Patching the 'Strongest' material in the game

[Scipio_Merc]

Now, we all know steel, we all know titanium or superalloy or plate. We know brick and stone and concrete.

But, my dear friends of the apocalypse, have you ever heard of the single most durable material of the Apoc?

LAMINATED GLASS

Now, don’t be too shocked or intimidated by this extremely rare and exceedingly durable material.

Do you know of this Glass? The most glassy of glass that smells… glassy.

Have you ever needed to hold back the tides of a zombie horde?

Close the Laminated doors!

You have two Juggernauts trying to eat you alive?
Capture|501x267

Close the Laminated doors!

Ever wanted to know what will keep the demons from corrupting your soul?

Bring a pane of Laminated glass!

Now, let’s put the jokes aside and be serious here.

Whenever someone last tinkered with the durability of Laminated glass panes and doors, they may have forgotten to, you know, still make it so that they weren’t harder than stone.

I, legitimately, have dragged a hulk over to test these Lam doors, and found that not even they knew how to break in.

I swear, if I could, I’d make a house out of this stuff in the current version since it practically ensures that nothing can get in.

If you manage to clear out the supermall, you, more or less, have a building filled with unbreakable defenses.

Request: Retool the durability of Laminated Glass, please and thank you. The hulk wants to give me a hug but he can’t get through.

[Sediment]

He’s just being polite and waiting for you to open the door for him like a good host does.

[MutaMan]

Pretty sure molerats can get through. And a thrown player.

[Ragno]

i will have to be on the look for it, im not sure to have seen it, or maybe i just run and leave everything open.

[Valase]

The Valase necromancer gestures at a nearby topic.

A nearby post rises from the grave!

On my quest to make my Zombie slave test facility hulk-safe, I tried different materials… as I wanted something that was both cheap and durable, I just went down the list in a testworld and constructed everything possible, placed a hulk in it and made some noise.

As expected, they walked through most walls as if they were made from paper. A fully built simple concrete wall however was strong enough to hold them in. Reinforced concrete, concrete pillars and resin walls did well too, but are more expensive.
So… Are there (cheaper) alternatives? Yes! But let’s slow down and take a look at some “evidence pictures” (using the ChestHole Tileset)…

You can build multiple safes to hold them back.
Now, those things are really expensive. They take more material and a lot longer to construct than concrete walls. So, why would someone use them? Well, they can be grabbed and moved (with enough strengh)!
Cool. But not necessary what I’m looking for. I need cheap and quick to build stuff. So, what else works?

Uh, sandbag and earthbag walls? Even the half-built variant? Well, okay, I guess they are indeed “expensive”, at least they take a long time to build, so it’s fair to make them robust…

Uhm… Arc furnace - fair enough… Kilns - okay? Standing tanks, fermenting vats and… forges? Stills? What in the…

No… these are “christmas trees”, not pine trees. They are dirt cheap to construct. Are they protected by a higher beeing?

Coffins?! Are they… are these things afraid of the death?

Oh… oh dear… Coat racks and barricades… please…

So… here an overview (as of build 10458) of all the hulk-safe materials (well, in hindsight, I probably should have constructed them in columns - sorry mobile users):

If you want to read it in text form

Picture from left to right and top down:

• open crate
• crate
• open coffin
• coffin
• bulletin board
• dresser
• bookcase
• entertainment center
• locker
• wooden rack
• display rack
• warehouse shelf
• coat rack
• wardrobe
• open safe
• road barricade
• fermenting vat
• wooden keg
• standing tank
• forge
• still
• charcoal kiln
• metal charcoal kiln
• rock forge
• clay kiln
• arc furnace
• decorative tree
• sandbag barricade
• sandbag wall
• earthbag barricade
• earthbag wall
• simple concrete wall
• reinforced concrete wall
• column
• resin wall

Now a word of warning: I’ve seen some of those materials getting destroyed by Zombies if there’s a group of them bashing the same tile or when a player character gets thrown into it by a smash attack. Also, everything that you can climb over by examining it (the barricades) can be climbed by some of the zombies as well.
Anyway, they still seem, at least to me, pretty “overpowered”.
Oh, and @Scipio_Merc… Do you think my buildable coat rack wall, which can be moved with a strength of 1, beats your laminated glass ?

If someone wants to know the cheapest hulk-safe option, depending on what you have and want, there are four in three categories:

Choose your cheat

The least material: [moveable] coat rack (fabrication 2, 25 minutes, hammering 2, 3 planks & 8 nails)

The lowest skill and fast: [moveable] decorative tree (fabrication 0, 20 minutes, hammering 2 & wood sawing 1, 1 log or 4 heavy sticks & 20 nails & 8 pine boughs) or [stationary] bulletin board (fabrication 0, 20 minutes, hammering 2 & wood sawing 1, 1 wooden panel or 4 planks & 8 nails)

The low tech tool and fast: [moveable] road barricade (fabrication 1, 20 minutes, hammering 1, 6 planks & 12 nails)

I did not found any related bug report on github, by the way. Also, I wouldn’t call it game breaking, so (for me at least) this isn’t high priority.

PS: I found a bonus whilst testing all these constructions and furnitures…:

Bonus cheat - I guess that's the equivalent to 'water' in Rock paper scissors

Found a lab but no keycard? Don’t worry. Remember, you are a MacGyver! Just use a tool, like some pebbles to… uh…

…do what now?

Oh…

…Oh no…

…Yeah… I guess that’s what happens if there’s no “pre_special”: “check_empty” tag… Breaking in with 200 pebbles, minimal skills and 1h 20min of spare time. You can pave over anything (including indestructible tiles and furniture).
While it’s easy to fix, it’s also the only reliable way I’m aware of to remove unwanted stairs, fix holes in the floor and build bases with multiple stories.
So… I’m kind of just hoping nobody scrolls down to check out the bonus cheat …

…It’s funny how I was looking for the strongest material and found the one that destroys them all…

Well… sorry about the amount of pictures in this post, I just figured this needs some… visual support.
Oh, and I’m also sorry for the puns in the subtitles…

[Ragno]

OMG xD, im amazed with your reasearch, pretty handy, i mean a coat hanger can beat a hulk :O!
Wait a minute, which of these options lets you shot over them?, iirc the barricades lets you, shoot over them, so instead of a cage, you have a fortress :O!

The only one that i feel its totally a bug, is the one to break wall with gravel floor, and being honest you deserve a medal for that one, who would be testing the construction options to check which one is exploit able xD

[Valase]

Yes, the barricades, including the sandbag and earthbag ones, should let you shoot over them. However, you can also shoot over (or “around”) the coat rack. The best one is probably the fermenting vat, as it has a coverage of 0% (which may or may not influence the bullet path, not sure for what it’s used other than if you can see over it when crouching).
But you can’t throw stuff over any of those, as far as I know.

@Ragno

The only one that i feel its totally a bug, is the one to break wall with gravel floor […]

Shhhhh!
To be honest, I noticed this in the file a while ago (probably 1 or 2 months), while I was searching for something else, but didn’t actually test it… until I noticed the option to build it over one of my test walls (yes, I tested all (base game) buildable floors and roofs too, just in case it somehow gets the hulk stuck - it didn’t).

However, I see some of the “too robust” furnitures totally as bugs, too. I think it can be explained why a safe can stop a hulk, but crates, coffins, bulletin boards, coat racks, many of the cabinets and christmas trees just don’t make much sense.
And if brick walls can get smashed by a hulk, so should probably sand-/earthbag walls as well.
For the other stuff… I’m not sure. Stills are made of copper and can be “easily” dented, but arc furnace are indeed massiv (unless “sloppily” built, which, to be honest, our self-made ones probably are).

[Mantar]

@Valase

it’s also the only reliable way I’m aware of to remove unwanted stairs, fix holes in the floor and build bases with multiple stories.

Well, there’s the debug map editor, which is what I would use for those things.

[Valase]

@Mantar

@Valase

to remove unwanted stairs

[…] there’s the debug map editor […]

B-but… But that’s cheating !
True. I just don’t like to work with it - also, there’s no time/material drawback, unless you just wait for an hour for no reason and throw a few materials in front of your cars wheel. On the other hand, it’s very easy to just mod in a construction recipe like this myself, so… I guess I’m just lazy?
Well… I guess I’ll leave a bookmark here for later.

Since it seems like everyone followed my request and nobody fixed this yet, I went ahead and did it myself. Well, too bad - it was fun as long as it lasted…

@Valase

[…] build bases with multiple stories.

Oops. Well, looks like I was pretty tired. My English isn’t the best all in all, but I usually double check for stuff like this. Oh well. Now you apparently need gravel to tell stories in buildings with multiple storeys…

[Ragno]

@Valase

Since it seems like everyone followed my request and nobody fixed this yet, I went ahead and did it myself. Well, too bad - it was fun as long as it lasted…

ºnº sigh, time to grab the old good pickaxe

[Valase]

Well, it’s not merged yet. So quickly grab the newest version and just stop updating .

[Mallowdust]

Do you think there is any role in having glass like that? Similar to the glass windows at the CDC in the Walking Dead episode S1 E6 “TS-19”. It could make sense to have this around the first floor of science labs to prevent anyone from breaking in since, just like in the CDC, the science labs also have extremely dangerous organisms that one wouldn’t want leaving to the surface.