Killing Time

[Nightfall]

So, what do you guys do to kill time in this game? I tend to have a good first few hours, but once I’ve looted some essentials and gotten myself situated, I hit a wall as to what to do next. Share your ideas.

[Vastin]

• You can go around trying to collect a posse of NPC’s to accompany you into more dangerous areas.

• Constructing a vehicle that is suitable as a mobile base is a good mid-game goal. A converted RV makes a nice start, or if you want something more robust, a fully converted APC deathmobile.

• Lots of strange places to explore that aren’t immediately obvious. There’s quite a lot more underground than first meets the eye, for example. Strange buildings and structures out in the wilderness, and so on. Make sure you are well equipped and supplied before wandering too far into any of these…

• Endgame often involves trying to cyber and/or mutate yourself into an inhuman killing machine. These tracks require extensive skill development in areas like medical, electronics, and computers, and exploration of aforementioned ‘strange places’.

[Hibou]

Searching for rare weapons is a fun pastime, it usually means finding/looting mansions, city centers, and other zombie dense areas. If you’re feeling particularly dangerous, you can try searching military outposts.

Building a vehicle is also a time consuming but very rewarding endeavor.

[egomassive]

Missions give nice little goals to aim for. Check the computer terminal in an evac shelter to point the way to refugee center if there is one. In a short time you’ll have 3 good sources of missions. Some will take preparation and skill to achieve, others just take time. I warn you though, missions are buggy. Static NPCs must be enabled.

[Nightfall]

Heh, yeah… about the missions. My buddy died in a huge fight, so, yeah.

Anyway, any tips about getting a vehicle working? Would I need any specific skills or supplies?

[Shopkeeper]

Take up hobby projects to keep things interesting. I’ve had characters build homes on the range and secluded forest cabins, made my own Dead Reckoning out of a semi-trailer truck and a couple armoured personnel carriers, on a particularly riverine world I built a houseboat and paired patrol boat to go looting, was a fun change of pace having to disembark each time I wanted to explore further inland.

Edit: You need mechanics skill of course along with a welder, wrench, and screwdriver to get to work. I’d recommend finding a working vehicle first, or at least find one you can fix up easily. Makes it much easier to move around and transport parts.

[SpadeDraco]

I’ve never really had a situation where my character just didn’t have anything to do. I usually keep up a strict list of goals and priorities though. It looks something like this:

Secure Shelter< Secure Infinite Water Source< Secure Infinite Food Source (Usually Marloss Berries)< Secure All Books< Secure All Tools< Build Deathmobile< Stockpile Useful Shit< Raid Labs< Acquire Bionics< Acquire Mutations< Raid Mines< Farm Artifacts< Prove Character’s might by taking on triffid groves, strange temples, vaults, etc.< Become Legend< Start new character or transfer existing character into much harder world.

So far the “Raid Lab” phase is usually where I die, but I plan on continuing the cycle until I become bored with Cataclysm (which will hopefully take a very long time).

[Vastin]

Anyway, any tips about getting a vehicle working? Would I need any specific skills or supplies?

Mechanics, Electronics, and Fabrication are the main ones for vehicles - with mechanics generally being the hardest to raise, lockpicking can actually get you started here if you don’t find a book early on.

The main hint I would give any aspiring mechanic - you really want to get a UPS recharging station and a welder modded to recharge off it in place ASAP - you’ll never find enough acetylene torches to undertake anything more than minor repairs, and you’ll burn through batteries at an unholy rate using an electric welder. Solar panels are also your friend.

Alas, there still seems to be a bit of a current bug where solar panels recharge batteries very slowly, and driving any speed above a crawl will cause most vehicles to discharge/run out of fuel in a shockingly short time. For my part I modded my JSON’s to make the solar panels a good bit peppier until these bugs are addressed for realz.

Also be aware that vehicle construction in VERY time consuming. I just spent an entire season rebuilding an APC, and I’m still not quite done with it.

[Nuh_Uh]

I tend to want to build a massive, incredible base.

I’ve just cleared out a FEMA camp that’s along a river and surrounded by swamp and forest. It’s basically the perfect base location. I want to make a home for myself.

This means razing the FEMA camp, repairing the chain-link fence that was damaged, hauling resources into the base, building a farm, building a garage, getting alcohol stills going, getting a pot farm going, make a living room. Smoke, drink, and read books. Craft spare weapons and armor (I think having three sets of everything is nice). Make and preserve all types of specialty foods, go out for runs (man, I really want some chocolate covered pretzels and I’m running low on coffee), and just explore.

Oh, and special challenges, like level an entire town of zombies without directly hitting any of them (through environment hazards such as traps, fire, acid, mi-gos, etc).

Prepare for the eventual death of my own character and offer a map, some food and drink, some armor, good weapons, and a the coordinates to the base graffiti’ed at evac shelters

[Rot]

Build some wacky stuff. I drilled a hole into a lab wall and patched it up with vehicle parts and made a “vehicle” (it’s more of a crafting station connected to the outside) and now I’m just trying to find materials to make all the crafting stations/find them by raiding the city.

Building a boat to scavenge down river sounds pretty cool, I’ll see if I can patch something up and try it.

Mutating is pretty fun, never know what you might get.

[proxiehunter]

[quote=“Rot, post:10, topic:13087”]Build some wacky stuff. I drilled a hole into a lab wall and patched it up with vehicle parts and made a “vehicle” (it’s more of a crafting station connected to the outside) and now I’m just trying to find materials to make all the crafting stations/find them by raiding the city.

Building a boat to scavenge down river sounds pretty cool, I’ll see if I can patch something up and try it.

Mutating is pretty fun, never know what you might get.[/quote]

You’re saying mutating is like a box of chocolates?

[PaultheNerd]

I usually aim towards a fairly abstract long term goal and also make sure to allow my character to live a little, too. Finding a car chassis (or just making one) and keeping it in a garage/works somewhere and slowly working on it by bringing back better parts that I find out and about. Sometimes I like to try and set up a little winter retreat somewhere, using a stationary vehicle to power minifridges and stuff so that it’s like a proper retreat. Getting to the bottom of labs, exploring places, clearing out big cities of all zombies and working on repairing some of the buildings. I usually like to play with the same world for a very long time (sometimes I have multiple characters at once, too) and I like my characters to aim towards leaving their mark on the world somehow.

Building a building from scratch is a rather pointless but fun and very rewarding thing to do if you want a long term goal. I also like to use the note feature to name towns and places and make the map screen look like an actual map with scrawlings and scribblings on it. I guess I just move to roleplaying my characters once I’ve gotten the basic survival down.

[Zanos]

So far the “Raid Lab” phase is usually where I die, but I plan on continuing the cycle until I become bored with Cataclysm (which will hopefully take a very long time).

Really? I find most real threats in labs are pretty avoidable. All the stronger zombies are in containment cells, and turrets are always in lit rooms so you can avoid them. Even then their 9mm is pretty garbage against any sort of real armor. The only truly nasty stuff is getting chainshocked by skitterbots or some of the beefier robots in the finales.

[Rot]

Lab raiding is really easy, just be cautious and use your head.

I’ve done hundreds of lab challenges and I can tell you this from experience.