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Huh, allot of big lookin' changes in the latest experimental versions for today. A moderate rework of the mutation system that seems interesting and something about expanding wet interactions for clothing and temperature management that has a massive .diff. From skimming it looks like getting wet lasts much longer and has more varied effects, and heat isn't as much of a showstopper during the summer with material breathability now being simulated or something.DoubleNegative posted:I've seen the "hey do this thing for me" option buried deep somewhere in the talk menus before, but only once. I've never been able to find it again since. -snip- Jawnycat fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Feb 26, 2022 |
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Feb 25, 2022 23:51
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Drakenel posted:just simply Good boy Tin Tim fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Feb 26, 2022 |
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Feb 26, 2022 00:52
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So this is pretty much exactly what I've been asking people over and over again not to do, including just literally a couple hours ago. If I haven't shown something yet that isn't because I forgot or didn't understand, it's because that's content I plan to show off. Please stop. There is a thread for general CDDA discussion, this is not that thread. sebmojo posted:did you leave earnest behind because he probably would have died? Partly. He also has the Pacifist trait so I figure RPwise he wouldn't be cool participating in a summary execution. worm girl fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Feb 26, 2022 |
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Feb 26, 2022 01:06
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Being completely honest, didn't even think of that as a spoiler; it's like saying you can press A to jump in Mario is a spoiler. It's pure, day one, gameplay mechanics and QoL stuff, no real narrative or content implications. Sorry tho, black barred the whole thing.
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Feb 26, 2022 01:44
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Jawnycat posted:Being completely honest, didn't even think of that as a spoiler; it's like saying you can press A to jump in Mario is a spoiler. It's pure, day one, gameplay mechanics and QoL stuff, no real narrative or content implications. Sorry tho, black barred the whole thing. The OP is clear about not using spoiler tags either.
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Feb 26, 2022 01:57
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why is the concept of "if the LP hasn't shown it off yet, don't talk about it" so difficult for some people?  it's just about the most straightforward rule possible
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Feb 26, 2022 02:28
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Have never played this game, but have always enjoyed reading stories about it in the same way as games like space station 13. Loving the LP so far.
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Feb 26, 2022 04:36
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Yeah, I’m really enjoying this LP! I used to be a lot more into roguelikes and your approach to the game works really well. With regard to the subway line, how deadly would that have been for a newer player with the same equipment? A lot of enemies in this game seem to be extreme threat based on the description but then they go down to a few shots same as anything else. I imagine it’s like any roguelike where a situation can escalate quickly with a few key misplays (or my old enemy, doubling down on a bad situation) but from encounter to encounter it can be hard to tell what’s a low threat and what’s a very high threat. …unless we haven’t seen any of them yet!
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Feb 26, 2022 05:04
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The subway was unreasonably difficult and even knowing all the enemy stats and behavior I only got through that on sheer luck. I used to recommend subway travel for characters stuck in large cities, but now I kind of think the surface is less dangerous in most cases. That whole section was extremely suboptimal play for the sake of story/doing what the thread wanted. You're always better off making a base and taking things slow, retreating, and building up your character and gear set rather than pushing forward into the unknown. And thanks! The thread's been a good way to revitalize the game for me after playing it to death on my own. worm girl fucked around with this message at 05:13 on Feb 26, 2022 |
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Feb 26, 2022 05:11
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worm girl posted:That whole section was extremely suboptimal play for the sake of story/doing what the thread wanted. You're always better off making a base and taking things slow, retreating, and building up your character and gear set rather than pushing forward into the unknown. I always felt the problem with building a base was that it felt like you relatively quickly "emptied" the area around your base of interesting and useful things, meaning you'd eventually have to deal with vehicle mechanics to get to anywhere with new stuff in a reasonable amount of time, and I could never really figure out the vehicle mechanics except to get my dumb rear end killed very quickly and efficiently. 
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Feb 26, 2022 08:12
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PurpleXVI posted:I always felt the problem with building a base was that it felt like you relatively quickly "emptied" the area around your base of interesting and useful things, meaning you'd eventually have to deal with vehicle mechanics to get to anywhere with new stuff in a reasonable amount of time, and I could never really figure out the vehicle mechanics except to get my dumb rear end killed very quickly and efficiently. Or you get good at the vehicle mechanics and no longer have a need for a static base.
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Feb 26, 2022 08:21
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The Lone Badger posted:Or you get good at the vehicle mechanics and no longer have a need for a static base. See the problem there for me is the basic qualifier of "getting good."
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Feb 26, 2022 09:03
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Gray likes fires right? call the dog Blaze
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Feb 26, 2022 11:13
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PurpleXVI posted:I always felt the problem with building a base was that it felt like you relatively quickly "emptied" the area around your base of interesting and useful things, meaning you'd eventually have to deal with vehicle mechanics to get to anywhere with new stuff in a reasonable amount of time, and I could never really figure out the vehicle mechanics except to get my dumb rear end killed very quickly and efficiently. Even spawning in a relatively empty area you can still do a lot of things, most evac centers these days have enough things in them that a crafty survivor could put something together for themselves.
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Feb 26, 2022 11:36
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Also, killing and pulping zombies by the bucketful gets really tedious really quickly. Almost none of them, outside really specific types, have any loot worth worrying about unless you're trying to find specific items for a crafting project or are legitimately starting out and need a weapon better than a broken table leg or something. And that's basically all there are inside of towns, just an endless tide of the undead packed into buildings like the world's grossest clown car!
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Feb 26, 2022 12:15
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world's grossest clown car is probably on the wish list as a future encounter.
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Feb 26, 2022 12:19
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With all the varied clothing options, there has to be a clown suit already in the game, right?
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Feb 26, 2022 12:37
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Probably a magician's suit too Give it up to the amazing ZOMBOR and his magical pets! 
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Feb 26, 2022 12:42
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It is a free game, download it and at least run through character creation. The list of starting professions is extremely extensive. Lets just say that the bondage suit being decent day one armor is a quickly provable assertion.
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Feb 26, 2022 22:09
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ZiegeDame posted:Can we load the canon with some sort of incendiary device? I'm afraid it's cannonballs only. We'll get our hands on plenty of other ordnance in the future I'm sure. Breadmaster posted:With all the varied clothing options, there has to be a clown suit already in the game, right? Sure is! I actually used it in the .gif I made during the first portal storm, one of the ghosts that appears is wearing it. I can't find the post, but someone else was asking if gun mods currently work. They do! I'll test it more thoroughly later but if you remember them being useless, that's been fixed. Aim speed is no longer strictly determined by weapon size, which was the problem before.   "Have you completed your mission?"We show her the photos on our camera's screen. All three women are dead. She seems pleasantly surprised that we actually collected evidence, and for the first time it occurs to us that we could have simply lied to her and told her we did it. No we couldn't. We have the truth teller trait, which tanks our ability to lie to people. We're also not very smart and have low social skill, which doesn't help. But it is one way to solve the quest. "Excellent. I suppose I ought to explain that those women were members of a criminal organization calling themselves the Hell's Raiders. Are you already familiar?"We shake our head. We're surprised at how much is going on and how much this woman seems to know. We've been knee-deep in the apocalypse for a month now and we barely understand what's going on. "These people were career criminals long before the Cataclysm. They're basically what's left of a few biker gangs that banded together during the riots to exploit the situation. At first they were just hijacking big rigs and selling the shipments on the gray market, but now there are no shipments and the market as it was is gone."She gestures out toward the hall. "Now they steal from groups like the Free Traders, or from any loners they find. They've left a trail of bodies up and down the coast and starved out some of the few groups that have managed to hold on. They're not just a thorn in our side, they're a serious problem for everyone." "I assume you're telling me this for a reason." "I am. You've done good work and I'll be sure to include all that in my report, but your country still needs you. Are you interested?" "I guess that depends. What have you got?" "We believe a member of the Hell's Raiders has infiltrated the Refugee Center. They've been too smart about hitting convoys, they have to have an insider." "There are a lot of people here." "There are, but only a small number of them would be in a position to leak delivery schedules. The people in the vault don't have any idea what's going on up here and most of the civilians who aren't directly involved wouldn't either. My guess is that it's someone who works in the loading dock, or one of the guards." "So what do you want me to do about it?" "You're an outsider. If there is a spy, they might let their guard down around you. They don't know we're onto them. Just talk to people, see if anything comes of it." "I'll keep an eye out, but no promises."At least Thi wasn't lying to us about the bounty heads. Nothing about the way those women behaved suggested that they were innocent. If the Hell's Raiders are targeting the refugee center, that could be bad news for us. This place is an important hub for tools and supplies that we'd otherwise have to go on dangerous and uncertain looting runs for. Its mere existence makes our lives a thousand times easier, even if they won't let us live here. Earnest would want to take a humanist approach. There are people here who are doing very well for themselves while the beggars starve in the lobby - Smokes for instance seems quite comfortable - but then there are also people like Makayla and Fatima who don't appear to have much to their names and are just trying to get by, and the Raiders are taking food out of their mouths, and they might have plans to hurt them if they care enough about this place to send a spy. We do know one thing, and that's that we're not particularly good at talking to people. We're a horrible liar and we've never been able to catch people out like they've done to us. In school we were always The Weird Kid. Earnest is kinda gawky looking, but he's way better at talking to people, maybe he should do this one. A peek behind the curtain here for clarity: The Hell's Raiders are planned as a future faction that players will be able to join, a la Caesar's Legion from Fallout, though they're more Mad Max (the first one) bikers than Roman wannabes, as implied by the armored leather jackets we found. For now, they're strictly an enemy faction, so we don't need to worry about not getting on their bad side. Secondly: We are sort of dumb at 8 Intellience, while Earnest is a brain boy at 12. He has the ugly trait, which makes NPCs he meets fear him more and trust him less, but it's a small modifier easily offset by his intelligence. There is code in place to tie ugliness to traits, which would allow Makayla to actually hide her ears under a hat or Earnest to benefit from wearing his bandana, but that project hasn't been finished yet.  We're going to need some things to fix up the mansion, and that means a looting run. Scarborough is unexplored territory, but it's the closest town, so we're going to scout it out.  We stop at a cemetary on the outskirts of Scarborough, hoping on the off chance to find a Quran for Fatima. We have no such luck, but it's one of the most beautiful sights we've seen since all hell broke loose. We take a moment to wander among the graves and briefly envy the generations past who enjoyed peaceful lives and peace in death. This is a really nice looking map.  Scarborough is predictably crawling with the undead. We clear a path with our mace and look for a high vantage point.  From a rooftop we get a good view of the neighborhood. We don't spot any houses with notable gardens in the immediate area, though there's a public garden on the east side of town. We could ride back up the road and loop around without going through the dense suburbs.  A glimmer of flame catches our attention. A massively bloated zombie is walking around with flames licking out of its mouth and nose. Some kind of fluid is leaking off of it...gasoline!  Morbidly fascinated, we climb down off the roof and draw a bead.  Our first shot hits the mark. Already we have a good sense that our new ergonomic grip is helping us manage recoil. I normally do precise shots whenever I have the time, but a careful shot here is only 119 moves, which is barely more than it takes to swing our mace. Not bad!  On the third shot, the zombie pops with a WHOOSH of flame that splatters burning fuel all over the street! We'll have to watch out for those, that would be absolutely deadly in melee. DO NOT MELEE GASOLINE ZOMBIES. DO NOT FIGHT GASOLINE ZOMBIES INSIDE A BUILDING. These guys are really good run enders, and they can especially gently caress you over if you're trying to fight from a rooftop as they'll set your house on fire.  Several zombies come over to investigate the sound and, spotting us, walk fearlessly into the fire. Nice. One of them looks almost like one of the ghosts we've seen, but from a certain angle we can tell it's solid. It's like there's an unseen light behind it at all times, casting the side we're looking at in shadow, even as it should be illuminated by the flame. shady zombie posted:An uncanny shadow envelops this creature, as if light itself were too repulsed to touch it. All you can make out is its shambling, human-shaped outline. These guys are partially invisible in darkness, and can only be seen if you're standing adjacent to them. They're otherwise just a normal zombie.  We grab a few things from the immediate area.  One of those bony zombies comes up the street as we pack things into the bike, and this one's shooting lightning everywhere. We get a sinking feeling when we see it. We're not seeing so many of the garden variety zombies anymore. As time goes on, they're getting bigger and more specialized. We, on the other hand, are just an ordinary human. How long can we keep up? Zombies evolve over time! Each zombie has a chance of evolving into a stronger form, and there are stronger forms beyond that. It's Digimon rules - rather than specific lines, there are branching and converging evolutionary paths different zombies can take, depending on what their current form is. Some of those forms combine different traits we've seen elsewhere - in this case we have a skeletal shocker that has both the skeletal armor and claws and the electricity attacks. This is also true of mutated animals. As time goes by, you'll see more of them and they'll tend to be more dangerous. Gray didn't notice it, but toward the end of our tunnel adventure, we were barely seeing any of the little tiny spiders, they were mostly the medium or large variety.  Oh what the gently caress. boomer glutton posted:A large, grotesque ball of flesh and fat. Seemingly vestigial limbs flop around haphazardly as it rolls across the ground. You occasionally catch a glimpse of bulging eyes and a distended gaping maw oozing some sort of black sludge. Hands down the best sprite in the pack.  boomer glutton posted:A large, grotesque ball of flesh and fat. Seemingly vestigial limbs flop around haphazardly as it rolls across the ground. You occasionally catch a glimpse of bulging eyes and a distended gaping maw oozing some sort of black sludge. We've noticed that most of the zombies don't seem to be eating anything. They do bite, but the objective is usually just to kill. This thing clearly has other plans. It bounces and squirms toward us almost comically as we pump lead into it. It manages to catch up and we're halfway down its throat before we can finish it off. These guys can be surprisingly dangerous. They resist bash damage really well and instead of punching or scratching, they grab you and just spam bite attacks. Bite is much stronger than a zombie's normal attack, but it's usually on a cooldown. We haven't found what we came for, but we need to retreat for now. We hop on our motorcycle and ride back to the mansion.  On the drive home, we spot a SWAT truck broken down on the side of the road.  There are some goodies in the back.  We attach the suppressor to our Px4 Storm. This thing won't make it silent like in the movies, but it will significantly dampen the report of our pistol, which means it'll attract fewer zombies and won't deafen us if we fire it indoors. Unfortunately, it won't fit in the holster like this. We'll have to screw the suppressor on after we draw our gun, like they do in the movies. That's OK with us due to looking badass. Suppressors make your gun longer which may be a storage concern, and they wear out with use. Other than that, they're really nice. This one reduces the audible range of our pistol from 80 tiles to 50 tiles. Since we're always using this thing in cities during emergencies, this will do a lot to keep us from drawing more trouble down on our heads. This is another argument for low caliber guns. A .22 with a suppressor is quiet. Quiet enough that you can use it on night runs and safely plink at zombies with it in town so long as you're not dealing with anything too armored.  Back at the mansion, we have some work to do. First up: we can't keep living like this. We have to name our dog.  "I think we should call him Lycos." "What?" "Like the search engine." "Never heard of it. His name is Good Boy because he is a good boy." "I want you to know that he poo poo in my bedroom today." "Good boy."  *general doggy excitement* "What's this?" "I made a bulletin board. This way we can keep track of projects and supplies more easily. I've been thinking - we could do a lot with this place. You were talking about farming, but we could do more with it. Turn it into a safe haven for people like us who can't get into the Center. It'll be a cool place, a better place." "Do we really want to just invite randoms in? There are bandit gangs and crazy people out there." He frowns. Our words carry the weight of experience. "OK," He says, "I'm not the one going out and risking my neck every day for us. If you want to bring people into our group, I'm all for it. If not, we can just hang out here and make this place into a home." Welcome to the Faction Camp system! This is a sprawling system that allows you to turn various sorts of locations into NPC bases. This allows NPCs to do fairly complex labor tasks such as farming, crafting, and cutting wood without our direct supervision. NPC party members already have the ability to build, study, mop, sort, butcher, farm, chop trees, fish, mine, and deconstruct or repair vehicles, but they normally require supervision: As previously mentioned, the player has a "reality bubble" that extends a fairly large distance around them. Anything outside this bubble is not simulated in real time, so NPCs assigned to these chores can't do them if you're not in the area. Faction camps change that, instead using a system where the NPC is removed from play for a set amount of time and then returns to the camp with such materials as their skill allowed them to get. Since it's abstracted this way, it doesn't need on-screen simulation, so you can drive halfway to Minnesota and the job will still progress while you're gone. To get the full Faction Camp experience, you need to start from scratch in an empty field. However, building the main camp requires a preposterous amount of time and resources. We will likely explore that at some point in this LP, but starting in the mansion instead skips over the initial build requirements. There is a bug that blocks us from doing specialized things with our mansion, but there's already a PR in to fix it and unless something goes wrong, that should be rolled out in a day or two. So that we don't risk breaking our mansion, I'm going to wait to actually found the faction camp until that bugfix is in. For now we'll just pretend  In a few updates we'll explore the system more thoroughly. Since Earnest is staying home, he doesn't mind doing chores while we get into terrible and constant battles. We step into the pool area to discuss our plans for the farm. Pressing (Y) opens the zone menu. Here we choose Loot: Seeds, which will define a zone where seeds are supposed to go.  For now, that bench over there is a fine place to keep them.    We select a strip of land along the wall here for our grapevines. We remember we have some wild herb and vegetable seeds, so we add those to the pile and then agree on where to plant what. We also had to define a tool zone and put a shovel there for him to use. He went and grabbed it on his own when we asked him to start farming.  Earnest gets busy turning over soil, planting seeds, and watering everything. It's a start. We have more work to do, so we leave him to it. I don't know why but this is really cute to me. He goes and gets the shovel and actually starts doing the jobs just like a player would. He even stops when it gets dark.  We'll need multiple smoking racks if we want to take food preservation seriously. It would be a shame to bag a deer or something and then have it spoil before we could process it all.  The next day, we've planted everything we have that needs planting. Earnest comes over to check out our smoking racks. "So how's this work?" "We load them with charcoal and start low fires under each one. We can put thin cuts of meat or anything else we want to preserve, like fruits and vegetables, up above, and the smoke keeps the bugs off while the low heat dries it out. After that it stays good for like a year."Once we get these going, they won't need to be tended. We do need to make some charcoal kilns though. Here's a demonstration of a smoking rack. There are a million different ways to build these, and they were likely used pretty much everywhere in the world. Every time I make one of these I think about Chris McCandless shooting a moose without having a smoker ready. It can happen to you!  We also set up some charcoal kilns by carefully stacking rocks into a dome shape with an opening at the front. These will evenly burn wood in a low-oxygen environment and transform the material into usable charcoal rather than just burning it to ash. We can use the charcoal to fuel all kinds of projects. We load up the kilns with some broken furniture and head out to the riverbank for our next project.  There's a clay deposit in the side of the hill. We use our entrenching tool to get a good-sized pile of the stuff. Do this via the (*) build menu, rather than just digging a hole on the deposit.  We don't have any cannonballs. If we want to use the cannon, we'll need to make some. To that end, we get to work making a clay crucible.  Clay is nice. You can use it to make stuff like the quern and clay canning pot if you're having trouble finding a food processor or a normal canning pot. Here's one from Primitive Technology. His is made from mud, but it's the same principle.  Then we smash up the old fireplace and, with some help from our copy of the DIY Compendium, we build a charcoal-powered forge out of stone in its place.  It's so hot that we strip naked and do a frontflip off the diving board. Earnest starts hollering something about algae, but at least this water doesn't have any zombies in it.  Ahhh, that's better. Being wet can raise or lower your mood penalty based on a variety of factors. Most clothing feels uncomfortable when it's wet, but being nude or wearing appropriate swimwear feels great in the water. It's also much easier to swim if you're less encumbered and weighed down. Being in the water cools you down by about 20 points as well, so if you're taking heat damage and there's a pool hop in! Things like pills and electronics can get messed up in water if they're not in watertight cases. This won't happen from rain, but it will from swimming. You get a prompt about it if you try to walk into a water tile.  "Welcome to the steel mine." "Really?" "Did you really think we were going to dig it out of the ground? What is this, the fourteenth century?" "Well...maybe, yeah." "Where would we even look? Besides, someone already did all the hard part. All we have to do is scrap it." This is the best way to get metal in this game. It is possible to dig for some minerals, but the process of turning ore into steel is waaaaaaaay more complex than just recycling the stuff, so it's not really implemented. Plus apparently New England isn't a really copper or iron heavy part of the country.   We come home with as much material as we can manage. We can take the bike out to gather more if we need. These shelves to our right increase the amount of stuff that fits in that tile by 500 liters. They're super useful for keeping organized. When crafting, our character is considered to have access to all tools, workstations, and items that they can walk to in 6 steps. We can sit in one of those chairs and do our forging at that table, which we'll shortly be replacing with a workbench for extra work speed. Staying organized is suuuuper difficult. There's an autosort button in the zone actions menu (O) that can be a godsend for staying sane. I think our little outdoor workshop is looking pretty nice so far. If it's not clear, the part we're standing in has a roof over it, though the pool area doesn't. That'll keep the weather off us but still allow us to take advantage of daylight. Since the smoke can escape to the south, it won't build up super bad here. We're immune to smoke as long as we keep our mask on, but doing so uses up the filters.  We have a couple of warm beers and spend the night practicing wound care techniques, referring to one of the manuals we have saved on our e-reader. We're getting pretty good at this, which is great because we keep getting our rear end kicked.  With the recipe book we got from Makayla, a bunch of chemistry tools we found in the lab, charcoal we made ourselves out of a busted up pool table, a bottle of oxidizer powder, and ammonia from the kitchen, we're able to make black powder! It's not as good as smokeless powder for normal guns, but for a civil war cannon? It's just what we need. However, it's not enough to pack a shot with. We're going to need quite a bit more oxidizer, and given how rare it is, that suggests we'll need to learn how to make it. We have the recipe, but it's pretty complicated, we'll need to practice our applied science skills. Earnest shows us how to make an electrolysis kit. With that, we should be able to play around with turning salt water into bleach until we know the ins and outs of working with bases. As a bonus, we know how to turn the bleach into superglue. Once we get that figured out, we look up the recipe for oxidizer powder. It requires (but doesn't consume) platinum, which we have a bit of thanks to the fact that we live in a ridiculous mansion full of rich guy poo poo, but we're going to need hydrochloric acid. We aren't in the mood to go all the way back to that horrible secret lab, but it looks like we can make some out of salt water - except we'll need an arc welder. Where the gently caress do you get an arc welder? There's a garage in Sharon, but it's not in an extremely accessible location. Earnest suggests we could try making one, we just need to scavenge some electronics and duct tape from around the house. We spend the next couple of days taking apart every nonessential appliance we can get our hands on. Eventually, we get the things built, but then Earnest tells us that the batteries we have aren't big enough to power the electrolysis kit.  So of course we have to go into the basement and get a stepladder. Stepladders can be placed anywhere and let you get up onto roofs. Very useful, but I never seem to have one handy.   We hammer together some wooden frames and start setting them up on the roof of our work area.  We get the basics of our rooftop solar panels set up, but the cells won't charge, so after some frustration we decide to take a short break. We need 4 mechanics skill to install the solar panels, and we only have 2. That's easily handled.  We gently caress around with a soldering iron and some bits of plastic and try to waterproof our Beretta. We have no idea why we'd want to shoot it underwater, and the gaskets make the gun a bit heavier, so in the end we decide not to use them. As far as I can tell, this isn't a real thing. I don't even know if these work in the game, and in any event a bullet fired underwater wouldn't go very far. This is probably a piece of legacy design that hasn't been removed yet. It does however teach the mechanics skill, and that can be a difficult skill to learn.  Of course, we'll need more copper wire to run power down from the roof. After a while we realize that we have scrap copper, and with an anvil we could make our own wire. kill me To do that, all we'll need is a draw plate and a swage and die set. We heat the copper rods until they're soft and pass them through the plate to make wire. All we need to make copper rods is a hotcut and a metal fileset. All we need for that is a pair of flatjaw tongs.  Several days later, we've completed a swage and die set. The work is exhausting, we find ourselves staggering to bed like one of the undead every night, and eating everything we can get our hands on any time we remember. The swage and die set is a bunch of tools used to give hot metal specific shapes you couldn't get with a hammer alone. Here's a guy using a swage.  The next morning, we're able to start melting our spare copper pipes down, molding them into rods, and then beating that into wire.   With God as our witness, we will never run out of copper wire again!  Earnest helps us twist the copper wire into cable, which we insulate carefully with electrical tape. Duct tape is NOT electrically insulated IRL. This is probably an abstraction until someone implements rubber working or splits electrical tape out into its own type.   We wire the other end of the cable to the frame we've placed at our workstation. This will form a compartment that goes under our seat.   The solar panels will convert sunlight into electricity, which they'll pass down the heavy-duty cable we installed to this car battery. The battery will store the charge and feed it out as needed to the charger we've attached to the seat. The charger will power smaller batteries for our various appliances.  With that, all that's left to do is wire up some lights and load our spare batteries into the charger. We now have a fully lit workstation that uses solar power to recharge any batteries (vehicle or appliance) that we want. It's small now, but we can build it up as we get larger batteries and more solar panels. It took two weeks, but we can finally use our electrolysis kit! "I can't remember what we needed all of this for." "We're trying to shoot a civil war cannon at a wasp nest." "Oh, yeah."This update nearly broke me. The game kept crashing and I lost some items to a bug (mostly replaced I think), and then I could not find any loving copper wire anywhere. The heavy duty cable should not cost that much, and people's walls should be full of the stuff! im going to go play elden ring worm girl fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Feb 27, 2022 |
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Feb 27, 2022 01:31
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Sorry to bother you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdm3Q7n3J-w link goes to a https://chris/
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Feb 27, 2022 01:59
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worm girl posted:
man do i know that feeling. well, the first part, at least
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Feb 27, 2022 02:27
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ChaosDragon posted:Sorry to bother you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdm3Q7n3J-w link goes to a https://chris/ Thanks for catching that, I've fixed it.
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Feb 27, 2022 02:43
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At least 'so we can shoot a wasp nest with a cannon' is an extremely worthy end goal.
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Feb 27, 2022 03:20
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Well I ended up reviewing Chris McCandless after forgetting about it for a long while. Let's just say that now I'm a little annoyed after reading on it for how dumb people have been regarding him.
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Feb 27, 2022 04:11
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Not gonna lie, my eyes kind of glazed over partway through the construction talk. I can't imagine diving that deep and playing it, to be honest. But it's fascinating as an example of what you can do.
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Feb 27, 2022 05:39
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Man, I would kill for a co-op version of CDDA so someone with a better brain than mine could do all the intelligence-requiring construction work, while I do all the violence-requiring gathering work. Because my brain's good for the tactical parts, but the practical parts... get a bit overwhelming. Especially when working at multiple heights since the game(mainly) only displays one Z-level at once.
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Feb 27, 2022 10:59
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The only way I could think of to do that with the current codebase would be asynchronous multiplayer. You could send the World file back and forth between you, pretending that one character is sleeping when the other does stuff.
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Feb 27, 2022 11:17
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The Lone Badger posted:The only way I could think of to do that with the current codebase would be asynchronous multiplayer. You could send the World file back and forth between you, pretending that one character is sleeping when the other does stuff. I mean, that could be kind of cool, either that or having the characters in separate reality bubbles, you play 24 hours(in-game) at a time, then reconcile the two realities, perhaps with some sort of solution for mailing items back and forth between the two that wouldn't require intersecting bubbles.
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Feb 27, 2022 11:30
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Drakenel posted:Not gonna lie, my eyes kind of glazed over partway through the construction talk. I can't imagine diving that deep and playing it, to be honest. But it's fascinating as an example of what you can do. Yeah that was kind of the idea. I was trying to show how easy it is to get lost in the sauce with that kind of stuff. If you want an easier version, don't build on multiple Z-levels. You can make two wooden frames and use (*) to start vehicle construction, then install them side by side. Put a car seat on one, then put a battery charger and vehicle controls in that same tile. On the other one, put a solar panel. Install a car battery, and then drop regular batteries in the seat or box. (e)xamine the seat and you'll get a menu where you can turn on the battery charger. The sun will charge up the car battery, and the electricity from there will be used to power the battery charger, which will fill up the batteries you leave in the seat. We only needed a forge and all that other stuff because there's a dearth of copper wire in the game right now. Someone just needs to add power cables that can be scavenged.
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Feb 27, 2022 14:24
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 We are back at it again in Scarborough.  We start our day by stealing a bunch of what looks like 40k figures, except...they're medieval? Bizarre. We'll have to ask Earnest about it.  It's not as oppressively hot today, but we're still having trouble.  Renovating the mansion really took a lot out of us. We lost quite a bit of weight, and we weren't very heavy to begin with. We've been eating voraciously to try to get it back, but we still feel weak. 20% is a HUGE debuff. It allows zombies to sneak more attacks in, which stacks more pain on us, which in turn makes us even slower. Most of this damage was done by a single zombie brute. We need to be extremely careful.  Eventually we reach the community garden, and are disappointed to see it's just a bunch of (mostly) useless flowers. There's another one just up the street, we'll have to give that a try.  Finally! There are a few food crops here ready for harvest. We creep in as the sun sets, hoping to get our hands on some fresh produce and seeds.  We do some stealth farming, and come away with a pretty good crop. Zucchini, tomato, onion, oat, chili, carrot, and barley! These are all hardy varieties that with a little luck and some careful timing should give us a harvest or two before winter. The barley in particular is going to be very important.  It takes us two trips to get everything home, and on one of them we get ambushed in the dark by a giant wasp. We're barely able to fend it off with our handgun. We really need to take care of those fuckers. It buzzes away, leaking yellow-brown bug blood. We know better than to chase it. We should also finish taking apart this wreck out front, it's an eyesore! DID YOU KNOW insects have yellow blood (called hemolymph) because it contains proteins called vanabins? They contain the element vanadium, and nobody knows why. It takes three trips to get our loot home, but it's worth it. There's plenty of food now, and after spending a little time extracting seeds from the plants we harvested, we hand Earnest a shovel and he gets busy farming. Time's a-wasting, so we head out to forage while he does that.  We spot a turkey. Perfect!  We really should be using our bow for this, but we didn't expect to see any game out here. If you use game arrows or small caliber bullets, you'll do less damage to the animal when you shoot it and wind up with a better carcass.  We load everything into a smoking rack and light it up.  The fields are planted and fertilized, we have solar panels on the roof giving us electric light and powering our appliances. The charcoal furnaces are happily burning, and the smoking racks are filling the air with a lovely smell. We've got a forge where we can work metal, a fairly advanced chemistry setup, we have thousands of pages of technical manuals, guns, ammunition, explosives - this feels pretty good. It was a ton of work, but with a little more we can go from surviving to thriving.  We check the rack and find our fruits and veggies are nice and leathery. The meat is smoked and will keep for weeks now, but if we run it through another cycle it'll be completely dehydrated and last even longer.  With that done, we can finally power our electrolysis kit and cook up some hydrochloric acid and oxidizer powder. The process is extremely annoying as the electrolysis kit keeps dying. We constant swap out power sources - we have a car battery, motorbike battery, and small electric vehicle battery we keep in rotation. Two go on the solar charger, the other goes in the electrolysis kit. One runs out, we swap one in and one out. It's tedious.  After hours of this, we're left with a decent pile of oxidizer and can get to work processing it into gunpowder. Oxidizer powder is annoyingly useful - we can use it to make high-quality antiseptic and hemostatic powder, both of which we want very badly. Hemostatic powder in particular sounds fantastic, as it will allow us to stop wounds bleeding almost instantly.  At long last, we have everything we need. We'll want to make a lot more gunpowder, but the wasps will know our strength before the day is through, so help us God. It takes a full five minutes to load the cannon. OST  The thing is way too heavy to push. Earnest comes up with a design for a yoke and harness and we pull it like a pack animal. "Mush!" There it is, buzzing with activity. This thing probably isn't super accurate, so we decide to get in closer. As we approach, one of the wasps takes flight and dive-bombs Earnest! It's the queen!! wasp queen posted:A mutated wasp queen grown to the size of a person, laying a single white egg in each empty cell she comes across while scurrying around on the paper walls of her home. She struggles to fit into some of them, but the newer cells seem to be getting larger… Without thinking, we fire the cannon into the melee. BOOM!      I could not believe it.  Sensing their queen has fallen, the wasps come charging in and chew Earnest up pretty badly as we retreat. Our Beretta comes in handy here, a lucky shot taking out one of the small ones while Earnest chops up the larger one.  We bandage Earnest's wounds and get the carcasses home. Waste not, want not. The meat is pretty nasty, but we decide to try something.   What was left of the queen still had a few eggs inside her. They're longer than a chicken egg and sort of soft-shelled, but once they're dried and powdered, they're mostly indistinguishable. We probably wouldn't want to rehydrate and fry a plate of these up, but could they be sneaked in to other food without us noticing the difference? It's pretty gross, but we feel bad just wasting a good carcass like that. The wasps are dangerous and mutated, but at the end of the day they're only animals trying to follow their instincts. You can use a smoker or a dehydrator to make powdered eggs, which keep indefinitely and can be used for all sorts of stuff. Like the spider eggs, these started at 25% toxins per serving, but now they're down to 9%! This makes sense as we've removed all the fat and water, which could have also gotten rid of the accompanying harmful compounds.  In the morning, we come back down to check on things. We find the bug meat smoked OK, but it'll need another go around before we can make an assessment.  We can do some digging while the smoker does its thing. We haven't been attacked from the north yet, but it's the one vulnerability in our main work area. This wooden privacy fence is useless for anything other than blocking line of sight. If we want to do better, we'll need to start digging a trench.  The trench itself is deep enough that zombies may fall in, but it's only the first phase. We're going to get some logs and sink them into the pit so we have a palisade. We can extend it outward to give us some room to keep one of the cows, if they're still alive. It's hard work. Hours later we're pooped, and not even half done. The = is just dirt. Digging big pits like this creates a ton of dirt with some rocks and clay mixed in.  We decide to take a break with something less taxing. We disassemble an RC car and grab one of its motors. Our forging project consumed more than 10,000 kcal every day for the whole two weeks we were doing it, and we lost a dangerous amount of weight. We have plenty of food, but our stomach is only so big, so it wasn't possible to stay ahead of the curve because we didn't have access to extremely high quality food. If you pace yourself a bit and space out extremely taxing actions like digging, forging, and vehicle work, you can still get a lot done without killing yourself.  The bug meat is now totally dehydrated, but it still stinks like sour garbage. We've got one more thing to try.  After practicing our soldering for a while, we go in for the kill and put together a food processor from scrap metal, some scrap electronics, a pot, and the RC car motor. It's hard. We burn out a motor and waste a ton of material before we've got a working processor ready.  We spend a little while trimming our dehydrated bug meat some more, then spin it in the food processor until it's an unrecognizable powder. In this state it's a lot less offensive. It still smells a bit, but we could probably mask it with something sweet. We blend it up with some of our dried berries and clean water.  We do all the usual tests. We smell the stuff, we rub it on our skin and wait for a reaction, we rub it on our lips and wait for a reaction, we taste it and see if it makes us gag, then finally, we try a small drink and see how we feel. We feel OK! We'd much rather eat normal food, but we don't know what's coming and the knowledge that we have one source of preserved food that won't immediately kill us is reassuring. We won't say it tastes great, but the fruit really helps. Regular protein shakes are much more enjoyable, but these are healthy and supply decent calories. We can't go over ~1700 calories of this stuff a day so it's not going to keep us going if you're doing a lot of work, but we can supplement and stretch whatever other food we have much farther. Also, it has +++ health! It's hard to meaningfully affect your hidden health stat as it swings back to neutral extremely quickly, but this will keep ours from dipping too low and may help us recover from injury a bit faster. We clink glasses with Earnest and down the stuff. He's got a pretty delicate stomach and has to hold his nose to get it down, but he doesn't vomit, so that's a win.  That done, we set about replacing our gambeson. It's too hot in the summer, too restrictive, it doesn't soak the big hits, and it doesn't protect our legs. It's lacking on every front and we've been putting up with it for far too long. We stay up way too late waterproofing a jumpsuit, using duct tape and leather to fit it with reinforcements, pouches, and pockets that are the perfect size for looting. We integrate an empty ballistic vest, cutting the kevlar down and using the scraps to add padding to the knees, shoulders, and elbows. "It's...beautiful." The survivor suit is the apex of homemade soft armor. There's better stuff out there, and we can make items that offer better protection for specific circumstances, but this suit is designed to maximize all-around protection with awesome storage and very little encumbrance. It comes in three weight classes, light, medium, and heavy. We've gone with light here as the difference is 4 extra cut and 2 ballistic protection for 3 encumbrance. The heavy survivor suit is 18/24/20 bash/cut/ballistic for only 8 encumbrance total which is awesome, but if you use the pockets it goes up to 21 on the torso as you fill it. That's still quite good if you keep it empty or are a gun-focused character, but we generally want to stay in melee and storage is useful. There are all kinds of survivor-branded items, just like our belt. There are bags, coats, gloves, winter variations, specialized gas masks, goggles, you name it. All of it is highly desirable, but the items require a lot of high-end materials like kevlar, and many of them require 5 or more proficiencies. The heavy survivor suit needs 7! Once you get established with a gambeson and some leather armor (or equivalent), you may want to consider grinding these proficiencies because the armor is awesome and you will need good armor. edit: As of 3/4/2022 the survivor suit has been renamed to the kevlar jumpsuit. We'll wear this under our chitinous armor. With this, we're very well protected from all kinds of damage and it's a lot less hot and restrictive than our gambeson was. We still don't want to get shot with high-powered rifles, but things are definitely looking up.  With that done, we start rubberizing kevlar and cannibalizing old masks. We wind up with a hood to replace our army helmet (they can be worn together in a pinch, but we're glad to lose it for now) and a new gas mask. The seals are just as tight as our old one, but the acrylic faceplate is much larger, giving us a better field of vision. The overall design is smaller, but fits the same cartridges as our gas mask. It's easier to breathe in this thing, and much easier to see, and unlike our old mask, this one is designed to take a hit and not come apart.  Thus armored, we should be impervious to a lot of zombie attacks and able to get around well enough that we won't get swarmed or cornered.  
worm girl fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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Feb 27, 2022 20:08
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You shoot a
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Feb 27, 2022 20:24
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That new sprite looks kinda... Fremen. Brown stillsuit, face mask, rebreather. Maybe if we walk without rhythm we can dodge the wasps... also does taking out the queen make a difference? Like is it the queen, and there's one per nest, and taking her out prevents it from repopulating? Or will they just hatch a new one/a new one will spawn? Fortifying locations is also a lot of work in some cases but it's also kind of... Zen, there's something just fundamentally satisfying about just slowly patching up holes and weak points in a property until it's an impregnable fort. As for digging holes... if you end up digging a hole on top of, say, a subway tunnel, can you just go plummeting through? Or are the holes not really passages from one Z-level to another?
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Feb 27, 2022 20:52
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I'm so glad we shot a giant rear end wasp with a cannon.
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Feb 27, 2022 20:59
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PurpleXVI posted:That new sprite looks kinda... Fremen. Brown stillsuit, face mask, rebreather. Less Fremen more STALKER, which is almost certainly the inspiration judging by the description. Night10194 posted:I'm so glad we shot a giant rear end wasp with a cannon. Not just "shot at", "obliterated" it's a thing of beauty TitanG fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Feb 27, 2022 |
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Feb 27, 2022 21:01
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Night10194 posted:I'm so glad we shot a giant rear end wasp with a cannon.
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Feb 27, 2022 21:02
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PurpleXVI posted:That new sprite looks kinda... Fremen. Brown stillsuit, face mask, rebreather. The queen is the only one who lays eggs. The eggs hatch into larvae which grow up to be wasps. With her out, there's currently no mechanism I know to replace her, so we're now dealing with a finite number of enemies at this location. It's possible to blow holes in the ground that reach all the way to lower Z levels, but not just by digging with shovel. You can, however, construct/dig stairs that go down a Z level. If there's open air beneath (ie you dug down into the subway tunnels) you can jump down or descend via a rope, which also leaves a rope you can climb back up. 450 damage is a lot, by the way, about twice as much as a good headshot from a .50 cal. There are enemies that can eat a cannonball and live, but not many. worm girl fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Feb 27, 2022 |
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Feb 27, 2022 21:05
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For reference, how hard would the Queen have been to deal with conventionally rather than with a cannonball to the thorax.
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Feb 27, 2022 21:07
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 what will all those poor wasps do without their mama
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Feb 27, 2022 21:16
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| # ? Jun 2, 2024 09:26 |
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worm girl posted:The queen is the only one who lays eggs. The eggs hatch into larvae which grow up to be wasps. With her out, there's currently no mechanism I know to replace her, so we're now dealing with a finite number of enemies at this location. drat, we held the base vote too early. Now we can't vote to move into the empty wasp hive.
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Feb 27, 2022 21:37
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