I’m probably playing it wrong, but for me cataclysm turns into a set of chores at some point where I am developing my character at a snail’s pace. I usually clean up a city from zombies, then collect all the loot, starting from zombie clothes and bones and ending with furniture, rocks and rebar from demolished buildings. Afterwards I’m building many support vehicles (to generate electricity, weld, cook, freeze, vacuum and smoke food, etc), then start building my base and creating a deathmobile.
The problem is that there are many routine things which take too much time - such as cooking, boiling water, crafting same stuff (e.g. metal frames) over and over, sorting and organizing things into piles for easier access, disassembling clothes into rags and rags into thread for tailor kit, etc, all of which I’d rather not do if I could. What would be neat is if you could create an automatically running chain of machines (or NPC at least) which did all of these things on its own once you set it up.
If there were such vehicle parts added that could solve most of the problems:
[ol][li]robotic arm - moves stuff from one neighboring tile to another, or can pick and drop items from vehicle storage. Requires optics built in vehicle to work. Stuff to move should be defined in robo controls by entering a string - e.g. *rock moves both rocks and sharp rocks. Mostly useful for automatically sorting stuff hoarders (such as me) bring home in heaps.[/li]
[li]autocrafter - crafts a single recipe over and over while enough solid resources are present on the same tile and enough energy/water are there in the vehicle. To craft an autocrafter you need some base amount of metal, wires, etc + some additional stuff depending on the recipe which it crafts: hose for liquids, robotic arm for solids, etc. E.g.: 5 wires + metal chunk + plastic chunk (base cost) + hose + pump + 1 wire (for water) + hotplate + 1 wire (needed as a tool) for clean water crafter, 5 wires + metal chunk + plastic chunk (base cost) + robo arm + 1 wire (for meat) + hotplate + 1 wire (needed as a tool) for cooked meat crafter. [/li]
[li]autobuilder - builds a same thing over and over. If you place it in vehicle and drag it (or make it move by itself somehow) it will dig trenches, cut trees or build walls etc as long as enough resources are provided.[/li]
[li]craftable robot which could pick and move stuff from designated tiles to other designated tiles (you designate wreckage you just dug and robots move back and forth collecting metal and dumping it for robo arms to sort it into piles and craft more robots for you)[/li]
[li]“designator” - allows you and robots to designate tiles. E.g. a turret could designate a tile with a corpse of an animal it just killed so working bots could come and collect it and put to use. Types of tiles:
[list]
[li]tile to load from[/li]
[li]tile to unload to[/li]
[li]traffic tile (your robots should prioritize driving on these instead of trying to move through a house, ruined vehicle or a minefield)[/li]
[/list]
Load and unload tiles should have labels, so that robots don’t dump freshly crafted ammo intended for turrets into a rubbish burning pile and don’t cover turrets in fresh animal corpses (turrets designate load tiles with MEAT label and bots unload it into MEAT dump, crafted ammo is put onto TURRET labeled tile and dumped by bots onto TURRET labeled tiles where turrets are placed.)
[/li][/ol]
This would allow you to start to compete on equal footing with other growing “civilizations” such as triffids and fungus.
Also old kinda related thread