The way removal of a large storage battery from a vehicle that then requires installation of another entire part in order to reassemble feels very unrealistic, and petty/pedantic. A far more realistic mechanism would be a probability of extra wear penalty if the large storage battery is removed and reinstalled without a mechanism designed for installation and removal. This was especially annoying after starting a camp in a cleared airport, managing to install solar panels on the roof of a hanger and then not having a way to connect those panels to the vehicle. The inability to use wall wiring and proximity makes no sense. Like, does the original building not have electrical anywhere. Then I remove the batteries to toss them up on the roof with the solar panels, charge them up and can’t install them using the same exact process I used to remove them. There are ways this could be made annoyingly pedantic, and that do make sense. One might have to remove many many small batteries if they are not in an enclosure. I should also be able to toss any battery into the trunk or onto a seat and use a jumper cable to make the connection too. If the batteries can be removed, then they are wired in parallel in the vehicle, so simply connecting positive to positive and negatives together should always work. Tying down a lose battery or it acts like an occupant without a seat belt would be interesting too.
With a chain link fence, I can’t disassemble it, but there is also the discrepancy between using a hacksaw and the lack of fittings. This feels like another case of bad entropy to me. If I need to use a saw for whatever reason, I am not losing all the fittings somehow. I can see the cutting action causing a proportional loss of like 1 pipe and some wire in order to reconstruct. In the real world, the last element that is going to be lost from taking a hacksaw to a chain link fence would be the fittings.
It would be interesting to add a manual post hole digger and require it for sturdier corner post structures for a free standing corner and the option to use concrete for a much more solid corner post hole. Basically treat the corner like a building wall depending on the quality of the anchor.
In the game I went to lift a heavy broken generator to move it and found it frustrating when a follower NPC did not attempt to help and I was unable to find a mechanism to recruit their help.
I have also been unable to intuitively figure out how to get the camp follower NPC to do much of anything useful without consulting outside sources like YT, which I still have not done. In particular, I have a spot for “looted: books” but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get the NPC to read. I also feel a bit frustrated with the resolution of disassembly zones. I wish there was a “unload vehicle” zone with a trunk or entire vehicle option. I also tried to set up a disassembly zone around the benches inside an airport terminal with no success. When moving an empty vending machine, it had no effect. I imagine that “disassembly” is intended for appliances and stuff that take far longer to complete, but at the early stages of getting established it is annoying to be setting up so much without help in a first time play through with a camp and NPC. I’m glad I played a few times without any camp or NPC with me as I find this aspect frustrating. I do not want to deal with the NPC’s abysmal combat skills, competence with sub machine guns, and the inevitable ammo running out issue if I leave them to do more long range types of tasks. I’m deeply conservative in my “survival” actions and always prefer to avoid getting hurt at all instead of being aggressive. The last thing I want to deal with is risking what appears to be useless incompetence in zone and base camp setup, then going out into the wild. The wording of the ‘recruit other NPC’s’ task and a few others do not help when it basically says they will only come back after major issues. In the beginning this feels like the entire camp and followers system is a useless headache. Perhaps that is by design. I have nothing to add in suggestions here. All I can say is that the experience feels like the wrong kind of frustrating in an unrealistic way. I expect a real survivor would be far more proactive and volunteer to do what they know while also emulating what they see. If I pick up and wield a plank, and there are more planks, do the same task or it should be easy to say “repeat what I am doing” like a macro.
