Make Stethoscope Craftable

[Datanazush]

You don’t actually need a state of the art stethoscope to crack a safe, a makeshift one will do for the ones in banks. Vaults in private residences, not so much. Don’t ask how I know.

Locksmithing teaches you some weird skills.

This could actually be a great time to introduce a use for the cordless drill; You don’t really care what happens to the safe after you’ve got it open, so why don’t you just drill it open?

[Rivet]

This could actually be a great time to introduce a use for the cordless drill; You don’t really care what happens to the safe after you’ve got it open, so why don’t you just drill it open?

I drilled the lock out of a broken filing cabinet once. Took far longer than you’d think, and it was one of those crappy lowest-bidder models used in colleges (I was doing it at my teacher’s behest, I swear!) so I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that trying to do so to an actual safe with a standard drill motor would probably be danged near impossible.

[Datanazush]

[quote=“Datanazush, post:15, topic:6613”]This could actually be a great time to introduce a use for the cordless drill; You don’t really care what happens to the safe after you’ve got it open, so why don’t you just drill it open?

I drilled the lock out of a broken filing cabinet once. Took far longer than you’d think, and it was one of those crappy lowest-bidder models used in colleges (I was doing it at my teacher’s behest, I swear!) so I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that trying to do so to an actual safe with a standard drill motor would probably be danged near impossible.[/quote]

Yeah, locksmiths use a specialized drillbit with a lot of knowhow (Don’t drill the tungsten plate it’ll chew up your bit and you need to replace it every other minute), but then again at the same time modern safes are all universally designed to either be dampened so a stethoscope won’t do shit, or they use a heavy lock or keypad.

Also you try to avoid drilling into the actual lock, do it from the side if you can help it.

[Rivet]

I used a metal-cutting bit, so it blasted through the lock like it was made of tissue paper.

Couldn’t go through the side since the goal was to break the lock out without ruining the teacher’s file cabinet - he had a cabinet that was locked but no key with which to unlock it.

[kevin.granade]

Safecracking is way more technically-oriented than I’d be interested in modelling in-game, which is why we’re going with the hollywood stethescope approach. It could stand to have a large-ish difficulty bump though, maybe along with a higher rate of useful things like guns in them?
If someone is interested in elaborating on it though, it shouldn’t interfere with the rest of the game, so I’ve got no problem with it.

[vache]

I think it would be nice if we had a special abilities type system, that tracks things you know that don’t necessarily need to be their own skill. Basically it would be extending the ‘p’ menu to a tabbed menu that includes bionics, active mutations, martial arts styles you know and their descriptions, and any special skills/abilities you have (such as knowing how to crack a safe, or how to fly a plane, etc.). The abilities would be learned in books, taken at char gen, or taught by NPCs, and it could even include unlocked abilities. Also as part of the extended system, it would be nice if you had a set of hotkeys, say F1-F12, and you could bind an activated ability to it that would turn on whenever you hit the hotkey, so you don’t have to go through the menu every time for your most used abilities.

[FunsizeNinja123]

I think it would be nice if we had a special abilities type system, that tracks things you know that don’t necessarily need to be their own skill. Basically it would be extending the ‘p’ menu to a tabbed menu that includes bionics, active mutations, martial arts styles you know and their descriptions, and any special skills/abilities you have (such as knowing how to crack a safe, or how to fly a plane, etc.). The abilities would be learned in books, taken at char gen, or taught by NPCs, and it could even include unlocked abilities. Also as part of the extended system, it would be nice if you had a set of hotkeys, say F1-F12, and you could bind an activated ability to it that would turn on whenever you hit the hotkey, so you don’t have to go through the menu every time for your most used abilities.

So, like abilities? “When activated gives you +5 to safecracking” or something like that?

[vache]

More like, when you try to crack the safe without the ability, either it forbids you, or you have a near impossible chance of succeeding. Trying to crack with the ability, and you have an 80% chance of succeeding.

[HunterAlpha1]

Also, maybe have safes spawn frequently in mansions, and occasionally in basements. The mansion safes would be the most difficult(rich people tend to be able to afford the best safes, your local bank not so much), with loot equal to that of a bank, and the safes found in private residences would be easier but with poorer loot.

[Hague]

I think if we’re gonna have drills then the bits need to be a thing that gets wasted in the process. Drills have no damage quality except bashing when they don’t have a bit. You can weapon-mod the drill with a bit to increase the damage that it does and what items you can use it to drill through. For instance, adding a screwdriver bit will give the drill screw driving quality and higher grade drill bits can be used for levels of a non-existent Drilling Quality. If the bit breaks as the result of a failure, it just destroys the mod on the drill.

Drilling should use the Construction skill instead of Mechanics since it’s really a matter of application of the reverse of construction whereas safe-cracking is a direct use of Mechanical knowledge in opening a safe. It’s also not unreasonable to believe that a really secure safe might not be cracked with either and need electronics skill to wire a code-generator or hacker’s PDA to a keypad-based safe. A safe that has a fail-safe to destroy its contents if breached, or rigged with a trap, is a good example.

[kevin.granade]

I think it would be nice if we had a special abilities type system, that tracks things you know that don’t necessarily need to be their own skill. Basically it would be extending the ‘p’ menu to a tabbed menu that includes bionics, active mutations, martial arts styles you know and their descriptions, and any special skills/abilities you have (such as knowing how to crack a safe, or how to fly a plane, etc.). The abilities would be learned in books, taken at char gen, or taught by NPCs, and it could even include unlocked abilities. Also as part of the extended system, it would be nice if you had a set of hotkeys, say F1-F12, and you could bind an activated ability to it that would turn on whenever you hit the hotkey, so you don’t have to go through the menu every time for your most used abilities.

Yea, tracking a yes/no for having learned specific things is neat, possibly recipes would even have knowledge-based prerequisites? (welding, carving, torch-cutting, soldering)

[vache]

Booby-trapped safes are a little too Hollywood, but there are safes that can become unopenable if you try to crack it and fail, or if it suffers extreme g-forces.

Something related I’d like to see is being able to use a welder to cut through metal doors and bars. It should trigger a robot alarm if done in certain areas though, to balance it out a little bit.

[VampyreLord]

Come to think of it, why not have panic rooms sometime spawn in mansions? Kinda like a ‘safe room’.

[Hague]

Come to think of it, why not have panic rooms sometime spawn in mansions? Kinda like a ‘safe room’.

Including multiple empty water bottles and a rotting corpse or pile of bones, naturally.

[Rivet]

Something related I’d like to see is being able to use a welder to cut through metal doors and bars. It should trigger a robot alarm if done in certain areas though, to balance it out a little bit.

That would need a cutting torch of some sort, oxy-acetylene or plasma, since our current ‘welder’ is some sort of battery-powered MIG welder that magically produces its own filler wire (and shield gas or flux) from thin air batteries.

Welders stick metal together, cutting tools cut it apart.

[vache]

I thought it was the same tool, just different configurations, especially considering that (in game at least) car parts can be removed with it and a hacksaw. Maybe require an oxygen tank with charges to cut things?

[Rivet]

I thought it was the same tool, just different configurations, especially considering that (in game at least) car parts can be removed with it and a hacksaw. Maybe require an oxygen tank with charges to cut things?

If you’re thinking of an oxy-acetylene welding/cutting torch setup, then yes they’re basically the same thing with different tips, but the DDA one is an electric, so it’s either MIG or TIG - though you can’t generally run those off of batteries IRL.

[system]

I thought it was like a stick welder that also used the batteries as sticks, also the batters are like micro fusion fuel for a mini nuclear reactor.

[Rivet]

I’ve always assumed it to be something like a MIG welder since there are no electrodes in DDA, and most folks I know seem to have this Hollywood idea of how welders work (you hold this pistol-thing near the metal and sparks fly out and things get magically welded together) so I’ve always figured DDA’s welders work on similar rules.

If it were a SMAW system I’d expect it to require electrodes in addition to power-input at the very least, since they’re such an integral component of the system that even an untrained person can plainly see - but the wire in a MIG gun isn’t exactly super-visible, so I can excuse people not knowing about it.

[kevin.granade]

See https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/207
I’d like to see them work more realistically, just haven’t gotten around to it.