Living off the land - rural only

Game Talk The Bunker
1

I know this is kind-of stupid, but I like playing a rural mapgen run with city size = 0. I even startscum until I am in an area where there are no cabins etc immediately visible. I prefer playing a lost submissive here to make it even harder. I enabled that no fungus mod since it is just overpowered currently in my opinion.

Edit: Discourse is not letting me put the links in here since it considers me to be too new, ugh. You need to remove the spaces from the URLs.

TL;DR: It is hard, quite minimalistic almost and I found a few shortcomings.

Anyways, I found out a few things and opened a few issues.

It very much depends on the mood of the RNG since an early zombear or mi-go or something will wreck the character. Even an odd aggressive bee or wasp could mean the end.

I usually start on day 61 or something and, yes the whole IRC channel made fun of me for that, the cold nights caused my characters arms to freeze off. So it is very important to get a blanket or some arm warmers early, but finding random corpses with clothes is not easy unfortunately. Healing that with no first aid skill was tough. It meant making a lot of bandages, deliberately falling in pits and applying these bandages until I can make splints.
Blankets are easy enough to make but pillows are not. There is no way to get cotton out in the wilderness and hunting birds is also hard early on. I suggested adding straw pillows: Feature request: Straw (and similar) pillows · Issue #49031 · CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA · GitHub

An important goal is making a hut for yourself, I usually go with wattle-and-daub walls. Ensuring you will not starve is also very important, this means you need to make some fields. I had the problems of wildlife trampling my fields and suggested adding simple wattle fences (Feature request: Wattle fences · Issue #49138 · CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA · GitHub) to solve just that. Someone added that feature pretty quickly. Hooray! \o/

However, there are other difficulties which need to be taken care of. Fortifications are very important, which are mainly just pits. There are currently 2 types of pit trap, the spiked pit and glass pit. Those break pretty quickly and I suggested ideas for more traps: https ://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/49008
My main focus are the rebar and sharp stone pits since they should last longer and are easy to make. The others are “just” ideas.
I also found https ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheval_de_frise, which may be a fitting fortification.

There was also a discussion about adding moats. The only method to somehow get water into your base is digging water channels, which are shallow and can not be made deep.
There are no fluid mechanics and all sources of water are infinite, which may need to get solved first.

In the long run it is important to become self-sustaining. I thought about maybe planting an orchard, but this is not possible yet unfortunately. Maybe one can harvest triffids for some of their instant tree growth thing? https ://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/49337

However, there is a little problem now in 0.F - there is no tool with cutting 1 except a bone shiv. Bones may be hard to find though. This triggered a discussion in the IRC channel since I suggested either making the stone knife easier to craft again or using a sharp stone, like the flaking rock or flint as a very basic cutting tool. Kevin Granade chimed in and said there are changes which should be made first in order for this to be possible, most notably durability of tools since a sharp rock will not stay sharp forever.

This is the biggest problem right now, but there have been many changes which made it actually easier, such as large rocks being anvils, more plants and you can also find minerals when mining underground which is pretty nice.
In the end there are still random NPCs which can help one to get going and also some rare roads where you can get vehicles and parts from.

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Never played full wilderness, where do you get steel for that?

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Roads. Just demolish them and you get a ton of rebar.

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you can try looking around in the bushes and might get lucky and find some things that either have cutting or allow you to make something with cutting quality, like a makeshift knife.

but aren’t there still houses you could check for tools?
with a high enough survival skill you should be at least able to make a Firestarter with a drill I think

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Basically, but finding a bone or a spike takes time and luck, since the RNG has bad mood swings. I usually forage the whole first day until survival reaches 2. I was informed that one could craft a stone chopper at survival 3, but a cutting tool is pretty essential still.

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Good news, everyone!
Stone chopper has been lowered to fabrication (2) and is now certified craftable from scratch.

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Any tips for training fabrication beyond 1 wihtout any tools? I’ve started lost submissive in crazy party scenario and tried to live in the the forest. I’ve trained fabrication on pebbles to 1 but no luck of finding any others ways to raise it. Without cutting tools I cannot even butcher small animals to gain bones for bone shiv (

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Sure.
Make straw beds and gravel floor. (Done via construction menu.)

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Thanks for a clue. Ok, fabrication is 2 now. But I can’t find stone chopper . Playing experimental from 23.07.2021, has 2 fabrication and 2 survival. I made a makeshift knife from spike from chunk of steel but I think that rng wouldn’t be so generous later.

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You need survival (3).
Easy to get by just foraging a bunch.

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Making pointy sticks should also help to train fabrication. They are useful enough that it makes sense to just make a bunch of them, unlike pebbles (imo at least).

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Pointy sticks require a tool with cutting 1. Getting it without having it is the whole issue.

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Another interesting issue.
How about crafting clean water? Only thing that I can think of is clay pot. But maybe there are some other variants.

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A clay pot requires skills and potentially hard work to make, since you need to dig a lot if there is no clay deposit or river near you. Training fabrication and others until you can craft it, will take some time, too and you are probably dehydrated until then.
Unfortunately you can not use tin cans for boiling anymore since 0.F, but maybe a new item would make sense here.
I could imagine some makeshift cooking vessel which is essentially a can with a hole drilled into it so a stick can fit into there.
The reason why you can not use cans for boiling anymore is probably because they have no handles and are too small for a normal fire to be placed in, so they will be searing hot.

Essentially transforming the can into a tiny pot can help but it will be tedious to cook with it. It will save you in an emergency but that is about it.

The current situation without any additions would require eating foods that can hydrate you, like berries. But this is going to become harder if you do not start in the summer. Finding eggs in the bushes will also provide some hydration, even if you have to eat them raw.

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You can still drink “unsafe” water (from puddles, etc). Sure, it will degrade your health eventually , but you will have more than enough time (a week or two) to find clay and make a pot.

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My character always puked his guts out and it is really hard to even get from “dehydrated” to “very thirsty”. I mean sure, it will buy you more time but only for a relatively high price.

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Did you try to drink from water sources that might be somewhat safe, or just any source of water? If I understand it correctly, different sources have different levels of risk associated with them.
Also, each “access” to a water source seems to make an independent roll on the danger table, so if you’re drinking directly from a source, each drinking action would get a different roll, but if you take water from a source in a container, all the water in the container gets the same status. This means that if you were to have a container (such as a bucket [luxury in the original context]), you could fill the container and drink from it. If you don’t get sick, the whole container is safe, but if you do, dump the contents and fill it again to get a different result (I used that with a heroin withdrawal character using a water well by a house since the withdrawal resulted in a depression such that no “crafting”, including boiling of water, could be performed, so untreated water had to be used once the bottled one ran out until the withdrawal symptoms dropped, which took another week or so).

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Thats an interesting mechanic. I was drinking directly from the source in this case since i only had very few and only small containers to store water in. Would explain why that happened so often.

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You can usually get by fine by drinking from deep water tiles (preferable running deep water) one sip at a time.

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So, here’s my experience with living off the land from 0.E.2.

I started with a Spring 1 - Wilderness - Naked and Afraid start. No clothes, no skills.

First, basic tools. Priorities were rocks, withered plant and sticks for a stone knife, stone hammer and digging stick. Find a rock, smash some saplings and bushes, craft some short cordage and make some tools. Survival 1 for the digging stick is obtained fairly quick with some foraging.

With a digging stick it’s possible to dig out infinite clay, sand and rocks from the ground (and just unbelievable amounts of dirt). This also allows construction of a fire pit with a stone ring, which is essential for warmth.

After this, I hit a bunch of swamps for cattails to craft plant fiber, crafting rags with them along with starch for flour. Eventually, I made enough clothing to fully equip my character from about four swamp tiles worth of cattails, plus enough flatbread to make food for days.

I sped things up by foraging for a canvas sack to make a swag bag, but carrying stuff by hand can also be a viable if tedious option until you create your first container. Cooking is easily done with five clay for a clay pot.

Really, it’s not too hard a challenge, just tedious at the start.