I decided to take up the challenge and see how I fair. Wish me luck. I will update as it goes along.
Character Layout:
Nice, Found a hotplate, bottle water, and gallon jug of bleach in the room I spawned in. (Should I upload a picture on everything, or just the important stuff?)
In the room across from the one I spawned in I found a bedroom, in it I found a PDA and some clothes. After destroying one of the dressers I made myself a wooden needle, now I just need some food.
Yep, I died.
Here’s a question for discussion, what sort of “challenge” should we be going for?
The first one (I don’t like) is the metagame until you can find a teleporter and leave, basically having a character with eight extra points after a few tries.
The second I prefer the most, is staying at a depth of 1 or more, for the entire game. Maybe you can find an unlimited source of water, and with cannibal, use alarms and stuff to keep summoning zombies, or just have to keep rampaging through walls and depths if you want to survive. Ant farms, sewer, triffid stuff, etc is permitted, basically.
The third, hardest, would be only lab, all the time. Like even if we had to “enforce” the method by making the map generator only make labs across the entire world, possibly including the “sky” z-level, if we can’t make it a no-access zone.
I’ve been playing this challenge quite a bit actually. My character is a little bit geared towards it. 3 Computer skill, Nightvision, Ninjitsu, and Light step. But to pay for those I use fragile. The only way I can get out of the lab entrance and into the depths is by talking to the NPC With me and convincing him to join me. If he does, you can nudge him out to to the turret and he destroys it, allowing you to actually play the game.
As pertaining to the scenarios of survival. I play, The goal is to escape, so if I find a teleporter then I can use it, If I find a hacksaw I can cut into the sewers, if there are any. But I can only escape after I’ve made it to the vault and seen whats there. If mininukes, thats what I use to escape… Though Ive made it to the vault 5 times, those characters have never found what was needed to get out 
Otherwise I love this challenge 
How do you cut into the sewers exactly? I have found several hacksaws yet I did not know of this method of escape so it interests me.
Some labs intersect sewer lines. If so, there are bars preventing access into/out of the lab, which you can hacksaw through.
Your chances of finding a lab that joins to a sewer arent something id count on though.
Yeah, ever since AtomicDryad left our mapgen code has been going to pieces. 
She was extremely competent.
shame. thats how i always end up dying in lab challenge.
by the way, that’s a fancy looking tile/font you are using! what’s the name of it?
Has anyone found a way out other than getting lucky and hitting a sewer line/ant colony, teleporting, and just burning the whole place down?
Labs have everything you need to manufacture dynamite, for one.
Assuming you don’t find any in storage.
You might be able to pickaxe your way through the ground floor walls, as well? I haven’t tried that yet.
Oh, and for the people having trouble getting past that first turret: Wait until nightfall.
When I’ve finished with my start in a lab I tend to start a fire on the surface and hope I can control it long enough to burn an exit out.
This.
I find this challenge so luck based that I stopped after few tries. I cleared 1 and half floors and did not find means to escape. Non trapped teleporters are extremely rare and explosives are locked in armories - and you need lucky stairs leading into them. In other words, it is reward for luck, not so much for skill. Biggest problem I see is, that you are not guaranteed escape even if you somehow clear the entire place (except armories and prisons that are locked), so you can play for hours, not screw up and game screw you up instead.
Some tips.
- start as Survivor, you need that pocket knife
- if you don’t start with bedroom in your wing, commit suicide and start again.
- smash beds and stuff (you might need lucky drop of bashing item for that)
- level fabrication to 1(nails to hooks)
- level survival to 1 (bindle + deconstruct)
- level tailoring and craft + reinforce gear
- you should have trench coat, backpack, club and more before midnight, when it is safe to sneak around the turret
- use pen and paper to map underground in more detail than map does
Traits:
Night vision - obvious, never took it though
Cannibal - never took it, but food inside is rare, dead humans are not, penalties for eating them without trait are extremely severe
Light step - silent movement
Ninjutsu - silent attacks, works with melee weapons
You could probably make a character tuned for this challenge but after you get out, you would have worse mix of stats and traits that if you start as Evacuee. So it is not for long term character IMO.
We didn’t actually balance it with the intent of characters being viable after getting out. If you get out of the locked lab alive, that’s its own reward.
Dynamite can show up outside of armories just fine - the lab room with all the crates gets mining spawns.
And, as I’ve mentioned, you can find pretty much everything needed to manufacture dynamite in labs with only a little luck.
Could be, I was not so lucky.
Its cooking difficulty 7. You need 6 to see the recipe from chemistry book. Components looks available enough, but you probably burn lot of points on cooking skill if you want to take this route.
Dynamite can show up outside of armories just fine - the lab room with all the crates gets mining spawns.
And, as I’ve mentioned, you can find pretty much everything needed to manufacture dynamite in labs with only a little luck.[/quote]
Yes you can get really unlucky and not find a lighter but I’ve yet to have a lab start where I didn’t get a lighter eventually. Or some other kind of fire.