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Yeah, invite Madeline in
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Mar 1, 2022 23:12
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I have to ask: Are you using the same experimental build since the start, or are you updating it from time to time? Does updating break saves on experimental?
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Mar 1, 2022 23:20
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Updating typically does not break saves on experimental. Though you should probably be manually backing your save up frequently anyway because beta versions. (addressing the post above instead of OP if it's not clear)
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Mar 1, 2022 23:22
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I'm gonna advocate for checking the robits first because the training from getting a car in shape will prep for building a boat. Also Maddy can joinworm girl posted:Aquatic content and mechanics are somewhat limited at this time, but we can absolutely make a badass pirate ship and it's a great way to travel long distances.
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Mar 1, 2022 23:28
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dervinosdoom posted:I have to ask: I've been updating to new versions as we go. This can break things so as DoubleNegative said, backups are a must, as well as the willingness to put up with the occasional error message or new mechanic that hasn't been properly balanced yet.
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Mar 1, 2022 23:45
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racerabbit posted:Yeah, invite Madeline in Invite her in but don't keep her well equipped for the first few weeks.
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Mar 2, 2022 00:00
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Invite Madeline in. This is no time to worry about Chinese spies.
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Mar 2, 2022 00:09
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Keldulas posted:Invite Madeleine in. It’s the more narratively satisfying move whether the result is good or bad. 
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Mar 2, 2022 02:22
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We need to crew that pirate ship, so I'm going to go one step further and say by the time we have the ship built and stocked, let's bring along everybody who wants to come with us. Can you assign multiple NPCs tasks around the house? Earnest can tend the crops while Madeline preserves them for the winter.
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Mar 2, 2022 03:36
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I spent way too much time playing this game back in the 0.C+ - 0.D+ days and this LP is making me want to install CDDA yet again. E: Invite goatsestretchgoals fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Mar 2, 2022 |
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Mar 2, 2022 03:47
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The weirdest thing about the hunting lodge is that it doesn't have a roof, excluding the 'roof' provided by the second story floor. Which would date it to being hell of old. There's a couple buildings and locations like that in the game, always sucks cuz they frequently would be nice bases; you'd think someone would do a quick go-over and make sure the drat places actually have ceilings. There's allot of locations in the game that need a refresh to take in account new mechanics and such added since they were as well. One in particular really stands out that I'll prolly rant about if we ever come across it. Anyways, Invite and Robots Jawnycat fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Mar 2, 2022 |
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Mar 2, 2022 05:20
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On the one hand, that RV would be a great mobile base for getting to the robots on the other hand we should make a pirate ship and go west, and also invite any recruits along.
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Mar 2, 2022 11:29
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Pirate ships are for kids, I want a walking mecha with the cannon shoulder mounted (Ernest can pilot)
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Mar 2, 2022 11:34
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Boat Simulator
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Mar 2, 2022 13:21
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So I picked up the game again off this thread, and I also found an E-Reader! But the problem is whenever I try to scan something with it, it says I don't have the necessary items at hand. I have a clean SD card in there, a ton of books both in my inventory and all around me, and I've tried with the screen on and off. Any tips? E: Oh, I had to read them first to see what content they had. Gotcha. Galick fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Mar 3, 2022 |
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Mar 3, 2022 00:12
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Galick posted:So I picked up the game again off this thread, and I also found an E-Reader! But the problem is whenever I try to scan something with it, it says I don't have the necessary items at hand. I have a clean SD card in there, a ton of books both in my inventory and all around me, and I've tried with the screen on and off. Any tips? You also have to have the book in your inventory and the e-reader in your hand. It's a little clunky.   "You're back." "Yeah. I talked it over with a friend of mine. We'd like to offer you a place to stay. You'll have to pull your weight, but it's safe and we're both well-equipped and experienced. We have food, shelter, weapons and medicine." "I guess I don't have anywhere else to go. The Refugee Center says they're full." Madelene joins us with a 100% success rate on our persuasion checks - it looks like she really is grateful for the inhaler, despite everything. Taking a look at her stats, we see she's a mixed bag. Fleet-footed is a top-tier trait, granting her a 15% move speed bonus on flat ground, but slow learner and slow reader together with her poor intelligence mean that it will take a lot to do anything with her stats. She has 3 melee and 7(!) unarmed combat, but her poor strength and terrible dexterity mean that she won't really be able to make use of those traits. Even if we give her brass knuckles or something, her bonus bash damage is bad and she won't be able to score crits effectively. As for the others, they're mostly fluff. Asthmatic means she needs to puff on an inhaler once in a while or her stamina tanks, chemical imbalance means she'll randomly get pain or fatigue or a morale change, clumsy makes her slower at wielding items, and far-sighted means she needs glasses to read. Lightweight and truth-teller are basically free points in chargen, you rarely need to lie to people and getting drunk/high faster isn't an issue unless you're abusing painkillers a lot in combat. Thick-skinned gives her a single point of cut armor and robust genetics is something we'll cover later. Overall, her build is much better than Earnest's, but unlike him she doesn't bring any stellar utility to the table. This is the kind of character that random generation often gives you - there are a lot of traits and not all of them mean anything. And yes, I know I mispelled Madelene's name in her little namecard here. Bite me! PurpleXVI posted:Also does the game actually support infiltrator NPC's that'll try to backstab you? Because that's awesome. Either way we should invite her in, we should try to be at least a little bit heroic, plus maybe she has some useful skills. I can't imagine someone with crippling asthma being an elite infiltrator that'll bring us down, anyway... Currently, no. This kind of thing is planned, but for now we're just roleplaying. That doesn't mean I won't gamemaster a "friendly" NPC into loving us over, but if you're playing at home and you get a friendly, they'll stay friendly.  Madelene looks sort of pathetic, stained with soot and filthy from sleeping rough for a night or two. There's no telling how she evaded the portal storm - maybe it only hit a small area? Before we leave, we get to work gathering nails from the ashes. We're going to need so, so many nails. This is the LP's one thousandth image!  We can use the zone system to automate the nail-gathering. We set the ruins to unsorted (skipping the area we know is mined so we don't automatically step on one), then define a custom zone for anything with the word nail in it. When we hit (O) and sort out the loot, all the nails in the unsorted region will go to the nail pile.  We spot a couple more land mines. If we were better at this, we could dig one up and redeploy it elsewhere, or take it apart and harvest the explosives inside. Unfortunately, we don't know enough about how these work to mess with them without blowing ourself and probably also Madelene up. We'll have to come back later. Mines that are buried are much harder to detect and disarm. If you're just trying to trap zombies, you can just set them out in the open and the dummies will step right on them anyway. Madelene dubiously eyes the mansion as we approach. It still needs a lot of work - these windows will all have to be boarded up, and there's still trash and destroyed furniture lying around. At least we got rid of the zombie corpses.  Earnest greets Madelene and helps her unload her gear before directing her to a place to wash up and make up her bed. She seems at once impressed and appalled by our setup - electric lighting is no mean feat in the apocalypse, but the heaps of bug shells, the ordnance, and the homemade furnace speak to a level of industry that she might not have been prepared for.  Madelene hands Earnest a couple new seeds to plant, and he gets busy farming while we head inside to pull apart furniture.  We work up quite a sweat, and it gets pretty uncomfortable in our armor. Over the last month or so, sweating has been deepend as a mechanic. You now actually use your body's stored water to sweat if you're hot, which cools you down. However, wearing a lot of gear means the sweat won't evaporate well which hits you with a stacking mood debuff. It currently seems extremely out of whack (-55 is like on par with murdering an innocent), but there's an easy fix.  Using a dry towel will remove your wet status. The towel becomes wet, but it dries off pretty quick.  We ditch the chitin armor for now. Our survivor suit is still too warm for this weather, but it's breathable fabric and not hard chitin, so it doesn't trap sweat. That's a mechanic! Without our rubber boots and bug armor, we don't get all wet.  We start tying the seatbelts we collected together. Five of them make a pretty decent rope. Thread becomes short string, short string becomes long string, long string becomes short rope, short rope becomes long rope. If you disassemble them, it goes in the opposite direction. Cordage is one of those things you are always in need of.  It's boring work. We take periodic breaks to play Battlehammer and burn trash in the brazier - a theraputic activity we feel no need to explain to our allies.  We start sinking logs into that trench we dug and lashing them together. It looks like we didn't need long ropes for this after all, so we wasted a bit of time on that. Whoops! It's easily fixed. The NPCs are supposed to be able to do this via the automated work system but they can't seem to figure it out when I tell them to do it. I'm not sure if the logs being too big to fit in their inventory is the problem or what.  We'll need to clear this concrete and dig a pit to put the gate in. We grab our pickaxe and smash it apart.  Before long, we've replaced our crappy privacy fence with a working palisade gate that should stand up to pretty much anything. We'll need to extend it outward, but once we do, we can keep a cow in the yard.  Digging this trench is days of backbreaking work, and it takes a lot out of us. We're easily spending 5000 kcal a day here, which put us on a Michael Phelps level. We eat and eat and eat but we still lose weight. Ideally you're not shotgunning huge labor tasks like this, but I'd like to get this stupid wall built so we can move on to other things.  Luckily we have east access to cattails. Their roots are edible, and can be cleaned and ground up to make starch, which can then be dried into flour.  Therefore, pizza time.  Days later, it's done. That cow had better not be dead.  C'mon you.  We get more than a gallon of milk from the cow, who seems pretty content with the situation.  We'll need to further process the milk unless we want to drink it raw, which may be inadvisable. From here, we could do any number of things with it. If we had a vat, we could process it into cheese. We could also make butter, ice cream, whipped cream, we could dehydrate the stuff and make powdered milk, we could mix it with our buggy protein powder, we could cook it down with sugar into condensed milk - and that's leaving out all the baking and stuff we can do. This cow is a pretty big windfall for us. Earnest is nervous around her, but she seems to like people. A real-life holstein can produce a preposterous amount of milk, gallons every day. It's not as simple as it is in Cataclysm though; like humans, cows don't usually produce milk unless they're pregnant or have recently given birth. A cow that isn't milked regularly can either dry up or get all kinds of health problems due to milk building up. You probably wouldn't just be able to walk up to a farm four months after the farmer died and start milking a cow that had been left unattended all that time, but maybe this one had a baby we just didn't notice or something. We're able to sit here and chug 6000 kcal of milk, and the cow has way more to give. We could probably live entirely off this one animal, but for RP reasons I won't be doing that. It's the apocalypse so the cow probably sucks, nobody's going to drink that much milk, we don't have fancy hormones or any way for the cow to get pregnant again, and Madelene's probably taking half the milk anyway.   "They're getting pretty tall." "Awesome, the oats are ready!" We pick the oats, replant what we can, and process the rest into 36 servings of granola. There were other ways to use it, but granola is a high-quality food that's pretty easy to make and will keep for a long time. Our mouth waters as we imagine pouring a bowl of this stuff with some milk. We don't have a refrigerator so it'll be room temperature, but somehow that doesn't even matter anymore.  With all that out of the way, we get to work on our next project. We're headed out west, to deliver the FEMA data Smokes gave us and hopefully meet up with the strange group he spoke of. "Do you even know who these people are?" "At first I thought they were feds, but Gray's been working for the government and it doesn't seem like the same group." "So why are we building a boat? Can't you drive there?" "Have you seen the roads?" "Alright, good point. Have you ever built a boat before?" "No, but it's cool. We got a e-book about it."Boat hulls come in a variety of materials. In addition to the ones listed above, we can make metal boat hulls (crafted via the vehicle construction menu for whatever reason and not here), and we can also find (but not make) carbon fiber boat hulls. Each offers different buoyancy, weight, and strength. Wood is quite weak, but it's also light, easy to assemble, and plentiful. Carbon fiber is the best on all fronts, but it's made using equipment that is beyond the ability of a postapocalyptic survivor and can only be scavenged.  Once we have enough hull pieces to get started, we get to work on building the frame. Wood, once again, is a poor vehicle material, but it's light and cheap and easy to work with. In addition to being required for any structural vehicle parts, frames reduce incoming damage to all vehicle parts build on them. Heavy duty frames like you'd see on an APC make the vehicle very hard to damage even before you take its armor and parts into consideration, but they also make it heavy as hell. Weight decreases buoyancy, makes the vehicle require more engine power, and reduces offroad capability.  We throw together a few other necessities as we work.  Tailor's kits are the best sewing tool. They allow you to make the most complex items and can be used to reinforce or modify existing clothes by adding kevlar or leather to them. This is only situationally useful, but I wanted this for completion's sake. In the screenshot here you can see me looking at the tailoring menu. I can pad our survivor suit with even more kevlar to boost its protection, but I won't be doing that as the encumbrance tradeoff isn't worth it - I'd be better off crafting a heavy survivor suit and just using that. Still, there is a time and a place for everything.  We build out the frame it slowly starts to come together.  Eventually we have to figure out how we'll be moving this thing around. Of course there's only one real answer.  The hardest part really is that this all requires a frankly preposterous amount of nails. We almost consider taking the motorcycle all the way back to Sharon and trying to hit the hardware store, but it's a very long and very dangerous trip for something so inane. Instead, we fire up the forge and spend a few days showing Madelene how blacksmithing works. She was a student with a wealthy family back before the cataclysm, so this kind of labor is totally new to her. Still, we can't write her off completely. While on break between forging duties, she shows off some of her martial arts prowess. We've become a pretty ferocious fighter by now but she's easily able to disarm us and lay us out with some kind of spinning kick bullshit. Apparently studying wasn't her strong suit, but she got all kinds of awards for Taekwando. Randomly generated survivors like Earnest and Madelene can come with backgrounds. Earnest is a hacker, Madelene is a martial artist. It influences a couple of very minor dialog responses and affects their starting skills and stats. NPCs currently don't come with martial arts and as discussed before, can't use most of them, but I decided to use the debug command to teach Madelene Taekwando as it fit her background and is the kind of thing that should be in place but just isn't implemented. Taekwando isn't the best style around, but it does have some stuff going for it. All of the attacks are kicks, which means you can use it while you're holding stuff you don't want to attack with (ie a gun) and it allows you to block attacks with both your arms and your legs. At Unarmed rank 4, you can sometimes snatch weapons out of hostile NPC's hands, though this doesn't work on things like ferals which are coded as monsters. It also gives stuns and knockbacks, which might make up for Madelene's poor damage. A set of changes are being implemented in the near future which will allow Taekwando's kick attacks to get extra damage from the user's shoes footwear. We'll be sure to give her some loving clodhoppers if that happens.  The three of us periodically pass out by the pool, drunk on milk and fruit. There's so much to be done. Once the frame and hull have been hammered together, we need tons of rope and even more nails to secure everything. We pass the dog day of summer in a frenzy of hard work.  Autumn hits as we work. We spend a little time picking apples. There are also chestnuts and rose hips to be had now, and plenty of other goodies in the woods.  The boat is also starting to take shape. After laying down the frame and the hull, we built an enclosed cabin on the aft section, then laid out a nice deck on the fore. Finding enough rope and rigging the sail up properly was a nightmare, but we think we've got it figured out. Somewhat. So what are we looking at here? The boat is currently pointed south. The Os are sections where it's still bare hull on a frame. We'll need to install a deck (wooden aisle) or some other surface to make it properly walkable. The section with the the Os is the enclosed cabin, which has two seats and a windshield looking out over the deck. There are also two doors, one onto the deck and the other that exits out the back of the boat. This thing is almost seaworthy, we just need to add some storage and amenities, then we can load it up and set sail.  Here's another view of the boat. This time, it's pointed north. The Hs are the deck, the Os are the cabin. We built the ship by constructing a filled 5x7 rectangle of wooden frames and placing a wooden boat hull on every tile. Then we installed wooden quarter panels (railing) around the deck and wooden boards (walls) around the cabin. The sail is installed in the same tile as the driver's seat, which is a bit of an abstraction - obviously the sail is rigged up all over the vessel and the mast would just be kind of in the middle of the thing. So far our boat weighs about a ton and only has a 5cm draft (that's how much of the boat is actually underwater) and a 72 cm clearance (that's how high the deck is above water). Those numbers will change as we add weight to the thing, right now it's almost sitting on top of the water.  The zucchini and tomato have come in, along with some onion. We take a break from shipbuilding to get it harvested. None of us are sure when the frosts will come, but we have seeds to spare, so we put some more oats in the ground and hope nothing stupid happens.  We are seaworthy! It was a monstrous effort, but somehow we've managed. Unfortunately, a single sail isn't enough to move a boat this big, so we're forced to put an electric engine in. We'll want to wire up some solar panels and attach the cannon, but once that's done we can finally get underway. We'll be taking Madelene with us. Someone needs to bring in the harvest, and it's better if we keep an eye on Madelene.  We're all ready to go. The boat is packed with food, medicine, tools, batteries, the FEMA data, weapons, ammo, and blankets. The cannon is secured to the deck on the port side, we've hung curtains on the portholes, installed lights and solar panels, checked and double checked the caulking, and made sure Earnest had everything he needed. Madelene is wearing our old helmet and one of the armored raider jackets we pulled off of the bandits who were squatting in her cabin. She looks pretty badass with her bo staff, aviators, and denim short shorts.  "I went over that data with a fine-toothed comb, but it's just evacuation plans and some irate emails. There's some information about FEMA facilities in there, but if these guys were with the government, they'd already have access to all this stuff." "Maybe. I guess we'll know soon enough." "Are you sure this is enough food, Gray?" "We'll be doing some looting along the way. Are you ready for that?" "Yeah. It'll probably be safer than riding around in a boat we built out of furniture anyway." "You kids have fun. I promise I won't eat the cow."We are underway! Now all that's left is to name the boat!
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Mar 3, 2022 01:29
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Well, our three survivors are Gray, Earnest, and Madelene. So the boat should definitely be named the GEM.
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Mar 3, 2022 01:41
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worm girl posted:
Name it The Eaten Cow.
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Mar 3, 2022 01:44
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This boat must have the strongest name, The Crab. Also... since you can dig holes, can you also dig canals? Could we give the mansion its own little harbor? Or is that kind of heavy industry beyond CDDA? Goddamn, though, sweat mechanics. Either things have gotten wild since I last played or I just didn't even notice that. Does Gray get extra morale penalties for wetness because it's opposed to their desire for fire or is being soaked really that demoralizing for everyone? The mansion's also pretty idyllic now its environs have been cleared out. I kind of wish there was a medium point between "nothing respawns" and "respawning is an endless unsurvivable, unfun slog." Which is how I remember the two settings for that mechanic.
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Mar 3, 2022 01:47
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That boat deserves only the most terrifying of names for a terrifying world with hopefully no water zombies. Thus, The Sharktopus.
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Mar 3, 2022 01:50
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Requisite vote for Boaty McBoatface
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Mar 3, 2022 02:23
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BraveLittleToaster posted:That boat deserves only the most terrifying of names for a terrifying world with hopefully no water zombies. Thus, The Sharktopus. RIP the British Navy. Again.
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Mar 3, 2022 03:08
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That's a pretty cute looking boat ngl  My name pitch is TuggerOnce I understood the vehicle system I started to make a lot of contraptions but never had a need for a boat until I happened to start with a game map that had an abnormal amount of river networks. With some help from the game thread I figured it out pretty quickly and some neat things came up there. Little warning, if you follow the quote there will be spoilers Dr. Arbitrary posted:Have to take a break, but here's a drivable minimal boat: 
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Mar 3, 2022 04:09
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Since our new boat floats around and packs a nasty sting with that cannon, it feels only appropriate to call it The Wasp
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Mar 3, 2022 05:00
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My suggestion for the boat name is Powderfinger, because we've got a big gun, and we're not going to be delivering any mail.
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Mar 3, 2022 05:36
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Would it be bad luck to name the boat Evergiven?
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Mar 3, 2022 05:41
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racerabbit posted:My suggestion for the boat name is Powderfinger, because we've got a big gun, and we're not going to be delivering any mail. Neil Young automatically wins. I feel like Gray would be a fan. Evergiven is a funny runner up.
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Mar 3, 2022 06:11
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I know in earlier versions snatching weapons with taekwondo was a little broken. My brother had a character with it and he snuck into a bandit cabin like you did at night, disarmed everyone, then beat them to death. It was pretty funny. Lady Jaybird fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Mar 3, 2022 |
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Mar 3, 2022 15:27
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  "Put this on." "Aye aye Captain." We decide to name our boat after a Neil Young song, or maybe a Beat Farmers song. Speaking of music, let's get some tunes going!  hell yea  Music is a great mood booster, but it only lasts as long as you can hear it, unlike some other things that linger on for a while after. The stereo is fairly loud and will attract zombies if we get too close to any.  We pass under a bridge, seeing only geese and a few bugs that we eventually figure out must be giant versions of those little water skater guys. Somehow they stay on the surface even when they're almost as big as we are. Neat. The wind is mostly too calm for it, but when it's at our back we can kill the engine and run under sail power while the solars recharge our battery.  Powderfinger executes a graceful turn as we head upriver. Multi-tile vehicles turn like this, and unfortunately that means stuff can walk in and out diagonally through the walls while we're turning even though it shouldn't be able to. They're working on a fix for this, but it's complicated. For now we just need to take care not to let it be an issue.  We spot something interesting and decide to hop out for a look.  zombie military pilot posted:Once a pilot, it is dressed in basic military fatigues, aviator sunglasses, and a sturdy-looking helmet. "Captain Graybeard, what should we do?" "Yarr! Bash its head in and take its dubloons, says I!"  Madelene moves in, delivering a series of well-placed kicks to the zombie that send it staggering backwards. She's not really hurting it too badly, but it's still impressive to watch. She could be pretty helpful in a fight as long as she remembers not to chase her target too far into a crowd. Her high unarmed skill means she's scoring a pretty decent number of crits, certainly more than I thought she would. Taekwando ignores your held weapon when making attacks, but giving her the staff means she'll be able to block with her weapon as well as her limbs, which should stop her from getting too chewed up. Her crits are still pretty low-damage compared to ours, but the knockback and stun effects Taekwando adds are helpful in tandem with our brute force. We move in and in short order the zombie is defeated.  He's got a military ID card with a chip for a card reader.  That building with the US ARMY stamps was just on the other side of the river, hidden in the trees. We'd bet anything it goes to that.  We don't know from choppers, but this doesn't look like a military model. We know the armed forces were commandeering all kinds of things in the last days of the cataclysm as supply lines broke down. In any case, it's completely trashed. We wonder what got him. Did he go feral in the sky and forget how to fly? He had an M45A1 on him, which is a variant of a gun you may have heard of called the M1911. The M1911 was the standard US service pistol until it was replaced by the Beretta M9 in 1985, but this variant is still used by the Marine Corps today. It is a semi-automatic handgun chambered in .45 ACP which is a great all-rounder that performs slightly better than 9mm in damage, accuracy, range, and penetration. However, they're really big bullets, they're loud, they kick pretty hard, and only 7 of them fit in this gun. The M1911 proved itself in two world wars and is one of the last handgun cartridges I'd want to get shot with, but our Px4 Storm holds 10 more rounds and is way easier to use, so we'll put this in the boat and stick with 9mm for now. Oh, by the way, there are helicopters in this game! If you find a working one and you started with the helicopter piloting proficiency, you can fly the thing, but they eat fuel like crazy. Currently there's no way to learn the proficiency if you didn't start with it as it's the kind of thing that takes tens of hours of flight school and supervised training to even begin to do properly and obviously none of that exists in the cataclysm.  "What is this place?" "Some kind of army bunker or something. I want to try using that zombie's keycard to break in." "Don't you work for the government?" "It's complicated. Right now we're pirates."  "Wait here, OK?" Mother of GOD THATS A FLAMETHROWER  We can't get to it right now, our card got us in, but won't open the doors. From what we can see, this was some kind of weapons cache. The shelves were probably fully stocked once, but now there are only a few weapons and boxes of ammo left. The glass is the same bulletproof kind from the lab. We'll have to either find more cards or come back with some really heavy duty hardware if we want to get further into this place. We will be back for that flamethrower as soon as we can. For now, all we can do is get back to the boat and continue up the river.  Orrington is totally infested with zombies, worse than most other places we've been. We also spot a ship that's run aground and is covered with strange crablike monsters. razorclaw posted:A man-sized crustacean clad in iron-like chitin, capable of emitting horrible shrieking noises. Often spotted near shipwrecks or other dark, damp places, which it uses as nesting grounds. They shriek and snap their claws at us as we pass, and we realize the walking dead are all around our boat, just out of sight beneath the surface. We decide not to engage.  At one point, a duck hops onto our boat to escape the chaos in the water.  We make good time since there's not much in the water to get in our way.  Sharon is as much of a wasteland as we remember. Ironically, it would be easy to get to the hardware store now that we have a boat. We might still want to check it out on the way back.  Just as we're thinking about how easy this has been, something MASSIVE rises out of the water to block our path. skeletal juggernaut posted:This hideous golem of plated bones and misshapen flesh drags its heavy, pointed limbs behind it like an unwanted burden. Formerly soft and vulnerable, bones grew around its form to protect it - only, they kept growing. And growing. And growing. This monster is twice as tall as us and four times as wide, and its bones have grown out into jagged blades.  Very well. FIRE!  The cannon roars and blood and bone chips fly in every direction, but the juggernaut still stands. We rush out to the deck to try to finish the job.  Surging through water only chest-deep to it, the zombie (can it even be called that anymore?) smashes our oncoming boat aside like a pool toy. We grab the doorway to steady ourselves and leap out onto the deck. Before we can engage, our vessel drifts past the creature, carried by the breeze in its still-unfurled sail.  We get one final look at it as we sail off, surrounded by a cluster of smaller zombies. It ate a cannonball and kept coming, how are we supposed to fight something like that?  We pass more of those crab monsters, their shrieking is almost too much to bear, so we pop in earplugs. Ahead, a massive carp breaks the surface and rams our prow, but a little careful steering lets us leave it behind.  Or so we thought! It's right on our tail! This is actually a reference to something from this forum.  vibes  We kill the engine, throw open the rear hatch, and start trying to smash the thing with our mace. It leaps and bites at us, but eventually decides it has better things to do and takes off.  dermatik posted:A colorful parasitoid wasp grown to the size of a dog, with a huge ovipositor extruding from her abdomen. She darts around in search of a suitable home for her many, many children. You know what? No.  A while later, after fleeing from the weird-looking wasps, we find a cool little church on an island in the river. It's an interesting mix of wood and stone, with stained glass windows.  The north side of the building has been largely reclaimed by nature, but it only adds to the sense of tranquility here.  We find some empty coffins in the back. Was this a place funeral services were held? In any event, there's nothing for us here now, though we can come back and rest here if things get too dicey.  We spot something else that might help us.   It's a long climb to the top of the radio tower.  We find a handmade telescope, a map, and a few bullets. Looks like someone was here before us.  With our vantage point and map, we're able to pick out the road we need to take. We're almost there!  For the most part it's a long, quiet walk down an empty back country road.  We pass a wrecked armored van. Madelene suggests we check the back, and inside we find a 24 karat gold chain and an amethyst.  wyrd spider posted:A cow-sized mutated grass spider with long spindly legs, light gray in color. It moves ponderously, depending on its webs to prevent prey from fleeing. "They really are getting bigger." A little while later, we're set upon by a pack of bizarre coyotes. slavering coyote posted:Unnatural bulges line the neck of this obviously-mutated coyote; green-tinted foam flecks from its lips, and there's a crazed look in its eyes.  We're experienced in dealing with hit and run tactics by now, and our armor is too much for their teeth. Not so with Madelene though, she takes a bad bite to her leg and gets all pale and sweaty. We clear the pack and continue when she's ready.  We come to a nondescript building surrounded by a nondescript concrete wall. This must be the place...  A massive metal gate sits half-open, revealing an empty parking lot around the building within. We give our weapons a once-over and cautiously stride forward.  Inside, we find...a waiting room?  The lights are on, someone must be home. We try the intercom. A sign over the secure door reads HUB 01. That's an intercom and a card reader, no idea why they don't have graphics.  "I was sent here by the traders at the refugee center. They told me to deliver some data that you requested." "Understood. Please drop the drive in the box embedded beneath the intercom. You are welcome to leave afterwards."We place the drive in the tray. It retracts into the wall and is gone. "We were hoping you could--" "I believe I made myself clear. Turn around and go back to wherever you came from. Your presence is not required here." "Are you kidding me? Do you know what we went through to get here? Gray just wants us to help each other survive!" "Shut that person up before I'm forced to..."We hear some muffled conversation over the intercom. "Alright, I suppose that's no small feat. We may have some use for you here - it's a dangerous job, but if you succeed, we're willing to offer you limited trading access." "You're not with the Old Guard, who are you?" "I'm afraid we won't be discussing that at this time."We didn't come here to trade, we came to find out who these people were and whether we could join their group. Still, this could get our foot in the door, and even if nothing more comes of it, we could position ourselves as a go-between with these folks and the Free Traders. "...what have you got?" "One of our scientists recently left the lab to perform a field test on a prototype robot, but failed to return and has not been heard of since. Investigate the test site and return with her and the prototype. Failing that, return with the data recorder that was attached to the prototype."He gives us some coordinates, and adds: "If the robot is still operational, it may be hostile. Don't try to fight it head-on, because it WILL kill you. Dr. Prado left the Hub with a handful of EMP grenades, use those to disable the robot."EMP what now? This interaction is a bit strange, and I think it might be bugged. You need to select the lie option "they said you might need help" even though it has a 0% success rate. If you get here first and the intercom guy won't talk to you, go find the refugee center, come back with the data, and try that.  We hotwire a hybrid. The testing site isn't far from Hub 01, but we need some gear from the boat if we're going to do this. Hybrids are just regular cars with bigger batteries and an electric engine on top of the gas one. They come with a smart engine controller, which is a chip that automatically tries to use the electric engine when the battery is above a certain threshold.  We grab our M16, a backpack, spare rounds, and a snack, then drive back down the road.  The boat really was a great idea; The river turned what would have been a nightmare slog through at least two cities into a relatively relaxed day trip.  The robot test was taking place in a relatively flat area. We pull off the side of the road and begin accelerating. Our Prius only has three wheels and it's out of gas, but as long as we have battery, this should work out OK. "What are you doing, isn't this the place?" "..." prototype robot posted:This robot's single, glowing eye surveys the landscape periodically as it performs the endless slaughter dictated by a misinterpreted and cruel routine. Between half-built plates, you can see the machinery and cables that animate it, and yet it moves deftly as it switches between one target and the next. We see it, to the south. Next to it, shredded into bloody pieces, are the remains of Dr. Prado.  "Gray? That's the robot. Gray, aren't we going to shoot it? Gray? GRAY!!"It is briefly distracted by a dog-sized praying mantis, and does not register our approach.  "You're crazy!!"Our missing wheel gives us a little trouble on the uneven terrain and we barely miss the robot. The mantis, however, is flattened. We throw the car into reverse and bring it around for another charge.   We collide with the robot, denting its chassis and knocking it off-balance, but we're only doing 15. We'll have to wheel around for another charge.  This time we really do some damage, but it's still up. Our car is falling apart, leaving scrap strewn across the field.  "AAAAAAAAH!!!"  We stand over the trashed robot, ready to bash its face in if it does anything. It doesn't. We collect the recorder and throw the dead robot in our trunk - maybe Earnest can make something cool with it.  Dr. Prado was wearing a lab coat over a nondescript brown jumpsuit, but her armor is really pretty interesting. What first looked like a rain poncho turns out to be kevlar. It didn't save her from the robot, but... Hub 01 modular defense system posted:A custom-designed extremely thick ripstop and aramid poncho for the true frontier explorer. Striped in brown and blue, the white seal of Hub 01 is emblazoned proudly on the front. Integrating quick access pouches attached to a waist drawstring and two waterproof internal dry bags it touts plenty of storage. This poncho also has notable clips and velcro just below the waist and around the shoulders, perhaps something attaches there. The internal clips attach to a contoured set of body armor constructed from plastic and aluminum. It looks exceedingly lightweight, and while it covers less than our chitin armor, it looks like it might get in the way a bit less. The coverage on this set isn't great, but it has high protection values and low encumbrance. The armor boasts a high "vitals" rating, which is a new stat that reduces the extra damage taken from critical hits. We may want to use this, or at least give it to one of our buddies.  We return to Hub 01 in our smashed up three-wheeled Prius.  "Don't you have a job to do?" "I killed the robot. Do you want the recorder or not?"The tray pops open. We insert the device. "Unfortunate that only the data was recoverable, but you have our thanks for returning it, nonetheless. One moment."We wait around in silence for about thirty seconds. "Is that a Prius? You ran it over with your car?" "It's not my car, I hotwired it, but yeah." "...I...impressive. We hadn't imagined the enemy would - nevermind. It's clear we've greatly underestimated your usefulness. If you are interested, I have another job for you." "I did your job, wasn't that the deal?" "Yes, and we're sticking to it. We've got a limited assortment of items we're willing to trade for supplies. If you'd like, however, we can properly compensate you for further mercenary work." "I'll...think about it. I have a few questions about what just happened." "Go ahead." "First off, your scientist was wearing some sort of weird armor. It's in one piece, do you want it back?" "Oh, that. We have been working on some specialized gear for our agents in the field. It seems we still have some work to do."There's more muffled conversation over the intercom. It seems like whoever we're talking to isn't really the guy in charge. "Feel free to keep it, as thanks for your assistance. We've recently been testing a variety of defense systems and are happy to trade for more, especially if you would be willing to supply data about their performance in the field..." "You want us to be lab rats for untested body armor?" "We are confident you'll agree that our prototypes are superior to...what the hell are you wearing, is that made out of insects?" "...your armor is kind of weird, Gray." "What was that robot, anyway?" "It was a modified Wraitheon chassis with a custom AI. We were hoping it would be able to interact with the outside world for us, but you saw how it went. It's a shame about what happened, with the...evisceration and all."We recall Wraitheon. It's one of the corporations that built military drones like the one we saw shooting up that bank. Intercom Guy sounds totally unfazed by what is surely first-person video footage of his coworker being torn apart by a malfunctioning robot. Eventually the tray under the card reader clicks open and we're given a printout of what they're willing to trade.  Piles and piles and piles of guns, for starters. They've also got military ID cards! We can't believe our luck. You know the AR-15 from the news. You can basically think of it as a civilian/police version of the M4A1, though it isn't the same gun. It is a cornerstone of gun culture today and it seems like just about everyone with a passing interest in guns has one. I've messed with one myself and they feel like toys compared to older guns. The AR-15 is lightweight, incredibly ergonomic, and very easy to operate. They're chambered in 5.56 and (mostly) only have single fire, though the recoil and handling are so good that it's easy to squeeze off a lot of very accurate shots in a short time. I don't have a strong opinion about their legality, but they are a good example of how weapons can become political totems. In CDDA terms, it's basically a single-fire version of the M4, and inferior to what we have access to. Great if you get one early-game and perfectly fine to hand off to an NPC, but not as good in a close-up fight. Further down the list we start to see some more unusual things that we have to ask for explanations on. FB51 optical cloak posted:A plastic cloak embedded with cameras and LEDs that will render you fully invisible to normal vision when powered and worn. You must be carrying a unified power supply, or UPS, to use it. Activate to toggle visibility. It's a loving invisibility cloak! We can't afford it, but it seems awesome. "UPS?" "Oh, yeah. It's apparently some kind of military thing that can draw power from certain kinds of batteries and acts like a rechargeable super-battery."UPS are weird. We found one a long time ago and haven't had much use for it yet. Instead of putting a battery in the device, you carry or wear the UPS and devices that are specced for it will draw power from it. It can be reloaded with heavy batteries and has a fairly large capacity. There are some edge cases we'll explore at some point that make UPS tremendously useful, but otherwise you can just think of it as a weird battery for high tech stuff.  They're also selling manhacks and skitterbots - these are the robots we saw in that secret lab in the subway tunnel, which all but confirms a connection between these people and the labs. The intercom guy advises that only skilled programmers should try deploying them, unless we want to end up like Dr. Prado. They've also got piles and piles of tools, books, and ammunition. Stuff we definitely want, but we didn't bring all that much to trade. We offer up a stack of merch which they seem willing to accept, but we learn that around here, they use their own money. Hub 01 gold goin posted:This is a small but surprisingly heavy gold coin. One side is etched with circuitry and the other side reads 'Hub 01 exchange currency'. For now, we come away with two military ID cards, some 3D-printed greaves for Madelene, a couple "scrambler grenades" which the guy says will screw up the friend-or-foe systems on any hostile robots we meet, a science ID card, and an industrial ID card. It isn't much compared to the hoard they're sitting on, but it's a start. We can't stop thinking about that flamethrower. Savvy players may notice some important items missing from the Hub 01 store. They're actually still in, but on their way out. These items have been moved elsewhere in the game and I'll be showing them off when we get there.  Madelene straps the greaves on. They look pretty cool, honestly. The military gear, the robots, and the ID cards give us a pretty good idea of who these people are - they seem to be a remnant of whatever group was running the labs. Is that separate from the government somehow? Who's producing the unknown robots, if not these folks? Maybe Earnest will know something. Doing mercenary work for these people is an idea, and a lucrative one at that, but we need to put a pin in it for the moment. It's already autumn and we have three mouths to feed this winter. Plus, we have a lot of other jobs that need doing.  We load our broken robot and the things we've traded for into the boat and set off.  On the way back, we try to hit the hardware store in Sharon, but it's impossible. There's another shipwreck here crawling with those screaming crab monsters, and hundreds and hundreds of zombies surging out of the river and running wild on the shore. All the Zs and ?s are zombie hordes. The ww is the shipwreck. We just don't have the firepower to get in there.  A lot of the action is taking place underwater, but occasionally we catch glimpses of dozens of reaching hands and snarling faces under the water, or poo poo like this. Water doesn't have proper z-tiles implemented yet. Stuff can be "underwater" which means it's not visible unless you're adjacent to it or underwater yourself, or it can be on the surface. Some enemies seem to try to stay underwater, others hang out on the surface most of the time, I'm not sure what influences that behavior.  As we climb out of the boat, we're attacked by something that even now challenges belief: A loving zombie shark! This is fresh water, why is there a zombie shark?! Madelene chases a cat-sized dragonfly around while we shoot at the sea monster.  We kill the shark, but the gunfire attracts more dragonflies. We shoot them out of the air one by one, but take several bites in the process. I encountered a bug/oversight here. Bandaging was recently changed to take time rather than being instant, which I'm all for, but there's no prompt if an enemy gets close or attacks you or an ally while you're doing it. We took like ten bites while trying to bandage Madelene's arm and lost quite a lot of blood.  Exhausted and feeling a little woozy from blood loss, we stagger into the weapons cache and close the doors behind us.   We reverently lift the flamethrower from the rack and check the fuel gauge. It's LOADED. Madelene eyes us nervously.  We also find a little pile of ammo and a few M27 IARs, which are functionally identical to the M4A1s we've been selling to the Refugee Center. Some of this stuff, like the 40x53mm grenades and .50 BMG go to guns we don't have. Useless for now.  The next room is just ammo, a grenade marked incendiary, and a loving C-4 bomb. Hell yeah!  We can't make use of most of this stuff at the moment, but the C-4 bomb should let us blow our way into just about any secure location, and the incendiary grenade will be great for causing mayhem. In case you can't tell, this location is very old and probably will get dropped from the game at some point. It doesn't feel like a real place in the same way a lot of other areas do and it's strange that there's just a basement full of guns in the middle of nowhere. This location can also be sort of game-breaking because it just dumps a bunch of high-end loot in your lap, luckily that hasn't quite happened to us here, though this is still a nice windfall. They're working on cleaning it up, but there are plenty of ways you can sort of just get to the endgame really early in your run and then have nothing left to do - I'll avoid all of that as much as I can. The flechette shells are a particular bugbear of mine. You might have heard the word flechette. It just refers to a thin metal dart, and is often featured in sci-fi and especially cyberpunk fiction. In these stories it's some sort of futuristic super-ammo, but that's not how it works when you put these things in a shotgun shell. They lose velocity very quickly and perform very poorly on both penetration and delivery of force. They're also not something the military has tried since a few brief experiments in Vietnam, so they shouldn't be down here. That said, there are ways to use flechettes that do work. Saboted flechette rounds and grenades or other large explosives that contain flechettes can be extremely effective. There are some of those in the game, if we find any we'll discuss them.  We found a joint at some point in our looting, and this seems as good a time as any. We light up and pass it back and forth with Madelene while we split an MRE. We're exhausted, and sleeping down here seems safer than trying it in the boat, what with all the zombie sharks.  We return the next morning exhausted and woozy. Earnest helps us get everything inside, and we head off to get some well-deserved rest. We are getting pulled in a lot of different directions at once, and I'd like to chip away at our to-do list before we go pick up more quests elsewhere. Unless the thread decides we hate Hub 01, we'll be going back there and doing more stuff before we head east to the mystery robots, but there are other tasks we should do here before we go back upriver. It's very easy to get distracted in this game. worm girl fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Mar 3, 2022 |
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Mar 3, 2022 23:13
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IIRC the old bunkers essentially acted as 'shops' - you can see the contents of each subroom through the glass, and then expend military ID cards to open the ones you want. I would like to suggest a long-term goal of breaking into the Hub and thwarting whatever their Evil Plan is. They must have one.
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Mar 3, 2022 23:37
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worm girl posted:
Obviously, we need more cannons
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Mar 4, 2022 00:14
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Breadmaster posted:Obviously, we need more cannons Or a fiddy cal.
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Mar 4, 2022 00:19
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So our pyromaniac has embraced destiny and found a loving flamethrower. What do you need to do to make fuel for that thing?
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Mar 4, 2022 00:25
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i'm kind of gobsmacked at the dwarf fortress level of details in this game, I was vaguely aware of it but had no idea of how deep the rabbithole went!
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Mar 4, 2022 01:12
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The Lone Badger posted:IIRC the old bunkers essentially acted as 'shops' - you can see the contents of each subroom through the glass, and then expend military ID cards to open the ones you want. 
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Mar 4, 2022 01:24
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Bunkers are a classic, along with robbing those bunkers. Pretty sure the jackhammer alone will get you in. I am probably underestimating the difficulty of guaranteeing any given bunker only containing end game guns or ammo. Or the equivalent thereof when it comes to fancier stuff. Also I am amazed at how long stationary base projects take. I was always in a rush, only stopping to trick out mobile bases. A later game might show off a cludge I always tried to take advantage of when it comes to vehicles at the start of the game.
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Mar 4, 2022 02:33
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Does the wire forcefield trick still work? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 4, 2022 02:37
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The Lone Badger posted:Does the wire forcefield trick still work? [added spoilers] i love this thread and probations are gonna start for this kind of thing. just think before you post, please.
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Mar 4, 2022 03:08
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Zombie sharks are certainly a thing I ran into one for the first time and it ended that run really quick.
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Mar 4, 2022 03:31
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sebmojo posted:i love this thread and probations are gonna start for this kind of thing. just think before you post, please. Thank you. And yes I'm aware I can use all sorts of cheese to get infinite military guns and ammo. It should be clear by now that I'm purposefully not doing that. The run and story are basically over the instant you go that route. worm girl fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Mar 4, 2022 |
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Mar 4, 2022 04:02
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