I have no arms yet I must fight

Game Talk The Bunker
1

Title is a joke, question is somewhat serious: what options do I have left when I’ve got two broken arms (both in splints) and I’m in immediate danger? I’ve survived for 2 days and racked up 77 kills (all melee) in the process of which I’ve broken my Left arm, with the Right one left at about 5 HP.

I was scouting the neighboring house and went down into a basement, the entrance to which was guarded by 6 zombies I couldn’t see. I was immediately attacked by all 6 zombies at once, taking the rest of the HP off my Right arm. This automatically prompted the dropping of my Baseball bat to the ground (which I did not realize until a couple dozen turns later), and prevented me from wielding my Winchester M37 shotgun as a last fighting resort.

I ran out of the building and back to my shelter to craft and equip another splint. When I went outside 2 of the aforementioned zombies spotted me and now I’m being chased with no way to fight back. What am I meant to do? My shelter has been compromised and I don’t have a functioning vehicle.

EDIT: I’m playing the latest Stable (0.E-3).

2

That’s easy to answer: Grab some explosives or grenades, yell at the Zombies (SHIFT+C key), [a]ctivate the explosive and run towards them. In the end, you’ll have 79 killed Zombies and at least one body that will certainly not rise again.
Alternatively - if you don’t have any explosives or in case that’s not your style - you can just stand still and wait (. or 5), or you can press SHIFT+Q to speed it up.

In all seriousness; There’s a very slim chance that you’ll make it out alive.
Unless you find an NPC that can and will protect you, or you can run away and hide until the bone’s mended, the only damage you’re going to deal is by kicking those Zombies (as in; just walk into them) or lure them through damaging terrain (aside from dropping live explosives and either run fast or die with them).

You’ve mangled both your arms in a Zombie appocalypse. If you let stuff like that happen, it’s expected to end bad…

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3

Walking into them did nothing, neither did [s]mashing them which I assumed would result in some form of kick / stomp action. Since I was faster (Fleet-Footed) I figured I’d just lead them to my starter NPC (about 8 overmap tiles away), which I remember conveniently holding a CZ-75 as I fared her farewell. Luckily enough she made pretty quick job of the 7 zombies I brought back to her.

Problem is, she’s asthmatic. I recall back in 0.C leaving an asthmatic NPC alone killed them after a few days, so I don’t know how much of it has changed since. I survived through the night, surprisingly enough, with only a couple minor zombie accidents.

It is now Day 5. I don’t really know how much longer my NPC will last. In fact, I ran out of food and can’t exactly scavenge for more, so I don’t really know what else there is left for me to do. How do I get food with no ability to fight? I visited your link and the picture it paints is pretty grim; seems it’ll take me about 6 days to be able to use my limbs again, they’re only at ###== health currently.

EDIT: I forgot food rations spawned at the evac shelter! I left like 30 of them there when I went out the first time. Regardless of how boring eating these is I think I will have to use them to survive through my arm healing process.

EDIT #2: Easy win.
Capture

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4

I’d probably try to go to a nearby bunch of bushes and make use of the survival skill, depending on what your map looks like.
Also pre-emptive condolences for the loss of your NPC friend :frowning:

5

You may also be able to forage for some food (assuming that can be done without working arms). In your situation I’d probably try to do some light foraging coupled with book reading while eating those rations if the things foraged isn’t enough (those things tend to spoil fairly quickly, so you can’t build up a stockpile, so forage only what you need).

Also, basements can be very dangerous, exactly because they sometimes are full of zombies you can’t see.

I would have tried to lure the zombies away and then leave them behind, returning to the starting NPC after that.

6

No need! 69 protein rations will singlehandedly carry me through this healing process alone. Roughly calculated, 20 rations last me for about a day (always Sated) and I have enough water to last me 2-3 more days. I only need one more day to make my limbs usable (both arms are at :.... health) so that I can finally [w]ield and use a weapon.

After that, finding ways to heal my limbs and scavenging for food should be no problem. Hopefully everything works out and I manage to survive this. Thanks for all the replies!

EDIT: Interesting, it seems I am still unable to wield items even though my Right arm is at \.... health. Is there a health threshold which you need to bypass for the arm to be considered functional? I was able to wield a Baseball bat right up until both my arms were completely gone…

What gives?
Capture

EDIT #3: Seems there was some kind of threshold, after another day of healing both arms are at \.... health and I am able to [w]ield by Baseball bat again. Cheers!

7

Walking into them (like normal melee attacks) does deal damage (I’ve tested it before I have written that part), but it depends directly on your strength and the targets armor. You usually do very little damage and are likely to miss, due to the high pain from your broken arms.
[s]mashing is meant to smash the ground and items on the ground, and bypasses any monster standing on that tiles. It will deal no damage at all, as it is not an attack form.

0.E-3 already has the new, realistic food system, where you store fat in your body and can go days without eating…
Given that 1 protein ration is 400 kcal (and you need about 2000-3000 kcal per day), you’re actually overfeeding your character, as around 6 of them each day should be enough to keep your weight.
Check your weight in the @ character screen.

8

I have indeed turned Obese already, my character still gets Hungry and I’m assuming having that status effect has its drawbacks as it did in older versions which is why I keep feeding him. I’m not entirely sure how to lose weight in the newer builds; I went from normal weight to Obese in less than a week, doesn’t seem very realistic to me…

My broken limbs don’t really heal either, I don’t understand why. I wake up daily with my body fighting me apparently. I gave my arms a couple of additional days to heal yet their health hasn’t budged from the |.... state. I just broke both my arms AGAIN, this time there’s a pretty large horde on my back and I may not have enough Stamina to break line of sight and get out alive again.

9

Well, that’s a wrong assumption… As written, you can go days without food and no negative effects.

I mean, you’re eating 8000 kcals each day… And you start at the brim of being overweight, so that will do the rest.

Dont eat. Literally. Just drink water. It will not go lower than “hungry” until you’re down to normal weight again (in my experience).
In newer, experimental builds, you can lose weight by exercising. But I don’t think that was implemented back in 0.E-3…

You need to bandage and disinfect them. Yes, even if they’re not bleeding or have a bite in them. Otherwise it will heal really, really slow. Oh, and sleeping also helps. And good health (as in, not being obese).

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I understand. I’ll try not eating entirely and see if that helps me get back down to normal weight levels. Provided I survive long enough. I may have enough Stamina to make it back to my bicycle, but then again using it requires Stamina… the good news is that I found the quest to get the Inhaler for the asthmatic NPC only expires in 4 weeks, which means she has to survive till then, right?

I already bandaged each of the arms once, do I need to have a bandage for each pip of health I want to recover? I don’t have enough antiseptic to keep crafting bandages at this pace…

11

Well, that’s one question I don’t have an answer for… I usually find the inhalers fast, and since I’m a loot hoarder, they are no problem for me later in the game.

The @ character screen shows you which body parts are bandaged and the quality of the bandage (it will slowly deteriorate).
If the bandage is gone, reapply another. Keep doing this until you’re healed up “enough” (whatever your definition of that is).
If you don’t have enough antiseptic, try making boiled or bleached makeshift bandages and use the antiseptic directly to disinfect (I think it’s worth more than just a better quality bandage).
You can also apply makeshift bandages (or even just cotton balls) directly, if you’re in a pinch.

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12

Weight management is messy in the game. Based on 0.E2 stable, it worked to never eat when Peckish and only when Hungry. Using that method my character kept oscillating between normal and overweight (and to gain weight you stuff yourself until you can’t push more food in, using as energy dense food as possible: eating only when the stomach said it was somewhat empty works only for energy dense food, and it’s still slow). For Obese, don’t eat at all (but drink, of course) until down to a reasonable level (I’d probably try to eat a bit of low calorie food once in a while when down to overweight for role playing purposes, and possibly before that).

Bandages: As mentioned, the effect degrades over time, so you can apply new ones daily (in your situation I guess you’d use Valase’s advice to apply new ones only when the previous ones have degraded completely).

13

I should add that the “hungry” message mainly reflects your stomach contents. So it displays that you are hungry, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to eat.

The weight management that seems to be common trend is to get to overweight, and stay overweight, only drinking water and/or eating low calories food to mitigate the rate at which your character burns through stored fat/calories. And when you see “Very Hungry”, that’s when you reached “Normal” body type (below “overweight”).

Personally i just eat once or twice a day, and fill the stomach with water / other drinks, depending on my food supply.

14

I always ate once whatever hunger status message I had at the time disappeared, making sure I got to Full or Engorged so that I don’t have to eat again in case I was on the run and had no more access to food. I suppose doing this built a dependency on food, which had the opposite effect. I was eating large meals 3-4 times a day which seems to have turned me Obese.

I have since applied @Valase’s advice and haven’t eaten for the past 2 days, only drinking water until I got to Hydrated or Turgid. This also had the effect of setting me back to Peckish from Hungry. I have also crafted 10 or so Boiled Makeshift Bandages and reapplied them whenever they got torn, healing one of my arms back to |||.. (whereas previously they did not heal without bandages at all).

I am kinda starting to get bored of the playthrough. All I am able to do is sit at home and read books waiting for my arms to heal. Every time I explore a new part of town I end up with my arms broken and with my life on the line, forcing me to play cautiously. It’s funny how a single random drop (a hacksaw, a welder) can affect your playthrough; can’t really get a car in working condition and can’t explore further without a car to protect me from the tougher zombies. I feel stuck.

15

Every time I explore a new part of town I end up with my arms broken and with my life on the line, forcing me to play cautiously

That is the point of the early game. Unless you start out with a ridiculously broken and overpowered character, you will not get away with just waltzing into a town and claiming it as yours. You also don’t have to fight. The baseline that often helps most people - especially newer / fresher players to the game - is that avoidance means survival. If you can’t raid at night because you have no nightvision and there’s no moonlight for you, be smart and raid the outskirts of a town during the day, always travelling around the back of the houses.

16

Yes, I understand this very basic premise. I have been playing C:DDA for years. The notion that the earlygame is meant to be this slow and tedious makes for some pretty boring gameplay, however. I started as a base-statline Lumberjack so, no overpowered start for me. That’s fine.

I refuse to use Operator / Military / Law-Enforcement characters for this very reason: they eliminate all earlygame needs - a good melee weapon, a ranged option, protective clothing, a decent set of survival skills - which the meat of this game consists of acquiring. What is there left for you to do? Make a vehicle and implant yourself with bionics? Pretty boring all things considered.

That said, being immobilized because you don’t have a welder or a hacksaw and can’t explore town for one sucks. I spec’d into Mechanics 3 just so I don’t have to go through the earlygame grind, but ended up running into it anyway (0.80 item spawn scaling). I explored a nearby Office Tower just to get ambushed by a couple Feral Runners, dealing damage to my working arm and impeding healing progress on my broken one, resulting in the need of another day or two of passive healing.

17

use fire, you don’t need a functioning arm to activate it. I make sure to always keep a lighter on me in case of emergencies, since fire is surprisingly effective at killing zombies. I guess the slime is particularly flammable.
Just place a piece of flammable trash like paper (or in an emergency your shirt) in front of you and lure a zombie onto it until it burns to death. You’ll take a few hits having to sit still, but it sure beats the hell out of dying.

18

I didn’t mean to sound condescending or something (which reading back I could understand if it was taken that way), but if I came across as such I apologise. I do agree with you: I think the early game is “kind of” very slow, but once you get tools and books, you jump into “god tier” within a week or two in-game - and most of the end-game locations are either very trivial or have no reason to be explored anyway, because the game pretty much only incentivises players to do Science Labs and Military Bunkers raids.

To combat that, I often prefer to “balance” my characters to try and avoid that very same issue, but the problem seems to be that once you’ve done two or three “decently long” playthroughs, you already know where things are, which things you need and the usual early game rituals, which, once again, trivialise everything you might want to do to challenge yourself.

Personally I very much always opt into severely hampering traits - low healing rates, lower total HP or in some cases skill-progression hampering traits (slow reader, savant, etc). Although I believe that early game needs a lot more attention. There are a lot more things that are considered “mid/end game” (locations, armours etc), that are also very easy to get very early in game for someone that has a “decent” (not necessarily great) grasp of how the game works.

For instance, skilling is (still) very easy, and it will always be that way until we move from the “single digit stats and levels” to “double or triple digits”, which would essentially accommodate a more balanced development of a character and open the window for proper weapons/tools/combat balancing - and it would also allow the devs to fix the issue with bows being essentially painfully useless for bow oriented characters, but super effective for brain-handicapped meatheads with strength.

ex:
instead of having skill and stats for things ranging from 1 to 10 (skills) and 4-20 (Stats), make it from 1 to 50 or 1 to 100, so that several different items, recipes, etc can be spread out more evenly, giving more usefulness to items that we’d never even consider using because when we unlock access to them, we also happen to unlock access to the best item in its category.

19

Both my arms have fully healed! I even crafted a pair of leather arm guards to protect them from any future damage they may sustain. After fully healing I went ahead and scouted the other side of town, only to find the other gas station with a garage next to it containing absolutely nothing of use. The house next door, however, had just the right book to raise my Electronics to 3 and be able to make my own makeshift arc welder; the raid was not in vain after all.

I took apart the neighbor’s TV (don’t think they’ll need it anymore) for the power converters needed to complete the recipe, and scavenged the rest of the supplies for the tool that would finally allow me to indulge myself in vehicle-crafting.

Found a sports car in relative working condition too, with another car nearby that had just the right spare parts for me to make an exchange and get a single vehicle in working condition. Little did I know the game will do me dirty and require a tool with drilling 2 for the installation of the a gas tank, one of the only parts I actually had to exchange and a tool not required to be used in any other installation of parts.

I don’t remember ever having to use a hand drill in vehicle construction or crafting, so that came as quite a surprise to me. Another random item spawn stood between me and the construction of a fully working vehicle. I’m really starting to feel the lack of a hacksaw too. Now I’m considering scrapping the sports car and finding one that doesn’t require a new gas tank, as every other vehicle part can be repaired or installed with tools and knowledge I already have.

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