I’m not a super big fan of Factorio, but if you played it you might know what I’m thinking. I don’t care about lots of detailed stuff, but the ability to effectively build your own factory with electricity powering your lights, turrets keeping off the enemies, automatic production of various thing you need, it just seems like it would be really cool.
I originally thought of this idea when I was walking around in the dark of night on a path I walk often, and I thought: "Man, it would be soooo nice if I could put some proper lights around here just to make it easier."
I like the idea of effectively the game recognizing the ‘stage’ of progress you are at, and when you reach it the game becomes a ‘bit’ harder. You’ll eventually need actual turrets to protect your base, not just makeshift holes and a bunch of basic traps.
Even with your amazing intellect, tools, and books, some things you just cannot make by hand. This is when it’s time to build up your factory which produces the most powerful items in the game, so that those zombies who are twice as powerful as a hulk can’t ‘recruit’ you so easily.
I dunno if I like the idea of it turning into full blown Factorio, but an actual power system for constructions would be amazing, especially if we could build some sort of nuclear reactor or RTG that powered things indefinitely.
Building your own factory seems a bit silly, but if we could find actual factories and repair them that would be good, or if we could steal the robotic arm equipment in certain areas then repurpose that to make some of the stuff we currently can’t (commercial guns, factory grade ammunition, power armor, solar cells, etc.) then it would help add an extra level of endgame content. Plus, it could be tied into the eventual NPC and basebuilding upgrades.
I don’t really expect or want it to go full Factorio, but if nothing else an electrical system would be cool. I’d very much like to be able to make some of the cooler stuff my self too, like you mentioned about the commercial guns and so on.
Maybe more devices that can passively work could help out with mid/late game. There are some items already in the game, like auto-cooker(?) that doesn’t require your constant participation in cooking. In similar fashion, something that requires precision of manufacturing could be installed and used as “passive” workbench. Like a 3D printer or some sort of centrifuge for working with chemicals, even concrete mixer could run on it’s own.
Some manufacturing robot maybe, like even simpler programmable cutting benches.
When you said robot it suddenly gave me the thought of how awesome it would be to have a little flying robot drone to help me. “Go Rusty! Peek around that corner so that I know if there is a massive horde or not!”
It’s surprising that with all that fancy tech you don’t find an RC quadrocopter in shops. There where RC cars thoe.
Well, the vehicle system can double as an at-home power system if you know what you’re doing. The Wiki actually has a (surprisingly still relevant) page on it.
http://cddawiki.chezzo.com/cdda_wiki/index.php?title=Power#Vehicle
I would LOVE the idea of being able to restart a factory, or at the very least more survivor guns that are actually useful. As I see it now, there are four useful survivor guns: The Pneumatic Bolt Driver, The Pneumatic Assault Rifle, the Nail Rifle and the Coilgun.
The Coilgun could stand to have its own automatic equivalent. They do exist IRL, and if the UPS works the way I think it does (able to deliver a large amount of charge in a short amount of time) surely making a full-auto coilgun can’t be too hard, right?
Problem being, that was made from brand new materials using full modern fabrication techniques. Whereas we have a soldering iron and a hacksaw…
I agree though, having another tier of craftable gear once we appropriate some factory gear, maybe one of the robotic arm things or the machinery you find around the place, would be EXTREMELY awesome. Especially if we could mount a robotic arm to our car and give it a katana to cut through zombie hordes.
Pretty sure that he made his Coilguns using similar materials to what we have available in game. I’m not sure about the one in the video I linked, but he states in this video that he had little to no experience when he started out.
Considering we can make a coilgun more deadly than the one I just linked in game, and making one that shoots on automatic is certainly possible, I don’t think it’s a stretch to make an automatic coilgun in CDDA with post-cataclysm materials.
And if not, we should go back to that idea I had once about Terraria-style NPCs joining you when you had a large enough base (think of what the Tacoma Ranch does in game, currently).
Problem being I suspect he probably used a lathe, laser cutter, stuff like that. He probably even had some bits custom made. We don’t have anything like that. However, if we took over a factory and DID have stuff like that… we could make anything.
Except Superalloy. 
No big loss. It’s kinda crap anyway.
Side Note: In the Design Document, there is this line when describing Mutation Trees:
Elf-a: These folks will become increasingly slime-warped forest-humans. You won’t be able to live among non-mutant humans, but when you appear you’ll have dramatic effects (good & bad) and ought to be able to survive fairly well, provided you didn’t get some of the nastier downsides. Once Research gets into the game, sufficiently science-minded chars might try refining the design.
Ehhh it’s only really crap because there’s not much we can do with it. If we could reinforce our armor with it to make it stronger without raising encumberance, for example, it would be extremely awesome.
O_O Good god…
I suggested something like this on reddit. Can’t remember what Kevin said. But it’d be great to be able to add Scrap Metal, Superalloy or Nomex to your clothes.
Yeah. Maybe someday…
@psyxypher Both of the videos you linked for coilguns suffer from the same problem. Because of the limit on available energy they’re limited to about 20 feet for penetration. As a college project we built one that could hit a target at 300 feet (with no reasonable accuracy, it was a pretty wide target), but the resulting power supply literally took up the entire cargo area of a suburban. The coil gun the military is developing (technically a rail gun) has a power generator and charging bank that takes up almost 1000 square feet and requires half an hour before shots for it to charge (but man is it glorious to watch the videos). In theory the UPS is wizardry in a box that has nuclear level power potential that it can discharge like a capacity.
Why yes, yes it is. You need stuff like that to make any of the cool science stuff that is the hallmark of scifi though. It’s no fun if we need a nuclear reactor in our pants to make pew pew lasers.
Yeah, based on the stats of the ingame coilgun that’s probably about correct. If you compare it to a conventional gun or a bow or something it’s fairly pathetic.
Between jumper cables and vehicles, you could have a “static” base consisting of a power generating vehicle and/or solar array, a stone wall, a series of pits, a series of 1x1 tile turrets (2x1 if using funnel+watercannons), a few floodlights, and a vehicle with a crafting array.
To make such a base “feel” static as opposed to just being an extension to existing mobile bases, I’d recommend adding a new series of vehicle parts. They would be extremely powerful, but so heavy that any vehicle they are attached to would be forced to be stationary. I’m talking 9,000,000 tons heavy, far beyond the lifting capacity of any vehicle (excluding impractical monstrosities like the Big Bertha).
Nuclear Reactor: More efficient than the micro/advanced reactor CBMs due to economies of scale, would produce upwards of 10k power per uranium, and would automatically turn off when batteries are full.
Fusion Reactor: Produces as much power as a 10x10 grid of quantum solar panels in a single day for no significant cost. Downside: Attracts hordes and nearby overmap tiles may get invaded by portals.
RTG: Produces a very small amount of power, constantly, forever, at no cost. Light enough that you could mount an RTG or two on a vehicle if it was big enough, but still too heavy to be practical on mobile vehicles.
Advanced Forge: Can only be charged by a nuclear or better reactor. Cannot be charged by traditional vehicle batteries. Required to craft and enhance advanced weapons.
Stone Pelter: Large turret that uses stones as ammo. Due to it’s shoddy construction, it must be weighed down with dirt to mitigate recoil - this makes it too heavy to be practical on a mobile vehicle.
I’d say a mod of this nature would be quite feasible. Blazemod probably contains all the json’s and code you’d need as a template to make a base construction mod. Even the advanced forge wouldn’t be much harder than making a new vehicle tool, giving it a new ammo type, and only allowing certain reactors to produce that ammo.
Summoning hordes might be trickier, but generating noise is easy and adding hordes shouldn’t be too difficult.
That’s not a bad idea, but some of the parts you suggested are problematic.
Fusion Reactors are still in their infancy and probably won’t be done by the time period used in the game. They would also probably have to be massive.
A better reactor would be really nice, but I believe the efficiency of a part is tied to the fuel. However, you could make an isotope centrifuge or something along those lines to make a new fuel.
RTGs would be awesome, but I’d prefer if Plutonium Cells were changed to act like RTGs instead of their current weird implementation. Failing that, RTGs themselves would be cool.
An advanced forge could be interesting but it would probably have to be set up so that it must be attached to a reactor rather than using something from it, since I don’t think a vehicle part can both use and produce a fuel. However, there’s not a lot that it could be used for other than perhaps making superalloy or something else suitably high-tech.
A stone pelter sounds boring and Blazemod already has one. Why not a massive railgun? A giant electrolaser? Something really worthy of being attached to a survivor’s base.
If just making vehicles static is the intention, what about a set of concrete parts? Frames, armor, boards, quarterboards, etc. Massive reinforced steel doors. Something on par with a concrete bunker for the survivor with everything else. Strong enough to take hits from a hulk without scratching and heavy enough that you would need reinforced caterpillar tracks on every tile to move it (slowly).