More traps

If a survivor can make turrets that can fire lasers and grand vehicles that’s practically a moving fortress, having nothing but landmines and shotgun traps and other basic stuff feels somewhat underwhelming. What we need are more elaborate traps that can unleash hell upon the next dumb horde who tries to loiter around a home base.

Modified landmines. Using the wide variety of explosives than can be crafted, let a zombie step on a bomb that’ll send it flying, or at least vaporize it’s lower regions. Or have them smash a crate filled with homicidal manhacks! A sprinkler system that releases napalm, then follow up with the area being lit on fire!

i agree that the current variety is limited. but Id be happier if pipe bombs and black powder bombs did more than make noise and rip clothing before we added moar explodies

This might require JSONized trap effects first.

Get some Swiss Family Robinson traps involving logs.

Some sort of incendiary trap would be nice.

Also, one amusing thing I found out: loose caltrops damage tank drones a fair bit. Less than ten steps in caltrops will destroy them. 'course, luring a tank drone into a path filled with caltrops will require nerves of steel, and probably other body parts made of steel for that matter…

[quote=“Azrad, post:6, topic:11255”]Also, one amusing thing I found out: loose caltrops damage tank drones a fair bit. Less than ten steps in caltrops will destroy them. 'course, luring a tank drone into a path filled with caltrops will require nerves of steel, and probably other body parts made of steel for that matter…[/quote]Im sorry, all I could hear from you is ‘Caltrops launcher’.

I just checked out trap code.
It’s quite old and most of it still uses “apply_damage” function directly.
This means that nail boards, caltrops, bear traps, tripwires, crossbow traps and shotgun traps all bypass armor.

I just checked out trap code.
It’s quite old and most of it still uses “apply_damage” function directly.
This means that nail boards, caltrops, bear traps, tripwires, crossbow traps and shotgun traps all bypass armor.[/quote]
so one less exploit for us. :stuck_out_tongue:

To balance it out we should be able to have more traps just as the OP suggests.
For this i would propose:

  1. Tripwire traps: Be it grenade/pipebomb in a can, or anything else with a tripwire attached.
  2. Spike pit traps (spike pits hidden from view) (this might be not that important)
  3. Capture traps: Using a net to capture anything that passes from the tile. Too large creatures can’t be caught, while anything from a zombie dog and upwards will be able to escape after a while (the time depending on creature strength maybe?)

Those already exist.
Despite being more useful than all the new traps suggested in this thread, they are so unused that most people don’t even know they exist.

There is no sense adding new traps when current ones are so underused.

The only kind of explosive trap I’d consider adding right now would be a generic explosive trap - a trap that detonates the first explosive item on its tile.
Since it would just use items, it wouldn’t require writing 30 different items nobody would ever use, it would reuse the existing explosives, it would allow using improvised bombs (gasoline pipe bombs, fertilizer, black powder) and later on could be extended to allow different items, such as noisemakers.

I still think all these ideas should be saved for when/if more effects become available from the JSON side of things. o3o

JSON isn’t a programming language, it describes values, not functions.

Those already exist.
Despite being more useful than all the new traps suggested in this thread, they are so unused that most people don’t even know they exist.

There is no sense adding new traps when current ones are so underused.

The only kind of explosive trap I’d consider adding right now would be a generic explosive trap - a trap that detonates the first explosive item on its tile.
Since it would just use items, it wouldn’t require writing 30 different items nobody would ever use, it would reuse the existing explosives, it would allow using improvised bombs (gasoline pipe bombs, fertilizer, black powder) and later on could be extended to allow different items, such as noisemakers.[/quote]

I know about spike pits, but these are visible from survivors and mobs. As a trap i meant something designed to be hidden until you spot it or trip it. It is not that important if the mobs path through them as if they weren’t there though… Haven’t recently checked, but they used to do just that…

Valid reasons for not expanding traps, i concede…

JSON isn’t a programming language, it describes values, not functions.[/quote]

True. I mean basically JSONizing some of the trap properties so they can be messed with by modders, or to allow more variety to be added in.

Properties like?
The only kind of traps that would be readily JSONizable would be ones that perform a simple attack, like nailboards, caltrops and… that’s pretty much it.
All other traps have qualities that prevent them from being easily generalizable.
And having 10 variants of caltrops would get boring fast (even if you could use LEGO blocks and d4s as makeshift caltrops).

True. There are a few basic properties that might be

First, reusability. Some, like pits, are unaffected by enemies stepping into them. Some, like landmines, remove themselves after triggering once. Some…I THINK might remove themselves and drop their base item. Like bear traps, I think? I’d need to double-check that. And there might even be the possibility of a trap transforming into another trap after being triggered.

Second, the possibility of mines that have different effects. By far, the easiest way to enable that would be to allow it to use the same code as exploding items like grenades, allowing for variations in explosion power, fragments or other special effects.

Raw damage-effect traps like caltrops might be easily JSONizable too, but allowing for variable damage, and possibly adding effects or debuffs (stunned, tripped, bleeding, etc) might work.

And then finally there’s silly things like the noisemaking effect of bubblewrap. Allowing for variation in volume and message displayed would allow for tin-can alarm systems.

a simple tripwire that ignites an explosive would be great. then I could booby trap a road in the path of a horde, drop a radio or something and listen for the explosions from somewhere safe.

Spring spear traps? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhOSWWsOA2Y

How about spear traps? Spinning disks? Spiked balls? !!!Magma!!!

We need freezing so we can build a degrinchinator.