Robotic Autocrafters

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

After fiddling with the multi-cooker, instead of some boiled noodles inside, I found an idea instead.

Automated crafting devices, that can either be found buried deep in high tech vaults or labs rarely, or can be made after finding the rivtech binder and/or robotics for fun and profit and/or the practicality enhancement lab book.

Decent requirements in electronics to craft, and can either be powered by batteries and be standalone or mounted to a vehicle frame. You mount them over top a relevant vehicle rig, like a recharging station over a cargo space, but it’s not required.

There’d be one for various kinds of things, like one for fabricating and one for mechanics, one for cooking, etc.

Activating one with enough charges or examining one on a powered frame brings up the crafting menu, but only shows what that specific type of autocrafter can make, but takes your own skill levels and nearby books and materials and tools into account.

Attempting to craft a recipe in this mode is a computer check, and automatically uses and allocates the materials into the device. Failing the check can damage the device and/or still use up the materials.

The device will churn and chug for the normal duration of crafting, possibly + or - some percent for being robutt and based on how good your computer skill is.

When the device is active, it will make noise and use power, and examining it shows you how long is left, and gives you an option to cancel the batch but might return losses of materials (if any.)

When the device is complete, it will make a ding.

This will allow you to just set and program in batches of crafting and walk away to do something else.

The time is computed even if you leave the reality bubble

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On a side note, it’d be neat if you could craft some sort of robot that can act as a construction bot. Give it a batch of construction commands and nearby materials and tools, and let it dig those holes or cut down those trees or build that wall or whatever. It’d have to run around doing it though, and would need a charging dock to go charge up at, and a zombie could probably chew on it to death.

2

With all the effort we’ve put into making crafting reflect reality, making magic crafting machines would be very counter-productive.

Recipes that INCLUDE some kind of automated tooling, like a CNC machine or 3D printer, great, but they’d be a tool, not some entirely new way to do crafting. The one benefit there is that if an automated tool like that were involved, there would probably be some amount of set up time, but then the thing cranks away until the item (or batch of items) is done. This might be all you were getting at, if so, sure.

Large, more capable devices might be found in some locations.

3

Some re-programmable assembly line with robotic arms you can refurbish, maybe?

4

So a machine that takes time and resources to get to work but reduces crafting time by doing automated functions would be cool. Example: a microwave oven reduced the time making soup than using a boiling pot.

5

Currently crafting time alterations aren’t supported by the crafting system.
A crafting system rework that would allow some of that is planned, but probably won’t happen very soon.

6

I mean as an alternative recipe, one recipe as normal and an alternate one taking less time using the machine.