Explaining Scarcity? Need suggestions

I was thinking about this, and what I’ve come up with is that all cars that spawn outside should be in very poor condition, only good for scrap with perhaps a fully intact component or two once every few cars. There will be a chance of finding a fully intact vehicle in garages (and perhaps modify the house floor plan to occasionally include a garage that has a chance of an intact car), but this is America, there should be roughly 2.5 cars per household*.

So end result, fully functional cars slightly more scarce than they are now, but a more convincing number of car hulks scattered all over the place.

And to make the post slightly on topic, the rationale would be that the first waves of acid rain were much more potent, and totally corroded all exposed vehicles.

*The cars wouldn’t necessarily be at the house in question, many would be in parking garages, parking lots, even those small ones in front of some shops, and some would be on the roads or the side of the road.

Love the ideas Kevin, I think that’s definitely the way to go.
I think the acid rain can (and should) be blamed for a lot rather than trying to go too far into making obscure lore up to justify things. I think it’s fair to say that with the autotaxi system there would be a lot less cars as well.

I don’t understand, why do people think cars are so OP? They’re hard as hell to control, and storage is a huge hassle. I often just end up crashing my vehicles. Even travel isn’t much of an option because I will often hit a minefield as I drive the vehicle. The only thing I ever end up doing anymore is modifying a motorcycle so it’s a bicycle and riding that to escape wolves. Is it because you guys play on linux terminals and not windows? I’ve compiled with cygwin and I don’t like the fact that if I hold a direction button down it will stick and keep going after I stop pressing the key.

The answer is don’t hold the button down, you aren’t expected to try and drive the car like some pseudo-realtime thing.
Tap wait, wait to see results, correct heading as necessary. If you’re running into things in any scenario other than slaloming through zombies at high speed it’s generally going to be because you’re being careless. Also hitting ‘x’ or ‘;’ and checking ahead of you regularly is essential at high speeds in case of large obstacles like minefields and lava flows.

There is a bit of an UI adjustment I’ve been considering that would move the origin of the display window to a point in front of your car while driving, because we know you’re going to be more immediately interested in stuff in front of you in that situation, also it means you actually have a “front”. This would help a bit with how much hassle it is to drive since you’d have a bit more warning of what’s ahead of you without having to manually use ‘x’ to look ahead of you every few turns.

I meant holding the button down while walking, not driving a car! I guess I just need to be more patient with it.

I think the best way to explain scarcity would be evacuation, that would explain most things that would be scarce.

I feel that there should be less zombies then?

I think scarcity can be explained fairly easily by transport shutting down. Once deliveries stop, cities won’t last very long if the population is full.

If the cities or the general New England area was quarantined a week or two before everyone became Zs, then I think it would explain some of the scarcity quite well. Then all you need for people to start dying and coming back en mass would be a nether portal or the like.

Cars can be ridiculously overpowered if you’ve got a high enough skill and are patient. I’d like to see a near removal of mine fields (only some very, very infrequently by military bases) and a lot more damage to the vehicle for hitting Z’s to even things out as currently it just seems annoying to drive around and keep looking. A forward view would probably help this as well.

As far as scarcity, I think transport shutting down would explain it well, especially if you were to say that heavy acid rain (again) halted transport. I think it’s just about not being to obtuse with the lore, but in the end it’s not like it’s a story driven game really, so it isn’t the end of the world (GET IT!) if it’s a bit simplistic.

We should have industrial train lines that are nigh unbreakable and travel constantly in the 4 cardinal directios. So we can build armoured deathtrains.

Death trains? What will you do when the tracks run out?

Infinite tracks!

The funny thing is it would be fairly easy to make infinite tracks, the difficult thing is actually making them match up. Such is software.

Track laying trains=win

Fixed

Take train>run off tracks>put rubber on wheels of train>win

This wouldn’t need to turn, it would move everything out of the way.

So… a car?

Also go read up on Winston Churchill’s pet project, a land submarine that dug it’s own trench https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivator_No._6

No, a trackless train.