The only NPC I have currently doesn’t have enough survival/fabrication to build some bits of the base I want, so I’d like to build them myself (particularly, the root cellar and the water pump). Are there any upgrades that have those as prerequisites? I’d rather not waste the time and materials building it once only to have to have an NPC repeat the process later just so I could get access to some other base upgrade.
It’s not exactly what you are looking for, but if nobody have the super basic skill required atm, you might want to train them with a book anyway - since you are likely to get stuck again and again later with worse requirement. Well, just a though.
I’m a new player, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt.
I’ve essentially followed the path Orage_Poilu described. My original companion got a fair bit of training during my initial stumbling about and reading, until I realized it would be better to have him read rather than do nothing when his skills were inadequate to help.
Once I started a camp (later than I should have), he was good enough to do the base building (so that’s what he’s doing, one bit after another [he was also nerfed by a bug, cutting his 81 HP down to 20, leaving him too squishy to participate in dangerous field work]). I then recruited the beggars group (apart from Dino Dave, who I can’t figure out how to get moving), and set them to cram books until good enough to do things.
That, of course, requires that you’ve actually found sufficient books, which I guess can be tricky if you start your base early.
I don’t think water is a big issue early on (unless you start when water is frozen), as you can use the largest container you can find to carry water in (I find a canning pot to be good: that amount of water lasts a fair while). (I’ve since build a single tile vehicle with a 60 L tank to allow me to haul salt water from the marsh in a single big trip). It is, however, convenient to mark a pump as a resource zone and thus have companion jobs use that water automatically, but I think you’ll have to be up to having started a kitchen tile to make use of that.
When it comes to a root cellar, you can’t really have too many of those, so I’d build one adjacent to the tile where the camp building would build one (you can go for a basement storage as well, but at that time the resources spent on an extra root cellar are probably not significant, and you probably needed the extra cellar in the mean time anyway).
I haven’t seen an option to get the NPCs to read on their own. That would be fantastic. What is required for that to show up?
Well, it’s not exactly “on their own”, as there’s a fair bit of baby sitting involved:
- Find the book you want them to read.
- Trade it to them
- Ask what they’re doing, and then ask them to read a book. They’ll as for the book to read, and you specify the one you traded to them (you can also specify one near to them instead).
The problems:
- You have to trade to book back to check if it’s still of a level they can learn from (as well as ask about their abilities to see their current levels).
- They’ll stop as soon as they’ve reached a new level, so you need to give a new order periodically.
- They’ll stop reading when it gets dark. I don’t know if reading light could work, but I walk into my Craftmobile where the light is on permanently and give the order when they’re inside the light radius.
- They’ll also sometimes stop at night, meaning you’ll have to reorder them to read again in the morning (but sometimes they claim to be reading).
However, it works well enough.
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Trade it to them
Just a hint: in case you don’t want to deal with, um, clumsy(yeah, let’s go with that) trade interface, you can use “there’s something I want you to do”-“hold on to this item” command.
Actually, you can just tell them to read the book and if they can’t learn more from it they will say so. Unless it was broken in latest builds?
Hold on to this item is definitely smarter.
I haven’t seen them respond that they can’t learn more, only a report once they’ve started that they can’t learn more (and usually they’ll just won’t read but continue to follow me around). However, I cannot rule out that I might not have paid sufficient attention to the reports (I’m using 0.E2 stable, so it can’t be something broken in a late experimental).
Well, yes, it will not be in a dialogue, they will start reading and at the next turn you’ll get a message in the log along the lines of “XX can’t learn any more from reading this book”, if I recall correctly. The NPC then will resume default behavior, which is usually following you around.
Excellent work from whoever implemented the ability to have NPCs read books on their own. Hell of a lot better than me having to read to them like they’re five, and works great for the pretty boy with no skills I recently acquired.
One tactic you could use is to have each companion specialize in one topic at a time (at least when past some base requirement level), and once they’re more skilled than your character they can teach you the skills. It seems you can get at least two training sessions in per day (requires a persuasion check to succeed) for each companion, and each session only takes a matter of minutes.
At higher level you don’t get much per session, but given that it’s almost free, it’s a good (albeit slow) way to increase skills that aren’t your current focus. My character had a companion cram First Aid up to 6 (the top level given the books I have), and is in the slow process of training the PC at (currently) 4 points per session (level 3->4). She can also train my character in Survival (7->8) at a rate of 2 points per session.
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It seems like the NPCs are still in a “follow” state when I ask them to read, such that when I drive away they’ll stop reading and start hoofing it in the direction of my vehicle. Is it possible to get them to read while hanging around the base?
A bit late, but I don’t think the constructions will register for the faction camp if you build them yourself. I haven’t tested this but the way they are structured as recipes that unlock in a sequence and may also add shared camp tool qualities implies that a self constructed wall/etc won’t be recognized.
I keep meaning to test this but I haven’t gotten to it yet.
We hope to make this much more flexible in the future.
I got a chance to test, and it doesn’t, which I did guess the more likely outcome. Once the boards are doing something like “placing blueprints for NPCs to work” rather than “magically making construction appear after the NPC vanishes into a void for the correct amount of time” would be when that could happen, I imagine.
I haven’t had that problem unless they wouldn’t read (book having too high requirements/can’t learn from book/too dark to read). When asked what their current activity is it should say that they’re reading, although I don’t know if that state changes immediately after the order. Regardless, if they didn’t actually start to read they’d follow my character immediately when I head towards the vehicle.
I try to make sure they’re indoors in a lit area when ordering them to read. I’ve seen that they stop when it gets too dark (which makes sense), and IRL they wouldn’t be too happy about reading out in the rain/glaring sun either.
Regarding the question whether PC built facilities would count towards camp resources, changing the logic to have the blueprint throw up single tile designations that companions can work on (which I assume is what was indicated), may be a prerequisite for PC building to count by allowing the PC to take up one of the single tile tasks, but wouldn’t automatically result from it.
A change from “gather a mountain of resources and then send off someone to consume it” to “designate the facility and then gather resources to perform the job one tile at a time” would be much nicer, in my view. Such a change ought to allow for individual tiles of each facility to use different building materials, as well as upgrading tiles one at a time (knocking down a wooden or adobe wall tile to replace it with e.g. stone or metal.
I guess blueprints generating a lot of individual tile jobs would require the UI to split the job into two levels, though, where you first select the construction and then get a list of each tile.
Edit:
My next question is regarding the blood analysis quest. I went to the hospital specified, cleared it out (actually easier than expected, as the building wasn’t a 15 story monstrosity [though by far means not trivial, including my first encounter with a hulk]). Once cleared I’ve picked through the place, but the equipment required is nowhere to be found. I suspect it used to be where there I found 3 piles of components (there are also two intact autodocs in the hospital). My assumption is that the designated hospital isn’t mandatory, but that any hospital with the required facility (which I’d expect all or almost all of them to have) would suffice to perform the required quest step. Is that correct?
Correct. You want a centrifuge with an active terminal beside it. Exact location doesn’t matter.
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It is quite impossible to find intact centrifuge in late-game hospitals because of sheer amount of angry zeds beating the snot of everything, be it alive, dead, undead or unliving. You’d have better luck in labs, the room with centrifuge there only have 1 guaranteed zed, and maybe some random stragglers.
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I find for hospitals it’s best to park with the hospital just outside the reality bubble for a day or two, and just fire off shotgun rounds to pull zombies out of the hospital’s spawn pool whenever. Make noise -> wait for stuff to spawn -> kill it -> repeat until things stop arriving. With a little patience you can get the hospital mostly intact this way.
It’s only worth doing if I have a specific need for something in a hospital.
Well, apart from that specific piece of machinery, it’s actually useful that they wrecked a lot of the place, as it provides various pieces of metal to scavenge.
However, it’s quite useful to know you can use such tricks. I drove by just outside the hospital smashing all that I lured out (including honking), but some didn’t seem to want to get out…
And, by the way, apologies for derailing this thread. I thought I was in the newbie questions ones.
I can reproduce it reliably, they will start reading, stand still (indicate that “reading” is their current task), and then I will see a “has finished their current task” message once I’ve gotten a certain distance away (it’s quite far, like 50 or 100 tiles or something, far enough for me to have gotten pretty far in a car), even though they won’t have gained a level from reading and nothing else has changed (no advancement of darkness, etc). I’ll turn the car around and they’ll be hoofing it straight toward me like an idiot.
I’m afraid I can’t provide any help, so let’s hope someone more knowledgeable comes along.
I’ve seen a similar behavior when companions are ordered to sort out items in Unsorted zones, though. Once I get about 60 tiles away they claim to be done and come running (both when walking and using a vehicle), but reading has worked fine for me (as has chopping up vehicles [until that got corrupted] once I returned from a trip I got messages that they’d dropped a lot of parts which ought to correspond to what they’d removed in my absence).