The mining mod includes makeshift picks made from bone, plus some metal deposits are on the surface. You really can bootstrap yourself from almost nothing to near civilization.
The last time I tried it, I think there was still a plastic dependency problem: you need vinegar to make plastic from milk, but a fermenting vat requires a chunk of plastic for the valve. You also need a full chemistry kit to make batteries, but you can’t make or reliably find rubber hoses. Survival Tools should include some makeahift hoses made from tanned stomachs or something.
Right, metal and clay pots have chemical making 1. You can do some stuff with them. But bleach, ammonia, and acid water all require chemical making 2+, which requires a basic chemistry set which requires rubber hoses. A couple of things require chemical making 3, which requires a full chemistry set, which requires a hotplate, which requires an amplifier circuit that you can’t make because it requires electronic scrap.
Again, someone who cares about this stuff (probably me) needs to come up with some alternate recipes for makeshift versions of this stuff and PR them against More Survival Tools. A soldering iron is just a resistance coil: a competent blacksmith should be able to improvise one. I think a spike of metal in a wood handle, next to a fire, would work okay.
I don’t know if I mentioned this elsewhere, but the last time I found a heli crash and bothered to dig up all the metal and move it, the helicopter had less significantly metal in it than a motorcycle, which seems like it might be a bug. It was a pain for my wilderness guy, being starved of metal like this and discovering that crashed military helicopters appear to have been little tiny things the size of a go cart. Anybody else noticed this?
Testing shows a reinforced nail bat will do it, with 22 bash. A homewrecker would be a solid choice that’s easy to craft, provided you can come up with the string somehow.
@miangsdorf I see what you mean. That would be awesome indeed.
@Mantar Not sure if that is the issue with heli crash giving to little or a bike having too much. You need 160 chunks of steel (or 4 steel frames) to make anvil (about 1 and half heli crashes). But after that, something like a forged sword needs just 12 chunks of steel. Which makes sense volume/weight wise for a heavier sword with some metal wasted in process.
From this point of view if bike needs 3 frames - that’s a lot of swords you can make out of just frames of a single bike.
Homewreker did the trick - got enough stone from medium boulders.