I started playing again recently coming from experimental 8593 into 11133. So, I’ve been messing around with camps and zones (mostly camps because of the absolutely ridiculous costs), it is me or do they basically do the same thing? While I like the idea of faction camps I feel as though zones do it FAR better. Not only can I build things without the insanely overpriced buildings, It’s faster and I can design things to fit for my desire. As I said I haven’t played with zones much but it seems to me that’s the direction this concept should head towards. A few things I would like to see are -
Nested zone trees (so I can group multiple zones into one place eg base 1 or base 2)
Assign npcs to multiple zones then giving priorities
Patrol zones
Crafting zones
Npc food/drink/sleep zones per npc (for when npc needs are active)
etc
Unless those who made the camp recipes miscalculated, the cost of constructing camp buildings should be the same as when the buildings are constructed directly. However, it’s a valid opinion to consider them to be much larger (and thus resource demanding) than needed.
Base camps provide some kind of direction for those who are looking for that, and they provide a resource sink that give the player a reason to scavenge building materials, which may or may not be considered desirable.
I basically haven’t used zones outside of the base camp, but if defining construction zones can be done outside of a camp (and actually work: it doesn’t work for companions in 0.E2 stable, but I believe that’s been fixed), the differences would be in the “recipes” provided by the base camp.
- The base camp canteen allows you to order companions to cook a limited number of recipes (with bread and pemmican being the useful ones, as far as I’ve seen, plus the “smoke scraps of meat into smoked pieces of meat”, which isn’t available to the player).
- The workshop provides a limited number of crafting recipes (which suffers from the recipes all sitting in a single list, rather than being divided into categories, so while expanding the list is easy (should be a matter of JSON editing), the resulting long list gets increasingly unwieldy).
- The garage provides the vaguely described Chop Shop order that seems to be inferior to a deconstruction zone.
- The main base camp provides gather materials, foraging, wood cutting, forest clearing, trapping, hunting, setup hide site, relay hide site, construct map fortifications, constructed spiked trench, recruit companions, scout mission, and combat patrol.
It can be noted that any camp work assigned to companions require calories to have been dumped into the calorie store for companions to draw from when returning from activities (including construction).
If construction zones work without a base camp (which may just be the board in case you don’t care to follow the rigid blueprints), the main difference is that you’re currently restricted to order construction of a single tile at a time, since that’s the construction set available. The potential addition of larger blueprints to be used for zones might reduce the micro management of single tile construction, but coming up with a blueprint set that makes sense in all reasonable situations might not be that easy (and the game would still have to be expanded to actually provide a way to use those blueprints).
Off the top of my head the first construction needed 40-60? logs, 4? wooden boards, 100-200? nails and 80? planks. It built like 4 log walls, 4 floors and not sure on the roof. It doesn’t cost that much to build so little and It just gets worse as you continue on. Right now I ordered someone to dig a trench (who just magically vanishes like all orders) on the north side which will take 4 days, I can’t wait to be disappointed with how small I’m guessing it will be.
Ok? Zones could do that as well and better, just need to design it yourself.
As I said zones have far more potential in that regard
Enabling npc needs would make this irrelevant.
The base camp recipes are currently (last time I checked, a number of weeks ago) calculated by hand, but there is actually functionality to allow the game to calculate the needs for you, resulting in recipes using exactly the same amount as building by hand.
You can, of course, check whether the recipe calculations are correct by comparing against the construction menu (and accounting for wall building being a two step process). Construction uses huge amounts of resources.
The auto calculation takes care of time as well, by the way.
Note that the (stupid) trench consists of deep pits, and they take a lot of time to dig. Don’t dig all the trenches, though, as the result is that you can only exit the main building through windows (the doors all lead into small areas blocked by trenches).
If you build things yourself you’re not following directions, which is something a lot of people want (in many cases because they don’t really grasp the sandbox concept).
Enabling NPC needs does not make the camp calorie store irrelevant. It’s active regardless of whether you’ve enabled needs or not, but while companions are on a multi day patrol route or away building a camp building for a few weeks, you can’t feed them manually, as they’re not present (and the PC might not be either). The current system makes up for that by having the companions draw from the calorie pool when returning (I guess it could draw from the pool daily instead). Once they’re back from their tasks they ought to be back to being the PC requirement to feed them (I’ve played with the needs off exactly because they have to be checked and fed manually, rather than be capable of grabbing food from storage when hungry).
The reason companions disappear when sent away on base missions is that the reality bubble follows the PC around, so they can’t move around actually performing the task. However, they’ve managed to fudge that with deconstruction zones, so it might be possible to fudge construction and other camp activities as well, but it’s probably not trivial.
Bullet points: I listed the differences as things currently stand, not trying to make an argument for it being better than a hypothetical future change to the game. You’re free to implement the changes you think would be good and issue a Pull Request for it (Github speak for requesting your changes to be approved and incorporated into the game).
Which frankly should be a companion command allowing anything the companion can craft using his/her skills and nearby tools (just like the character), not some hack made via camps code.
Uh huh, basically, my point is that if some of the functionality of camps was instead cannibalized into zones (totally removing camps) it would allow greater flexibility in how you want to approach construction and how npcs are managed.
Yes, it would be better if companions could be ordered to craft directly. It would also be better if the reality bubble was multiplied so companions could actually perform tasks when the PC isn’t present.
When you make the changes to the game that allow companions to craft you’d either have to port the disappearing act of base camp crafting, or handle them falling outside of the reality bubble, either by providing them with bubbles of their own, or by processing what would have happened during the absence as the PC returns the bubble (quite possibly by looking at how vehicle deconstruction performs a speed run as you return.
Ah, I forgot about the reality bubble thingo. Probably that’s why it was made in such a way I guess that makes sense now. How’d a game like Factorio get around this problem having
basically infinite sized maps with like a million things happening at once? Maybe there is way to see how they did it…
Merging faction camps and zones is a fond dream of mine, all it needs is someone who wants to work on NPC’s (a lot) to get the two systems working together (or migrate camps fully to zones, idk what’s best). I have a list of zone type activities I want added for camps, but I can’t code c++, nor can I expect someone else to focus on NPC development.
I re-wrote the faction camp expansions from the older primitive camp style, so at least you can use the modular system with varied wall types and I feel they generally look a lot better then the original maps.
As far as build costs go:
They definitely use the same amounts as simple construction costs for the PC. They all used to use something called auto_calc that did the calculated the costs in game. Most were migrated to the explicit costs due to some performance issues. However, auto_calc is back which is why I’ve added that 3rd shelter and made some other minor additions. A bit of that high cost is because it’s adding in the implied cost of roofing with floors, neither of which would be needed in an existing building.
Integrating the faction camp “mission” bulletin board system and some other aspects of NPC control like the kcal storage and radio communication also need to be considered if we move to the zone system.
Oh, we probably also need smarter NPCs in general, city living isn’t a strength for them.
Yeah I played around and you 2 are right. It’s just when I’m constructing the buildings myself you have incremental progress and it just seems like it’s taking less time/resources idk maybe it’s just me.
Makes sense, I’m constantly shocked at the costs. The real answer is probably a good audit of construction recipes and then update the camps to the new values. IMO camps have been at this cross-roads for a while, since we lost the most prolific NPC coder. I could keep making blueprint style camps and expansions, but it seems like a waste when I know the zone system would be over all much better for this purpose.
Blueprinted full OMT expansions may have a role in the far future, for example, have the core building be pre-existing but allow a player to use the blueprint expansions if they have the free land. More a convenience for the player then anything. This approach means I’d want to add multiple variations of the kitchen so players get more choice. Alternatively, if NPC’s ever get smart enough, they could use the faction system to start their own camps and players would use the zone system.
I’m currently reworking the current base camp construction (purely JSON so far, so constrained to what that can do), and the auto_recal works fine.
However, what I’m doing is probably not what the two people who have had opinions about it want, as I’m trying to use the area available as well as possible, while the commenters seem to want it as small as possible.
I’d like to see it when it’s done.
I’ve recently been trying to figure out a way to make a “mini-camp” option. Which would be a 3x3 tile area that you can lay out in any building (bulletin board, brazier, table and water pump). It’d offer the bare minimum of the camp features, but allow you to do the missions like gathering, recruiting, etc. However, I haven’t found a good way to implement it in json only.
It’s purpose would be for small city bases to make dealing with urban environment NPCs easier.
Here’s the thread for the base camp rework https://discourse.cataclysmdda.org/t/field-base-camp-adjustments/24924. I’m a bit over half way when it comes to expansions, with the Storage and Workshop remaining to be reworked.
The problem with player camp options currently is that there’s too much that’s hard coded that needn’t be. Something relatively simple I’d like to see is a code modification that allowed you to declare your player base variant in a JSON file (by adding it to the list). Then the camp would have another JSON list of expansions the base supported (so you can add various kinds of expansions). I’d also want to “export” knowledge of the relative location of an expansion so that the JSON format would be able to make blueprints available based on that by requiring the northwest, north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest or west token to be be present.
As it currently stands, it seems you have to replace one of the other player camp versions to make a mini camp, but if you can just get to that starting point I don’t see that much of a problem to provide the functionality that’s currently available to a base camp to be provided by it (I don’t know about a pump on the second floor of a building, nor in a basement).
When it comes to player camp wish lists, I’d like to see support for the third dimension (at least a basement), with zones available across Z levels.
Z levels is high on my wishlist too. Especially for city camps.
Mini camps could be added, but you’d need to specify every valid omt as a new entry and also designate where in that omt the little 3x3 update_mapgen would be placed. Im sure someone could code a more permissive system though so I haven’t followed through.
You can do it backwards with a “I’ve done it, promise” system. I.e. you build a pump and then activate the “I’ve built a pump” action, with would open up whatever recipes you want to tie to that.
However, a coded blueprint selection location support (similar to how you make construction zones, essentially) would be a lot better.
Honor system isn’t a great solution. I really look forward to an expanded zone system for sure. Until then, thanks for doing a pass through the current system to improve it.