The new NPC camp manager feature does help a lot with the tedium. By just farming wheat and boiling salt I can basically make enough hard tack for NPCs to do all the work I really can’t be bothered to do. With guidance it’s borderline self sufficient, and there’s usually still plenty for me to eat as well.
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Some players are more willing to build bases if the benefits of purchasing certain items are greater than those of exploring blindly or avoiding doing the same thing over and over again.
I look forward to:
When the base meets certain conditions, there will be NPC visits, and they will sell some materials.
Nails (no need to tear down a city)
Stone (no need to clean up a wasteland)
Books (no need to explore ten cities, laboratories, villas…)
Basic chemicals such as bleach / ammonia / soap (difficult to produce, but demand a lot).
Map
Animal
CBM
Automotive components
Folding bicycle
Maybe…
Install CBM
Call the construction team to build a preset house on the designated open space.
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From a survivor perspective, having a static base to call home is good for morale. Most survivors aren’t battle hungry and will want to restore civilization, form families, be safe, etc. Killing zombies at all would seem to effectively reduce morale. Which is why our player characters behave much like heroes in the apocalypse. While other people would do the bare minimum to survive, we constantly put our characters lives at risk.
I think incorporating a progress towards civilization would be a great long term goal. Right now we only really have the kill count as our means of progression. Faction relations, and main quests would make the game far more immersive. Restoring power to a town, powering up a water purification plant, search a lab for the cause of the zombie outbreak, search a military installation for a way to hack into drones threatening the area, enable weather stations and restoring long distance radio communications.
There’s really no end to the amount of end game content that could be implemented. Meanwhile, we could see our affects slowly restoring civilization to its former glory.
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Well, I was going to say farming would be a benefit for having a base, but due to the new changes to farming, it’s putting a bit too much effort into farming to get worthwhile returns. Also, thanks to the farming updates, the NPC farm is basically broken since NPCs aren’t updated to do the new farming mechanics.
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Yeah that’s the worst part. Farming became very worthwhile so long as you had even one NPC companion. The one positive is that a longer season seems to create higher base yields. Before with thirty day seasons you needed to farm for nearly 60 days. Without a massive farm you barely broke even on time investment to food use.
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Automating travel would be the biggest help in having a static base. Driving from point to point on curving roads is tedious and has the biggest danger of a car crash if you neglect it.
Building a safe network for travel is satisfying, especially if sewers and subway could be mixed in.
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good idea，Maybe we can build a helicopter and some helipad(s). The flight process is omitted to reach the destination. But there is a certain probability of an accident.
Or train network in addition to road networks which allows for fast, efficient and relatively safe way to travel (once you cleared any wrecks/other dangers that might be on tracks), but at the cost of having to stick to existing railway network and/or making your own tracks.
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I had always wanted to use the actual subway system. Maybe even convert a train car to a mobile base without a car. Especially if I was going for an albino-rat guy, navigating the subways of the apocalypse. It would be great way to meet a middle ground. Oh, how about a quick idea structure for what the Cataclysm could one day be?
Sewers = Boat base, minimal carrying capacity or a small enclosure base underground acting as a hub for travel.
Subways = Train Car base, limited to subways only and chance of crashing a blockage, or travel hub base again.
Ground = Car base, uses fuel but offers maximum mobility on the ground, or regular base that will allow for a defensible potion not limited by walls or place on the overmap, including the fact you can just take over pre-existing buildings
Air? = Hot air balloon that allows for MAXIMUM maneuverability with weight limits but invulnerable to zombies (except ranged), or flying airship or tree house for staying out of the way entirely.
I never ran a base after I could get a car going. There were a few reasons:
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exploration - this really needs no explanation. If you’re into the game for exploring and maxing out your character, you can’t do that standing still.
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Farming takes ages. Even if I take days to craft fertilizer (there was only 1-2 kinds) and used it every time I could, it would still take weeks. Not doing things has deleterious effects on your players sleeping, and you can’t raise skills without proper stuff sometimes (and many areas don’t have good books, at all). Fertilizer’s normally made from limited ingredients, unless they increased the quantities of bones or changed the recipes.
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You can’t take it with you. If you get a vehicle, you can pretty quickly get rechargeable/“subsidized” welding, forging, cooking, etc, so it gets even easier to stay away. Having to return to base if I wanted to try to make better stuff is annoying.
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You CAN take it with you. Having a big vehicle isn’t that terribly difficult, and once you travel you can find resources for a better engine, frames, etc. I don’t remember if I preferred medium frames, but a single electric engine can go a long time when your vehicle is literally covered in reinforced panels. If you find the quantum panels you can use one or two heavy electric engines. I still had a gas engine because why not.
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There weren’t good non-vehicle multi-tile objects, or powered stationary objects for cooking, etc. The resolution before was to construct a stationary vehicle protruding into your home, with solar panels or engine on the outside and the usable stuff on the inside. Forging/cooking etc takes tons of power unless you use a rechargeable system. It’s get tiring lugging trees worth of coal only to have it gone when I need to craft something or raise a skill. AND NO FRIDGE!
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Boring machines and track layers to create lines to other locations. (would be very material intensive for both the tracks and the boring itself)
I think the more important question is just how awesome is your mobile base? When your mobile base takes up more than the road, I suppose no reason to have a regular base.
Oh, I thought you meant boring as in “wow, that would be boring.”
But yeah. That would be a downfall if you had a train car base and wanted to expand. You would need massive amounts of ore and space just to make new tunnels. Unless there was a super easy/dangerous way of doing it, like taming a creature that digs tunnels for you underground.
Then you just have to keep it fed.
There’s also the advantage of being near renewable/unlimited resources. Infinite salt water is always handy.
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In real life, it is hard to find such a high quality salt mine.
I’d think just dehydrating salt water would be far more effective at obtaining salt anyways.
That’s essentially what boiling salt water does. I am upset that we can’t distill more things to get clean water as a byproduct.
Hell. I once “designed” an extremely efficient charcoal maker that also powered a steam engine and captured the steam as distilled water as well as capturing the tar runoff from the charcoal making process. But in CDDA there’s precisely one distillation recipe I know of that actually gives clean water as a byproduct.
What would you use the tar for?
I’d be down more with how Dwarf Fortress has its travel system. Where you can travel over map and when you approach notable landmarks, you go down to the map. So being able to quick travel on the overmap with the appropriate amount of time used would be nice. Would make having a base more easier to come and go to. Of course then comes the issue of vehicles.
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