Tips, Tricks, and Newb Questions!

[Jesus_Smith_Nandez]

[quote=“pisskop, post:12120, topic:42”]The finale might have explosives. They’ll perhaps blast through the walls or doors.

If you have the z-levels on you could start a fire topside and wait it out below. I forget if the outer walls are concrete on the ground floor.

CBMs might help? You should beging havesting any human meat you can if you havent already, and keep in mind that zombie meat will be edible as a very last resort.

Maybe laser weapons will do things?

pedit: butt-ah you knew what you signed up for when you agree to take the lab challenge. I didnt hear anything in the lore about forced testing or ‘volunteers’ so I can only assume your character also had it coming :p[/quote]
That’s not the issue, I can’t find the stairs out of the mine fam; I entered it from the outside. I’m on the first underground floor rn and can’t get back up

[pisskop]

oh. The stairs up is gone.

Start destroying all the furniture. The furniture can spawn on stairs. I guess instead of destroying it you could 'x’xamine the tiles covered by furniture instead too.

Worst come to worst, either cheat or accept it.

[pisskop]

if i devoted time to building a base, would npcs be capable of waiting there? as props?

[deknegt]

if i devoted time to building a base, would npcs be capable of waiting there? as props?

I know that if you can talk a (static) NPC in going with you, you can guide them to a safe place and then tell them that you’re going to run solo again, they’re going to stay in the spot where you left them until you re-recruit them OR they have to defend themselves… Advantage to straight up telling them that you’re leaving rather than have them guard is that they revert into ‘ordinary’ NPC mode who don’t have to sleep and don’t need to eat.

Not sure if the same applies to wanderers

[Azrad]

if i devoted time to building a base, would npcs be capable of waiting there? as props?

You can tell them to guard the base, and they won’t move from their spot until you let them join you again. They won’t need sleep for that. They won’t pick items up when guarding, but be sure to set the area as a no NPC pickup zone first.

[KliPeH]

I just died in an extremely BS way, when I peeked into a lab room guarded by a turret and got insta-killed as 59 damage got dealt to my torso (through a reinforced Kevlar vest, a reinforced duster and a reinforced MOLLE backpack) in one turn without me being able to react. I savescummed and returned to the lab with the intention of getting my loot back, but the corpse of my former-self is one tile inside the room and standing in the doorway gets me shot.
How do I recover it?

I don’t have any EMP grenades and can’t craft any yet. No CBMs either. I tried to move a display rack between me and the turret to block line of sight but it doesn’t, and constructing anything will get me frozen to death in a few minutes.

[Valpo]

You can lure zombies there. When they stand at the door you open it. The turret will shoot them. Make sure that you coerce them to keep standing in the doorway by tanking theire attacks. The cyborgs work well too. Repeat this till the turret runs out of ammo… good luck.

[BeerBeer]

[quote=“KliPeH, post:12126, topic:42”]I just died in an extremely BS way, when I peeked into a lab room guarded by a turret and got insta-killed as 59 damage got dealt to my torso (through a reinforced Kevlar vest, a reinforced duster and a reinforced MOLLE backpack) in one turn without me being able to react. I savescummed and returned to the lab with the intention of getting my loot back, but the corpse of my former-self is one tile inside the room and standing in the doorway gets me shot.
How do I recover it?

I don’t have any EMP grenades and can’t craft any yet. No CBMs either. I tried to move a display rack between me and the turret to block line of sight but it doesn’t, and constructing anything will get me frozen to death in a few minutes.[/quote]

That does seem BS-ey but do note that all armor has coverage value (a probability percentage), which means a bullet can bypass armor entirely, even multiple armor/clothing items. Only a coverage of 100 is guaranteed to filter the relevant incoming damage.

Before you enter a room, make sure you’re “at full speed”. Wait a few turns behind the door before opening it. Make sure you’re not in pain, hungry or thirsty, tired etc. All those reduce your speed - the breakdown of speed factors is in the character sheet. With high enough speed, and with fast enough aim, you’ll be able to get a drop on turrets every time. Note that you can tell which rooms have turrets even before opening a lab door - the room walls and doors glow in the dark, since turrets have a light source.

If you can craft a ton of smoke bombs, you might be able to get your stuff under the cover of smoke.

When you do get EMP grenades, try throwing them into the room without exposing yourself.

Note that turrets have limited ammo, so in theory you could have it waste its ammo to some other target.

If you can outrange the turret, for example with a sniper rifle, you could in theory break down a few select wall sections to create a long-distance view to the turret and snipe it a few rooms away.

Are you in an ice lab? The temps are notoriously low in them. You are however able to stand still for hours in them if you build a fire next to you, meaning a blazier and a ton of two-by-fours. There are other methods, of course. Hope this helps with construction projects.

If all else fails, forget your former dead body, and just use debug commands to give yourself some of the stuff. I’m not an expert but I believe games are supposed to be fun and not stressful Although I’ll perfectly understand if you have the mentality “Do you think this is some f***ing game?”, for sometimes I do, too.

[Flare]

If you have the z-levels on you could start a fire topside and wait it out below. I forget if the outer walls are concrete on the ground floor.

I was under the impression that fire does not compute when the player is not in the immediate vicinity, is this not true for z levels?

[pisskop]

thats just it, with the experimental versions option to use zlevel it all processes, from the migos shouting to fire you. reality bubble still though.

dont know about the mod

[KliPeH]

With high enough speed, and with fast enough aim, you’ll be able to get a drop on turrets every time.

If you can outrange the turret, for example with a sniper rifle, you could in theory break down a few select wall sections to create a long-distance view to the turret and snipe it a few rooms away.

I don't think I own anything strong enough to kill a turret. I mean, checking the wiki I see it only has 30HP but also high armor against both bashing and cutting (bullet) weapons; I'd need at least a few bursts from my SMG to have it killed, which gives it time to shoot at me and kill me as well.

When you do get EMP grenades, try throwing them into the room without exposing yourself.

This was the initial plan but looking through my stockpiles I didn’t find any EMP grenades I could use, and getting Electronics to lvl 4 (where the recipe for them gets auto-learned, I believe) will take way too long for my liking.

If you can craft a ton of smoke bombs, you might be able to get your stuff under the cover of smoke.

Smoke bombs! Didn’t even think about those. I got 4-5 smoke bombs back at base, never thought I’d get a good chance to use them. I should go ahead and try that.
Do you happen to know of a way to disable/kill turrets under the cover of smoke without having to be right next to them? I fear that once I get too close it’ll spot me and shoot me point blank at which point I’ll be 100% dead without even the slightest bit of a doubt. Should I even go for the turret scrap/ammo or nah? I want to get the items on the corpse but I’ll take anything else I can get if it’s not too risky.

Are you in an ice lab? The temps are notoriously low in them.

Do ice-labs have a distinctive map tile or features to them? Because if they don’t I might be. But then again, it’s winter and I was exploring it at night. It looks like a regular Science Lab to me.

[pisskop]

youll know if its an ice lab.

even B1 is colder than all but the darkest wonter nights

[Azrad]

Yep. Even if you’re normally clothed, you’d notice a big drop in temperature. If you can access the second basement level of a lab, check the temperatures. Normal ice labs won’t differ in temperature the deeper you go, while going one floor lower in an ice lab will have a big decrease in temperature.

[scorpion451]

Tricks I learned from being a masochist who loves lab challenge starts:

• Turn off your flashlight and watch for bright walls. Light=Turret It’s your only warning sometimes most of the time. (if you need a realism justification, think of it as looking for light under the doors.)
• Seriously. Turn off your lights. Flashlights, atomic lamps, cranial headlamps… they’re all big red bullseye targets not just to . Any one of the many night vision options is your friend in a lab. If you don’t have access to that option, toggle your light on only as needed.
• Never stand in front of lab doors when you open them. Stand off to the side, open them at a diagonal, and use shift-x to peek around the corner.
• grind electronics and computers until you can craft a control laptop. For lab start characters, the books and components needed to do so can all be found in labs. You just have to survive long enough to build one, and escape gets a lot easier. Never enter a lab without one. If I drive across the map to a new lab and realize I forgot my control laptop, I will turn around and go back for it.
• Yes, it really is that important: a control laptop not only takes care of turrets, it will save your life by turning all the other robots in a lab from swarming death machines into YOUR swarming death machines.

An aside on robots: make sure to harvest those manhacks and turrets you commandeer. I love it when I can leave a lab with a fresh stack of inactive manhacks especially, they save my butt all the time. Set one loose while you’re crafting or salvaging a car in an unsecured area- its a wonderful thing to see a “you see X approaching” followed by " manhack kills X". They’re worst nightmare of any acid zombie: since they fly and are made of metal and plastic, the acid only damages on a direct hit…and manhacks are hard to hit. And lastly, they make phenomenal distractions and emergency backup. A pack of the flying butcher knives can sometimes even take down a hulk (with heavy losses, but those can always be reassembled back at camp when you’re skilled enough at electronics…unlike yourself). Even if they don’t, the few turns the hulk spends crushing the pointy glowing flying things instead of you can save your life.

Back to hacking.
Just getting a control laptop isn’t an “I win” button-

• hacking anything stronger than a manhack usually takes a few tries until your computer skill is really high.
• Early on, or for things like tank bots or security bots, make that a few dozen tries. Fortunately control laptops have large battery capacity and don’t use much charge per attempt. Still, hacking is best done from a neighboring room with a closed door (or, if you’re using z-levels, the floor above or below)
• Even failures can be a good thing though, as they can damage the target with short circuits. This can destroy robots and turrets if you short them out enough times. This makes it harder to gather your robot army, however, so keep atomic coffee and adderal handy for those tricky hacks on the eighth floor of an ice lab.
• “turns friendly” is not the same as fully overriding the IFF protocols. It seems to reset after a while. If you see that message, either sprint to the turret and deactivate it while you can, or wait for it reset. Nothing worse than getting a tile away and having it remember its supposed to be shooting at you.

And lastly, I personally think there is no shame in save scumming in cata.
Okay, a little shame, but mostly in the “note to self: double check that you are wielding katana and not a bag of potato chips when hulk is charging” sense. X3
Its amusing now and then to do a world where you self-enforce permadeath, but sticking it out with a character for the long haul rather than just repeating the same early-game grind over and over lets you really get invested in their story, and saves a lot of frustration when you get killed by something stupid like the game spawning a pack of 16 corrosive zombies and 8 hulks. (been there, done that, cursed, reloaded, set fire to hospital, spit on smoking remnants of RNG’s FU.)

pedit: butt-ah you knew what you signed up for when you agree to take the lab challenge. I didnt hear anything in the lore about forced testing or ‘volunteers’ so I can only assume your character also had it coming

Actually, one of the options in the lab challenge is involuntary test subject. X3

[Azrad]

Some other random ice lab tips:

If somehow a shoggoth is loose, highly unlikely, but if it does, lure them into a goo pit. They turn into a harmless blob. This can be done against zombies as well, such as bio-operators (though turning them into blobs is wasteful). You can lure them into a dissector instead.

[Murdath]

[quote=“scorpion451, post:12134, topic:42”]Tricks I learned from being a masochist who loves lab challenge starts:

• Turn off your flashlight and watch for bright walls. Light=Turret It’s your only warning sometimes most of the time. (if you need a realism justification, think of it as looking for light under the doors.)
• Seriously. Turn off your lights. Flashlights, atomic lamps, cranial headlamps… they’re all big red bullseye targets not just to . Any one of the many night vision options is your friend in a lab. If you don’t have access to that option, toggle your light on only as needed.
• Never stand in front of lab doors when you open them. Stand off to the side, open them at a diagonal, and use shift-x to peek around the corner.
• grind electronics and computers until you can craft a control laptop. For lab start characters, the books and components needed to do so can all be found in labs. You just have to survive long enough to build one, and escape gets a lot easier. Never enter a lab without one. If I drive across the map to a new lab and realize I forgot my control laptop, I will turn around and go back for it.
• Yes, it really is that important: a control laptop not only takes care of turrets, it will save your life by turning all the other robots in a lab from swarming death machines into YOUR swarming death machines.

An aside on robots: make sure to harvest those manhacks and turrets you commandeer. I love it when I can leave a lab with a fresh stack of inactive manhacks especially, they save my butt all the time. Set one loose while you’re crafting or salvaging a car in an unsecured area- its a wonderful thing to see a “you see X approaching” followed by " manhack kills X". They’re worst nightmare of any acid zombie: since they fly and are made of metal and plastic, the acid only damages on a direct hit…and manhacks are hard to hit. And lastly, they make phenomenal distractions and emergency backup. A pack of the flying butcher knives can sometimes even take down a hulk (with heavy losses, but those can always be reassembled back at camp when you’re skilled enough at electronics…unlike yourself). Even if they don’t, the few turns the hulk spends crushing the pointy glowing flying things instead of you can save your life.

Back to hacking.
Just getting a control laptop isn’t an “I win” button-

• hacking anything stronger than a manhack usually takes a few tries until your computer skill is really high.
• Early on, or for things like tank bots or security bots, make that a few dozen tries. Fortunately control laptops have large battery capacity and don’t use much charge per attempt. Still, hacking is best done from a neighboring room with a closed door (or, if you’re using z-levels, the floor above or below)
• Even failures can be a good thing though, as they can damage the target with short circuits. This can destroy robots and turrets if you short them out enough times. This makes it harder to gather your robot army, however, so keep atomic coffee and adderal handy for those tricky hacks on the eighth floor of an ice lab.
• “turns friendly” is not the same as fully overriding the IFF protocols. It seems to reset after a while. If you see that message, either sprint to the turret and deactivate it while you can, or wait for it reset. Nothing worse than getting a tile away and having it remember its supposed to be shooting at you.

And lastly, I personally think there is no shame in save scumming in cata.
Okay, a little shame, but mostly in the “note to self: double check that you are wielding katana and not a bag of potato chips when hulk is charging” sense. X3
Its amusing now and then to do a world where you self-enforce permadeath, but sticking it out with a character for the long haul rather than just repeating the same early-game grind over and over lets you really get invested in their story, and saves a lot of frustration when you get killed by something stupid like the game spawning a pack of 16 corrosive zombies and 8 hulks. (been there, done that, cursed, reloaded, set fire to hospital, spit on smoking remnants of RNG’s FU.)

pedit: butt-ah you knew what you signed up for when you agree to take the lab challenge. I didnt hear anything in the lore about forced testing or ‘volunteers’ so I can only assume your character also had it coming

Actually, one of the options in the lab challenge is involuntary test subject. X3[/quote]
Oh darn, so I killed the chicken walker for no reason? I had tried once and it failed, I had never failed before so I assumed that I couldn’t make it friendly. Could have had a new pet. I never failed to hack a turret or a manhack, regardless of time, but then again I had over 8 computer skill.

Are there any easy ways to get chains? They take forever to craft. I got 32 spiral stones and 2 vortex stones from a single mine…

[Zireael]

Is there any way to see in-game what the healthy mod of foodstuff is? I’m at negative health despite taking vitamins, and I’d love to know which food is causing it…

[pisskop]

I put a small dirty tank and a funnel on the back of the car. Then I put a water faucet on the same tile as the tank. It doesnt seem to register the faucet, and will go directly to the examine vehicle screen.

[deknegt]

I put a small dirty tank and a funnel on the back of the car. Then I put a water faucet on the same tile as the tank. It doesnt seem to register the faucet, and will go directly to the examine vehicle screen.

Is there actually water in the tank?

[pisskop]

of course