Stationary crafting parts and more fuel consumption seem reasonable.
Limiting storage of vehicles doesnt.
The following Suggestions duly noted, if someone finds the time to conceptualize the manpower needed to program this into C:DDA.
You’re ignoring the distinction between, “require a base” and “forcing a sedentary lifestyle”.
This doesn’t have to be somewhere you live, or return to daily, weekly, or if you’re set up extremely well even monthly, but it is something that does need to happen occasionally to do heavy repairs, restock things it’s not trivial to scavenge, and refuel.
This is imperatave from both a game design and realism point of view, if the player is too self-sufficient, it’s boring, because there’s no risk or running out of resources and no mechanism to induce travel.
You need to have a base to use for servicing your vehicle if nothing else, because packing all the equipment you need to maintain a vehicle into that same vehicle is a losing proposition. Historically we’ve made tools for working on vehicles very steamlined and portable, but as tooling becomes more complete, that needs to stop. This can be a NPC settlement instead of a base you own, but there need to be some fixed location(s) you care about for purposes other than looting.
Heavy vehicles can (and should) have excess wheels/axles/etc in order to prevent a single part breakage from rendering the vehicle immovable.
As many people have pointed out in this thread and elsewhere, you can’t make stationary bases attractive right now because vehicles are way too good. They go everywhere, they’re trivial to repair when damaged, they can hold everything you’d ever want (and can still move with negligible fuel use when so loaded), they’re excelent weapons, etc.
Right now, the experience with vehicles is that you get a sizeable vehicle put together, top it off with fuel, and never worry about how much you’re driving or how much damage it takes again other than to perform routine maintenance.
Adding hordes won’t do it unless vehicles have problems dealing with them, which they currently don’t.
NPCs looking to trade doesn’t help, because you can just go find them.
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Could you reduce fuel efficiency in regards to weight, or make it more noticeable on 5k+ deathmobiles?
If you need a central base to which you return and moving which requires a lot of work, it counts as “forcing a sedentary lifestyle”.
If you can set up a temporary base to brew some fuel in at most a week, it’s not really a proper static base.
The middle ground is currently farming: it takes ~30 days for crops to grow, which is way too long to wait out in the base, but once you harvest it, you’re no longer invested in the base and can go.
Fruit trees that fruit regularly could push farming towards “sedentary” niche.
Being forced to regularly return to one point on global map would certainly be more boring than not being forced to do so. Travel is currently very boring and will stay that way until someone implements autotravel.
At the moment, being able to haul all the crap on the vehicle is the lesser evil.
Vehicles have to be more attractive as long as scavenging is the primary reason to leave the basement. No (semi-realistic) way around it.
To make bases attractive, they have to compete not just with vehicles per se, but with scavenging.
Farming is an example of this. Granted, DDA farming isn’t really fun or well designed or anything, but it does the job.
To make static bases viable, they’d need to be able to “farm” uncraftable (or very-long-craftable) items. Or at least allow the player to wander around while the items are “crafting themselves” in time too long for the player to wait out.
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I feel the crafting system in general is the issue here. I can do precise crafting while freezing to death, or treat mayor trauma on the fly. If crafting would check the environment (lighting comfort level cleanness and what not) and the state of the player( Now you can use a needle while wearing boxinggloves) that would having a base (mobile or not) way more viable then it is now.
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Part of the problem is that it’s pretty logical to use a mobile base if you live mostly alone in an unremittingly hostile world that relies on you scavenging to survive - assuming it is possible at all.
I mean, if the main threat to your survival is thousands of shambling two-legged monstrosities, your top priority is staying ahead of them - and as long as you can maintain/fuel a vehicle, you’d basically be an idiot to try to set down in one location for very long UNLESS you were expecting to build a settlement that could defend itself through force of numbers.
Also when you’re one of the very few survivors in a large world, hunter/gatherer behavior makes a lot more sense than trying to set down and engage in agriculture. There will be vast amounts of game and forage that is basically uncontested.
So yeah, there are a lot of ways to kinda force the player to settle down - crafting and storage limitations certainly make sense, though I’d still LIVE in my vehicle in those cases, I’d just build local safe-houses with storage and crafting facilities that I’d visit occasionally - which is probably fine?
Severe weather and terrain make the most sense for limiting vehicular dominance. Deep snow could immobilize you for a few days, and wet conditions could make off-roading untenable unless you have chained tires or tank treads. Generally speaking the penalties for off-roading should be much higher - more wear and tear for trying to go fast, dramatically reduced acceleration/top speed, risk of loss-of-control even at moderate speeds.
Between that and a nice smattering of potholes in the regular road network you could make vehicular travel a lot less convenient, perhaps even encouraging players to set up alternative bolt-holes or overwinter sites and the like. The truth is, in a world where it is possible to maintain a decent RV-style vehicle, you’d really, really want one, and want to spend most of your time pretty close to it for reasons that should be quite clear.
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So you can perform CBM surgery only in a sterile setting. Use hygiene values calculated from stuff ariund you, mopping, place never having been in fire or smoke, showers for general hygiene and sterile status for your hands and so on.
Take away at the same time mobile welding, forging and cooking, and while the RV is gone the home lives.
Perhaps you could Designate a Reconstruction zone where you have your designated base.
That could then be treated differently from the game (no more spawning in regions which player cant see, even with hordes). And then maybe tie that to a condition, like fence intact or something.
As a side note, not only is it more convenient to set up all your crafting in a mobile base than a static one currently - the fact is you generally don’t even want to install most of the real crafting stations, as they take up far more room than you need to.
It’s much more compact to make a bunch of rechargeable tools and toss them all in a single cargo space with a recharging station. All the crafting tools you need take up fairly negligible space, and leave you several more free spaces in your vehicle for storage.
So all of those stoves, foodco buddies, reloading stations and what have you - are basically irrelevant.
More realistically, they should provide considerably better crafting values/times/successes than the hand tools alone do. Then there should probably be yet another higher tier which can only be built as furniture - functionally immobile.
So for crafting you’d basically need more quality tiers for all the tool types, and higher tier equipment would require (or at least benefit from) some of the higher tier workspaces:
1 - Crude stone tools (fire pit)
2 - Makeshift tools (brazier)
3 - Proper crafted tools (highest tier for carryable/rechargable items) (survivor mess kit)
4 - Vehicular Workstations (RV Stove)
5 - Full Workbenches (immobile) (Kitchen Stove)
The game obviously already supports this idea pretty well in terms of the available stats - it would mostly be a somewhat extensive rework of the object data to make it actually happen if people thought it was worth it.
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In my opinion Cataclysm should face the problem of a limited food + fuel + ammo + guns + items. Now, hunting is the source of an unlimited amount of meat. Animals spawn in a crazy way so that players don’t have to worry about starvation. It is strictly connected with the fact that guns / ammo aren’t rare. Calibers like 9mm, .22, .223, and 00 for shotguns stock in an enormous amount. If a given player lives in the environment in which animals(big game) are really rare or in which he is not able to find a gun or ammo for it, he faces a real danger of a starvation.Moreover, animals should be much more dangerous. It is quite stupid to kill a bear with a small knife, maybe even with an axe. We all know that moose can be deadly in an early stage of gameplay. What if we can’t kill it with guns after two months or even after a year because we have only five bullets for our AR-15 which should be used in emergency just to survive? It is hard to kill a moose with a makeshift crossbow but NPC with crossbows (from our base / their settlement) can help us. We would use them as hunters, farmers, crafters etc. They would be able to find fuel which is very limited. Thats why stationary base will be a necessity. Right now we just need a car to survive. We can gather 300+ 00, 1000+ .223, 5000+ 9mm and 10000+ .22 in our car and hunt down 100000 animals because we have tons of guns. Are you out of ammo? Just drive. Are you hungry? Drive and hunt, Are you thirsty? Drive till you find a motel/ mansion / river / city. “BUT GUNS ARE LOUD AND HORDES ARE COMING”! “So…? Just drive”
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Mainly storage, and a place to go if your vehicle gets scrapped. If you have a mobile base and consider it satisfactory, there’s really no need to change things. I prefer having supply racks and organization which is hard to do with the limited storage space of a vehicle.
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I have this bicycle in real life mate. PM me if you want to see pictures =D
Wald baskets at the front and rear each have been modified with a 1/8th inch cold rolled steal plate with a lock on each side. The “cage” is boxed in with thick aluminum but to look at it no one would know it isn’t steel. A 4 stroke motor in the middle and fenders front/rear for rain. Kevlar tires(no…seriously) and I was thinking about a key starter before I ran outa cash. At the moment it is a pull start with a free wheel. =D
Gas/Fuel:
Well fuel may go bad. You can use a stabilizer agent to have it last for up to 2 years. Ignoring the fact that all the dead mobs around would allow you to have a near infinite supply of Biodiesel. I would think that the gas found in a jerrycan is more likely to be stabilized than not. Since most people who buy those cans in the first place tend to know to do this. How about pre-stabilized/treated gas too? Every hardware and supply venue in the new england area has some of these agents and fuel type =)
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Came back to CDDA after a long break, signed up to the new forum and stumbled right on the topic I thought about too. What I think we need here is some kind of a more or less unified vision on the underlying narrative and philosophy of the game, so I’ll try and have a go at it. Will be a wall of text, sorry for that one.
So, we are the protagonist of a story every time we try and create a new character. But why do we play? It is because we have interest towards the dynamically created narrative. So whether we want it or not - and no matter how much realism we infuse in the game - we still end up playing as a hero (or villain). Because having agency is fun.
But to have agency, you must have problems to solve. Static bases at the moment are just that - static. They don’t offer much in terms of change in the scenery or action, so the role we as players gravitate is the Traveller. A Road Warrior with his trusty 15 ton steel steed. He is the problem-solver and the troublemaker in one package. Sometimes he agrees to help you clean out a zombie-filled sewage treatment facility, sometimes he blows your nascent community to smithereens because the nearby raiders promised him some nuclear stuff to refuel his Atomic Doomtruck. He is purveyour of goods exotic and sometimes he dies because he stepped on a landmine. Should have just stayed a moisture farmer…
Sure, the static base way of life can be made fun, but barring a strategic mode that will require some kind of relationship system coupled with dynamic events, so that NPCs and Factions can generate some drama about who has swiped the chewing gum from the last MRE. Or you know (thanks to a nearby meteorology station you have an outpost in) that the winter ahead will be a long and crushing one, so you have to let some person die and it’s up to you to make the decision. Or maybe people decide that it’s you who must go, so you try to persuade them to let you stay - or just put a bullet into everyone. Gee, sure glad that I picked that Psychopat trait.
The appearance of new settlements to serve as a base should be managed by something like the horde system: you start with singular survivors who with time start to gravitate towards “places of power” - malls, power stations, water treatment facilities, factories, military bunkers, farms. And when they finally reach the critical mass, the settlement is born with its internal conundrums, and after that it slowly starts to spew out the NPC “hordes” other way around: both as the scouting and looting parties and as parties trying to establish an outpost or a settlement of their own.
As for the trading and the “invisible hand” we can just follow supply and demand by specializing each settlement depending on its focal point. A settlement built around former military base can sell rare ammunition and perform the repairs on the big guns, but it will need some food or water in return. Taking their stuff by force is tantamount to suicide - even your Death Proof car won’t stand to their GAU-8 turrets for long. So you can spend time to scavenge the goods from the territories surrounding Fort @, but you also can try and search for a farming community in a nearby vicinity. And that farm has its own “input/output”. They buy water and fertilizer and don’t shy away from occasional weapon, so you can unload that beaten Mossberg or some spears you made in your spare time. Or maybe you unload that Mossberg into the farmers instead. And then cook some “mystery meat” for those military boys. It’s the end of the world, surely they won’t mind the long pig! Or maybe they do, because they have this pesky “morality” numbers high and here you are, rolling a new character.
As for the things discussed previously - weather conditions and terrain preventing free travel, as well as the rebalancing the crafting towards the stationary appliances would be really steer the game in the right direction.
If someone is up for the discussion of the NPCs, Settlements and Factions, I will gladly share some more thoughts and can probably try and outline some concepts.
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I agree with the opinion that just placing a whole lot of roadblocks on vehicles is not the way to do this.
Static bases are boring. If you nerf vehicles so they need them, what you’re achieving is forcing the player to insert boring interludes in their playthrough.
For static bases to be attractive, you need incentives.
- Traveling increasingly long distances to scavenge is boring, if you can still obtain rare items without having to do so, then having a base to return to becomes attractive rather than a chore.
- If the gameplay provides interesting things to do while on those static bases, then the player has an incentive to make or stay on those static bases rather than load their things on their deathmobile and move on.
- If you can set up your full crafting set for less skill level and resources than doing so on a vehicle, then the player has an incentive to start a base rather than wait until they can weld.
- If the player can fortify their base without wasting an ungodly amount of playtime doing so (note that I mean play time, not game time), and they can be reasonably certain that if they go away to loot a little and come back, they won’t find a zombie spawning inside their home, then having a base to return to becomes less a chore with no upsides and more of a nice thing to have.
Give the players content to do when having a static base, and ease the tedium and artificial inconveniences of having a static base like needing to build a vehicle in order to be able to have power and full crafting, and players will gravitate towards it in order to experience that content.
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Seriously! Let’s start by making static bases at least as functional as vehicle bases. Items under the construction menu that use or generate power, or charcoal equivalents would be a great start.
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This topic comes up pretty regularly. A static base would have to have VERY attractive features in order to beat out a vehicle in a world where you are fighting alone and a staggeringly large enemy horde could just wander through at any time (assuming you play w/hordes, oc).
If there was a more standardized set of crafting tiers, with the highest level of each requiring strictly immobile constructed objects, like a massive drill press, full restaurant quality stove, a large scale forge, or what have you, then you’d certainly have a reason to build a static base with these things in it.
But even then it’d be foolish to actually try to LIVE in it, given that your own presence would represent a huge risk of attracting attention to your extremely valuable machinery - bad enough that I once in a while get unlucky enough to have a ZHulk take out the welding unit on my DM before I can get out of dodge or kill it. Imagine a couple of them rampaging through your static workshop at the vanguard of a full horde, destroying all the immobile machines you’d spent the last two seasons constructing.
You’d only want to drop by to offload materials and craft up new top-tier gear occasionally, and then move back out into the world with your deathmobile so that you need never fear being overrun by a horde you cannot deal with.
The only time a truly permanent base would make sense would be if you could array a large scale set of automated defenses, or populate it with a significant number of NPC’s, ala Dwarf Fortress, so that you’d have a feasible chance of fending off even a really substantial horde without having to give ground - and so you could sleep without committing suicide.
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I definitely feel like stationary constructions for extremely high tier crafting recipes would be a solid positive to a static base, but then the concern becomes the only way to craft the high tier stuff is to set up a static base. Which I’m sure loads of people would complain about. Even if they only had to stop driving their behemoth for a season or so.
Making base construction easier and less time consuming and creating alternative and sustainable sources of energy available for indoor use (“Hey, just found an experimental nuclear reactor in a lab, that i can put in my house! (and gives energy to 10 tiles wide) what can go bad?”) can really boost the benefits of stationary settlements.
Just imagine making your underground safe shelter powered by running zombies trapped in a kinetic wheel. Magnificent
(For my mod, I’ve even thought about a specific power armor for construction, imagine alien´s power loader)
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I think that even if emplaced tools just provided a significant time reduction, they’d be valuable enough to consider making, without being a requirement, in the same way that farming tools and companions reduce how long it takes to farm.
In general, what I’d like to see from bases is the same breadth of options that we get from weapons: Lots of equally valid choices.
I currently have a static base. I don’t generally have to deal with hordes as I’ve depleted the local area of zeds and do a perimeter check and keep quite. I have had some small hordes attack but I have a line of barbed wire and spiked pits all the way around it. I am on around day 85 of a 91 day season game with 3X zeds and 2x loot.
Benefits to me are-
Easy access to supplies, I have a size 15 town I am slowly looting.
A place to grow crops.
Easier power supply, you’d be surprised how much running your deathmobile base takes up power usage.
Easier supplies. I just walk next door for some wood or metal or any basic materials, and go a couple blacks down in my march to clear the town for more uncommon stuff.
Animals are easier to utilize, especially with the new mechanics.
Defense is cheaper, I can have smaller weaker guns in a higher quantity to defend myself than trying to get laser cannons for my deathmobile.
You can fit more npcs in a static base. More npcs mean more skills and if you are playing with the new base mechanics more hands means easier work.
More space for loot, I don’t have to prioritize loot. If I think i may use it i take it, it makes crafting in the future so much easier.
Easier to build deathmobile. My death bike was simple to build and could run circles around most deathmobiles.
Cons-
Takes a while to find a good location.
Takes a while to clear an area enough.
Takes a while to set up defenses.
Moving if SHTF.
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