Fabricators

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

In the future one could likely assume that at least some aspects of production had been overtaken by 3d printing, replicators, fabricators, Makerbots, whathaveyou. Currently they only produce in a limited range of weak plastics but the United States Army has already deployed at least one to Iraq for use in battlefield prototyping and stopgap part manufacture. Futurists see these desktop factories printing anything from drugs and organs, to food or weapons with the right designs and feedstock.

Such devices would be incredibly useful to any survivors, assuming they could get them to work or power them. However I would imagine them possibly being ‘overpowered’ if anything, even warranting various limits like feedstock, power, collecting design templates without a functional network, computing skill, or even the devices themselves having gone haywire and begun producing their own robotic defense ‘hives’ after the fashion of triffids or fungaloids. Such dangerous yet valuable devices could easily form the basis of their own quest lines.

2

Ooh! self-replicating robot army! How do we not have that yet? That’s going in the issue tracker NOW.

This topic came up on IRC a few days ago, basically the plan is to have fairly generic fabricator devices (technically some kind of terrain piece as opposed to a portable item) the player can interact with in order to produce items. As you say, these should have various limitations, like power, raw materials, maintenance, and designs for items. Additionally I’d like them to have an editorial limitation of having the recipes they can use be limited. Currently there’s a compactor terrain tile that you can feed scrap and get usable metal objects (chunks, liumps, frames, etc), and it’d work kind of like that, but be more capable of course.

For more compete fabrication, the plan is to have workshops the PC or NPCs* can use to make things using heavy industriaol tools, and if/when we get more full faction type things working, perhaps full-fledged factories that you can man with NPCs and mass-produce things. Each step up increases the variety of things you can make, as well as adding a level of efficiency and speed to the process.

The fabricator thing is something we could add relatively soon since it’s something the PC can take advantage of, the workshops and factories are fairly pointless (except as map locations) until the requisite amount of NPC organization and interaction is implemented. An exception is we could start out having the workshop locations be required for certain large endeavors, for example using a garage to build a large vehicle, and only be used by the PC at first.

There’s a final tier that was suggested, which was material processing plants, such as a steel mill or coal processing plant that would feed each other in order to mass-produce various items. While these would be great locations to have in game, I think actually making them operational and building a resource infrastructure like this would be significantly outside the reasonable scope for the game. Never say never I guess, but something like this would basically be a different game.

Feel free to discuss various aspects of this, none of this is set in stone, though I think it’s a pretty good way to break it down. Also if anyone wants to summarize part of the IRC discussion I missed, go ahead.

*The NPCs wouldn’t be using them autonomously, probably they’d be player-directed.

3

3D printers are already pretty common. A hobby shop next to my house has one that they use to print off D&D miniatures. I could see them being in some shops, and having schematics be pretty uncommon.

4

How are fabricators supposed to work, compared to conventional crafting?

I think industries and supply chains could be beneficial if the focus is on their implications, and not the internal workings of factories and the like.

5

Y’know, I was thinking that some one-off Lab finale could be a Mutagen-making machine. Feed it and it spares you the Cooking 8/9. Trouble is lugging everything down to the finale.

6

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:2, topic:1978”]Ooh! self-replicating robot army! How do we not have that yet? That’s going in the issue tracker NOW.

This topic came up on IRC a few days ago, basically the plan is to have fairly generic fabricator devices (technically some kind of terrain piece as opposed to a portable item) the player can interact with in order to produce items. As you say, these should have various limitations, like power, raw materials, maintenance, and designs for items. Additionally I’d like them to have an editorial limitation of having the recipes they can use be limited. Currently there’s a compactor terrain tile that you can feed scrap and get usable metal objects (chunks, liumps, frames, etc), and it’d work kind of like that, but be more capable of course.

For more compete fabrication, the plan is to have workshops the PC or NPCs* can use to make things using heavy industriaol tools, and if/when we get more full faction type things working, perhaps full-fledged factories that you can man with NPCs and mass-produce things. Each step up increases the variety of things you can make, as well as adding a level of efficiency and speed to the process.

The fabricator thing is something we could add relatively soon since it’s something the PC can take advantage of, the workshops and factories are fairly pointless (except as map locations) until the requisite amount of NPC organization and interaction is implemented. An exception is we could start out having the workshop locations be required for certain large endeavors, for example using a garage to build a large vehicle, and only be used by the PC at first.

There’s a final tier that was suggested, which was material processing plants, such as a steel mill or coal processing plant that would feed each other in order to mass-produce various items. While these would be great locations to have in game, I think actually making them operational and building a resource infrastructure like this would be significantly outside the reasonable scope for the game. Never say never I guess, but something like this would basically be a different game.

Feel free to discuss various aspects of this, none of this is set in stone, though I think it’s a pretty good way to break it down. Also if anyone wants to summarize part of the IRC discussion I missed, go ahead.

*The NPCs wouldn’t be using them autonomously, probably they’d be player-directed.[/quote]
…Can we make them craft infinite amounts of mugs?

7

Good question, basically you’d need to dump raw materials on it and make sure it has power and recipes somehow, then interact with it to select a recipe. At that point it’d start doing its thing and consume some of the raw materials, and at some point later it would generate the item. You could be off doing whatever while it does its thing though. Bio-fabricators could definitely be a thing you could do, and interacting with all this kind of thing would give a nice low-medium level use for compter skill so you can work your wa up to hacking. Just have to be careful to not let it reverse things, where computer skill overshadows everything else.

Yea, I’m not saying it wouldn’t be a good thing to have in game, but when I start thinking about how to implement it I’m thinking of the UI to manage all that, and it’s definitely starting to drift away from the first person roguelike interface and toward simcity or something. Another option is to do what Toady has been talking about with his adventure mode stuff where you run things by talking to managers instead of having some kind of global map interface.

On the other hand, if we just don’t add the ability for the PC to be in direct charge of all this stuff, it simplifies things greatly, because it’s then a matter of factions being in charge of these resources, and the PC would only be able to take advantage of the factories etc indirectly (by asking the factions for stuff).

How to handle all this is something to keep in mind as we build out NPC AI and factions for sure.

8

…But the mugs! What about the mugs?!

9

When I think of fabricators like you aredescribing I think of things like a loom or mills. Stationary crafting spots. There could also be things like blacksmithing/hide tanning/bakeing, or any other such thing. These are all things that fall under a fabricator in my opinion, and dont use the computer skill.