New player (PALU) questions

Game Talk The Bunker
1

Very fresh, have reached the second day, and I think I’ve been extremely lucky to find a farm and more or less every kind of seed (extracted those via crafting).

  1. Is there a difference in outcome between 'g’etting something that can be harvested compared to 'e’xamine and then get it (in Unreal World the former just picks parts of the plant, but harvesting gets everything)?
    2a. There are dogs on the farm, and as far as I understand those can be tamed by giving them food, but how do I actually do that? Will throwing shreds of cooked meat at them do it, or is that considered an attack? Can it be done from the safe side of the fence?
    2b. If I do tame the dogs, how do I feed them, and how often/how much?
  2. There’s a bunch of chicken at the farm, probably in the same area as the dogs (haven’t dared enter that area). I’ve got a recipe for chicken feed, but how do I give chicken feed (or if it was bird feed) to them, and how much/often do they require it?
  3. If I use a recipe from a book, will I learn it, or do I have to bring that book out every time I want to use that recipe? I’ve got a cook book that teaches basic recipes and trains up to level 1 (reached by boiling water already). The feedback when reading the book was that I couldn’t learn anything new from it, but yet I interpret the UI to mean I did actually learn one of the recipes in it. If that’s the case, is there a way to select which recipe to learn?
  4. There’s a whole bunch of plants in the game, and you can 'e’xamine them and then get stuff from them, but how do I know what I (might) get? Checking every prospective plant on the wiki? In a number of cases I’ve gotten decorative plant seeds, which I’m not particularly interested in.
  5. I’ve found a dehydrator, but it doesn’t seem to work, so I guess it doesn’t have any battery or the battery doesn’t have any charge, but how do I check if items have batteries and whether those are charged or not?
    (Same thing with other devices, like the flashlight that’s off and I haven’t yet tried to use).
  6. On the farm I’ve found two kind of round metal structures with what’s described as metal doors in them (when e’x’amined). However, trying to go through them does nothing, and trying issue an open command says there’s nothing to open. I’ve previously encountered a lab with locked doors, but that told me the doors were locked. Any idea what these things might be and what I might be able to do with them (apart from trying to “harvest” metal from them)?
2

No. [g] is for picking up items from the ground/furniture while [e]xamining it give you more information or executes an action, but if you get the “pick up item” display (because there’s nothing else there than the objects to pick up), they function the same.
You can’t pick up grown plants (flowers, planted wheat) with [g] and have to use [e] on them. The farm comes with pre-harvested crops, that’s why you can pick them with either.

You need to [a]ctivate dog food next to them.

Unless that changed during the development of the game, they are loyal to you forever and don’t have to be fed anymore.

The same as with dogs. [a]ctivate the bird food and once accepted they don’t have to be fed anymore (unless this changed).

Yes. To the whole sentence. Everytime you use the book to prepare some recipe in it, you have a chance to “remember” it and don’t have to use that book for that recipe ever again.
There are also recipes that are learned automatically at a higher skill level.
There’s also a chance to learn the recipe of something from disassembling it (well, probably not food).
If you have bad luck, you don’t learn it from crafting it once (or even multiple times) and always have to bring that book with you if you want to craft that recipe.
Rereading the book does not learn recipes.

Either check the wiki or pick them and note them down. It’s not very time or energy consuming to pick them and you can use decorative plant seeds to feed to more chickens/birds (or just throw them out).
You can see the name of the plant (if the tile pack you use does not differentiate) aside from other information by pressing or [;] and moving the cursor over the plant.

Open your [i]nventory, select it and press enter. In the description you’ll find if there’s a battery in it (it would say so) and more importantly, what type of battery it takes.
If there’s a battery in it, it should also say so (including the charges left in the battery) in your inventory next to the name of the item, like “food dehydrator (0/2000)”.
Also, unless that changed, you can’t “use” the dehydrator. It’s part of the crafting recipe as a “tool” and consumes a fix amount of charges.

Look for a pulley system nearby. Unless they got destroyed by some monster, you can [e]xamine them to open the doors.

For future reference, if you need some fast answers, you’re probably better off with Discord, IRC or the Tips, Tricks and Newb Questions: Reborn! forum topic.

3

Thanks for the answers.

Not having to feed animals seems way too easy (but as far as I understand it might be tricky to program). On the other hand the default seems to include a mod that disables feeding of companions (I thought it just would remove needs to keep track of mood, sleep, etc., which would be a pain to manage), but given that it seems to be broken for them to feed themselves outside of bases (according to another thread) it might be for the best.

As the dehydrator didn’t say anything about charges, but only types of batteries, I assume it doesn’t have one. I never would have guessed that it would be used as a tool that’s a crafting requirement rather than an item to be interacted with. Definitely useful to know of this somewhat backwards interaction principle for further cases.

Metal structures: No pulleys nearby (there was one to release the zombies in the barn…). I guess I’ll find out what they are, eventually.

It’s unfortunate that the forum convention is to stuff everything into a single monster mash-up Q&A thread, rather than to create threads that just sink into oblivion when they’ve served their purpose, but if that’s the custom, I’d better try to deal with it.

4

If you press [a] outside of any menu, you’ll get a list of everything that you can activate.
If it can be activated but is missing batteries, has no charges or fuel left, it will state so.
This gives a quick overview over stuff in you inventory (or on the ground) that you can use in a specific way.

Wait, is it possible that you mean locked wire gate? In that case, it should state so if you [e]xamine them.
I don’t think I’ve ever run into a silo with doors on them, just metal walls.
If it is a wire gate, you probably better of by just [e]xamining the fence next to it…

I don’t think that’s the “only right way” how this forum handles questions (unless someone confirms that). Creating new topics for questions is absolutely fine, as far as I know. It’s only that you may have to wait longer to get an answer.

5

There actually are silos with locked metal doors, they usually spawn in 2x4-road-2x4 type farms.
The only 3 methods of dealing with locked metal door (which doesn’t have connected pulley or terminal) are acetylene torch, sonic resonator CBM or good old explosives.

1 Like
6

I would like to note that you can see what you can harvest from each plant by finding it with and then pressing [e].

2 Likes
7

Ah, never run into one of these, I guess (I even just teleported around the map to check if there’s one like that and didn’t found any).

… or a vehicle. Vehicles are a solution to everything.
At the moment, based on the code, there’s also a way to get NPCs(/Camps) to open all doors, even closed metal ones. I’m not sure how, though, maybe that’s just a stub. Is there a “Loot Building” option yet?

I did not know that (or I forgot), that’s helpful, thank you very much!

8

The x-e key combination seems very useful. Thanks for that!

The buildings might be some kind of silos, although the one I’ve found had ladders to allow me to climb it after climbing over an (impassable, according to the ‘x’ description) fence, so it would be a different design. However, as I have no reason to expect them to suddenly open and spew out the denizens of Hell, I’ll just leave them be for the time being.

9

“Impassable” just means you can’t simply walk on it, but there can be means to get over stuff like that.
By the way, silos are a good way to reveal a large portion of the map, so you might want to climb to the top on the ones with the ladder.

Yeah, heh, it’s Cataclysm DDA, this sort of things neth - uh - never happens here… he… hehehe…

2 Likes
10

In case anyone’s interested, one of the metal structures could be unlocked with a lockpick and contained wheat. Using ‘e’ on the door indicated a lockpick could be used on the door.
I suspect the other one contains something similar, but the lockpick broke, so it will be some time before I will know for sure.

11

They must have been silos then, but I never noticed a door. I am playing older versions though.

12

Interesting. Either they were changed, or maybe there are different kinds of closed metal doors. I never found lockpick-able ones before so I just stopped trying.

13

no they appear in the stable not even experimental they seem to only appear in one type of farm which is the already stated 2x4 fields and house 1x4 road 2x4 barns, silos, fields, and animal areas