This post should be a feature request on github.
How do I get calories for faction camp members without spending most of the time in the kitchen?
I’ve got a large number of chicken mostly enclosed, so I can probably collect two dozen eggs per day. Similarly, I can can probably kill the same number of hens without depleting the stock, I’ve got sheep and cows that can be milked (I’ve noted milking takes time, but I don’t know how much, but it seems to be independent on how much you actually extract). However, a full butchery of a hen took 8 minutes and resulted in two measly scraps of meat which is a silly amount of time for a puny number of calories that need to be processed further to be accepted.
I’ve seen I can order camp members to do butchery, but not cooking (although the faction camp orders seem to be backwards in that I have to assign someone to do an upgrade (select carefully!), but then don’t get to see the options before someone has been assigned (assuming I do get the options, and it isn’t some kind of flattening the ground that’s already flat given that the camp has to be on open ground), so there might be something hidden away in there. I can send them out to forage, and berries are fine to put into the food stock, but, again, wild vegetables need further processing.
So far I’ve manage to build up a net calorie plus on my camp with a single companion by converting all candy type stuff dropped by zombies and found in looted houses into calories, but not enough to feed the lobby beggars, should I recruit them (I’ve reverted that exercise, deciding I probably need a calorie buffer in my camp before I invite them to allow for some days of fruitless activity while trying to figure out how things works).
I also expect to have days without zombie bashing, both because of a need to recover from injuries, and a need to spend time reading, as well as time spent building/upgrading vehicles, so zombie bashing/looting can’t be the only calorie source, unless I can increase the yield a lot (I’d prefer to avoid tainted meat, or [acid] ants could probably provide a lot of that).
What are the best vehicle’s to make into a death mobile and what are the standardish steps to convert a vehicle into a death mobile?
I hope someone other then me can help better. All I can add is that the faction camp stuff has been put on hold, due to the interested programmer taking a break. A lot of stuff with it is wonky/unbalanced currently, and reading the 0.F stuff on github, nothing with NPCs seems to be a priority.
It may very well be that what you are looking for, stability I guess, is not really possible.
A giant question from you sir. I asked a similar one here when I was first learning the basics.
Long story short, make sure you have:
- Wrench
- Screwdriver set
- Hacksaw
- Duct tape and plastic chunks (butch a TV for plastic chunks)
- Makeshift Arc welder
- Lots of Med batteries and a way to charge them, for the welder.
Also, you will need spare car(s) built from the type of frame you want to use. Smaller cars use light but weak aluminum, larger ones strong, heavy steel.
Most people, after playing with it for awhile, would agree that the “Security Van” ( the one with the separate 1x3 cab and 3x3 space in the back) is a good mix between size, protection, and interior space. Larger death mobiles can be tricky to actually get mobile, with all the abandoned cars and crap on roads and in towns.
As for basic steps, most of your time will be spent repairing/replacing the frames and armor back to full health. Building the interior won’t take that much time, but scrounging for workstation pieces might. Basic stations inside include Kitchen, mini-freezer (or 2), a trunk/battery charger, Workbench, and maybe a welding station if you have the knowledge and books for it (makeshift welder works though, just a PITA with all the battery swaps). Also plan on a tank for water (don’t forget to add a faucet to the kitchen to use it), and a large storage battery to run things.
To actually kill things with it, you need at least rams on the front/back, and lots of armor around the whole thing. Then just point at them and hit the gas. Hitting anything with it will damage any vehicle tile, so be careful of things like wheels and solar panel placement.
If you are still having trouble, try asking about specific things that are eluding you, because this is a large and complicated topic.
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Raiding evac shelters for protein bars can be a decent source of calories for faction camps. Vending machines also often have calorie dense food suitable for filling the camp’s larder.
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Does the type of wheels you put on your vehicle matter all that much or not really?
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Does the type of armour matter or should you just slap on whatever you can get your hands on quickest?
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Is there any merit to switching out the motor with regards to performance as well as what fuel it can use and how abundant/renewable that fuel is.
Thanks. Not quite what I want, as those are limited sources, but it is definitely useful.
@spicyshadow: Deathmobile: I’m very fresh and in the process of modifying my first one, but a very basic choice is whether you want the vehicle to be a base or a day trip tool.
- I believe wheel type has an effect. Regardless, you’ll probably want armored ones.
- Slap on the best you can and change it when you get better skills.
- Yes, I believe so. Diesel can be produced, solar power is renewable, but panels are fragile, so I wouldn’t use panels on a fighting vehicles (you can still use jumper cables to charge batteries while parked at a base/camp). Multiple engines allow you a backup if one fails, assuming the backup is strong enough to move your vehicle.
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The wheels matter for offroad performance (field etc; not road tiles). The heavier your vehicle, the worse the performance (top speed) you get. Larger tires counteract this to an extent. Tank treads are the best, but very heavy.
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The better the armor, the more hit points it has. The point of armor is to absorb damage so the other things on the tile (wheel, frame, engine) don’t get hurt.
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Large electric motors use electricity, stored in the batteries and recharged from solar panels. That makes them the easiest combo to use. Gas and diesel will need to be found often to keep your tank full. As for performance, it mostly has to do with weight vs engine power. If you build light enough, one large electric motor will be plenty. If you want a real giant, steel plated tank, you will have to get stronger, larger engine.
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I recall a wheel rework being done so that ‘fatter’ tires do better off-road and suffer less movement penalty for traction and stuff. Smaller tires ***shooooould be better for quick acceleration/light vehicles that don’t need extra traction, but while i’m pretty sure about this I haven’t played around with it enough to know
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Military Composite armour is the best, BUUUUUT its hard to get more for repairs& replacement so the guru answer is heavy steel armour framing and armour if its a deathmobile that expects to be hittting things. There are some later game options too but if I recall they are a bit meh compared to just keeping heavy steel smashing through all the things
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^^^^ As Palu said. You can also keep 1+ engines of different varieties (gas, electric, diesel etc…) so that you can freely switch between them as fuel is available/ use electric for quieter travel. Running engines in parallel gives ever reducing return. I want to say something in the neighborhood of quadratic but its been a while since I saw the devs update on that.
While on the combat vehicle topic, I’ve got a few questions of my own:
- Ram/spiked plating/shock dampeners? Should you have all of those, or are some combinations better than others (my vehicle came with spikes at the front, which has worked well, and I aim to add them at the back as well, but fail to find any to scavenge in the current town)?
- Scoops: Do people use scoops to gather the (mostly junk) mowed down zombies drop before they’re crushed by the wheels to sort out the few gems, or are those mostly flavor (I’ve just added a wheel at the center of my vehicle to pulp zombies better)?
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I remember there was a definite best way. Don’t remember what it was. Shock dampeners should absorb impacts to prevent further back blocks from being damaged. Think there is a max to it, but if your not going ludicrous speeds and/or ramming heavy objects, (and its properly installed) it should isolate all the damage to the ram. Vastly reducing repair tedium
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Yes that is a thing people do.
Edit: I think this has previously been confirmed outdated info but old build patterns for rams included the ends being tucked back, as frames weren’t allowed to fall off if they were supporting other frames. Im near positive that the ram section being semi separated from the rest of the vehichle attached by only a few buffer frames with the shocks located there is a good build. like so:
| - - - - - |
|. ^^^^ . |
.
| and - == ram segments
^ == buffer/shock dampeners
== rest of the vehichle
. == ignore, just there for spacing
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Easy, you make your follower to work in the kitchen. You’ll need to expand a camp with corresponding facility, though. IIRC it is called “cantina”.
Reinforced solar panels are quite sturdy, as long as you don’t put them on outer vehicle tiles.
Amount of wheels does matter too.
Those are mod-only stuff, though.
I’m lazy so I went with quarterpanel+spiked plating. Spikes are too fragile for my taste, they often can’t even take one run through a decent-sized city. Rams should be more sturdy, but qp+sp basically never breaks, unless you start playing bowling with skelejuggs all day long.*
And regarding scoops, it’s exactly what you said - zeds leave too much junk for scoops to be worth it. If we could “program” them to filter what they “pick up” then I’d consider use them.
*: btw, the bug where you need only energy(or acetylene) but don’t need materials to fix vehicle plating is still in effect, so there’s that too.
Thanks.
- I haven’t reached the stage where I get a cantina option yet. However, building up a calorie buffer before recruiting a bunch of misfits so they can gradually reach the stage where they can work in the cantina seems to be the way, then. I’m finding expansion to be very demanding, though, as my fairly well trained companion isn’t able to continue without a number of days of book cramming, and the beggar misfits basically start at 0 in most everything, with occasional spikes. Recruiting them early without preparation seems to be a recipe for a painfully grindy start.
- Fragile panels: I’ve read about hulks ripping your vehicle apart…
- Looks like quarterpanels + spiked plating is good enough then (has been good enough for me so far, including a few skeletal juggernauts), although I’ve read about vehicles being used to bust walls, but those vehicles might have been throwaway ones?
- I’m not sure what material you’d use to fix buckled metal. I guess using a small piece of metal if the damage is at most yellow, and a small metal plate for red might be appropriate. Other things seem to use lots of glue and plastic.
how do you dig up graves?
Not always, though sometimes people grab the nearest working/near working car and just ram it into the desired building. So they can be almost as disposable as ‘turret vision blocking’ carts… if your willing to toss a whole functioning vehicle at something just to bust into a military bunker or other loot heavy location.
I’ve seen versions that had an extended hallway rear end with doors so that they could ‘puncture’ a hole in the wall with minimal damage and walk straight into the building without needing to pull out of the hole or leaving any spaces for zeds to get in and those seem intended to be reusable. though if the character is strong enough, then a sledge and adjacent parked vehicle should work about as well.
Given the number of cars working enough to be started and driven in a mid sized town, I wouldn’t really care about smashing a few of them, as I can’t see any reason to collect even half of them. And that doesn’t even count the ones that can be used after a couple of hours spent on repairs.
The syringe (or virus) puncture method seems interesting, although I assume you’d need to be prepared to face what’s inside the building, so I think that’s a fair bit into the future for my character.
@Spicyshadow: I’m guessing, as I haven’t done any digging at all so far, but I’d try to 'a’ctivate a digging tool, 'e’xamine the grave while having a digging tool in the inventory, and try to find a suitable kind of digging from the construction menu (again, having a digging tool in the inventory).
^^^ I’ve not done anything with graves, so was hoping someone who had would jump on it, but in theory it should be just like rubble and that should do it.
Containers, do they have any use?
Bottles can store things, and I believe tin cans can be reused (and used in some recipes), gallon jugs (and other plastic ones) can be used in recipes, I think, and store stuff, while glass jars (both kinds) are used to preserve food.
What I’m really after is whether I waste resources dropping glass bottles with booze, aluminum cans (source of aluminum?) with drinks, boxes with perishable food, etc. into the camp calorie zone to be eliminated and turned into NPC fuel.
I’m not really worried about things useful for low volume stuff, but glass jars seems to be possible to use in almost unlimited quantities, and if canning food reuses used tin cans you can use similar quantities of that (provided my inner Uncle Scrooge manages to open these precious tin cans to generate opened ones…).
What about plastic bags, cardboard boxes, paper wraps, etc?
I’m not sure what plastic things arn’t useable but at ~Fab 3 it becomes possible to turn enough plastic chunks into a
plastic mold which is a required tool for:
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recycleing lots of plastic junk, from empty plastic bottles of all sizes, plastic bags etc… into chunks
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crafting plastic chunks into various bottles and containers including jerrycans and gallon jugs
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some other miscellaneous and useful craftings that I don’t fully remember but potentially include higher tier pocketed armor and weapons that include plastic in the recipe
tin and aluminum cans can be recycled (once you are high enough fab) into basically everything, personally I keep them in a pile in case my character ever gets high enough to smith, in which case I WILL want all I can et my hands on. Though I have never ACTUALLY had a survivor live that long, possibly largely to playing ~randomized characters with rerolls until baseline conditions are met to prevent un-fun levels of min-maxing
cardboard and paper I usually keep as fire material until I have sufficient cooking/fire crafting alternatives then its mostly trash, but kept around in case of use in a recipe so I don’t need to actively go search for it.
I know that canning is a thing, but haven’t actually gotten to use it at all.
Thanks. I think I’ve got enough sources of plastic (so far I’ve cut up plastic containing clothing/armor, like football armor), but aluminum in particular doesn’t seem to be that common outside of aluminum vehicle frames and cans.
This probably means I should batch up the aluminum can drinks and pour it into plastic containers before sending it into the calorie grinder (I’ve avoided alcohol and junk food on my character, and my game experience with coffee did not cause me to want to try it again).
Edit: I just found a use for paper wrappers and cardboard: Tinder for base camps. Apparently base camp stoves use tinder as fuel, and one of more or less everything results in one unit of tinder, so you can use one heavy stick or five paper wrapper,s or one piece of cardboard from a cut up box to have your followers make one piece of tinder out of.