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Game Talk The Bunker
#1

playing 0.E. Now is Summer, Day 7.

  1. Had a like-new APC with bed, kitchen, fridge, welding rig, charging station, chem lab, and two (almost) filled tanks of bleach and ammonia.
  2. Raid libraries and bank safes and got recipes for mutagen as well as katanas and other weapons.
  3. Trained on Archery, now wielding composite bow as main weapon that deals 60-110 damage per hit
  4. Got 2-3 || ESAPI vest in mil. surplus and plenty of MREs, wearing army helmet, pads and binoculars.
  5. Got control laptop.

What I would like to do but didn’t by the time I write this post:

  1. Get compound bow and more carbon fiber arrows. Raided a hunting store but no luck.
  2. Get a decent vehicle weapon, preferably with ammo easily craftable or recyclable. Now considering vortex bolt/scorpion ballista ?
  3. survivor armor. still crafting, but compared to >70 average bash-cutting defense from ESAPI, survivor armor seems not so desirable?
  4. Enter Lab. Though I have control laptop, the turrets just won’t accept my control. How shall I get in?
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#2

Compound bow is far superior to the composite bow in the stable branch, and I highly recommend. Carbon fiber arrows are hard to find, and break often enough that it’s hard to use them for an extended period of time.
For the vehicle, yes, go for the ballista. It’s incredibly powerful, and makes the riot control turrets as well as any above ground monster a walk in the park so long as your vehicle is within range.
The survivor armor is better than the ESAPI vest not because it has higher protection values, but because it has far higher coverage. The ESAPI vest has somewhere around 70-90% coverage, but even at 90% there’s a 10% chance for the armor to be ignored completely when you get hit. The survivor suit has 100% coverage.
It depends on what kind of lab it is. If it’s an old science lab (pink map marker) just bringing a keycard to open the door will get you in and from there the turrets are mostly isolated. If it’s a new lab (blue map marker), then i have no idea because I’ve only raided a single one before and it was pretty breezy.

As for additional objectives, setting up and fully completing a survivor camp is a pretty good objective, as is doing all of the quests for both the Hub 0 and the Refugee Center. I recently built a walk in freezer using vehicle coolers, so you could do that as well.

#3

are you playing aftershock?

anyway, esapi protects the torso, you could craft some nice protection for arms and legs, find some good acid protection for foot (but if you play nice with a bow, acid zeds arent a big issue)

#4

Firstly, thank you for your reply! But here are some questions:

Compound bow is far superior to the composite bow in the stable branch, and I highly recommend.

but where shall I look for it? In hunting stores I only find regular crossbows. Is it just my luck or they don’t spawn there?

The survivor armor is better than the ESAPI vest not because it has higher protection values, but because it has far higher coverage.

I understand the part about coverage percentage, but may I ask why is survivor armor considered having higher protection values compared with ESAPI vests? heavy survivor suit has 20 in bash and 24 in cutting while ESAPI has astonishingly 50 in bash and 90 in cutting. Or is it not correct to compare these numbers?

If it’s an old science lab (pink map marker) just bringing a keycard to open the door will get you in and from there the turrets are mostly isolated. If it’s a new lab (blue map marker), then i have no idea because I’ve only raided a single one before and it was pretty breezy.

Actually it shows as grey "l"s on my map, named “research facility”. Can I go into there safely without being killed by turrets?

#5

You can find the compound bow rarely in hunting stores, but that’s the second most reliable place to find one. The most reliable place is crafting, as you can find the recipe in a book (can’t remember which one, think it might be welding & metallurgy or the bowyer’s buddy).

It isn’t considered to have higher protection values, just better coverage. There’s an arguement to be made for protection values over coverage, but most of the convos I’ve seen in the forums agree that coverage is usually more important. If you want better protection, just get the survivor suit and reinforce it with kevlar. That gives you 36 cut and 26 bash protection while still maintaining the 100% coverage. If you are really adamant about using the ESAPI vest and are going for a ranger build (as is the most OP in current stable) then you might as well wear both as torso encumbrance has negligible importance for ranged characters.

The grey and sprawling “research facility” is not the same thing as a lab, and is much, much more dangerous. It has extremely high numbers of kevlar zombies and nether creatures, as well as many active portals. You should probably complete a regular lab first before attempting it, just to get a taste as for how to take on larger structures.

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#6

I possess both books you mentioned, and have 10 in fabrication, 8 in mechanics and 4 in archery, still I can only craft compound greatbow but that’s very different thing from compound bow i guess…

#7

Just looked through my crafting list (I have pretty much every book) and… yeah I can’t make the compound bow either. Huh, they must’ve removed it in 0.E-1. Makes sense, it’s incredibly OP when you set it to high draw weight. Just keep looking for hunting stores I guess, I found mine early in my current run but I can’t remember where, maybe a LMOE shelter or something? Idk, just check hunting stores and anything that spawns guns.

#8

Survivor suits occupy the ‘normal’ layer whilst ESAPI occupies the ‘outer’ layer.

Personally I like going for light survivor suit and then add an ESAPI on top of it as well as arm guards capable of blocking and some light-medium strap/outer leg guards.

Light survivor suit also has the most efficient encumbrance to protection ratio, with heavy coming out just behind and regular having only slightly better than half of light’s efficiency.
Even though heavy and light have comparable efficiency, there are other pieces (such as the simple ‘steel arm guards’) with greater efficiency than the both of them, that’s why I like using the light version as a foundation since the heavy already encumbers you so much.

TL;DR for below: How I do my dumb efficiency calculations:

(Add total protection values together then divide the result with encumbrance, higher value = more efficient. Coverage values are not as simple to put into a calculation as its impact is relative to other pieces protecting the same part, if you already have a decent amount of guaranteed DR from say a light survivor suit, it helps offset those 15% of hits an ESAPI will let through and in turn increases the value of your ESAPI.

For the sake of lazy calculations, you can multiple the protection value with the coverage %, 50 + 90 = 140 x 0.85 = 119 / 10 = 11.9. But again this does not really tell you everything, having 119 defense with 100% coverage is immensely more powerful than having 140 with 85%, therefore this is only usable if comparing gear which are both sub 100%.)

While I’m already ranting, who would seriously ever use the regular survivor suit? It needs a buff.
Light survivor + ESAPI = 6/8 100%, 50/90 85% = total 17 encumbrance
Regular survivor = 8/12 100% = total 15 encumbrance

Wait, that’s possible? Goddamn gonna have to get around to that.

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#9

Yeah. I started on Spring day 30, prison island, and had it up before summer. I’ve got over 2000L of perishable food stored up. It has a bit of a problem with the whole reality bubble thing (when you leave the area, it unloads and the food may unfreeze) but it works pretty well for anything that doesn’t turn mushy.

#10

Oh damn that’s too bad, such cool (heh) possibilities otherwise. I wonder if the code recognizes what’s causing a temperature shift so you could somehow lock it down if caused by certain things even outside of your reality bubble and the vehicle coolers don’t work.

But that might be a lot of effort for a very niche payoff.

#11

You should find more martial arts books, specific to what melee weapons you have. Once you get power armor and a means to charge it, protection becomes irrelevant.

You want rm13 combat armor for all-around Lightweight general protection, you can find these in banks, mainly.

Train your dodge to 15 (zombie wrestlers can get you this high) and your melee stats to 11, I recommend switching to a different style once you get bored.

Mutate/find rare bionics. Find a mutation tree you like and go for it. My personal favorite is chimera, but it’s high maintenance and high risk high reward.
If you go chimera I recommend finding an expanded digestive system CBM first, if you find both nutrition bionics your extreme metabolism becomes very manageable.

Install all useful bionics, you want a cable charger system and nothing else.
Air filtration, blood filtration, repair nanobots, radiation scrubber, quantum tunneling, synaptic acceleration, all star boosting CBMs and hydraulic muscles are all great things for long term survival.

If you double down with faster learner plus apex predator from chimera tree you can learn combat skills and max them out within a couple of in-game days.

Stats through skills/kills really helps on your enjoyment, at least for me.

Good luck on your journeys, when you get bored, don’t be afraid to explore.

Remember, careful preparation is key, don’t get cocky.

#12

About research facility - there is a lab beneath it but you have to get to it first through everything mentioned in Mega_Glub’s post.

#13

It currently doesn’t work (might in experimental) but it probably wouldn’t be too hard to add a couple lines of code that save whether or not there’s Cold Air in each tile when it unloads, and then keep it frozen when it reloads. That does mean that if the cooler ran out of power and then unloaded the food would still be cold, but that’s a pretty niche situation and would be difficult to exploit.

#14

I was just thinking that the game would need to know the source of the temperature shift so that a place you visited in winter doesn’t have a bunch of frozen stuff when you get there for the first time in summer. Then you could whitelist which temperature shifts get saved and which don’t.

#15

Pretty sure that already happens. I mean specifically that it saves the “Cold Air” tile that is used in place of having a room temperature system, as that is what the vehicle cooler produces.

#16

oh damn. Now zombies evolve so fast and I can barely clear out small town with ease.

#17

For the mass culling of zombies in a town/city, nothing beats a deathmobile.