Wilderness survival on newest version

[Maverick]

I decided to go as an Unwilling Mutant on the Experiment scenario. I don’t plan on staying in the woods forever, but I’m staying until I have my outpost to semi-self sufficient.

• World Settings
  City size: 16
  Spacing: 8
  Days per season: 31
  Construction scaling: 75
  Wander spawns
  Npc spawns
  Scenario npc spawns
  Z-levels
  Carrion spawn: 50%
  Evolutions: 6
  Rad mutations
  City spacing: 8

• Mods
  Filthy clothing, Bens GF recipes, extended realistic guns, makeshift items mod, medieval and historic content, more survival tools, mutant npcs, npc traits, national guard camp, more locations, tall buildings, urban development, boats, folding vehicle pack, vehicle additions pack, tanks and other vehicles, and stats through skills. All of my mods are default to the launcher.

I’ve survived into the first week of summer and I’m running into a few issues. First of all I can’t figure out a good way to grind fabrication to 3 for the smoking rack or charcoal kiln. That’s making long term food and issue. What can I grind to raise it from 1 to 3 at least?

I managed to find several NPCs and got them to join me, but I’m now struggling to keep them all fed. Is there a way to “feed group” or “give water to group” ? What about easy batch craftable foods that don’t rot in a few days?

I was hoping to get a camp up and running but I don’t have the extra food to provide for them. I have a large farm growing, but I can’t maintain the weeding and watering of the plants. It’s also pretty tedious. Can I have my NPCs do that for me?

How can I make a simple cart, when I can’t weld and don’t have any nails? That would help SO MUCH with hauling corpses to butcher.

How can I maintain my vitamin c until I can start dehydrating fruit? Only things I’ve found are cattails and rhubarb that provide it, and that’s in small amounts.

Those are my main concerns right now, any information or tips would be appreciated.

[Maverick]

Ah I’m retarded. This was supposed to go to the bunker.

[Trigon]

Pine needle tea is great for vitamin C. Add it to your diet to keep health up as well and drink it hot for morale. When I plan on making camps I disable NPC hunger because it’s silly to have them all double up on their food intake. I know it’s a little gamey but I assume they’ve survived this long. They can feed themselves seeing as I usually eat enough for eight people by myself.

[Maverick]

Thanks for the info about pine needle tea. I’ve seen it on other characters, but I’ve never needed to make it before. I’ve been drinking herbal and mugwort teas for health. I also realised that most of the seeds I’ve found have vitamin c too.

Can I safely add no npc needs mid game? Or should I use the debug no needs trait/mutation? This is the first camp I’ve made and I didn’t realise it would essentially double my out going food. My original thought would be that the caloric intake of their “missions” would cover food, and water would automatically become covered once a well was built. I figured sleep would be the only issue, but I had hoped they would do that on their own too.

[Trigon]

Debug the trait in. Adding mods mid game is problematic and almost never worth the hassle.

[Maverick]

Ok, does it lock their needs where it currently is, or should I lower/raise their needs to zero?

[Trigon]

I am not entirely sure honestly. I’ve never debugged in the trait.

[Maverick]

Cool, I’ll test it when I can. Do you ever use wander spawns? I don’t imagine I’ll be running into any hordes for a little while. I was hoping I’m far enough away that they won’t show up in mass for a very long time, if ever. If they do show up, what are some good methods of killing them reasonably quickly without drawing even more in? I can’t make nailboards till I find an ample supply of nails.

[Trigon]

I use wander spawns yeah. For nails your best bet is to forge them.

[Maverick]

Ok so I managed to get a forge and it’s tools, smoking rack, charcoal kiln, and now I want to work towards getting brewing/fermenting going. Is the water faucet/spout craftable? Once I have some batteries I plan on working towards a makeshift welder. Once the welder is done I can work on getting renewable energy.

[Trigon]

Yeah, pipe, scrap metal, plastic chunk. Then you need a saw and hammer. It’s pretty easy. You might have some difficulty with the plastic chunk but when I go full woodlands I usually have no trouble getting one from zed drops or cutting up a plastic cup while foraging.

[Maverick]

I’ve been collecting all of the clothes I’ve found from the random corpses, so I’m sure I can get at least a few plastic chunks from them. I’m going to pausing on this character until I can find a way around a game breaking bug I found, or a way to quickly rebuild my camp. I can no long talk to the manager about assigning jobs without it crashing. I’ll see if I can find a work around.

[Maverick]

Ok so I fixed whatever the error was. It had something to do with some of the crops so I debugged regular dirt where the crops were, and that fixed it.

Now my issue seems to be maintaining calcium. I know bone broth provides it, but I was either really lacking calcium or it doesn’t provide much. Had to pop a few of my precious multivitamins to get it back to normal even after drinking 15 portions of bone broth.

I’m thinking I’m getting close to needing some stuff for town. I need 1 heating element and 1 power converter to make a soldering iron. Thought I would be able to disassemble some of the pieces of electronics I’ve found with a screw driver set, but I was mistaken. Still progress is progress.

[Trigon]

For calcium you’ll want eggs and fresh rhubarb. Kind of upsetting that dandelion greens don’t give more. IRL they have more calcium than spinach and eggs combined. Otherwise only bone broth gives notable amounts.

[Maverick]

Well rhubarb is out of the picture. It’s late enough into autumn that I wouldn’t be able to grow any before it got cold. I might try domesticating some baby birds, or chasing a turkey or something into one of my tents.

On the subject of calcium, can you manually milk cows or do you have to use the milker machine?

[Trigon]

I think you can manually milk them if you’ve got a big enough container. I didn’t even know you could use the machine.

Though getting a domestic cow and keeping it from getting torn apart by zombies, bears, and zombears is the real challenge.

[Maverick]

I’ve never actually used the milking machine, let alone milked a cow, I just assumed that’s what it was for. In all likelihood bringing a cow back to a base would be more trouble than it would be worth, but it would be cool for the RP purpose of making a survival camp away from civilization.

I did manage to get 3 brown chicks, and tied them up in the shed by my farm. Hoping they start multiplying, but I’m worried about roaches coming out of the litter and rotten eggs. Not entirely sure how the carrion and offspring spawning works.

Hit a pretty big jackpot on some corpses. Found the rivtech design binder, 2 of the classified chemical pages, and a suit of heavy power armor all at the same location. Gotta love RNG, too bad I have toe talons or I would be wearing the armor. Looks like one of my NPCs is going to get a huge armor boost.

[mlangsdorf]

You can manually milk cows. It’s 2.5 L milk/cow per day, so they’re totally worthwhile. Even a single cow will drown you in milk, and two cows is enough to drink 1 L of milk/day and still make 9 hard cheeses, if you had enough vinegar and wild herbs to sustain that rate of production.

As far as I know, milking machines don’t do anything in game but I haven’t tried.

[Maverick]

That’s awesome, that in itself would make getting a cow back more worthwhile. Having milk and cheese year round would make calcium a joke, its just finding one AND leading it or hauling it back. Do you need to only feed them to domesticate them or each time you plan on milking them?

My chicks grew, two turkeys and a crow. Do the birds provide different egg laying and litter values or is it a flat rate for all of them?

[Mantar]

If you have to bring a cow long distance, you could make a small wagon and put a livestock carrier on it. That will prevent enemies from targeting your cow en route, though I guess a big mob might wreck the cart and she’ll be dropped out.
Downside is that it take several large ropes to make the carrier, but if you’ve had farming up for a while, you probably have plenty of withered plants to craft them with.