First post, general game reactions and comments

Game Talk The Bunker
1

So, I’ve been playing this a lot recently. Started about a week before 0.C introduced monsters fighting each other, almost rage-quit over the silly “police robots only attack you, and zombies leave them alone” thing… 0.C came along exactly in time - good job, devs!

Anyway, on to other comments:

-Blobs. Seriously, the whole map is being taken over by them. I’m playing on 20x zombie spawn, I just passed my first year in this game, and I’ve killed almost as many blobs as I have zombies. That’s bloody silly. I first found them about 3 months in, 10-15 tiles from my home area, and now they’re almost to my base. The idea is nice, the execution is crazy.

-Blobs bonus: half the time, when you hit them, they spawn more… which triggers the safe mode stuff. GAH!! BLOBS.

-Related to blobs - is there any kind of repeatable area-effect attack other than fire? I don’t want to burn the world, especially since…

-out-of-area doesn’t really work properly. I started with the “bad day” thing, the when I went back to the area just recently (almost a year later), the house was still burning. Yes, I get that things are unloaded when you aren’t around (I’m a programmer, I get it, really), but there needs to be some attempt at dealing with the passage of time when it gets loaded again.

-Speaking of burning buildings, the “big box” buildings collapse WAY too fast - starting with a building on fire in a furniture store (or other “big box” style building), I literally can’t leave before it collapses on me about half the time. I had one game when it collapsed when I took my first step.

-I have a towel that never dries out. Occasionally, I get meat that never cools. I think this happens (but only sometimes) when I drop something (the towel or the meat), then go downstairs.

-Integrated toolset - it’s buggy. You can use it instead of several things, which makes sense… but only if you have those things on hand to trigger it. The integrated toolset needs a way to be actively used. Some way to use it for plastic repairs, for instance (since it counts as a soldering iron).

-Is there a way to refill or unload something without picking it up? I shouldn’t have to pick up my 55-gallon drum of water to fill my waterskin from it, for instance.

-Is there some way to clear rubble other than individually confirming EVERY. SINGLE. SPOT? With so many zombies, there are so many zombie MASTERS, which means so many big guys to collapse a lot of buildings, and it’s taking forever (real time, not game time) to clear them.

-Some of the recipes should scale. Smoking meat, for instance… it should take longer, but be you should be able to smoke a LOT of meat at once… meat is quite plentiful (there’s an anthill nearby), but preserving it takes FOREVER. Otherwise, I have to go hunting every day. Something like the charcoal kiln, where you start it and come back 6 hours later sounds about right (real smokers work a lot like that - 6-12 hours later, it’s done).

-Do the sewers ever run out of water? Seems infinite and easy. Pools are the same. Rivers, too, of course, but that’s as it should be.

-Is there any kind of ending? I see posts about late-game activities (labs, toxic waste sarcophagus, etc)… just wondering. Found some black boxes, I’m thinking there’s probably something with that?

-Any use for money other than vending machines? Also, being able to melt down the leftover money cards into plastic chunks would be nice… I’m coming up on 1000 of them. I think I could actually make a recipe for that, just tried yet.

-Any fun uses for lava? I ran into it a little in a few early games (had one where the stairs in the evac shelter dropped me into a pool of it, heh), but I haven’t seen any of it in my current game, so I haven’t experimented any. Does it provide light? Count as nearby fire?

-With static NPCs, do you ever find any besides the starter? I haven’t…

I know there’s more, but that’s probably already too much for a first post… heh.

Smegging BLOBS! :-/

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Related to blobs - is there any kind of repeatable area-effect attack other than fire? I don't want to burn the world

OK, I answered this one for myself (though other suggestions are welcome, of course!).

Chain Lightning bionic. WOW.

Have to be careful not to get yourself (especially at night with the low visibility), and it’s pretty pretty energy intensive, but WOW. Light up the universe, especially if you fire two or three shots in succession - they seem to build on each other. Doesn’t fix the blob problem, but it definitely helps.

Zap.

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[quote=“deoxy, post:1, topic:9212”]1. Blobs
2. Blobs bonus (splitting)
3. Related to blobs (AoE)
4. out-of-area doesn’t really work properly
5. Speaking of burning buildings, the “big box” buildings collapse WAY too fast
6. I have a towel that never dries out. Occasionally, I get meat that never cools.
7. Integrated toolset - it’s buggy
8. Is there a way to refill or unload something without picking it up?
9. Is there some way to clear rubble other than individually confirming EVERY. SINGLE. SPOT?
10. Some of the recipes should scale. Smoking meat, for instance… it should take longer, but be you should be able to smoke a LOT of meat at once…
11. Do the sewers ever run out of water? Seems infinite and easy. Pools are the same. Rivers, too, of course, but that’s as it should be.
12. Is there any kind of ending?
13. Any use for money other than vending machines?
14. Any fun uses for lava? Does it provide light? Count as nearby fire?
15. With static NPCs, do you ever find any besides the starter? I haven’t…[/quote]

Edited the quote so that it’s easier to answer.

  1. Blobs: You are near a slime pit. Around those, you’re bound to get flooded. Outside that, blobs are quite rare.
  2. Blobs are supposed to overwhelm you with numbers, “clog” you down. I agree that it could be tweaked in some ways, but I don’t recall anyone suggesting how.
  3. Unlike in Dwarf Fortress, here grass doesn’t burn. Fire only spreads to adjacent tiles. You can sacrifice a house - burning house is loud, which attracts blobs. Blobs are too dumb to avoid fire.
  4. Game would be unbearably slow if fires burned outside your immediate area. Notice how slow fires are at the moment. If someone has a really good solution, I’d love to hear it because I’ll need something good for when I’ll be updating fields.
  5. Fire is kinda hard to balance, but I agree - it takes an hour to grow from small to medium, then like 5 turns to grow into a raging inferno, then 20 turns to destroy the entire building.
  6. Certainly a bug, but I’m pretty sure there was at least one attempted fix for it recently. It SHOULD work fine in 0.C. If it doesn’t, try experimentals.
  7. Toolset is not buggy, it’s just that no one implemented using the contained tools as tools because reasons. I don’t know why, but if the reason was just laziness/lack of time, it would be quite easy to make it work now.
  8. I don’t think there is a method that works with liquids. Check experimentals. Though in this case it’s semi-realistic - IRL you’d probably need a hose to drain the drum.
  9. Yes, but only in experimentals. There it simply doesn’t ask you when clearing rubble, unless there is something important (monster) on the rubble.
  10. They do, but only when you use batch crafting. Instead of pressing enter when selecting a recipe, press ‘b’. A lot of recipes has a much lower time when you produce items in big batches.
  11. They never run out. You can think of them as being refilled by rain or something like that. Making them run out wouldn’t change much, because they should realistically contain like 500 units of water per tile, so you’d never really run out anyway.
  12. No. Maybe someday you’ll be able to turn into fungus king or venture into alien realms or something like that, but I think the devs have explicitly said they don’t want to force the players to end the game after “winning”.
  13. Buying gasoline and trading with NPCs. You can’t steal gas from some gas stations, that’s where money comes in handy.
  14. Both light and crafting. You can also lead zeds into it and dispose trash there. No DF-style magma crafting (lava/magma IRL generally isn’t hot enough to melt iron)
  15. There are big NPC encampments and bandit cabins. Both quite rare.
4

Thanks for the answers. Further questions, then:

  1. Define “near” - I have explored a pretty good radius and can’t find one.

  2. Apply time when it gets reloaded. Don’t do anything with the mobs except apply damage if appropriate, as few of the monsters are smart enough to move, anyway. Shortcuts could be taken, as it just needs to be approximate. If a structure was on fire a year ago, simply pick a random percentage of damage (I have seen them go out, so clearly they don’t always burn all the way down) and apply in the manner fire would happen (adjacent squares) until the number of squares is achieved. All squares are totally burned, except maybe the last few. Done. Should only take a moment, as you aren’t doing anything else.

  3. The towel might be left from 0.B. The meat is definitely happening in 0.C

  4. Nifty - I’ll have to try batch crafting - sounds VERY helpful (when you have 100+ meat or tainted fat…)

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[quote=“deoxy, post:4, topic:9212”]1. Define “near” - I have explored a pretty good radius and can’t find one.

  1. Apply time when it gets reloaded. Don’t do anything with the mobs except apply damage if appropriate, as few of the monsters are smart enough to move, anyway. Shortcuts could be taken, as it just needs to be approximate. If a structure was on fire a year ago, simply pick a random percentage of damage (I have seen them go out, so clearly they don’t always burn all the way down) and apply in the manner fire would happen (adjacent squares) until the number of squares is achieved. All squares are totally burned, except maybe the last few. Done. Should only take a moment, as you aren’t doing anything else.[/quote]

  2. It may be possible that you just got a small number of blobs and they multiplied, but it sounds unlikely. Blobs grow when in reality bubble (the area around you, roughly 60 tiles to each of north, south, west and east), but they do so slowly. You’d need to spend about a day near them for them to seriously multiply.
    The spawn range is quite big, I think around 10 overmap tiles.

  3. But then you’ve got things like rain, trapped NPCs, items to burn, big buildings you set on fire a week ago etc.
    Plus, you’d have to ensure the entire possible area is loaded before you start simulating the burning and you’d have to simulate the burning until you run out of burnable squares (which could take forever). Otherwise you could approach the burning building from a different direction and totally change the result.
    Finally, you’d have to ensure the system handles both short time lapses and entire years.

It probably is doable, but it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Mostly due to the tons of variables you have to track and the expensive calculations fire performs at the moment.

6

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:5, topic:9212”]4. But then you’ve got things like rain, trapped NPCs, items to burn, big buildings you set on fire a week ago etc.
Plus, you’d have to ensure the entire possible area is loaded before you start simulating the burning and you’d have to simulate the burning until you run out of burnable squares (which could take forever). Otherwise you could approach the burning building from a different direction and totally change the result.
Finally, you’d have to ensure the system handles both short time lapses and entire years.

It probably is doable, but it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Mostly due to the tons of variables you have to track and the expensive calculations fire performs at the moment.[/quote]

None of those things need to be truly simulated, only randomly approximated - the player wasn’t there to see how it happened, so if the result is plausible, then you win.

NPCs and “intelligent” monsters (don’t know what would go on that list) are unhurt, other monsters in a square that was burned are burned. Roll the dice for if it rained at some point, and stop the damage at a random point.

Assuming chunks are loaded the same way they are generated (whole buildings) you’re going to have everything you need loaded at the same time, barring some serious player intervention/construction. Also, getting different results when coming from different directions doesn’t matter, as the player will only see it once and not know, as long as those results are even close to plausible.

For passage of time, run a few dozen simulations, record how long it burns and how much damage, then make a chart or build a function that returns something similar when it’s called.

Stop thinking you have to do everything - the results of fire in the real world only tell the experts what actually happened, and even then not as well as we tend to think. The rest of us just see that stuff was burned, and if we find a pile of ash in the shape of a building, we will believe a building was there and burned. The game world doesn’t record NEARLY as much detail and is therefore MUCH easier to fake.

Now, a lot of that goes out the window if it’s a forest fire…

7

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:5, topic:9212”]1. It may be possible that you just got a small number of blobs and they multiplied, but it sounds unlikely. Blobs grow when in reality bubble (the area around you, roughly 60 tiles to each of north, south, west and east), but they do so slowly. You’d need to spend about a day near them for them to seriously multiply.
The spawn range is quite big, I think around 10 overmap tiles.[/quote]

I went looking at the abilities, and I think if I remove the “formblob” ability, it should end the spawning.

For balancing, I think you could add some kind of formblob cap - maybe it only functions while there are less than a certain number of blobs loaded/in a certain radius (even unloaded - just storing how many blobs are in an unloaded chunk and referencing it without loading the whole thing doesn’t have to be expensive).

Or perhaps remove formblob entirely and make the deathsplit a little more powerful, say, blobs occasionally split into blobs instead of small blobs, and big blobs sometimes split into blobs and sometimes into big blobs instead of small blobs. That make them able to clog up the map without letting them go crazy just by being left alone.

8

Blob counting is doable, but pop limit would have to be quite high for blobs to do their job anyway. You’d still need to genocide nearby blobs not to get flooded.
There actually is a population limit, but it’s global (in the reality bubble) and very high, like 1000 or so.

Blobs will probably be reworked someday (to avoid this reality bubble dependency), but for now try modding it out, blacklisting the blobs, spending more time underground or not staying in one place for too long.

9

on a good note. tons of blobs means you have near infinite superglue. :wink:

how I contained my blob problem in map when I knew I was afraid to go down into the slime pit early on. I setup a 4 tile ‘car’ with flamethrower turret. 4 gas tanks full. Solar power, batteries. and like an electric engine to drive it over there.

I placed it 4 tiles from the opening of the pit. I left the controls, (leaving it on). Then I cleared the city of other blobs. (I believe this is the time I set the city size to like 10… which I’ll never do again… was like hundreds of houses).

That allowed me to clear that area of the town for stuff I needed. I eventually left the place.

Making that thing helped me level my mechanics too. Hardest part was getting the flamethrower. I think I bought it off an NPC or something.

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4. Game would be unbearably slow if fires burned outside your immediate area. Notice how slow fires are at the moment. If someone has a really good solution, I'd love to hear it because I'll need something good for when I'll be updating fields.
Actually I have very complex solution which basically is supposed to save every single CPU-time and every single byte of RAM. I really don't think someone would think to code something like this because it's very complicated. I can explain this one, but it's really hard.
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As for blobs, my base at one time was 5 map squares away from a slime pit.

I just went there and killed all the blobs around in three trips, haven’t seen a single one later even though I traipsed through the area many times.

12

Kinda similar but on one playthrough my starting base was somewhere close to a fungal zone of some sort, and the only ones around were fungaloids. There wasn’t a nearby source of water, so I ended up butchering the fungaloids for them fluid sacs. It was handy, but at the same time it made me nervous at the same time since the fungus might spread out toward my base.

13

As long as you can close a door before they get inside you should be safe. If they get in the doorway though, good luck.
You’ll need to remove plenty of blob goo before you can force it closed. Also try fire.
Also blob glue is a precious resource. Superglue, duct tape and bandages forever.
Also food, if you’re really, really hungry.

Last time I fortified a nice little public works centre, I woke up to find my shelter surrounded by ants. Hundreds of them.
Thankfully, being stupid ants, they couldn’t get inside.

Just pray you don’t make a home too near an anthill or a fungus tower.
Everything is worse with Fungaloids.