ll be spawning fungaloids in the process.)

I’m gonna stand by my opinion: this would be an interesting localized obstacle, and could work as another Annoying Weather Pattern similar to acid rain, but as a routine, long-duration global event, it causes far more problem than it solves.

Speaking in my dev capacity: The original idea is way overkill, but can be refined. We’re trying to work with you here. Help us help you.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

[halberdsturgeon]

-massive snip-

Good grief, remind me to be more careful about word use around you. If you’re done grimly hanging on to the literal meaning of that one word, would you mind telling me why you think, rather than simply reducing the power of things that are too powerful amongst the high tech electronics in the game, it’s better to introduce magical Doom Storms to eradicate their use for days at a time?

[PoeSalesman]

[quote=“JimQuaid, post:73, topic:5561”]Quote from: JimQuaid on March 25, 2014, 03:53:55 PM

I would have thought a rare lab final reward could be a shielding against Purple Sky effect.
"This is an experimental electronic fortification device. It shields one small object completely from outside radiation. You don't know what the scientists here were going to do with it, but you are sure you will find a use for it".
It would either mod one tool "hotplate (rechargeable, shielded)" or protect a tile in a vehicle ("heavy duty frame, storage battery, rv kitchen)

That or drag your stuff deep underground to use it without failure.[/quote]

I’m pretty I told you why that’s an awful idea already. An EXTREMELY RARE item, that can only work on ONE SINGLE THING to avoid your horrible caveman-forcing weather is not a good solution. What we have in lab finales now are: a pack of extra-dimensional creatures I’ve never bothered with, a pile of energy weapons, a pile of ballistic weapons, a pile of nukes, a pile of biotics, and some machine that’s apparently supposed to make super sharp weapons out of diamond. So what you propose, is a single item that wards a single piece of equipment from magical caveman storms that stomp all over electronic player’s feet. In counterpart to the piles of goodies you get from most labs. Absolutely no other way to avoid being forced to play a primitive for a quarter of the year other than to bust your way to the bottom of a lab, probably get frostbite, and hope you don’t get eaten by a flaming eye or shoggoth, in the gamble that instead of a bunch of useful things you find a tiny item that shields only one electronic thing from the forced caveman weather.

[Blackopsman9999]

Well currently you are kinda forced to play electronicly… want a forge to make nails and start making a house? Need a welder! Want to keep some food preserved? Nope, use electricity.
Everything right now revolves electricity and it kinda removes the CATACLYSM from the game, it is more like “Meh they all died, I’m going to drive my electric car that drives perfectly down the road that I made my self in four hours.”

[halberdsturgeon]

What are you talking about? You don’t need a welder to produce nails, and you can preserve food with a charcoal smoker. And again, why in the world does everyone seem to think that the word ‘cataclysm’ is synonymous with ‘bashing rocks together to make fire’, like it’s something obvious?

[Sean_Mirrsen]

If you want to make a charcoal forge to make nails from scrap, you need a welder. If you want to make a charcoal kiln in order to start making charcoal, you again need a welder. This means that charcoal and electric paths both have the same prerequisites, and electrics get you far further.

[halberdsturgeon]

Point taken. I don’t see why you should be able to get as far with low technology as with high technology, but no matter.

[Sean_Mirrsen]

A great many electric powerplants run on coal. Trains ran on coal not so long ago. Ultimately, coal and gasoline are simply alternate sources of energy - anything that doesn’t involve electricity should be doable with fire and carbon fuels.

And charcoal can also be made using basic dirt-sealed kilns.

I think that basic steam engines should be possible to construct. We’d need some manner of more complex interactions between parts of such an engine. The “steam engine” itself is the engine, but its power would be influenced by the boiler, which is a combination furnace and water tank. The boiler would need fuel put into it, and would need a source of fire to activate, and as long as there is a burning fuel in it, it will consume water from an installed water tank. And while the boiler is fired up and there is still water, the steam engine will run.

[PoeSalesman]

[quote=“Blackopsman9999, post:77, topic:5561”]Well currently you are kinda forced to play electronicly… want a forge to make nails and start making a house? Need a welder! Want to keep some food preserved? Nope, use electricity.
Everything right now revolves electricity and it kinda removes the CATACLYSM from the game, it is more like “Meh they all died, I’m going to drive my electric car that drives perfectly down the road that I made my self in four hours.”[/quote]

Cata isn’t about being stuck with nothing and everything destroyed forever, you’re supposed to be picking up the scrap and trying to build a sort of life for yourself, high or low tech, depending on what you find and what you can do.

To the first bit, I think this is a bit of a problem, though it’s a little unrelated to the main part of this topic. You should be able to make nails and forges, of probably low quality but still, solely through primitive means, and you should also be able to preserve food the old fashion way with salt, smoking, and/or a simple drying stone out in the sun to make jerky. That doesn’t involve forcing you not to use tech though, but adding new items and recipes so you can live the tribal or medieval lifestyles without needing to use electronics at any point. It doesn’t hurt players for playing differently, it lets them play the way they want while also making other playstyles more viable.

[JimQuaid]

There’s no mitigating it, there’s no resource manage element, you can’t use your tech at all, period, no matter what you do, because you dared to move past using your nailbat as your primary weapon.

[quote=“JimQuaid, post:73, topic:5561”]Quote from: JimQuaid on March 25, 2014, 03:53:55 PM
That or drag your stuff deep underground to use it without failure.[/quote]

200 years ago we didn’t have widespread use of electricity. So what kind of weapons were used for example in the war of indepence? More than 200 years ago that means… No electricity = caveman times = they were using clubs! No other possibility! You either have electricity or you are cavemanlike! Guns? What are those?
There are places in the world where people don’t have access to electricity but have bicycles, ovens and newspapers. Do you label these people Neanderthals because they don’t cook with hotplates?

[quote=“KA101, post:74, topic:5561”]Yeah, fixing that formatting would make it much more legible. Ease up on the colors, please.

(Especially as red is action, whether RPing outside the Rec Room or moderation/devspeak.)

Regarding the bionics, thanks for pointing that out. Unfortunately, that’s still open as “powered” bionics has two definitions: bionics that you formally activate and pay bionic power for, and bionics that are passive but would involve electronics. (They’ve negligible drain, possibly powered by piezoelectricity or internal batteries.)

For example, take the fingertip razors. They don’t require power to use, unlike the claws or blade, but they do specify that they retract. Will they jam in one position (perhaps on?), or be defaulted away?

That page has a handy table of augs. How about the Internal Chronometer? That’s electronic, most likely. Diamond Cornea and the Anti-Glare Compensators aren’t electronic, though. Internal Storage doesn’t define how it operates.
If my power systems are acting up, I don’t even want to think about what Metabolic Interchange, Expanded Digestive System, or the Recycler Unit would do. Muscle Augmentation would stick around, but Wired Reflexes might or might not.

That’s a lot of if-statements there, and even simply disabling active augs invalidates a lot of people’s work. (Getting and installing augs isn’t a joke.) 5 days is easily enough for a fungal infection to incap or kill if you can’t get royal jelly and someone turned off your Blood Filter. (IIRC, 5 hours is almost to the arm-breaker stage, and you’ll be spawning fungaloids in the process.)

I’m gonna stand by my opinion: this would be an interesting localized obstacle, and could work as another Annoying Weather Pattern similar to acid rain, but as a routine, long-duration global event, it causes far more problem than it solves.

Speaking in my dev capacity: The original idea is way overkill, but can be refined. We’re trying to work with you here. Help us help you.

Thanks for your time and consideration.[/quote]

Hm, I would imagine those fingertip razors would be muscle controlled? Like cats can retract their claws (without electricity :)) moving your hand in a certain way would make them come out or go back. Similar to the Fusion Blaster Arm: It doesn’t drain power continously so presumably you can wave it around using what’s left of your muscles and sinews. You just can’t fire it though.
Basically if it can be explained using mechanical means (Recycler units for example could be very small machines powered by the movement of your stomach walls or just your breathing expanding your body) or small amounts of bioelectricity (which would have to work, otherwise it would be silly) you can still use it. Internal storage I thought was a Bender(Futurama)-like door in your chest.
Bio Power Sources: No energy generation or consumption so they would do nothing.
When this localized feature gets to a serious consideration stage I would be happy to help with figuring out which bionics work and which not.

I’ve given up on the initial and afterwards slightly improved suggestions a few pages ago since there are other things in planning and, presumably, have already been thought more about it. So yeah. If I have given someone another idea that resonates more wiith the community and more importantly those who actually will do the coding I’m happy.
I was hoping that Sean Mirrsen would open up a separate thread so that the title could attract more people.
I think I will do that now myself. (here it is)

On the whole I kinda felt I was misunderstood in my intentions but I’m very glad that neither of the two people I argued with most suggested that “if you don’t like electronics just don’t use them, duh” or that I should “just play another game if you don’t like it”, which I would usually expect when some suggest a game idea people don’t like.
So just for that Thank You, halberdsturgeon and PoeSalesman

[halberdsturgeon]

On the whole I kinda felt I was misunderstood in my intentions but I’m very glad that neither of the two people I argued with most suggested that “if you don’t like electronics just don’t use them, duh” or that I should “just play another game if you don’t like it”, which I would usually expect when some suggest a game idea people don’t like.

That’s alright. Pardon me if I seem overly aggressive, that’s just me. As I said, I can agree that things like bottomless solar power supplies are over the top, I just strongly dislike the idea of an anti-electricity field as a means of mitigating it.

[PoeSalesman]

[quote=“JimQuaid, post:73, topic:5561”]Quote from: JimQuaid on March 25, 2014, 03:53:55 PM
That or drag your stuff deep underground to use it without failure.[/quote]
I went over this too. There’s no wiring so no power supplies from above, and this would force you into using a lab as the only viable base.

[quote=“JimQuaid, post:83, topic:5561”]200 years ago we didn’t have widespread use of electricity. So what kind of weapons were used for example in the war of indepence? More than 200 years ago that means… No electricity = caveman times = they were using clubs! No other possibility! You either have electricity or you are cavemanlike! Guns? What are those?
There are places in the world where people don’t have access to electricity but have bicycles, ovens and newspapers. Do you label these people Neanderthals because they don’t cook with hotplates?[/quote]
Missing the point for the sake of hating the terminology I used, honestly.

[quote=“JimQuaid, post:83, topic:5561”]On the whole I kinda felt I was misunderstood in my intentions but I’m very glad that neither of the two people I argued with most suggested that “if you don’t like electronics just don’t use them, duh” or that I should “just play another game if you don’t like it”, which I would usually expect when some suggest a game idea people don’t like.
So just for that Thank You, halberdsturgeon and PoeSalesman[/quote]
To a point I did understand what you meant. I don’t disagree entirely with everything that ended up being said, I just don’t like the idea of a cosmic event aligning to hurt a type of play. I really don’t like just telling people to go away during an argument, that’s basically like throwing a tantrum.

[Belteshazzar]

I went over this too. There’s no wiring so no power supplies from above, and this would force you into using a lab as the only viable base.

You seriously don’t haul car parts downstairs to build ‘generators’ with? Hell I don’t even understand what you mean by ‘wiring’ and ‘power supplies’ there are no currently functional power networks… anywhere. Unless you mean solar and that stuff is literally and figuratively a’ fair weather friend.’ Even then, just because there is no underground equivalent of solar doesn’t mean we couldn’t be rigging up steam engines in later versions (geothermal, nuclear, or waste burning.)

This fear of random events disabling electronic reliant playstyles, even temporarily, is beyond hilarious to me. Why do you cling to a playstyle that entirely relies on only one or two aspects of what is available to you? Cataclysm is a rougelike mercifully gracious enough to not restrict what you ‘may’ learn, and you complain that you may be forced to use every ounce of it to survive?

This isn’t a class based game… you arn’t a DnD wizard who cannot use armor… or a priest who cannot use edged weapons. USE EVERYTHING YOU CAN, BECAUSE YOU MUST.

The goal here I see is to further encourage diversity in tactics. If you cannot adapt you deserve to die repeatedly in the same way I deserve to die repeatedly if I refuse to use modern weapons, tools, and medications when they are available to me just because I wanted to play an Amish technophobe.

[Robik]

[quote=“Sean Mirrsen, post:11, topic:5561”]I think low-tech options simply should be made to run longer, and easier to acquire.

This, coupled with making it easier to create charcoal, should be pretty good, I think. As it is, charcoal is a scarce commodity. You need a charcoal kiln to make charcoal, and even though 3 levels of fabrication isn’t too high and a metal tank can be taken from a vehicle, the need for a welder instantly pushes this into not-entirely-likely territory.

Charcoal needs to be made more accessible. The wiki (that is, the Wiki) says that you can make charcoal inside basically a dirt-sealed chimney. Make it a basic (skill 1) Survival/Construction item, using a log or a pile of sticks/2x4s on a dirt pile to create a “wood charring pile” that one can use a source of fire on to turn it into a lump of charcoal. I think this will basically require that items/terrain tiles can, upon burning through, turn into some other item that is not on fire. Everything else is basically already covered by construction.[/quote]

Yes, yes, I completely agree. The obnoxious way of charcoal crafting in this game makes me angry sometimes… It should be in construction menu to make a wood pile covered in dirt. Start the fire and make charcoal in bulk.

Also, I was wondering why the hell I have to stare in the kiln for entire hour to make a charcoal… yes, it takes time, but you really don’t help the process by sitting on your ass and staring on the kiln.

[i2amroy]

As I mentioned earlier, charcoal making is definitely something we want to move into a “start and walk away” form of crafting, which should do a lot towards making it easier to acquire.
Adding more ways to make makeshift forges/kilns is also something worth looking into.

[Robik]

[quote=“i2amroy, post:88, topic:5561”]As I mentioned earlier, charcoal making is definitely something we want to move into a “start and walk away” form of crafting, which should do a lot towards making it easier to acquire.
Adding more ways to make makeshift forges/kilns is also something worth looking into.[/quote]

I am guilty of responding to Sean’s post before I got to yours.

It will be epic once it is done, I made some fruit wine and some yeast already, which is using this way of crafting and I love it. Easier way to obtain low tech forges and kilns would be most welcome.