A place away from the city with a lot of ‘junk’. Should be safer than cities with a low hostile density.
I think there should be two types of items:
Everyday waste
Appliances
The first will be plastic bags, bottles, tins and the like, perhaps some out of date food.
The second will be fridges, cookers, motors, etc. which can be disassembled into useful parts, e.g. copper wire, fluid pump, scrap metal etc. Tools could be found as well, but it is highly likely they will be damaged.
It should be time consuming to collect and disassemble appliances there, so it would be more time efficient to go into town, but safer. The everyday waste can be picked up easily.
I this want since I spend most of my time on the outskirts of highly populated cities, and seem not to be able to enter. Think of this as a low-efficiency low-tier gearing up place.
To cut down on lag associated with having a lot of items on screen, you should be able to sift though the trash (similar to how you pick vegetables from brush, but with many more uses per rubbish pile).
Possible enemies:
-Dogs
-Zombies (low numbers)
-Burrowing Giant insects (not ants in their current state, I think they would be too difficult, say a large beetle (size of a dog, but lives in colonies))
I like the idea, but I’m not sure about putting lots of appliances and things there. I imagine you’d be able to build some pretty good forges/electronics/mechanical things from a few fridges and cookers.
Again, I think this would be great if it was mostly actual trash and a few bits, but we’d need to be careful for it not to be ‘safe-ish place where you can stock up on parts’
I’ve brought up yunk yards, and recycling centers, before in other threads and it “feels” like it’d be good. One thing to remember too, is that this is the “not-too-distant-future” and we already recycle pretty extensively in much of the US (and with the North-East being more liberal, they may recycle even more than the average) so it could be pretty easy to just “lore” yourself out of the need for junk yards and garbage dumps all together or at least limit their contents based on that. I doubt you’d see many appliances, since you don’t really just throw those out in the trash right now anyway, etc.
Then how about we add recycling centers then. High risk and high reward, they’ve got massive amounts of zombie employees countered with lots of extra unprocessed goodies as well as piles of steel, metal, and plastics.
I know it is a few years into the future. But there will still be surface dumps, which may still not be used.
Concerning the easy to get a forge up question. Many of the components will be very broken, and you may not even find anything. It would take a long time to get anything and these will be remote, so it will be a long trip to get to one, so you’ll probably need to stay there over night if you want to do anything.
I do like the idea of recycling centres, but not all materials are recyclable, thermosetting plastics are difficult to recycle, so these would be dumped.
Perhaps we could have some of the recycling centre area with more useful renewable but with a some zombies inside, and the dump right next to it with fewer zombies.
Of course this needs to be balanced. But considering you can go into a city if you have the initial population density low enough and de-construct any metal object, plus there are the Craters which have a lot of scrap metal there.
Think of their placement similar to where sewer works are.
Have a look at what is found at a landfill site, that’s pretty much what you’ll find, most of it will be completely worthless but you can find some ‘gems’ in the rough.
Balancing may be difficult, but there needs to be an easy area to get basic materials to progress, especially if you like using bows like me so can’t handle a hoard like some people can with armoured cars.