Coming back to the game after a few months, I’ve started a new character to see what’s new: quite a bit, it seems.
Meet Andrew ‘Old Man’ Thompson, senior citizen, stranded in a garage in the middle of a big city, surrounded by the undead.
After narrowly fleeing on a nearby rooftop, he managed to get into a working hybrid car and escape into the surrounding wilderness.
He managed to loot a couple houses in the outskirt and even snatch an armored SWAT van: however, problem was there were no safe places to camp. The city looked like it sprawled endlessy and the best the Old Man found was a somewhat shacky shack.
Moving out a bit more he came across a camping site and… treasure! …a luxury RV, brand new, with some 20 L diesel in the tanks!
Not really a “mobile base”, but will do for the moment.
Having found a few soldier zombies occupied against some other monster, Thompson has got himself a decent stash of weapons and ammo.
Now he can camp outside the city, sort the loot, and plan his next moves…
Notice a bandit lurking around near my main base, so I follow him to see what he’s up to. He runs into the basement of random house, so I follow him down.
In the basement are two more bandits, and it doesn’t look like they are planning to leave. Well this is right next to where I sleep, so I can’t have this. Run back to my base, grab a stick of dynamite that I’d found earlier. The plan is to just throw the dynamite into the center of the main room, but one of the bandits is blocking the exit to the stairwell. So I light the dynamite and just throw it at that guy, he of course starts running away so I sprint to the dynamite with the burning fuse and threw it into the main room. Closed the door behind me for good measure, sprinted back upstairs, outside, and as far away from the house as I could get, but still blew out my ear drums bad enough to lose all hearing for some time.
Coming back to the house, windows are blown out and furniture is destroyed in half the rooms on the main floor. No idea if the bandits survived or not, but the stairs have been destroyed so I don’t think they’ll be bothering me any time soon.
After setting up camp with his newly found Luxury RV, Old Man Thompson good luck didn’t end there. He managed to break into a junkyard in the outskirts of the city that was pretty much zombie-free and steal away with a welding cart, a folding engine cart, and other stuff salvaged from the vehicles in the lot.
With this newfound bounty he was able to bring the trusty hybrid car that brought him to safety back to almost pristine condition; then he set to work on it and make it better suited for the dark new world.
Offroad tires, a welding rig, more storage batteries and added reinforcement to the front of the vehicle.
With it, he planned to plow through the zombies in the city, opening a way back to the garage from where he first fled.
It wasn’t just revenge, he needed the stuff inside of it; or so he said to himself.
A few hours and some 150 zeds later, the Old Man was on his way back, his car battered but victorious, loaded with juicy goods. The whole battlefield was about 3-4 times wider than this screenshot, actually.
This may be a stupid question, but still: what benefit does the welding rig have over the arc welder item other than not having to fiddle with batteries? The arc welder weighs only 4kg, while the rig is ten times as much AND occupies a tile in your vehicle (which could instead be a +150L shopping cart) AND cannot be easily carried to e.g. remove stuff from the second floor vehicles of a car showroom.
The battery part is the biggest thing. Also, a vehicle welding rig does have some storage space to it, so it does have a little functionality beyond welding.
It has 50L storage space. By comparison, a shopping cart has 150L, of which 8.75L would be occupied by a battery compartment modded arc welder+car battery for it. 28.34 kg total weight. Does the welding rig make welding any faster than arc welder? And for that matter, does the RV Kitchen unit make cooking any faster? Neither of these are foldable, so you either waste one vehicle’s tile or one bike rack slot.
ATM I installed the welding rig because I didn’t have an arc welder and I also don’t have batteries; instead, I do have a luxury RV with solar panel and a jumper cable to connect it to the car and recharge its batteries.
Other than that I usually install just minifridge(s) and a vehicle lab (better than the kitchen), keeping the rest as battery-powered stuff.
Found the aftermath of a crazy drug deal gone wrong. 20+ zombies including one zombie child, a working humvee with loaded grenade launcher on site, a loaded RPG-7 and a mininuke. Don’t know what was going on before the cataclysm but this has to be the most mental thing I ever found in cataclysm.
I’ve had some very brief runs for the past many restarts - partly due to random scenarios and partly due to a desire for a low-strength character with limited combat skills. I like the challenge of having to fend for their lives at first with whatever basic weapons they can acquire, but it gets a bit old, if they consistently die too fast.
This time random char gen gave me a razor girl. Usually I just skip to the next character, but it seems a but cheap to start with a combat specialist, but this time I went for it and - oh boy - it is a difference. In addition to the basic starter skills of melee 2, dodge 2 and unarmed combat 2, the random gen also gave her self defence classes, so day 1 Krav Maga. No other skills beyond that, and stats are fairly basic, except for Dex 10, which is then increased to 12 because of wired reflexes.
It is actually fabulous to have a character who doesn’t die to the huge cockroaches, when poking their head out of the basement they started in. Now on the exploring the city.
Annette Bruner, my latest scoundrel character, has managed to zig and zag her way back to her apartment at the top of her building in the early morning with her coveted prize: a pillowcase full of marijuana plants! (and some extra plants tucked into her messenger bag for good measure.)
She’s only been surviving for about 5 days now, but with some modified world settings to make things interesting. Zombies are set to double speed but half as many, loot at a quarter rarity, we started about a week into winter and in the general outskirts of a megacity with size set to 16 and spacing at 0. I think I may have been shredded to death sooner if I hadn’t of found a fitting leather touring suit and a pair of leather chaps to soak most of the damage, but generally I’m finding that 2x speed zombies aren’t that scary. Eskrima definitely helps with taking them down pretty quick when combined with the starting switchblade for scoundrels.
I feel like starting in winter has helped me out in a few ways instead of hampering me like I thought it would. I find that it’s generally clearer out at nights, which is helpful because I didn’t take night vision for once as an added challenge. The cold hasn’t been terrible as of yet, but maybe as it gets deeper into the middle of winter it may be more of an issue.
All things considered it’s not going that bad, even at .25 loot there’s probably at least 2-3 weeks of food in the entire apartment building; so if I need to lay low for a while to heal up it shouldn’t be a problem. The switchblade is getting a bit damaged so finding a decent replacement for it is probably next on the list.
Maybe for next time I’ll drop the loot rate even lower, bump the zombies up to normal spawn rates, keep the double speed but drop their HP to half.
You can do that in your current game, although it will only affect newly spawned zombies and locations. Anything that’s been in the reality bubble before will have the old settings.
Oh just the reality bubble? I thought it’d be everything in the chunk when you generate it. So if I haven’t looted anywhere to my south, say for 15 tiles, I could bump up the spawns and the south would be swamped with monsters and loot?
I was thinking about doing a restart because primarily for the loot spawn rate, but I’m thinking even if I drop it down to .10 I’d still be swamped with food, which is the main gripe I’ve got since there’s no real pressing reason to leave my safehouse with so much food in abundance. Also it kind of sucks having the loot rate so low because guns store are pretty much empty at the lower rates which is also no fun. Less food more guns/ammo!
I’m trying to find a good balance for zombies in a mega city. Regular spawn rates and the city is just too swamped, so a megacity just becomes innavigable without a certain amount of cheese and I’m not a big fan of cheesing. I do kinda miss the flashlight flick on-off trick, though. I wish there was an item that let you flash a narrow beam of light in a direction of your choosing without lighting yourself up. It may just be impossible to do a playthrough like this without night vision unless you get ungodly lucky and find a pair of light amp goggles or night vision.
That being said - UPDATE: The switchblade has become dull and flimsy, so after looking over her options Annette discovered a PR-24 baton sitting among the pile of unorganized loot. It’s doing mighty fine as a replacement, stuns are definitely the way to go when dealing with pcp zombies. She also managed to grab a leather duster and is now fairly armored up, and having spent quite a few days recovering after a scavenging mishap that left her touring suit hanging on by a thread she’s figured out how to repair her clothing(tailoring 6 was needed to bring a touring suit from XX without much risk for destroying it). She also snagged a couple pistols from some soldier zombies, a FN Five-Seven(a bit dirty) and a m18 in a holster.
With the PR-24 she’s managed to start taking control of the close surrounding area and head out a bit further, which led her to the roof of a home improvement store where she found a survivor telescope! With delighted glee she raised it to her eye on that roof and spotted a small island not too far off the coast of the lake and some sort of building quite close to it(Fresh water research station). The best part, she found a canoe in one of the basements close to her safehouse. Escape is at hand.
well look at it this way: if you attach the welding rig to your vehicle, then you dont have to carry the arc welder with you, you can use the arc welder not only on any part of your vehicle but on anything within a few tiles of the welder itself… i usually have my welder on the back end of my vehicle so i can both use it while inside the vehicle, but also back up to stuff and use it that way
… and its also attached via bike rack with its own storage battery, in case i need to detach it and drag it wherever i might need it.
Ugh. Lousy death. Was a few days in and just starting to get settled into raiding a town from a nice little rural house, playing it cautiously and doing very well.
Opened a garage door to a house that I’d scoped out pretty carefully - aaaand giant wasp. Inescapable insta-death for an unarmored early character.
All was well. I was a powerhouse on my way to crafting the Ferromagnetic Rail Rifle until I was hit by an explosion that killed me instantly. I have all level 20 stats. It said, shrapnel cuts through your body. Any ideas?
