Heirloom items/stashes

[Sharklaser]

Each evac shelter has special safe that can accomodate 5 items. Any live character can PUT items into evac shelter heirloom safes but cannot take those items away for themselves, so its not a container but one way thing - previous items in occupied slots gets erased. This safe is global (yea, it breaks realism, just bear with me) so only five different items can exist in these safes at any time. Also the content of these safes survives trough the world reset.

New characters can choose “Heirloom” perk that costs 1 background point. Before the game begins three random items from the heirloom stash are locked and character can choose one of the two remaining.

“Grand Heirloom” perk locks just one item, allows character to pick 1 and other is rolled randomly - this option costs 3 background points.

Empty heirloom spaces are filled automatically with moderately useful randomly selected stuff: big stacks of non-spoling foods, first aid kits, piles of bandages, decent piles of often used ammo, backpacks etc etc - nothing high level like purification flasks or jellies or HC bionics.

This way you could “donate” nice stuff to your future characters.

[Zireael]

Sounds like a nice idea.

[Sharklaser]

One possible tweak to idea:

To make donation you need 3x money bundles accompanied with the item you want to donate. I mean, having extradimensional storage service is not exactly the cheapest thing to upkeep.

[vache]

I kind of disagree with this. The early game is the real hard and most intense part of the game. If you fill your save with nodachis or power armors or whatever have you, you can skip a lot of this difficulty. Granted, you don’t have to use it, but I think the flattening of the early game difficulty curve is something to avoid.

[Hyena_Grin]

Ehhh.

I mean it’s a clever idea, but I feel like if you want to ‘leave stuff’ for your characters you can do that simply by not making a new world every time you make a new character. Just go find your stash. I’ve done it a few times. Personally I find it takes a lot of the fun out of the game, to stumble onto your old stockpile of supplies early on. Having access to stuff on day one would just kinda take the challenge out altogether.

I dunno! It’s not a directly harmful suggestion. Easily avoidable for those that don’t want to use it. So I’m not against it, per se, but I wouldn’t use it myself.

[Sharklaser]

Btw that naturally occuring “leave stash” option is far more gamebreaking than heirloom safe.

When I was noob in this game I did characters that had only dodge/dex/parkour/speed perk would simply run into gun store/pawn shops, loot it and when the brutes reached me I’d just throw stuff towards city border, rinse, repeat until one character had enough supplies to über the game from the start.

[kevin.granade]

I’m against having this be something where a character leaves stuff for later characters, there’s just no rationale for it, and it enshrines the causality-warp we have in the game as an actual mechanic instead of just being a bug of the implementation we turn a blind eye on.

I’m not totally opposed to the trait though, “prepper lite” or similar, cause a stash of handy stuff to spawn nearby-ish on your map, and marked so you can go hunt it down. It’d be fairly points light, because you still have to go find the thing. First aid kits, water purifier, a gun and some ammo. It’d give some nice direction to an early game.

[EkarusRyndren]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:7, topic:3518”]I’m against having this be something where a character leaves stuff for later characters, there’s just no rationale for it, and it enshrines the causality-warp we have in the game as an actual mechanic instead of just being a bug of the implementation we turn a blind eye on.

I’m not totally opposed to the trait though, “prepper lite” or similar, cause a stash of handy stuff to spawn nearby-ish on your map, and marked so you can go hunt it down. It’d be fairly points light, because you still have to go find the thing. First aid kits, water purifier, a gun and some ammo. It’d give some nice direction to an early game.[/quote]

Merge it with the survivalist profession and up the cost. Have it replace a building in the nearest city and add a note to your mini-map “My House”

Pre-Fortified, guns, etc, etc.

[i2amroy]

I’m against having this be something where a character leaves stuff for later characters, there’s just no rationale for it, and it enshrines the causality-warp we have in the game as an actual mechanic instead of just being a bug of the implementation we turn a blind eye on.

This right here. Besides, we already have a method of getting the stuff from your old character; by hunting down their body and finding the stuff (which should become much more exciting when your old characters start to revive as zombies and you have to kill them again before they let you harvest them.

That said I think I might have just stumbled upon a potential way to make the game continuous in the calendar at least and remove a bit of the time warp (so that new characters in the same world start at whatever turn the old character died on). I can’t take too deep of a look at it right now, but maybe later I’ll see if I can work something out.

[Endovior]

add a note to your mini-map “My House”

Actually, that’d be an interesting addition in general. Everyone should live somewhere, after all, though some people will have more useful possessions than others. Maybe you can find personal items of sentimental value (family pictures and such), or scenes of personal distress (your zombified family is still home, and wants to eat you). Generally speaking, military and survivalist types should have better stashes at home, while people with job skills should have appropriate professional supplies. Even a penniless hobo might have a stash hidden behind a dumpster or something.

[EkarusRyndren]

[quote=“EkarusRyndren, post:8, topic:3518”]add a note to your mini-map “My House”

Actually, that’d be an interesting addition in general. Everyone should live somewhere, after all, though some people will have more useful possessions than others. Maybe you can find personal items of sentimental value (family pictures and such), or scenes of personal distress (your zombified family is still home, and wants to eat you). Generally speaking, military and survivalist types should have better stashes at home, while people with job skills should have appropriate professional supplies. Even a penniless hobo might have a stash hidden behind a dumpster or something.[/quote]

…This is a great idea XD I hadn’t even thought of that, hell having a “My House” for a shower victim would be great XD

YOU HAVE ONE GOAL: GET HOME, GET SOME PANTS.

[VampyreLord]

[quote=“EkarusRyndren, post:8, topic:3518”][quote=“Kevin Granade, post:7, topic:3518”]I’m against having this be something where a character leaves stuff for later characters, there’s just no rationale for it, and it enshrines the causality-warp we have in the game as an actual mechanic instead of just being a bug of the implementation we turn a blind eye on.

I’m not totally opposed to the trait though, “prepper lite” or similar, cause a stash of handy stuff to spawn nearby-ish on your map, and marked so you can go hunt it down. It’d be fairly points light, because you still have to go find the thing. First aid kits, water purifier, a gun and some ammo. It’d give some nice direction to an early game.[/quote]

Merge it with the survivalist profession and up the cost. Have it replace a building in the nearest city and add a note to your mini-map “My House”

Pre-Fortified, guns, etc, etc.[/quote]The fun of the game is to try and hunt down several items and build your own fortified place yourself not try and hunt down a pre-stashed candy box full of goodies, where’s the fun in that?

Plus, you can already find nice loot such as the dead army guys.

[EkarusRyndren]

The fun of the game is to try and hunt down several items and build your own fortified place yourself not try and hunt down a pre-stashed candy box full of goodies, where’s the fun in that?

Nothing says any of these places have to be in pristine condition. Besides, nothing says you have to go and loot these places. It’s just that /clearly/ you didn’t poof teleport from where ever you were to the Evac center. That said there’s also nothing that says you weren’t for example visiting a friend/family member in town when the shit hit the fan (Thus leaving you without the ‘Your House’ advantage)

On top of all that, retrieving your crap from a city? Total cake-walk. Definitely advisable as your first move in the game.

[VampyreLord]

[quote=“VampyreLord, post:12, topic:3518”]The fun of the game is to try and hunt down several items and build your own fortified place yourself not try and hunt down a pre-stashed candy box full of goodies, where’s the fun in that?

Nothing says any of these places have to be in pristine condition. Besides, nothing says you have to go and loot these places. It’s just that /clearly/ you didn’t poof teleport from where ever you were to the Evac center. That said there’s also nothing that says you weren’t for example visiting a friend/family member in town when the shit hit the fan (Thus leaving you without the ‘Your House’ advantage)

On top of all that, retrieving your crap from a city? Total cake-walk. Definitely advisable as your first move in the game.[/quote]I don’t know. As long as it is an option like merging it with the survivalist profession, I see no harm in that.

[Zireael]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:7, topic:3518”]I’m against having this be something where a character leaves stuff for later characters, there’s just no rationale for it, and it enshrines the causality-warp we have in the game as an actual mechanic instead of just being a bug of the implementation we turn a blind eye on.

I’m not totally opposed to the trait though, “prepper lite” or similar, cause a stash of handy stuff to spawn nearby-ish on your map, and marked so you can go hunt it down. It’d be fairly points light, because you still have to go find the thing. First aid kits, water purifier, a gun and some ammo. It’d give some nice direction to an early game.[/quote]

I like this idea a lot.

[Birdie]

You used to start inside a house, I still remember my first game of Cata, and my starting house’s layout.(mostly…)
I’d love to be able to start in a house again, but that will probably come with time.
If you have the highest possible city size set, and skip through the debug messages of “Can’t find evac shelter!” You’ll likely end up in a building skirting the edge of town. In my experience, anyway. So there’s that.

[kevin.granade]

Yea, spawning in various different locations right at the beginning is a goal, we actually have some things going in right now that might make it playable, specifically the ability to “peek” through curtains or boarded-up windows without revealing yourself, that way you could spawn in a house, even in the middle of town, and get your shit together before braving the hordes. When you spawn in a house we’d automatically have all the curtains start out closed.

We could have several levels of a prepper trait, one where there’s a stash somewhere with a few things, one where we mark a prepper house in a town, possibly a stocked cabin, and the ultimate, your very own LMOE shelter. Of course as the level scales up they get progressively harder to get to… (the LMOE shelter migth be completely on the other side of the map from you)

I’m liking how this could go, we could start you out with a quest similar to one of the NPC quests, but for YOU instead of for the NPC, possibly even quest chains totally independent of NPCs. I’ve wanted item-based and site-based quests anyway.

[GlyphGryph]

I’m not totally opposed to the trait though, “prepper lite” or similar, cause a stash of handy stuff to spawn nearby-ish on your map, and marked so you can go hunt it down. It’d be fairly points light, because you still have to go find the thing. First aid kits, water purifier, a gun and some ammo. It’d give some nice direction to an early game.

This sort of thing would probably be better wrapped into the scenarios system we’re putting together after z-levels, instead of having it as a trait of some sort. Especially since the whole point of the scenario system will be to drop you in interesting places and give you a set of immediate goals.

[kevin.granade]

That’s fine, but I’d rather transition it from a trait to a whatever it turns into than put it off.

Most of the work is going to be the code to find an appropriate place to stick the thing anyway, which is going to be shared.

[Hyena_Grin]

Starting quests attached to professions would also be interesting. Maybe some of the starting gear you get with professions could be tucked away somewhere, or maybe you know that your car is parked at the closest mine, etc. Or maybe it’s just a flavor quest - find your daughter, or something along those lines.

But yeah, I’ve been wanting different starting locations for ages. It’s one change I’m reeeeally looking forward to. Trumped only by Z-Levels, really. And maybe stealth mechanics.