So where are we heading?

[Alec_White]

Any tips? At one year I don’t really have much in the way of combat stats because I try to avoid combat, now I’m facing scary things like hulks/masters/shocker brutes more often and I can only resort to blasting their faces with a shotgun a few times for fear of being mauled. Should I create a training pit or does that have very little return for the effort?

You can grind ranged with bows/selfmade ammo weapons and hit and run tactics, but it will be a pain.
Melee after a year will be hard without grinding dodging before and having a very good armor.

If I were you, I would do as Zanos recommended, with a pneumatic bolt driver and lots of ammo, while keeping holstered a “oh shit” shotgun/large calibre handgun.

Oh, and power armor, that stuff is the best to keep you alive. Add a water source and a few crops and you can live for ever.

[Rot]

Build a pneumatic assault rifle. It uses pebbles, marbles, and ball bearings as ammo. It has a 5 round burst and 15 round capacity.

It absolutely tears through enemies with the burst, and is silent.
Not to mention it levels your rifles skill so fast it’s not even funny. I made 1000 ball bearings (Which is actually really cheap) and leveled from 4 rifles to 16 in about an hour or two of irl time of grinding in a city.

Also cleared a mysterious temple in less than 2 minutes without even sustaining a scratch.

[TooDAMNMuch]

If you are on Windows there is a much better way to take screens. Find a thing called, I think, cutting tool open it and you should be able to figure it out from there. Windows tools are under-used.

snipping tool is the proper name, most handy.

[Zanos]

[quote=“Rot, post:22, topic:12864”]Build a pneumatic assault rifle. It uses pebbles, marbles, and ball bearings as ammo. It has a 5 round burst and 15 round capacity.

It absolutely tears through enemies with the burst, and is silent.
Not to mention it levels your rifles skill so fast it’s not even funny. I made 1000 ball bearings (Which is actually really cheap) and leveled from 4 rifles to 16 in about an hour or two of irl time of grinding in a city.

Also cleared a mysterious temple in less than 2 minutes without even sustaining a scratch.[/quote]
It’s great against most basic zombies, but…

Do not recommend for anything tougher.

[Rot]

That’s disappointing, maybe it’s been nerfed.

But tbh soldiers have high ballistics protection. Try using it on unarmored opponents.
(Hulks, brutes, your regular zombie)
I’ll test this out now.

Also, what ammo are you using?

EDIT: I just tested it, it works extremely well with regular zombies, and with brutes and ants too. Even killed a fiend. Ammo isn’t really a concern, so you can just auto fire and tear them apart. Hulks took multiple burst fires to kill, about 5-6. Then again, my rifle and marksmanship was both 3.
Just tested it with a soldier, and it was pretty ineffective.

Best if you use it against unarmored opponents. Obviously, this gun is air-powered and while air guns can be powerful, it’ll probably not be as powerful as an actually bullet for… Obvious reasons.

However it would be unwise to overlook the utility of it. Cheap ammo and it is pretty easy to build providing that you have the right skills. Not to mention that it can easily wipe out unarmored mobs of enemies silently.

The only cons I can see are the obvious weakness against armored enemies, its small magazine capacity (15 rounds), that the best ammo for it (Bearings) can only be reliably produced with forging, and that the skill requirements to make it is pretty high.

All in all, it’s a good weapon providing that you have the means to produce the best ammo available to it, and that you really just use it to take down weaker enemies at night raids, or just to save ammo when you’re raiding a dungeon or something.

[Zanos]

Yeah, I was using bearings in that screenshot. I tested it some more, and it definitely does tear through hordes. The biggest issues with it are that it’s reload 1 with a smallish capacity and each individual shot doesn’t do a ton of damage. Probably fine for clearing a town or lab, as long as you keep something for the more dangerous enemies on hand. I was mostly comparing it to the pneumatic bolt driver, which has similarly easily crafted ammunition, but also has 42 damage and 10 AP when loaded with steel bolts and accurized, so can kill pretty much anything in a couple shots.

[Rot]

I’ll agree with you on that one, but in my opinion you have to go through so much of a hassle to make bolts for the gun, and even then steel bolts are uncraftable.

At that point I’ll just make the assault rifle with its super cheap ammo.

Anyway, for optimal results, use the assault rifle with the bolt driver or a powerful sidearm like the Ruger Redhawk.

[Zanos]

On the latest experimental, the recipe for steel bolts is 2 chunks of steel and 6 scrap metal with hammering 1 and 7 forge charges. Pretty easy to make. Metal bolts are a bit worse, but don’t require a forge.

And you can reuse them.

[Rot]

[quote=“Zanos, post:28, topic:12864”]On the latest experimental, the recipe for steel bolts is 2 chunks of steel and 6 scrap metal with hammering 1 and 7 forge charges. Pretty easy to make. Metal bolts are a bit worse, but don’t require a forge.

And you can reuse them.[/quote]

I haven’t used crossbows since version 0.A, and in that version steel bolts were uncraftable. Hell, maybe they still are, but a mod maybe made them craftable.

Anyway, thanks for this. It’ll clear some confusion