If chain lightning counts, yes. And not necessarily a lot of damage, but it’s not the hit point damage that gets you with shocker enemies; it’s the pain. (Last I heard, chain lightning is between like 2 and 25 points of damage.)
Lightning Storm lightning doesn’t fire actual bolts into the area (just the lighting); shocker bolts can do about 0.5-1 bar of HP but the stun tends to be the more dangerous part.
I read the wiki, but I still don’t understand mutations. I found a generic mutagen and drank it and got the traits gills, strong, and dexterous. Will I mutate more naturally with time or do I need to find more mutagens? Am I on some sort of path given how I mutated thus far?
I took the robust genetics trait because becoming a mutant seemed like a fun idea, but I have no idea how it works.
[quote=“Ayt, post:6444, topic:42”]I read the wiki, but I still don’t understand mutations. I found a generic mutagen and drank it and got the traits gills, strong, and dexterous. Will I mutate more naturally with time or do I need to find more mutagens? Am I on some sort of path given how I mutated thus far?
I took the robust genetics trait because becoming a mutant seemed like a fun idea, but I have no idea how it works.[/quote]
You’ll need more mutagen. Gills/Strong/Dextrous is marginally Cephalopod but in practice you’re not significantly committed anywhere with those. (They’re all nice ones, though. Good rolls!)
Robust Genetics probably helped out there. Short version: most mutations (consume mutagens, get comic-book radiated, weird stuff affects you) have a 1/3 chance of going Bad, rather than being truly random. Robust Genetics flips that, so when the 1/3 forced-roll hits, you’re instead guaranteed a Good mutation. You got the full three mutations from the mutagen, so chances are one of 'em was thus forced. But since your genetics are robust, you got one that’s considered an advantage, rather than one that’s considered a disadvantage.
And welcome to the forums.
Thanks for the info and thanks for the welcome!
The strong and dexterous mutations seem advantageous if I can max them out. I’m actually playing right now and just found some marloss berries. I popped a couple and now also have a long tail. I’m not sure if I’ll eat the other four I found. I’m kind of attached to this character.
First off, it should not be so hard to register on the forums, took me almost 20m due to not knowing the answer a question it asked.
Second, some tips I have found: (I play with night vision, weak scent, and light step, so they may not work for everyone)
When you are playing for the first time, get a crowbar, as practically everyone recommends. (Rock + pipe from locker) Once you have your crowbar, find a way to waste time until night, such as throwing rocks to level your throwing skill up, or crafting/deconstructing things to level crafting skills. Once it is night, find the nearest house in town and apply the crowbar to the BACK door (A key). This will let you in with a minimum of noise, preventing the whole getting your face eaten off problem. From there, circle the house in either direction along the wall, when you come to a window, close the curtains from the diagonal (C key) - this minimizes the chances of anything that may happen to have night vision from seeing you, if anything is out front.
Once you have done that, you will have a base of operations at the edge of the city, so long as you did not manage to break anything inside. If you have any zombies while clearing it, lure them out through the back before you try to kill them - you don’t want noise attracting more zombies inside.
Another tip - if you cannot find enough leather to craft anything, try zombies. Plenty of them wear leather clothing. Likewise, if you cannot find plastic chunks, try zombies. Footwear seems to give plastic quite often if you cut it up (shift+B)
For vehicles, I highly recommend a motorcycle to start with, very low fuel usage, and it is quite speedy. Find an empty area such as in a field and start spinning in circles to level your driving skill (hit 8 on keypad once to speed up, then hold 4 or 6) and try to hit level four or so. I believe you stop losing control then. After that, you can zoom around to check out garages – you want an acetylene torch, and hopefully welding goggles. You can then tear the cargo storage off of a truck and weld it to the motorcycle to carry huge amounts of loot back to your safehouse. The same torch can also breach the bank vaults (A key, direction of metal door) letting you get very high end equipment as long as you have a picklock kit and stethoscope, which you can find in a hospital, though that is rather dangerous. With high strength, you could also try smashing the safes.
Another tip for if you get a van/truck instead of a motorcycle - put curtains up on all the windows, and replace the quarterpanels with boards to block vision. Each curtain needs a sheet, but allows you to close your doors twice to block sight, or close your windshield to block sight. This can be a HUGE help, as you can then sleep in a ‘non-safe’ area and have much lower risk of waking up to having your face eaten off.
For trying to loot, again at night time, try checking each vehicle you come across for a horn (E key on any part of the key selects driver seat where the horn is by default) - if it has a horn, you can honk it a time or two (E+direction of seat, then hit V to go to controls, then you can select the horn) and it will attract all nearby zombies. Then just run off and enjoy being able to avoid zombies easier due to them all being in one little area.
If you need a fire to cook food or boil water, try cutting up some wood into splintered wood (shift+B while standing on a pile of wood, then cut it up) - then drop one splinter of wood outside and light it on fire. It lasts a surprisingly long time, and you can easily cook a few meat or boil a few bottles of water with it.
If at all possible, try to find the following: kukri (mil surplus, maybe sporting goods store?), refillable lighter, antibiotics (pharmacy, house bathroom), sheath/holster/scabbard, nailgun (hardware store), and any small knives/rocks/etc. The kukri knife slaughters things with ease. The refillable lighter can use gas (quite common) to refill again and again preventing the problem of not having a fire source. The sheath/holster/scabbard allow you to hold your weapon for zero volume by wearing them, though the weight still applies. Nailgun is nearly silent and burst fire does surprising amounts of damage and is very easy to hit with at point-blank range. And any small knives or rocks can be used as throwing weapons to take down spitters or shockers to avoid their nasty side effects. Additionally, you can throw them into windows at night if you are being hunted to distract whatever is after you.
If you apply your sewing kit/soldering iron, you can repair clothing, then refit it, then reinforce it. Practice both using clothing found on the ground, and rags obtained by cutting up clothing you find. Try not to work on your own equipment until level 2-3 in tailoring. You can also use the soldering iron on metal weapons to repair and reinforce them. I have found that a handful of reinforced knives is quite potent when you need to kill something - just keep chucking knives into its face as you retreat.
Shotguns bad. BIG BOOM draws in all the zombies, more big booms fighting them, then you get swarmed and die. Guns bad. Bang = more zombies, more bangs, more zombies. If you must use a gun, get a silencer, or be sure you can kill anything that comes your way. Bows, crossbows, and throwing are much safer alternatives for ranged combat.
If in doubt, get a lot of attention and run into a house with a back door, race through, close the door, then set the house on fire. You can easily kill 30+ zombies at once doing this, even if you do not stand a chance in direct combat.
Strength is nice, but intelligence keeps you alive. Be tricky if you want to stay breathing.
It should not be so hard to stop spambots from flooding the forums en masse and dragging legitimate use to a crawl. We regret having to ask folks to actually poke around the forum/wiki in order to register and participate therein.
But welcome to the forum, and that’ll hopefully be the first and last time you get Questioned.
Night raiding is a popular strategy, yeah.
Aren’t labs supposed to have multiple levels? This one only has one, with a huge room under the off-blue symbol on the underground map.
Sometimes their mapgen gets overwritten by other underground stuff, but single-level labs aren’t unknown.
A Relativly easy Offensive build to play would be perhaphs shaolen adept, Tiger Style, Bionic athlete, and 12 int, the rest of the stats can go drown cause your muscles somehow give you accuracy, unless you want a ranged weapon.
also it lets you be able to easly-ish kill shocker brutes with a usb drive early
I intend to fortify an open field, just box out a whole big area above ground. I’m thinking a layer of barbed-wire then chain-link fence. Would digging a shallow/dip pit on the bar-wire ring help? Slow them down a bit? In my past experience, nothing dangerous really confronts my base, just small animals die in my barb-wire which make for easy morning meals.
I want my welding/ crafting/ reading survivor to be safe in his/her shed during daylight hours, I don’t want fuckin monsters crashing in and wrecking my custom cars and shit. Building a full stone or wood wall is way too material-intensive.
Any ideas?
A wood wall would probably be less of a pain in the ass than a chain-link fence. A chain-link fence–especially a large one–requires horrific amounts of pipes, scrap metal, and wires. Don’t try it unless you take a sledgehammer and bolt cutters out to a few basketball-court parks to harvest them for the parts and fill up several tiles’ worth of vehicle trunks with them.
Meanwhile, a wood wall just requires two-bys and nails, which aren’t that bad, and you can throw the splintered wood from processing the logs into planks in your charcoal kiln.
[quote=“AllisonW, post:6453, topic:42”]A wood wall would probably be less of a pain in the ass than a chain-link fence. A chain-link fence–especially a large one–requires horrific amounts of pipes, scrap metal, and wires. Don’t try it unless you take a sledgehammer and bolt cutters out to a few basketball-court parks to harvest them for the parts and fill up several tiles’ worth of vehicle trunks with them.
Meanwhile, a wood wall just requires two-bys and nails, which aren’t that bad, and you can throw the splintered wood from processing the logs into planks in your charcoal kiln.[/quote]
My shelter is near two large fuckin’ power-service-stations and about 5 small ‘customer service uplink sites’ or whatever the fuck, it’s a small building absolutely surrounded by wire and pipe and scrap, why I was asking about barbwire/fence/pits. I dont want to farm friendly-village… IF onnly the 2x2 Public Works were this common! Nope! I get fucking T’s and T’s and goddamn ants and huge cities, robots, flugal spores, do rest, no respite, ect.
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What is the purpose of serving area interfaces?
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Can the electrical equipment at power substations be used in any way (other than dismantling them for spare parts?)
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Is there any way I can build a large metal door that is opened and closed by a mechanical winch (like the ones in garages, fire stations, etc.)?
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How do I put things on the roof of a car (primarily solar panels)?
And with my latest start, ran into a new problem. What does one do when one cannot find a sharp object? I could craft a stone knife… If I could butcher these corpses for sinew.
About ready to just mod in a stone blade for it, been three days in the middle of the wilderness now.
[quote=“Eric, post:6455, topic:42”]1. What is the purpose of serving area interfaces?
- Can the electrical equipment at power substations be used in any way (other than dismantling them for spare parts?)[/quote]
I think that’s about it (dismantle stuff for parts). Plus, the purpose of serving area interfaces probably has something to do with special zombie spawns more than the structure itself or any loot in it. Did any zombie technicians or shockers or the like spawn there? I know you’d get some at the power substation but I dunno about the serving area interface.
3. Is there any way I can build a large metal door that is opened and closed by a mechanical winch (like the ones in garages, fire stations, etc.)?
This one I dunno about, alas. Might be something in the latest experimentals but I just dunno off the top of my head.
4. How do I put things on the roof of a car (primarily solar panels)?
If a particular part is intended to sit on the roof (solar panels, floodlights, red and blue lights, and the like), they’ll be placed on the outside automatically if there’s a roof present on their tile.
[quote=“Lorith, post:6456, topic:42”]And with my latest start, ran into a new problem. What does one do when one cannot find a sharp object? I could craft a stone knife… If I could butcher these corpses for sinew.
About ready to just mod in a stone blade for it, been three days in the middle of the wilderness now.[/quote]
Entirely in the wilderness, I don’t think you can do much, actually. Your best bet would be to find a window with curtains, rip’em down, and disassemble the long string. I don’t know if being unable to start totally from scratch in pure wilderness is intentional or not; a chance to find plant fiber while foraging would help a lot, even if it’s uncommon enough to only be a thing you’d deliberately forage for if you had no alternatives.
What does the RU stand for in the active mutations?
Resource Units or something: it’s a placeholder because nobody had a good way to say “hunger/thirst/fatigue, any or all thereof depending on the mutation, in minimal characters”.
…Not sure if HTF would be better.
Resource Units or something: it’s a placeholder because nobody had a good way to say “hunger/thirst/fatigue, any or all thereof depending on the mutation, in minimal characters”.
…Not sure if HTF would be better.[/quote]
STAM, for stamina? It’d correspond at least a bit more clearly to hunger/thirst/fatigue, though some players may read it as fatigue-specific. Still a bit more intuitive than RU.
[quote=“Lorith, post:6456, topic:42”]And with my latest start, ran into a new problem. What does one do when one cannot find a sharp object? I could craft a stone knife… If I could butcher these corpses for sinew.
About ready to just mod in a stone blade for it, been three days in the middle of the wilderness now.[/quote]
Update on this: I fixed this for you in the latest build. You can now get binding from a withered plant when making a stone knife. 
[quote=“AllisonW, post:6460, topic:42”][quote=“Lorith, post:6456, topic:42”]And with my latest start, ran into a new problem. What does one do when one cannot find a sharp object? I could craft a stone knife… If I could butcher these corpses for sinew.
About ready to just mod in a stone blade for it, been three days in the middle of the wilderness now.[/quote]
Update on this: I fixed this for you in the latest build. You can now get binding from a withered plant when making a stone knife. :)[/quote]
Cool, thanks. I just modded in an option to make a sharp rock - worse damage than a normal rock, bit lower weight, took a hammering tool plus a rock, usable as a weak hammer same as a rock, plus worse butchering than a pocketknife. Just enough to get started off. Now struggling to get enough sinew to make a firestarter. But now I have a chance instead of “Haha, nope you dead!”