Items need. keys

[Umbra.Animo]

ok so we have locked doors and yet no keys. this make some starts very anoying. like prison escape. i killed all the zombies but not a single area is lit enough from me to craft a lockpick and get out and i have no weapons strong enough to break the jail doors

[Erk]

Most of the doors can be opened with a makeshift crowbar. Break a locker, get a pipe and a chunk of steel. Activate a flashlight or other light source long enough to craft a makeshift crowbar. Use it to open most of the doors in the place. Profit.

I don’t think it works on the barred doors, but I also don’t think that you need to open them to escape.

[Umbra.Animo]

the bar door would not open but i could not find a single light source i ended up being able to get a ton of picks and got out but i think added keys would still work for lore kill the undead police and get a key to the doors to start escaping

[Erk]

I dunno, I’d like to avoid the overdone trope of “hunt around for the keys to this one locked door” myself. The prison is one of the few places it would actually make sense to find keys; mostly I assume keys to locked doors are long, long gone with the bodies of the people who knew what they were for. Or, more accurately, the game world is probably full of keys and there’s no hope in hell that we’ll ever figure out what they were for.

[kevin.granade]

the game world is probably full of keys and there’s no hope in hell that we’ll ever figure out what they were for.

This is the real problem, too many keys instead of not enough. There are ways to spawn keys that will work right, i.e. each key works in the appropriate door, but the mapgen code to spawn them would be a huge pain.

[Umbra.Animo]

hmmm ok yeah i can see what you mean. i would say only keys for prisons labs and other high secirity places will spawn and only in that area. on a zombie locked in side or something to that affect

[Barbreaker]

will there be any way added to lock doors you own? such as adding a bolt to unlatch it from the inside? or simple keys made from wood and nails? I would really like to avoid other survivors looting all of my things without barricading doors using fridges and bookshelves, but I can’t mod for crap, and I’m not even certain I can change the behaviors without needing to make a pull request and make my own version.

[Umbra.Animo]

that would work. and add something to other survivors they may lock doors in their bases that you can pick. and the same for you and there are lock qualities a deadpolt is a low quality one since i have seen trick to open one or just raw strength can work and a nail and wood key lock is makeshift quality.

[Elkie]

Isnt it easier to have a chance (lets say 1/5) to spawn dead corpses nearby a locked house with a key on them? so it is AS painful as it should be, but not THAT painful.

[Umbra.Animo]

as long as some locations had a 100% chance of spawning in the right area. read prisons and the like.

[TheZoneWizard]

I have thought a good deal about this very topic. Kevin pretty much sums it up. The random nature of who has keys and what they go too is so varied in real life. It would a mathematical nightmare to quantify for almost no gain.

Like saying I have keys. I go to main street in Shmoville bumwhere? So my keys to my house 40 miles away are supposed to do what for anything nearby because…why? Makes no sense in terms of both reality and game. Sucks…but no real way to make keys work.

As mentioned though. Perhaps a closed system. But even then. Who says anyone with a key got trapped? Like. If they have a key to get out. Why would they be trapped unless killed? Still…iffy, ya know?

[Elkie]

I dont get it, “why would they be trapped unless killed?” they are in fact dead, that’s why you could find keys on corpses and such… the way they died is for developement to explain (or not), like the closed bathroom with the noose and dead corpse inside.

That’s an interesting part, the dont have to explain the death, its like you found a victim of roadkill but no car nearby.

[Umbra.Animo]

often the bodies i mostly talking about having a key would be bodies in areas you would epic to be locked. factories malls. meilitary locations prisions and labs. areas that would have lots of people and could be hard to get out of. i don’t mean keys for each house or something just areas that would be locked but have lots of bodies that you could expect to loot. and it does not even need to be on a body could be somewhere in a piece of furniture

[Grimm_Spector]

Keys seem like a lot to track, and as people have said, of limited use cases. Though if they were implemented, we could have a simple keyring mechanic, similar to things like Project Zomboid, where all keys we pickup get added to the keyring, are no longer items, and when we try to use our keys on a door it just uses the right one if its there, or fails if its not. No fuss, no muss, no wasted time and key presses.

[Umbra.Animo]

yeah agreed with the keyring. and I mostly think of locations that lots of zombies would be in the building. This was made when i was doing a prison break start but had no locations I could see enough to make lockpicks. so one of the police zombie having a key or having something like a desk having a key.
So one rule could be. “keys Can only be found in X distance from the Location they are related too”

[Madnessinabottle]

Perhaps Police ID Cards? Work similar to Military/Labratory ID’s?

[Invalid_Username]

Demolition Man-esque maglocks, with that two-pronged doohickey.

[Fris0uman]

So it seems that project zomboid does the key thing. I thought they were able to do that because the map is not random and then I realised that in CDDA the map is not really random either, most of the map chunks are defined in json.

So (if we want to have keys) what about :

• All the keys that are not around the locked thing are lost and we don’t generate those

• A small fraction of key remain that are close to the thing they open, we probably need an arbitrary number here that should be based on game balance.

If we take the easy exemple of the closed front door of a house, where can the key be ?

• Under the rug
• In a nearby flower pot
• In the mailbox
• Inside the house : on a desk near the door for exemple
• Or lastly on a nearby Z

So we could either have furniture with a Flag CAN_HAVE_KEY or (i’m not sure how json map works) have coordinate in a map designated as key spawn point.

And then things could go as follow :

• Is the door closed ?
  • Is the key around ?
    • Lets choose a spawn point and put a key here.

[TheZoneWizard]

Seems reasonable for a few locations. But I find it easier when I need to get inside. Just smash a window. I know. I dig key idea. But. When you think about how each house is a less than 1 minute affair. Running around to find a key for the front door seems like too much work when it has windows that provide resources once smashed anyway lol

[Umbra.Animo]

to be fair. I am more about areas like prisons and the like. not so much for the common house. tho House alarms could help with this. like you break down the door or window alarm hits but if you manage to find a key/lockpick a door it stays off