Fumigation Chamber/Trap

[Wally-kun]

I was recently thinking about the best way to go about constructing traps to wipe out creatures or to just better handle large groups safely. Before I’m armored up and invulnerable, direct confrontation with an enemy is dangerous. I could get hurt. I could get killed. I don’t want to waste ammo or endanger myself.

Huge spike pits work, but the issue is that at some point I still have to beat down the creatures that I lure into it. Not AS dangerous, but still possibly risky. A hulk only has to hit me once to send me flying.

I considered fumigation traps of some sort, like a smoke chamber to suffocate creatures in, but zombies don’t breathe. Nor do fungi, which means fungal farms aren’t feasible that way. Animals are kind of scarce so I can’t really use it on them, or else I could chase a deer into it or something…NPC’s are ok, but they can open doors if they’re hostile and they might have guns. Murder isn’t always a feasible option.

I guess it’d work on triffids, but I don’t know how useful that’d be. They can bust doors down as well. They’re also not the easiest things to find compared to the other things in the world.

What kind of intricate traps have people come up with to help me put down large groups of creatures? Something other than explosive landmines or things like turrets or other high-end stuff the average joe might not be able to find.

[Coolthulhu]

The problem with traps is their large cost of production. That’s why pit traps are useful, but land mines too expensive (except the ones you find randomly around the world).

Rather than traps, something more like a dangerous terrain would be useful. We have barbed wire, but that’s not that useful against stuff that doesn’t bleed.

Something like a giant nailboard (spikeboard) could be nice. Combined with tripwires/slippery oil, it could trip smaller and less agile zombies and impale them, becoming less effective until corpses are removed.

Against zombies, the traps don’t need to be hidden well. Zombies will blunder into even the most obvious traps.

[Wally-kun]

Actually I’ve seen zombies slowly grind themselves down on barbed wire fence until they die, like it was a giant cheese grater. I’ve also seen animals snare themselves and die on them. Barbed wire is actually a very effective attrition-based land hazard that kills more things than one would normally expect. It’s also next to impossible to produce unless one happens upon a length of chain-link fence.

The trap things themselves aren’t what I’m concerned about; bear traps and the like aren’t feasible until I’m ready to just straight up one-v-one something myself. I’m talking like, a little shed set up in the middle of nowhere that you run monsters through, slam the door shut, sneak around, shut the door behind them, and then do something to fill the room with some kind of substance that kills them. Ideally something besides fire, because wood is an ideal construction material. Also if the walls break and the roof collapses before they’re dead, they could just crawl out and get you that way.

A lot of stuff doesn’t breathe. Triffids do, so a smoke trap would work eventually. Does tear gas do damage to stuff that doesn’t breathe?

[Coolthulhu]

Does tear gas do damage to stuff that doesn’t breathe?

Nope.

There’s no good substance to “drown” zombies in.
Acid is expensive and destroys everything
Fire destroys everything
Gases need to be breathed in or otherwise absorbed. If someone added a poison gas that is (slowly) absorbed through skin, it could work, but wouldn’t be too effective and would require strong walls to keep the zombies in long enough for it to work.
Radiation kills too slowly to matter.

[Wally-kun]

This is what we need poison for. It slowly kills something and has the consequence of turning any butchered meat into tainted meat - except you don’t care when you’re killing zombies. We need something nice and potent to brew up later and poison your arrows with it. Hulks still terrify me even late game.

[Sundaysmile]

If I ever needed to kill a Shocker Brute or anything big and killy, i’d typically fill a house with cheap traps and obstacles designed to slow someone down.

Then i’d get his attention, run into the house, take the “safe” path through it all, wait for the bugger to break down the door and then molotov him and trap him inside by blocking the exit with furniture. The house will burn down, but hey… It’s one less Brute to worry about when you’re starting off.

[Wally-kun]

Except then the house collapses and brings in a horde with about 6 brutes and a hulk and a zombie master…

[Sundaysmile]

I’ve never had that issue, even then, they’ll go towards the collapsed house, and its not like you wanna hang around a pile of rubble afterwards right?

[Pthalocy]

When I bother with base construction, I like to set it up so there’s a strip of lava involved near the obvious entrance. It means I can’t loot the corpses of any Edmund-seeking mobs, but it helps a lot. I generally set up my entrance so mobs attempt to cross the lava to get to me rather than take the long way around to find the actual door. I still have to resort to spike pits for the rare ones that get past the lava, but it means a lot less work on my part.

[jaked122]

When I bother with base construction, I like to set it up so there’s a strip of lava involved near the obvious entrance. It means I can’t loot the corpses of any Edmund-seeking mobs, but it helps a lot. I generally set up my entrance so mobs attempt to cross the lava to get to me rather than take the long way around to find the actual door. I still have to resort to spike pits for the rare ones that get past the lava, but it means a lot less work on my part.

That’s fantastic.
Also “Now you’re thinking with magma!”

[Rivet]

When I bother with base construction, I like to set it up so there’s a strip of lava involved near the obvious entrance. It means I can’t loot the corpses of any Edmund-seeking mobs, but it helps a lot. I generally set up my entrance so mobs attempt to cross the lava to get to me rather than take the long way around to find the actual door. I still have to resort to spike pits for the rare ones that get past the lava, but it means a lot less work on my part.

Edmund, are you a dorf?

[Pthalocy]

Very maybe.

[Blaze]

Blade traps. If you can soak the hit (with heavy armor), you can disassemble it and get the components back too. Electric motors aren’t too difficult to find, with the amount of vehicles out there.

I make a small 2-trap wide circle of blade traps and set a truck horn on the inside with a remote control; although a string of wires will work just the same.

Honk the horn, zombies go to the horn and get shredded by the blades, most zombies go down in 2-3 hits.

[dakenho]

pit traps + gasoline?

[TheWumpus]

If only we could mod something like Sarin into the game. Since it works on skin contact it’d WRECK zeds because it’d basically melt their nervous systems…at the very least they’d be severely slowed, impaired to hit, blind, and unable to dodge. And yes, I know it works by inhibiting neurotransmitters that allow muscles to relax. Of course mustard gas is a blistering agent and that could slow/weaken zeds as well…

Or you could, ya know, stash a couple bottles of alcohol inside a structure and then chuck a molotov at it while it’s full of zeds. That always works. Not as glorious, and less on the fumigation, but a very effective trap all the same.

[Thwap]

When I bother with base construction, I like to set it up so there’s a strip of lava involved near the obvious entrance. It means I can’t loot the corpses of any Edmund-seeking mobs, but it helps a lot. I generally set up my entrance so mobs attempt to cross the lava to get to me rather than take the long way around to find the actual door. I still have to resort to spike pits for the rare ones that get past the lava, but it means a lot less work on my part.

What are you doing that there are still monsters around by the time a base is finished? Because I’d like to build one but there doesn’t seem to be any point.

[Wally-kun]

[quote=“Pthalocy, post:9, topic:10297”]When I bother with base construction, I like to set it up so there’s a strip of lava involved near the obvious entrance. It means I can’t loot the corpses of any Edmund-seeking mobs, but it helps a lot. I generally set up my entrance so mobs attempt to cross the lava to get to me rather than take the long way around to find the actual door. I still have to resort to spike pits for the rare ones that get past the lava, but it means a lot less work on my part.

What are you doing that there are still monsters around by the time a base is finished? Because I’d like to build one but there doesn’t seem to be any point.[/quote]

Hordes. There’s always at least one on the edge of your peripheral vision at any given moment 90% of the time. If there are any zombies within a 10 mile radius, anyway.