Honestly, I think the only reasons for not including complex industry are:
the problem with any “it needs X” reasoning can be countered with “then why can’t we make X?” such as >you need factory fresh primers >so why can’t we make primers? >because you need a primer maker >so why can’t we build a primer maker? ETC.
[quote=“BorkBorkGoesTheCode, post:3321, topic:5570”]Honestly, I think the only reasons for not including complex industry are:
Exactly how much infrastructure do you think is involved in complex industry? If the player was going to reach a stage of sustainable industry they’d need to be able to harvest and refine their own raw materials, maintain a clean, stable environment to prevent cross contamination, maintain precision instruments to exactly and perfectly reproduce components the same way every time, and so on, and so on.
Meanwhile the player is making their plastic components out of melted down shopping bags, their metal is scavenged, reforged scrap of mixed origin and mixed purity, their “factory” is probably either exposed to the elements or a ramshackle construction as good as a single individual without scaffolding, construction vehicles and a reliable electrical supply can be expected to build, while the player is most likely a skilled layman with mostly hands-on, practical experience in a small subsection of the overall field of expertise necessary to do any of that.
Organisations might, in the fullness of time, be able to recover and maintain some of the pre-Cataclysm industry as they work around problems with manpower and infrastructure that the player does not have.
So sure, you need A: The best supply of A is in a mine. If you can find a mine in New England that caters to that specific material, then great. That A is transported to B where it is chemically treated with machine C and chemical D. Those chemicals are found in other mines. You need rare earths for that one, they’re only available in large quantities in E. When’s the next container ship coming with a shipment from E? Got E from a shipwreck? Lucky you. Now you need F, high precision tools to make G, higher precision tools, to make H, which you can then use to make I…
You might, by the time you get to Z again, be able to reliably make ammunition with a 0% chance of a misfire, by which time it’s year 43 and who’s been bringing you food all this time?
There are as many excellent reasons for restricting manufacturing options to the player as there would be to you, right now, to start manufacturing factory grade munitions in your basement - you have a lot more resources available to you than your average Cataclysm survivor, effectively unlimited light, study time, food, and all the wisdom of humanity available to you. Not to mention no rampaging zombies breaking stuff every couple of years.
“Why can’t I make CPUs with 1+ GHz clocks?”
“Because during the time you were redesigning the 500 MHz ones to be craftable with your current technology, data drives containing the descriptions of the necessary processes got too rusty to be read. And there are no working copies left in the world. And you grew so old you have problems remembering things”
So no, this reasoning dies pretty fast if you want to keep a semblance of realism.
maybe if we were starting from scratch but we have remnants to bootstrap things. if a thing exists then the tools needed to make that thing must exist somewhere. power armor is too advanced to make by hand, but the power armor factory that they must have come from would have literally everything that’s needed to build one.
Sure, okay. If shocker brutes haven’t destroyed the machinery and wrecked the storehouse, malfunctioning electronics haven’t caused fires in key areas, and if you can somehow power it, then you have literally everything needed to build one.
One.
Like I said above, manufacturing isn’t about one factory, it’s about INFRASTRUCTURE. Even grossly simplified, that’s Mines → Ore Refinery → Distribution → Multiple different factories that build everything from the little chip thingies on the circuit boards, the actuators, the filtration systems, the circuitry, the ACTUAL CIRCUIT BOARDS THEMSELVES, and somewhere, far, far down the line, you have a factory that puts the products of all these other factories together to make power armour.
So sure, as long as your Power Armour Factory is fully stocked and somehow managed to avoid anything that might make getting it up and running again impossible - Like losing power mid production sequence, not being shut down properly and needing a full system wide factory reset where the only three people who know how to do it are the three Zeds you just killed loitering outside the entrance, then maybe you could get your one, singular, suit of power armour.
That’s about the same as the bottom of the lab - You’re still not manufacturing, you’re scavenging that last abandoned treasure, and that factory is never going to work again until you build the tools to build the tools to build the tools, and that’s assuming that the massive resource requirements involved can even be met by post-Cataclysmic humanity within the timeframe that Dark Days Ahead covers.
you still seem to be going back to thinking there is no bootstrapping. why would a factory have 0 components in storage? why would the power armor control system factory have 0 completed control systems waiting to be shipped out to the assembly plant?
besides which, this would help balance how powerful power armor IS. right now you can just find a suit of power armor randomly and that’s it, you have power armor to murder everything in. but with this, if you want power armor, you need to go out of your way to find all the parts. everywhere that used to spawn a power armor can now spawn a power armor component instead. you have to search high and for all these different parts and then finally you can assemble them all into a suit of power armor.
It seems like they make bullets in Afghanistan and Pakistan out of old film, sand and chutzpah.
In fact, this source says they use a hammer (!) instead of a loading press and very primitive dies.
For preserving health and some morale bonus. Combine small room, with stone stove, fire and water to get sauna 
[quote=“tarburst98, post:3327, topic:5570”]you still seem to be going back to thinking there is no bootstrapping. why would a factory have 0 components in storage? why would the power armor control system factory have 0 completed control systems waiting to be shipped out to the assembly plant?
besides which, this would help balance how powerful power armor IS. right now you can just find a suit of power armor randomly and that’s it, you have power armor to murder everything in. but with this, if you want power armor, you need to go out of your way to find all the parts. everywhere that used to spawn a power armor can now spawn a power armor component instead. you have to search high and for all these different parts and then finally you can assemble them all into a suit of power armor.[/quote]
Are we talking past each other here?
You can make “salt”. You can harvest salt water, boil it into salt, and produce as much salt as you like.
You can make “light strips”. You can harvest buildings, salvage the necessaries, and produce more or less as many lightstrips as you could ever want.
You can even make “mutagen” to reliably alter your body in a number of ways, all through methods readily available to you as a player.
On the other hand:
You can find artifacts.
You can find items that lead to artifacts.
You can perform actions that lead you to artifacts.
You cannot MAKE artifacts.
Manufacturing implies at least some degree of sustainability and choice - you have access to functionally limitless amounts of certain resources, and can expect to make things out of those resources at your leisure. Sometimes the “mine shaft” contains an artifact, sometimes it contains something that leads to an artifact, but at no point do you get to turn around and say “Yeah, I make artifacts”. They are irreplaceable, cannot be forged, cannot be found outside of luck.
Power armour is, as far as the player is concerned, an artifact in every single respect. The factory is the ancient temple. the components are the stone eyes, the places you find those “stone eye” components or Mk I “lesser artifacts” are the forgotten mine shaft equivalent military supply bases and other such arcane dungeons. You lack and will never attain, the resources necessary to change this fact, regardless of how many crafting menus you put between the player and their reward.
Does this make my position any clearer?
Suggestion:
Externalise Horde Size and Horde Frequency into discreet world settings.
I want Rare Megahordes to show up in my game: Increase size, lower frequency.
I want a no-respite low level zombie threat: Increase frequency, decrease size.
Currently the only way to manipulate hordes is to play with the base spawn rate, and that has knock-on affects on everything else, and makes it impossible to spawn the rare “uberhorde shambling in from another area before moving on” so much as the “drown beneath the sea of bodies spawning from a town you’ve cleared out twice” that makes me want to play on static spawn.
It would be nice if the name of an item could specify where to pluralize it, or whether or not it should be pluralized at all. Currently, we have oddities like “chunk of meats”, and I get JoJo flashbacks whenever I cook a loaf of bread.
Zombie Scientists should probably be marked as light red enemies (on par with z-soldiers) due to their ability to summon manhacks from hammerspace.
Also, the smoke effect on cars needs to go. It looks kind of nice, but it A) creates smoke so thick you can’t see through it and B) doesn’t disappear immediately, meaning that if you drive back through an area after the map tile unloads, there’s a magic trail of floating smoke.
nope, Pantalion. i am not talking mass manufacture, or artifact creation, i am talking abut artifact splitting. take the millennium puzzle from YUGIOH, it’s many pieces, but when you put the pieces together it becomes an artifact. you will never be able to produce a “high quality power armor servo” but you can find one. you gather all the artifact shards and put them together. you need to kill and search to find several servos, raid labs to find control systems, military bases for armor sections. then you go to the manufacturing plant and stand next to the “power armor assembly station” and it combines the item shards you have in to an item. this means that to make power armor you instead need to combine SEVERAL artifact tier items together, rather then just crack open a bank and find a heavy power armor.
Yeah, I figured we were misunderstanding one another. Piggybacking off irreplaceable tech is fine, but when you mentioned “Bootstrapping” I assumed you were using the term to refer to the process where you increase in complexity from limited starting resources - take a rock and some dead plants, make a hammer, use hammer to make a knife, use knife to make a bow, use bow to hunt deer, use the sinew to make a fire-starter and so forth. In my opinion the player shoudn’t even be able to advance to a stage of complexity where they could even reliably repair power armour.
Honestly the whole thing sounds like an interesting mission line - Guy wants you to raid a bunch of places. You bring him the stuff, he asks you to bring him to abandoned factory A, you reach it, he randomly betrays you and tries to shank you or lets you use the item after getting what he needed from the factory (potentially something even more valuable, at least to them), you claim “Experimental Prototype V3.01a Power Armour” as your reward.
that’s because the talk changed from ammo to power armor.
the only things stopping the handloaded ammo from being perfect is exact measures and ratios, a reused case may not fit in the chamber as snugly as a fresh one, result in less power. the powder mix isn’t as pure as factory ones so it misfires or has less power, the primer isn’t seated properly so when the firing pin strikes it it doesn’t spark.
making perfect grade gunpowder from a home still does indeed not make sense, but a gunpowder manufacturing plant would have the the specific purification systems to do that. melt spent brass down and use molds and measures taken from the brass factory to make fresh undamaged casings, ETC. ammo may need some exact measurements but it is not arcane super science like the artifacts. also, the reason factories need the massive quantities of resources(like metal and coal) is because they produce a LOT of items. the brass factory makes thousands of cases a day, you wont need that many.
If you find a casing factory, you’re probably going to find more casings that you’ll ever use anyway.
Blast from the past:
[quote=“Pantalion, post:3227, topic:5570”]Existing Clothing Tweaks:
Sleeveless Survivor Duster should have “Sleeveless Duster” as a valid ingredient.
Sleeveless Survivor Trenchcoat should have “sleeveless Trenchcoat” as a valid ingredient.
Survivor Trenchcoat should have “Leather Trenchcoat” as a valid ingredient.
Sleeveless Survivor Trenchcoat should have “Sleeveless Leather Trenchcoat” as a valid ingredient.[/quote]
Sleeveless Survivor recipe fixes. by Soyweiser · Pull Request #18126 · CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA · GitHub I didn’t agree with the latter two.
They have this now. I guess due to being made out of plastic.
Recategorise Beds so they do not hide items stored on them. Beds do not readily conceal items, unlike shrubs, cupboards, and desks.
They somewhat do - there can be things concealed under bed - But I agree that things like blankets and pillows should be visible
By that logic things could be hidden under benches too, tables and chairs, yet none of these hide items in-game. The things that hide are either things that close - Fridge/Cupboard/Dresser/Desk (drawers), or things that might reasonably obscure view of their contents from a distant observer - Bathtubs/Shrubs/Sinks.