What would you like to see added to the Tacoma ranch? (New missions, furniture, features, etc.)

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I’ve been working on the Tacoma ranch modernization and bug fix work and am getting to the point where I’d like to start adding some extra missions to the NPCs, but I’m looking for ideas from others as to what I should add. I’m also open to suggestions on other buildings, furniture, features, maybe even new NPCs, that should be added.

What currently exists:
Services offered:

Barber (hair/beard cuts)
Bartender (bar shop)
Crop Overseer (purchase field, plant/harvest crops for small amount of merch)
Doctor (aid - stops bleeding, removes bites/infections, some healing - gated behind first two quests) (bionics installation/removal - gated behind 3rd multipart quest)
Nurse (lesser aid - stops bleeding, small healing) (buys medical items)
Scavenger Boss (companion missions in exchange for merch and items)
Woodcutter (buy logs)

Foreman:

200 planks, 25 blankets, 2500 nails, 300 salt, 30 liquid fertilizer, 75 rocks, 50 pipes, 2 electric motors, 150 bleach, 36 bandages, 6 bottles of antiseptic, 2 arc welders, 12 car batteries, 2 two-way radios, 5 backpacks, Homebrewer’s Bible, 80 sugar, 30 glass sheets

Scavenger:

12 simple knife spears, 5 headlamps, 3 leather body armor, 12 Molotov cocktails

Nurse:

100 aspirin, 3 hotplates, 200 multivitamins, 4 charcoal purifiers, chemistry set, 10 filter masks, 4 pairs of rubber gloves, 2 scalpels, Advanced Emergency Care, 10 syringes

New quests added so far:

Doctor: 10 book binders + 500 paper, 10 pairs of medical gloves, 3000 anesthetic + scavenger hospital raid + scrapper side quest needing angle grinder and hacksaw

NPCs that we have available:
barber, bartender, 2 carpenters, crop overseer, doctor, 2 farmers, foreman, nurse, scavenger boss, scrapper, sickly laborer, 2 woodcutters
Also Dana and Pablo Nunez as well I think, but I haven’t actually gone down this path.

I would especially like to implement a multi-part quest for the sickly laborer, but need ideas on what the person has and how it would get cured. (Maybe multiple things need to be tried?)
Sickness is described as “being constantly sick”, “I’ve tried everything. Just give me time…”, and “I keep getting sick! At first I thought it was something I ate, but now it seems like I can’t keep anything down…”

Quests do not need to be limited to simple item retrieval, but they are certainly the easiest to implement.

Any suggestions or ideas would be appreciated!

2

I’d recommend restructuring the post such that the services provided are listed first, followed by intended/contemplated additions, a spoiler warning and then an outline of quests with the quest details blurred out.

Thus, I’d describe the Scavenger quest line along the lines of “Scavenging quests to collect/craft items related to scavenging” and the Nurse one as “scavenge/craft items related to medical care”.
The new Doctor line I’d describe as “Initially scavenging/crafting quests for fairly high volumes of medical related items followed by more difficult combat oriented quests”.

Sickly laborer: If possible, I’d try to set this off as a number of parallel quests to get some diagnostic tools/equipment, with a dosimeter and/or Geiger counter for radiation poisoning as one quest, something to check for parasites as a second, toxins as a third, and possibly allergy as a fourth. Once those have all been ruled out the next quest(s) could be to check for diseases that the doctor can’t detect (although I don’t know what that would be). It could end with the disconnection and movement of an autodoc (with nursebot as a possible additional requirement) for installation in the clinic for surgery against cancer. It would even be possible to top it up with a quest to get a CBM for installation, either one that replaces the stomach, or one that boosts a broken immune system. I don’t know how well a tie in with the CBM system would be received, however. Given that these things are rather valuable, it might be difficult to come up with suitable rewards. An autodoc would be a great benefit to the whole settlement, and so the settlement would have an incentive to provide a reward, while a CBM for an individual is harder to justify a community reward for. Note that there is currently no support for the disconnection, movement, and reinstallation of an autodoc and its terminal, and an autodoc would need an electric supply, which might be an incentive for quests to supply the commune with power generation and storage (which might even translate into lighting in the houses).

Other things I’d like to see: The fence being replaced by a sturdy wall and some additional farm plots (to feed the commune as well as provide exports to the Refugee Center).

Another possible quest: Supply the commune with a flatbed truck, although given that they have facilities for vehicle dismantling it’s something they ought to be capable of doing themselves. However, a truck neatly parked outside somewhere along the line of their expansion would make sense. If a quest, note that I don’t know how ownership transfer would be handled, nor how to verify that a truck supplied would be considered to be the correct type, as I suspect a vehicle built from the ground up by the player wouldn’t be recognized even if it had exactly the same parts as the vehicle defined by the game.

3

Services are already listed first, so I’m not sure what you mean by that. I chose to only list the quest items you need to get as the only rewards are continued building up of the buildings and internal walls. I didn’t think there’d be much value in explaining a quest provides “west palisades” or “partial bar construction” because that would have just taken longer to write this and provided very little value, but I’ll consider going back to add more details when I have time.

For the sickly laborer, there’s some good ideas there and the more I think about it, I really think we need to nail down what they have first. It has to be rare enough that it would go missed and present regular symptoms, but still be detectable in some way. (Maybe something blob related even?) The autodoc as a reward would probably be redundant unfortunately as the doctor already provides bionic installation/removal, but I could look into the specifics of how that works to see if autodoc + doctor would provide a higher success chance. Finding a CBM isn’t the worst idea either now that we have Rubik as an early game source of them. Could even provide a unique CBM just for this quest that the player could be tempted to keep for themselves instead of helping the sick laborer. The commune already has some power generation through getting batteries and setting up the sawmill, so I don’t see that as a blocker. Also, thanks for reminding to go back and add lighting to some of the buildings after the batteries are acquired.

For the fence, I don’t know how reasonable it would be to replace the farm’s outer fence (which I assume is what you’re talking about) entirely and the current build order provides an inner ring of palisades and vehicles to protect the commune. There’s definitely a ton of room for expansion though, so if there were enough things added, it might make sense eventually.

For the flatbed truck: I’m split on this idea. Mostly because I don’t think it could function to transfer ownership at this time and that the scrappers already bring in 5 or 6 junk vehicles. With that said, maybe there could be a quest chain that spawns a vehicle, which includes the scrappers finding one, getting help from a mechanic to fix it up, finding specific parts, and so on. I think there’s enough room to work off of that; it just needs some fleshing out. (Also, would you get use of the vehicle or would it just provide faster caravans/raids/etc maybe? More trade opportunities?)

4

What I meant was to restructure the order so the services from all NPCs are listed first, so the “secret” parts would be at the very bottom of the post (again split per NPC within that section).
I don’t think there’s a need for the details of exactly what changes each quest results in.

The sick laborer could have some blob related, or even some blob infected/related parasite. A unique custom made CBM sounds like a good idea, but it doesn’t make that much sense to be able to order one from Rubik but not a second one, but on the other hand the greed temptation is a good angle. However, that line would require you to be on friendly terms with the Exodii, which probably isn’t desirable (i.e. you shouldn’t be completely blocked if you aren’t: things being a fair bit harder otherwise, including the requirement to extract it from a specific fairly uncommon Exodius would be OK in my opinion).

I did mean an upgrade of the outer fence, as that is what separates the whole commune from the external world, and you probably don’t want to leave livestock and fields unprotected in the long run (but the Refugee Center, with its broken fence is more in need of repairs/upgrades).

Helping the commune get a vehicle sounds like a better option, and it might also provide better missions with combat components rather than straight fetch quests. It could be something along the lines of clearing out the zombies around a truck they’ve found, patched up, but had to flee when ferals (plus zombies) blocked the road with a tree, fetch quests to provide them with some of the things needed to repair it (they’re scrapping vehicles themselves, so they ought to have most things), and then possibly have it stolen with a quest to regain if from raiders. There’s still the issue of ownership, though, as the truck probably would have to be marked as owned by the commune when it’s spawned to avoid a curious player from trying to start it (and thus claim it).
I didn’t think as far as to actually have any use for a truck, but rather have it as window dressing, but it could provide faster caravans/raids with a lower risk (which would, of course, require the caravan/raid code to be changed, which may not be a bad thing anyway). Possible additional expansion might be to get a vehicle with a turret as an escort to further reduce the risk to caravans.