Needful things (simple additions to improve the game)

[deoxy]

Poison is one of those things that really isn’t much fun. This gets pretty obvious in real life when you look at critters with poison. Now, sometime, you get something large with poison, like trees, but as a rule, poison only happens in small critters. You look at a rat, it is mean, it’ll 'ave a go, a lemming doubly so, but all it’ll do is take off some skin… Then you look at a spider, likes to hide, can kill something a thousand times its size… Or a snake, likes to go to sleep on paths, tends to be nigh-invisible or easily mistaken for a stick, reacts to being imperilled(such as when someone walks along the same path it is sunbathing upon) by killing something a hundred times its size… Poison has this annoying habit of multiplying the tediousness of survival. You can safely ignore twenty rats wearing bandannas and carrying needles who glare at you and draw their free paws across their necks in perfect unison, but one dark shape moving in a dark shadow can end you…

The thing about poison is that it’s expensive (biologically speaking) and limited. Some very poisonous spiders can indeed (occasionally) kill a human, but then they have no poison for a significant length of time. Also, in the zombie apocalypse, poison is likely to be much less useful (I doubt zombies would be bothered by it much at all, in most cases), so it may well be that poisonous creatures should be dying off faster than non-poisonous ones (though poison would likely still be quite useful against the giant non-zombie critters, so there is that…).

[Litppunk]

there hasn’t been enough time for many creatures to evolve, aside from rapidly changing creatures like the blob/zombies. Also I don’t see how a creature having/not having poison would hurt/help as long as they do not overly rely on it. If the native animals already instinctively try to get away from zombies rather than fight when given the chance, then whether they have a poison that does nothing against zombies but helps them elsewhere is irrelevant to their survival except to help them.

[Litppunk]

Make it so when crafting a liquid fuel using item the fuel from the ingredient item either goes into the created item, or we get the same (U)nload feature as we do elsewhere, allowing us do dump to where we are standing/and or surrounding tiles. I lose more lamp oil this way…

[iceball3]

[quote=“Litppunk, post:2962, topic:5570”]there hasn’t been enough time for many creatures to evolve, aside from rapidly changing creatures like the blob/zombies. Also I don’t see how a creature having/not having poison would hurt/help as long as they do not overly rely on it. If the native animals already instinctively try to get away from zombies rather than fight when given the chance, then whether they have a poison that does nothing against zombies but helps them elsewhere is irrelevant to their survival except to help them.[/quote]Well, we got giant mosquitos. Giant toads. Giant wasps. Giant bees. Giant slugs. Dermatiks. Et cetera. So something is mussing up the ecosystem something nasty already.

[Litppunk]

Yea, creatures all becoming giant makes more sense than: all the poisonous animals stopped being poisonous because it was hurting their survival chances.

There are several things that can make an animal take on some gigantic growth spurts, usually deadly, though with the blob making all things more susceptible to mutations without being killed by them, most alot of those deadly factors would be nill. So giant makes sense. Animals just “stopping being poisonous” doesn’t so much, except from a “thats no fun, so we need to tweak” devs point of view

[iceball3]

[quote=“Litppunk, post:2965, topic:5570”]Yea, creatures all becoming giant makes more sense than: all the poisonous animals stopped being poisonous because it was hurting their survival chances.

There are several things that can make an animal take on some gigantic growth spurts, usually deadly, though with the blob making all things more susceptible to mutations without being killed by them, most alot of those deadly factors would be nill. So giant makes sense. Animals just “stopping being poisonous” doesn’t so much, except from a “thats no fun, so we need to tweak” devs point of view[/quote]Another possibility is that the blob already gave all infected a form of very strong venom resistance just as an innate consequence of being in the body. Weird immune system mutations.

[Litppunk]

Yeah but then how does that explain… OH… yeah. I guess that makes sense. But it isn’t all the poisonous animals got eaten so I am happy, makes the poison nerf make sense.

Rattlesnakes have been found to not rattle as much anymore/ not giving warning because of the new wild boar problem making them get eaten for giving warning. But that is a different story altogether not losing poison.

[Elidor_VON]

How about to add option “put the stone on the gas pedal”? So the car could go without a character in.

[Litppunk]

doesn’t electronic controls, or drive-by-wire, or robotic controls, or cruise control accomplish this already? Especially cruise control since all vehicles with controls have it. Can’t you set the speed to 120 or whatever and then dive from the vehichle while its going like 2?

[TheFlame52]

Nah, when the character stops controlling the vehicle it starts slowing down. I think he’s suggesting doing things like dropping a brick on the accelerator, diving out of the car, and watching the mininukes take out the horde.

[Litppunk]

oh. Well I like the idea either way. Only downside I see to not already having it that way, or making it so it can be done is:

What about when the vehichle misses the target, or hits, and then just keeps going? It will move every-time you bring it into the reality bubble, which could be annoying. How about setting up a “GPS” targeting driving, or “laser guided” car control system. That would be pretty hilarious I think.

Now I can’t stop thinking of a hulk standing in a field getting up, getting run over, getting up, getting run over. Then view zooms out and you see some guy sitting cross-legged on a rock outcrop, and pointing a laser for the car. Like some kid with a V8 for a cat. paw-paw-paw paw-pawpawp
uuuuuurrrrrrrrrrr.
paw.

[Elidor_VON]

What about when the vehichle misses the target, or hits, and then just keeps going? It will move every-time you bring it into the reality bubble, which could be annoying.

Marloss Man answered everything right about my idea.

And what about this “annoying everrush”. I suppose it would be more like “shooting in space”. Eventually it will hit something. And slow down to the point, when acceleration would be impossible.

P.S. It happens to me pretty often, so I know what I’m talking about

[Szara]

Road Signs! Please! It’s a bit annoying to be plopped into a new game and have no idea where anything is in the local area, like you were a tourist who got tossed out of a bus in some no-name town, but in all cases it would be pretty neat to have road signs giving some directions to significant landmarks. Signs at crossroads and in the middle of town such as we have in reality. There was a thread about this before but I didn’t want to necromance it back from 2013. Apparently there was some groundwork laid for the feature but it was never finished.

On the note of landmarks, what about state/national parks, large swaths of forest with trails and maybe small access roads (often dirt or gravel), fire towers (though most have fallen out of us by the present day in favor of aircraft), that sort of thing? Though these are less needful things and more flavorful additions to spice up the end of the world.

[pisskop]

A autolearned welder would do me some kindness.

And enemies not spawning around my car when I go inside.

[TheFlame52]

A autolearned welder would do me some kindness.

We can make some pretty amazing things at high levels, why not a welder?

[pisskop]

A mechanics where hordes can contribuite damage or accuracy or armor pierce or [i[something[/i] to make blobs of things do more the heavy critters/players/armor.

[TheFlame52]

Something to make hordes of zombies stop knocking down houses/turning cars into scrap. I don’t care how long the zombie is going at it, flesh and bone can’t penetrate military composite!

[omegakill]

Something to make hordes of zombies stop knocking down houses/turning cars into scrap. I don’t care how long the zombie is going at it, flesh and bone can’t penetrate military composite!

I second this, with the exception of maybe the Brute and the electric brute which is clearly inhumanly strong, military grade materials like that shouldn’t be even scratched, and I expect that if I’m sat in a tank while a zombie hoard is walking through town ala walking dead season 1, I can sit there without worrying that the tank is eventually going to be ripped apart.

Maybe even make it so that when generic and to a greater extent, decayed zombies, try to damage military grade materials like that, the zombie should take small amounts of damage, the same way that when you for example, use a hoe to try and chop a tree down, should just damage the tool you’re using.

[RAM]

It depends upon the mechanisms involved. A human won’t do much of anything to a tank. I would expect that a million humans could easily crush a tank if they could find a method of combining their force. A tool made out of human flesh would generally break down long before it channelled enough force to crush a tank, but if you factor in deformed human flesh with things like brutes and ferals running around… Well, okay, it is still a bit on the insane side, but it starts to become plausible, and if zeds ever figure out how to construct and wield a kilometre-long titanium battering ram then you would probably find that a horde has plenty enough force to mess up a tank…

Then there is the question of hardness. Normally a human wouldn’t have any means of scratching metal or ceramics. Diamonds, on the other hand, quite famously have the means to scratch most anything and are not all that uncommon in most settings. All it would take would be for some enterprising blob to build a regenerating limb that it studded with the stuff and it can start sand-papering its way through…

And then there is time. Erosion will get the best of anything if you let it… But that really isn’t relevant to the time-scale of the game…

[troll_from_behind]

Didn’t Doctor break through diamond wall after tryin long enough?
Though beign able to stay safe inside your tank while the horde pounds outside does sound kinda realistic we need to add in the factor EVERY fiction has, for some reason zombies can take out tanks.
Also doesn’t it make survival a bit boring when you can just hunker inside your APC safe from the wicked world?