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Night10194 posted:For reference, how hard would the Queen have been to deal with conventionally rather than with a cannonball to the thorax. She was only marginally harder than the regular giant wasps. Fast, OK armor, and a hard hitter, but not super bulky.
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Feb 27, 2022 21:57
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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 22:29
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That was god drat majestic 
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Feb 27, 2022 23:16
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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 23:23
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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 23:41
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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. Like a lot of things in this game, I've found that it all looks a lot more intimidating on the surface than it actually is--but yeah, otherwise it's a personal flavor kind of thing. I love building functional static bases because I like having some place to go home to. It helps that there's a lot of major things getting added to bases right now, too. This is really excellent LP. I've been playing the game a bunch lately and it's dope getting a look at your thought process, even when some of the choices are RP-based. There have been some absolutely bonkers moments that I can't believe didn't end in a wipe. An early run through the subway and lab with no real prep or breaks between them would get me killed 9 times out of 10. I really do hope you end up getting around to a Magiclysm run. It's just so good--and it's wild how little you have to stretch the imagination for it to just slot right into the base game's universe and themes and have it make sense being there. You prompted me to try MSXOtto+ for the first time, and it's neat, though I actually think Ultica (I use Chibi_Ultica because I like how expressive the sprites are) has passed it in terms of how complete it is.
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Feb 27, 2022 23:53
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worm girl posted: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.  Thx for the info though! Seeing the current state of the game makes me more willing to move on from my old version but I'm still not looking forward to the extra button presses of the pocket system Also big el oh el at splatting the queen
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Feb 28, 2022 00:19
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Tin Tim posted:I edited my post because I feared I stepped off into spoilers again I messed around with it in testing and it looks like certain mods (ie ergonomic grip) don't help us, they add to our reaim time instead of reducing it even though the listed recoil is lower, which was the problem with the old ones. I suspect that's either because we're so strong we don't need a mod to compensate, or because ergonomic grip isn't working. edit: this is wrong i was tired and dumb. I did proper tests and posted the results a few replies down The other mods seemed to be beneficial but I need to do some actual tests and find out what's going on. It's a murky system. If anyone knows what's up with the current state of gun mods please do chime in! worm girl fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Feb 28, 2022 |
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Feb 28, 2022 01:13
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I think it's because many gun properties are calculated by gun volume and weight, and mods directly add to both. So the benefits from a mod rarely offset the bulk they add to the gun
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Feb 28, 2022 02:43
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Anticheese posted:I think it's because many gun properties are calculated by gun volume and weight, and mods directly add to both. So the benefits from a mod rarely offset the bulk they add to the gun That was the old issue, which I discussed, but it was supposed to be fixed and the dev team seems to be acting like it is fixed.
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Feb 28, 2022 02:54
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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 28, 2022 03:32
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Feb 28, 2022 08:07
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I think the detail I appreciate most about the wasp being cannoned is that all the parts are just scattered around at random. It's hilarious and evocative.
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Feb 28, 2022 09:15
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Like I understand the cannon was a huge amount of work to get working but think about how insanely worth it it was to be able to show the internet you can use a civil war cannon to slaughter bio-horrors in this game. There is no better argument for this game's existence.
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Feb 28, 2022 14:35
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This update really shows off how you sometimes need to make tools... to make the tools... to make the tools to make the good stuff doing it from primitive scratch is painful.
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Feb 28, 2022 15:40
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Now I can just imagine people doing a Caveman to Spaceman run, starting with just your fists and a burning will to prosper.
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Feb 28, 2022 16:07
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Tin Tim posted:I edited my post because I feared I stepped off into spoilers again Anticheese posted:I think it's because many gun properties are calculated by gun volume and weight, and mods directly add to both. So the benefits from a mod rarely offset the bulk they add to the gun To follow up on this, I made a survivor and gave them 3 in all skills and 8 in all stats. I gave them 0 hand or eye encumbrance and debugged in immunity to weather, hunger, thirst, fatigue, etc. I spawned 4 Beretta Px4 Storms, each with an identical 17-round magazine. The first I left bare, the second I attached an ergonomic grip to, the third I put a compact suppressor on, and the fourth got both modifications. I made 4 shooting targets and used each gun to take two shots at its target from an equal distance in full daylight. In all cases, the mods performed as expected and reduced recoil despite increasing the weight, volume, and length of the guns. Remember that lower numbers here are better. Unmodded Turns for precise aim (first shot) 223 Turns for precise aim (second shot) 202 Compact Suppressor Turns for precise aim (first shot) 223 Turns for precise aim (second shot) 200 Ergonomic Grip Turns for precise aim (first shot) 223 Turns for precise aim (second shot) 198 Compact Suppressor and Ergonomic Grip Turns for precise aim (first shot) 223 Turns for precise aim (second shot) 197 That's only a difference of five milliseconds, but if you're shooting a lot in quick succession, especially if you're not going for precise aim, these things can add up. The effect appears to be slightly more pronounced on guns with a higher base recoil, though I didn't extensively test those. So in summary, gun mods are working as intended and do what they say on the tin, but the mods we've tried only have a very minor effect on recoil, which makes sense. An ergonomic grip is only going to do so much and the suppressor wasn't designed to reduce recoil at all, it's just a little bonus. Adding bulk to the gun does not affect its shooting performance, though some mods do have an explicitly stated downside. If you're playing the game and want to slap all the tacticool poo poo you can find on your gun, for the most part you'll only be making it better, though if it gets too big and heavy it might be a pain to deal with in inventory management. worm girl fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Feb 28, 2022 |
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Feb 28, 2022 20:41
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I've learned so much from this thread! I might actually have a survivor that survives for once!.
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Feb 28, 2022 21:27
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Koorisch posted:Now I can just imagine people doing a Caveman to Spaceman run, starting with just your fists and a burning will to prosper. I have done this start naked with no skills, you cannot use any Anything you have not crafted/harvested yourself except as crafting materials
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Feb 28, 2022 23:36
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Hell, one of the mods that ships with the basegame removes anything man-made from generating in the game, forcing you to build up from caveman. Is fairly boring though, since the only enemies around are mutated wildlife and things like mi-gos and there's almost nowhere to explore or loot.
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Mar 1, 2022 06:40
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So there's cannons and blackpowder and vehicle building. While it might be a very long way away, how likely would it be for you to do a run as a river pirate?
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Mar 1, 2022 11:33
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Breadmaster posted:So there's cannons and blackpowder and vehicle building. Huh, yeah, interesting point, I've seen all sorts of wacky ground vehicles, but never watercraft. Are watercraft possible at all?
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Mar 1, 2022 12:06
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In the meantime, please mount the cannon on your motorcycle.
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Mar 1, 2022 12:11
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Breadmaster posted:So there's cannons and blackpowder and vehicle building. I don't think there are snazzy pirate hats in the base game I could be wrong
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Mar 1, 2022 12:43
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I would not be surprised at all if rivers and lakes and oceans or whatever are full of horrors in the deep. I only started playing because of the LP and my world map generated in such a way that there's no water anywhere near my starting location so I really have no idea. But c'mon. The sort of game this is, there's no way that krakens and leviathans aren't lurking in the briny deep. So what I'm saying is if it's at all possible, you need to make a kickass pirate ship. 
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Mar 1, 2022 13:01
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Jawnycat posted:Hell, one of the mods that ships with the basegame removes anything man-made from generating in the game, forcing you to build up from caveman. Is fairly boring though, since the only enemies around are mutated wildlife and things like mi-gos and there's almost nowhere to explore or loot. edit: rip, and I told myself I wouldn't be that guy Sab Sabbington fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Mar 1, 2022 |
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Mar 1, 2022 17:51
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worm girl posted:Spoiler Policy: This is a roleplay/participation focused LP intended to present a somewhat immersive experience. I will be doing OOC asides to explain game mechanics and background stuff as we go. If something's been shown or covered feel free to talk about it, otherwise please do not spoil areas, mechanics, enemies, or content that we haven't encountered in the LP. "Here's a screenshot of my guy dressed as a samurai doing donuts in the Foodplace parking lot" is fine. "Here's a breakdown of the loot and enemies in this map location OP hasn't been to yet" is not, even if you use spoiler tags. Do I need to just start closing the thread between updates? worm girl fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Mar 1, 2022 |
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Mar 1, 2022 18:25
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Late July finds us making preparations for what we're sure will be a bitter winter. With food in the ground and armor on our backs, we're certainly doing better than ever before, but we are by no means out of the woods yet. "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." We feel we've become someone Grampa would be proud of. We've worked ourselves to the bone and in the process, we've become quite the renaissance person. Moreover, we've stood up to the Hell's Raiders and spilled buckets of our own blood for our best and only friend Earnest, who has a good heart but lacks our talent for mayhem. We don't want to die, but if we went down today we'd go to our grave (we should be so lucky) knowing we fought as hard as anyone ever has. Fire used to be a curse. We needed it, and it got us into a lot of trouble. Now it's our best friend. Maybe we were born for this world. Over the last two years of development, it's become much harder to advance your character. The early game feels about the same, with ranks 1 and 2 coming quickly, but after that the meta has certainly changed. Once upon a time, you looted a stack of books, spend May or June reading until you had 7 in every skill, and strolled into the endgame with a full set of Survivor gear and whatever bullshit weapon you wanted to make. Now, we're still solidly in the midgame. 5 melee and 6 bashing weapons is respectable, but that's not going to cut it forever, and our crafting skills have a long way to go. Part of that is proficiencies, and chasing them down is certainly interesting, but I'm finding that the theory/practice skill system is much more interesting than it seems. Finding skill books is exciting because manually grinding skills without them is excrutiating, but our intelligence is so low that we hit a wall around 5 theoretical ranks in a skill. A lot of our books take an hour to read a chapter when they would only take Earnest half that. We can have Earnest read and then give us lessons, but there's a cooldown on that and it still takes time.  Our buddy Earnest is sort of the moral compass around here. Back in Steuben a guy like that probably didn't have many friends. He's too smart for a small town. People might have complained about the president or the governor, but mostly it was just like rooting for your sports team. You wear a blue ballcap or a red ballcap and you get a bumper sticker and get unreasonably mad at your phone in the Starbucks drive-through. Earnest was the guy who knew the whole system was crooked and had stacks of proof that he wouldn't shut up about. No one wanted to hear it, but I guess he got the last laugh. If it wasn't for him, we'd be dead in the subway tunnels. Even if we lived, we wouldn't have any direction. He's not just someone to joke around with, he gives us a reason to go out and face impossible odds instead of giving up. I am so glad we're not playing as Earnest because he's loving terrible. I play smart characters a lot and his food restrictions aren't too bad with the current food meta, but he's got glass jaw on top of his garbage base HP, and all of his stats besides int are bad. Computers is not a very useful skill at the moment, and while he can excel at social, that really means he's only good at crafting and recruiting. You can see that he's picked up a lot of proficiencies - if you're working on a crafting project near an NPC, they'll help you with it or watch you work, which allows them to learn. His melee is still only at 2 - pacifists learn combat skills at a vastly reduced rate, so he'll likely never be worthwhile in a straight up fight. That's fine though, he's a good help at home.  Many of the trees around the mansion are useful, plus they look nice. However, there are some dead ones we could use for lumber. We could tell Earnest to handle this while we do something else, but we're nervous about them falling on the house, so we chop while he supervises. You can designate trees to be chopped via the zones menu (Y) and then tell NPCs to chop them via their dialog trees, but the NPCs won't know to make them fall away from whatever building you don't want destroyed. That's fine if you're out in the woods, but we don't want to wreck up our base.  Once the tree falls down it'll look like this. These are tree trunks, and can't be moved or used for anything. We need to chop them into logs before we can do anything with them. Do this by (a)ctivating your axe. Your yield from this will be based on your survival. Despite everything, our survival is still only 3, so we only get 7/12 possible logs from this tree, the rest is sticks and splintered wood   This is hungry work, and until the crops grow in we won't be self-sufficient here. We head out to the woods for a foraging trip. Hopefully we'll spot some game, too.  There's no shortage of fruit out here, but fruit is mostly sugar. We need a better volume to calorie ratio if we're going to build these fortifications.  We find a trail and take it. It's easier than struggling through the underbrush. We're up north, near where those bandits were holed up.  We spot another wasp nest, and a big spiderweb. The walk in the woods was so nice that we'd almost forgotten it was the apocalypse. We decide instead to take a detour to check out the burned up cabin. We always get a weird little thrill when we see the aftermath of our fires. There's a woman standing amid the wreckage. She spots us and we immediately reach for our quiver.  She approaches, hands in the air.  "Please, I need to talk!"We detect an accent. Chinese?  Behind her, the charred ruins of the cabin lie largely undisturbed, ash and blackened timbers cover the remains of the three women we left here. What is she doing here?   "What?" "Please, I'm...having an asthma attack..."Her wheezing sounds like a tiny accordion and her lips are starting to turn blue. She's not faking it. We happen to have an inhaler in our medical supplies (we're not asthmatic, but The Wonderful World of Arthropodology mentions that some venom can cause breathing problems, and you never know...), so we toss it to her. We do not put down our bow. "Oh thank God!" She takes a puff and starts to relax. Our eyes scan the forest around us, but if she has friends, they're well hidden.She's not exactly dressed like a biker. She has a leather jacket on, sure, but it's one of the little feminine ones you see city girls wearing. She's got daisy dukes on over a pair of tights and some faux-suede booties. Her hair was lightened at some point but it's growing out now. She just seems...normal, but that doesn't mean anything. She's also wearing a firefighter helmet, which is concerning given the circumstances. "What the hell are you doing all the way out here?" "This is my cabin, or it was. I spent months trying to get out here when everything went to poo poo, but I guess that was a waste of time."We feel bad, but a part of us also gets a rush out of hearing this. We did this. Hee hee! "Yeah, that was me. Watch out, there are land mines and a couple of bodies in the rubble."Might have been better to keep quiet about that, but we can't help it, we're a truth teller. "What the gently caress? What do you mean?"It seems to dawn on her that we're armed and she isn't, and there's no help for miles if this goes south. She takes a step back and gets halfway into what looks like a martial arts pose. "Some bad people were holed up here. They were killing travelers like you. If I hadn't done what I did, you'd probably be dead already."She looks stricken. Our story might be hard to swallow, but one look at our gear tells most people that we're not the average survivor. And we did just save her life. "This was my property, you can't just..." "I'm sorry. I don't know what to say, it just happened." "Yeah. OK. I guess I'll just...camp here until I figure out what to do next. What was that about mines?"We point out the south side of the lot, then make our goodbyes. We consider asking her to come with us, but we don't feel comfortable making the decision without Earnest. She got here OK, she'll be OK for another night or two before we make our decision.  We move on. At one point we spot a rattlesnake and take a few shots at it, but it gets away before we can give it anything more than a scratch.  Eventually we come to a fenced-in lot with a solid-looking metal building and a little guard shack.  Is this one of those miltiary bunkers they were putting up before the Cataclysm? We don't see any of those turrets we read about in the news. The place is locked up tight, with a card reader different from the kind we saw at the lab. All over the place everything is stamped US ARMY KEEP OUT. We make a note of the place and move on.  We come across a big cat stalking a groundhog. Hunger takes over, and we loose an arrow. We hit the cougar in its leg, but it's not a serious injury.  A few more shots and it's down, and the groundhog gets away. We hustle over to prep the carcass before the flies get to it.  We see you, motherfucker.  We slice the belly open with our knife and manage to get the guts out without any major spillage. Once the blood is drained off, we heft the carcass and start heading back.  On the way back we spot a working RV with a kitchen unit and minifridge. The tires are blown, but that can be fixed. We make a note of its position and get back to hauling.  We set a folding table out next to a big hickory tree and loop a rope over a branch to string up the carcass. Then we get to work on it.  "You shot a loving mountain lion?" "We're not in a position to be picky. Besides, they taste fine." "I thought predators weren't good to eat." "Common misconception. Cougar's like pork, and it's not even all that gamey if you do it up right. Hand me that knife."You have to be careful though. Parasites tend to concentrate in apex predators, who inherit all the bad stuff that their prey and their pray's prey ate. I've found articles suggesting that bear and other large predator jerky is safe if you get it up to temperature (it has to be brought to 137 degrees (medium rare) through and through. A charred outside and a cold center can still safely harbor worm eggs. There are parasites in this game and they're pretty nasty, but gameplaywise we run no risk of that here as it's assumed our characters are following proper food safety protocols when preparing their dehydrated meat.  We get our blade in and peel a pretty good quality pelt off the animal. Earnest holds one end while we scrape off the fat and blood vessels from the inside, then head over to salt it.  Earnest fries up the liver for us, and soon the pelt is drying in the sun.  When all's said and done we get a few day's worth of meat out of the animal, which was about as good as we could hope for. We run it over to the smoker and get busy. If we had more organs, we could can or pickle them. As it is, all we can do is fry them up and eat them - they taste alright, despite the weird texture. There are probably nutrients we haven't been getting in some of this stuff.  We tell Earnest about the woman we met as we put together a stabilizer system for our bow. This should dramatically improve our accuracy, which is nice because we're not great. Handling affects recoil, which isn't a huge issue for bows but it'll still help us reaim quickly. Reduced dispersion is just a straight up accuracy bonus, and a pretty significant one at that. "You just left her out there? You should bring her back here! If she made it to the cabin on her own she must be able to take care of herself." "Yeah, yeah. I thought about it, but what if she's with the Raiders? Or like, a spy?" "What, because she's Chinese? Come on, don't be like that. Anyway I think we're past the point of worrying about global politics." "Didn't I just kill three people for the US Government?" Now that we've had a chance to get familiar with the bow, we can think of all kinds of ways to improve it. We stick a little plastic tab on for the arrow to rest against when it's nocked, we add some foam padding that reduces the noise of it firing and also makes it a bit more comfortable to use, we stick a bow sight on to extend our range and greatly improve our accuracy, and the aforementioned stabilizing system makes it a joy to fire. Pink numbers bad, green numbers good. You can see that our base aim speed has gone down slightly, but that's actually because we've extended our precision firing range out to 9 tiles from 7. It naturally takes a bit longer to draw a bead on something that's that far away. Our mid-range actually moved out a bit and got faster. Everywhere else, we're looking great. Sight dispersion is cut in half (squinting at the code tells me sight dispersion is how well you can use the sights while recovering from recoil), regular dispersion is down 20%, and it's only loudness 2 instead of loudness 10. This won't turn a bad archer into a good archer, but it will make us overall more effective and turn some near-misses into hits. We've used the single-pin bow sight. There's also a five-pin bow sight that gives you more accuracy at longer range, but it slows your aim speed. That might be better for sniping with the bow but we're not good enough to get one hit kills with ours yet.  With that all done, it's time to take a little trip. Earnest will stay behind and keep an eye on things. We need rope to build our palisade, we need food, we need shitloads of nails, and we may as well strike out west a bit and try to see if we can see what Orrington's all about. Scarborough has been mostly unproductive thus far.  On the edge of Orrington as the summer sun sets, we see something that chills us to the core. The way this zombie moves is almost human. It's not shambling around like the other zombies but walking fluid and upright. It's not physically imposing at all, but that almost makes it worse. zombie master posted:This zombie's features have tightened, its lips pulled back into an unnatural grin, revealing rows of blackened teeth beneath large, piercing eyes. It stands tall and its movements are fluid and tightly controlled. A feeling of danger permeates the surrounding air, and the light that falls on it seems somehow harsher and more glaring. Luckily we're downwind, and there's just enough light that our eyes are still better than a zombie's. We nock an arrow.  We stick several arrows into it as it turns and purposefully strides toward us. It only briefly has a chance to flail its limbs against our armor before we put it down. Just down the street, an automated riot control platform repeats a warning over and over that seems to be distracting the rest of the local zombies. It also sounds like it's long since run out of ammo. We don't get to see the master's power in action here, but I will say for now that if you see one of these, killing it is your top priority.    Eventually it gets too dark to do any shooting. We put the bow up and decide to do some night creepin'.  While exploring a basement, we encounter one of those screaming zombies, except the noise it lets out is so loud and unearthly that it leaves us dazed. It's like a bomb went off. We manage to put it down, but we resolve to wear ear plugs if we see another one. These guys can be a huge pain. They actually tanked our perception all the way down to 0! It wears off after a few minutes.  This place turns out to be some kind of hunting lodge. We snag a couple of books and some snacks.  The hunting lodge map is really weird. I'm not sure if it's an old location or I'm just not understanding what a hunting lodge is supposed to look like. That's a bath tub (hot tub?) to the south of us, a couch up north, refrigerators and dressers seemingly randomly strewn about in this long hallway type room.  This side is all locked up. This being a hunting lodge, we can safely assume it contains some ordnance. We'll have to come back with some tools.  We're on our way back to the bike when something starts to feel off. We know this feeling. We briefly consider trying to get back home before it gets too bad, but we're already pretty dinged up. We'd be gambling with our life unnecessarily. Instead, we drag all our loot into the basement to set up camp. Portal storms are set to happen way too often right now so that they can be properly tested. I could go in and manually fix it, but I'd have to download uncompiled versions of the game and mess with the code and recompile every time I wanted to update to a new experimental. Not worth it.  We were right not to gamble. The monsters are upon us before we can even get to the basement, and for the first time we catch a glimpse of some of what is actually happening out here when it gets bad like this. There are holes in the sky like ragged windows. Beyond, we see lights and flashes of fantastic color. One of them opens nearby and something huge and snakelike reaches out of midair. It takes a moment, but we soon realize it can only be the arm of something far too big to fit through the portal.  It rushes us and we block its attacks with our chitin arm guards, but no matter how much we batter it, it doesn't seem deterred. Eventually it rakes a vulnerable spot near our armpit and the strength just goes out of us as we're wracked with nerve-shattering pain. We collapse down the stairs into the basement, firing our pistol at it with our one good arm until the gun is batted out of our hand. We go for our knife, certain this is the end, and then - it's gone, sucked back into the portal as it closes. We bind our wounds and crawl away from the stairs, gasping and sobbing. Soooooo that was close. Glad we didn't try riding home. The giant appendage has one billion HP and does 5d5 bash + 14 cut damage when it attacks. It's faster than a normal survivor's walk speed and has 6 melee skill. Its only weaknesses are that it has no night vision and disappears after a few seconds. I didn't know that before I started fighting it. Portal storm monsters can't open doors or bash windows, but they can go inside if there are openings. There's also a portal storm effect where doors and windows randomly open and shut, so you want to ideally be downstairs or hidden behind a couple of doors when these things happen.  The next morning, things seem relatively calm outside. We find a working bicycle, which we decide to use to ferry loot to and from our motorcycle. Bikes are a great example of how to build a vehicle: You have 3 frames, which make up the body of the bike. There's a wheel mount and wheel on the front and back, plus a seat, foot pedals, and handlebars. That's all you need to make one. The handlebars are the control unit, the seat is where the driver goes, and the foot pedals are the engine. These are the minimum features every vehicle needs to move around. A car is really only a bigger version of the same thing with an engine instead of foot pedals. If we put an alternator on the bike, we could also attach batteries, and a portion of the foot pedal power would be used to charge the batteries. If we put solar panels on the bike, the solars would charge any attached batteries. If we put an electric motor, we could use battery power to move the bike around instead of foot pedals. Once you understand how all of that works, things really start to open up. It's actually possible (though enormously inefficient) to run a battery charger like we have at our base using a stationary bicycle instead of solar panels. We could also slap a gas or diesel engine on there and use that to charge our batteries and power appliances. The possibilities are endless! The Lone Badger posted:In the meantime, please mount the cannon on your motorcycle. The cannon weighs 825 pounds and would unfortunately make our motorcycle too heavy for its engine. We could put it on a larger vehicle. DoubleNegative posted:So what I'm saying is if it's at all possible, you need to make a kickass pirate ship. 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. We will be doing this as soon as it's feasable. It will have a cannon.  Eventually we fill our motorcycle's box with food, books, and many, many seat belts and decide to head home. On the way, we stop by a farm field - crops were planted before the Cataclysm, maybe some of them are ready for harvest.  To our horror, the fields are completely overrun with swarms of insects large and small. Hordes of locusts mindlessly devour everything that isn't moving while aphids slowly waddle from stalk to stalk, sucking the plants dry. Farms are normally a totally broken source of food if you can survive to late summer. We won't be using them as they would trivialize our food requirements. These bugs don't normally spawn here (I debugged them in, something I normally haven't been doing) but they're intended to be an issue down the line. They do codedly eat crops, so if you see them near your food, you need to keep them away. We ride on, hoping our own crops won't meet the same fate.  The southern roads are a circus. We pass a bunch of zombie cops being torn apart by mutant coyotes, and here at the edge of the swamp we're accosted by a cow-sized mosquito, swollen grotesquely with stolen blood. We decide not to stay.  Earnest greets us as we return. Together we haul the loot in and pick out a few items to trade at the refugee center. He's changed out of our old leather armor and now wears a ballistic vest over a simple dress shirt. He looks a lot more respectable, even if he is pairing it with cargo shorts. Merchants like smokes update their stock weekly, so it can be worthwhile to check back periodically.  It's almost nine when we pull up to the place, but who keeps a normal schedule anymore? I love the cone-shaped headlight beam. It's too bad they can't do something similar with flashlights without making it annoying to deal with.  We trade some spare guns, armor, cigarettes, and Adderall for a stack of merch and some polycarbonate sheets.  Earnest seems eager to stop in and see Fatima. We still haven't found a copy of the Quran for her, but she's happy to listen to the story of our copper wire adventure and share some knowledge about welding.  That done, we start chatting up the guards. Earnest is much more of a natural with people, we've always been a loner. He makes small talk, and we find that most of the guards are motivated by pay - things aren't equal here at the refugee center. It's from each according to their ability, to each according to how much they can hustle. Anyone willing to pull guard duty gets extra merch and that means better food, quarters, and whatever else. We find ourselves in a big pantry, with food stacked on shelves like it's a makeshift grocery store. Smokes talked about issues with the food supply, but it's not totally desperate - we're likely not the only traders coming through, and we've heard talk of truckers hauling supplies to and from other settlements. This food is all flagged as belonging to the NPCs here. If you take it, they get mad and will attack you if you don't drop it. Once hostile, it's not possible to calm an NPC down ever - you're hosed for good.  Earnest spots one of the guards walking the aisles of the pantry and gives us a nudge. We don't see anything suspicious, though the woman is maybe paying a little too much attention to what's in stock. "Hey there, what's good? How's Guard life?" "Uh...you know. Good. I haven't been here long, still getting used to it. It's hard to tell who's going to try to cause trouble."There's immediate tension in the air. Earnest knows how to be annoying. "Trouble, eh? I know how to avoid trouble. How about you?"The guard squints at him. If this isn't the spy, Earnest might be about to catch an rear end kicking. "Come on, you know what I mean." "I'm afraid I don't, friend. Maybe you should think about heading home." "So what are they paying you to spy on these people?" "You're new here. Who the hell put you up to this crap?" "Got something to hide?"Earnest has his bandana on, but we can almost see his goofy rear end grin. If you talk to all the guards during this quest, you'll see that one of them has some different dialog options than the others. Exhausting these leads to a difficult social check (you can choose either persuade or intimidate, your character may be better at one or the other for various reasons). Failure has no consequences and the check is repeatable, but depending on your stats and appearance you may be at 0% for both checks. Characters are more intimidating if they're holding weapons (especially guns), if they're ugly, if they're uninjured, and if they have certain traits. Characters are more trustworthy (and therefore persuasive) if they're attractive, unarmed, and have certain other traits. NPCs also have personality traits that decide how they react to your appearance and certain interactions. Some people don't care about appearance, others highly value altruism, etc. There's not really any way to see most of this stuff and it usually doesn't matter. The main deciding factor here is your Social skill followed by Intelligence. Earnest is smarter than us and has 4 social vs our 3, so we had him do this check. He had a 33% success rate for persuasion and a 0% for intimidate, while we had a 22% for persuasion and 0% for intimidate. "That's it, you're dead!"The guard turns and raises her rifle at Earnest, immediately provoking a lot of shouting from the other guards. The two of us decide to just book it out of the room.  The guard at the door, having seen the whole thing, lights up our attacker as we scoot out of the way. We take a few hits but the spy's Ruger 10/22 is not really doing much against our kevlar jumpsuit. The 10/22 is a lightweight hunting carbine chambered in .22 LR. It's a great gun for hunting, target practice, or just screwing around. It's a semiautomatic with extremely low recoil, so you can easily get multiple rounds off in succession if you want. Gray got absolutely peppered by this guy, but his armor made him pretty much impervious to low-powered rounds. Eventually the other guard (the real one) puts a stop to the whole fiasco with a single pull of the trigger, leaving the spy dead on the ground amid a pile of casings and spilled food. We spend the rest of the evening explaining ourselves to the guards before reporting back to Thi. The other guard has a Remington 700 which is a bolt-action hunting rifle chambered in .30-06 Springfield. .30-06 (usually pronounced thirty ought six) is a very powerful rifle round that's been around forever. It's more powerful with longer range and penetration than the 5.56 rounds we use in our M16, but pays for it in recoil, size, cost, and weight. .30-06 is suitable for hunting large game like moose and bear, though you really want something more powerful for grizzlies. Given that .22 LR is not even really big enough for deer hunting (unless you're a crack shot), it's easy to see what went wrong for the spy here. If you do this quest, take a look at the guns the people in the room have. If the spy has a high caliber gun, you can call more guards in by hitting (C) and yelling. NPCs will come to check out the noise if they're close enough to hear it. Remember also that you can use (C) to talk to NPCs from across the room, which is useful if you're trying to stay far away from the spy. If you attack the spy before they attack you, you'll turn the guards in the room hostile as they'll misunderstand the situation. There's no fixing things once you do that, so don't screw it up!   "Nicely done, you two." "I'm not taking credit here. Gray was the one who wanted to get involved."Earnest doesn't seem terribly happy about how things went. He was probably hoping we could just run the spy off or get her arrested. "Mm. In any case you're entitled to the spy's equipment and possessions, plus I've got a few other things set aside for you."We wind up with a bunch of .22 LR ammo, some spare fabric and leather, a rail-mounted laser sight, and a bottle of chardonnay. Everything else, including the spy's gun, we trade to the Center for Merch. It's not a bad haul, all things considered. "Listen up. I don't usually hear much from command, but we got a message by radio recently. You might be the right choice to look into it for me. There've been reports of robots and other weird things wandering around since things went south." "We've seen army and police drones." "Yes, many of those are rogue and some are actually still under our control, but apparently that doesn't account for what my superiors have found. These are unknown designs, and the Old Guard believes they've triangulated the source. We want to send somebody to check it out, but remember, this is strictly reconaissance. Whatever you find there, do not engage directly."She gives us some coordinates which we mark on our map. "So I'm just supposed to go and...look at them?" "Yes. Get a visual, find out what you can find out, report back." We have some decisions to make! Do we: Invite Madaline back to the Mansion? She seems harmless, but she could be working for the Hell's Raider's, or she could even be a foreign spy - before the Cataclysm, tensions were high with China and our two countries were in an extreme technological arms race, with proxy conficts all over the world leading the media to declare that we were in a second Cold War. Madaline seems healthy and reasonably capable, unlike the beggars at the Refugee Center, but running into her where we did was such a strange coincidence, and as long as we're working for the feds, that's something to think about... Go east by car to investigate the robots or go west by boat to investigate the strange group? We have two jobs that need doing and they're both equidistant from our home. If we want to go check out the robots for Thi, we'll need a car. If we want to go check out the strange group with the scientist and the brown uniforms for Smokes, we can take a boat up the river. These are both big projects with their own challenges and we can eventually get around to both of them, but we need to pick one to start with. Also on our to-do list, just so you know I haven't forgotten: Find a Quran for Fatima, bring a ton of small cardboard boxes to Dino Dave, track down Alonso's special pants. There are plenty of other jobs to be done around the Refugee Center, and our plan is to take them as we go rather than trying to shotgun them all at once. worm girl fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Mar 1, 2022 |
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Mar 1, 2022 20:34
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worm girl posted:The place is locked up tight, with a card reader different from the kind we saw at the lab. All over the place everything is stamped US ARMY KEEP OUT. Are you gonna let a stamp tell you what to do? Assuming the card reader doesn't make this impossible, I vote we check this place out. (If accessing the base is impossible, check out the robots)
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Mar 1, 2022 20:53
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PIRATE SHIP PIRATE SHIP PIRATE SHIP
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Mar 1, 2022 21:05
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sebmojo posted:PIRATE SHIP What is a pirate ship with only one cannon though? CANNONS CANNONS CANNONS
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Mar 1, 2022 21:12
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Invite Madeleine in. It’s the more narratively satisfying move whether the result is good or bad.
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Mar 1, 2022 21:14
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sebmojo posted:PIRATE SHIP Keldulas posted:Invite Madeleine in. It’s the more narratively satisfying move whether the result is good or bad.
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Mar 1, 2022 21:43
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sebmojo posted:PIRATE SHIP my vote for comically impractical water vehicle would be hovercraft > amphibious tank > submarine if any of those are even possible options in this game?
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Mar 1, 2022 21:49
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Keldulas posted:Invite Madeleine in. It’s the more narratively satisfying move whether the result is good or bad. We did burn down her place! And if those were her friends, then she knows we aren't to be hosed with. Besides, we'll need a third person, perhaps more, if we're to build the... sebmojo posted:PIRATE SHIP
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Mar 1, 2022 22:01
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Invite Madaline in, sure. More than two people around would be nice. I'm sure she'll be awed by the sweet digs we've claimed for ourselves. If she tries anything, there's always the cannon-based rebuttal. And west by boat. BraveLittleToaster fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Mar 1, 2022 |
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Mar 1, 2022 22:08
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BraveLittleToaster posted:Invite Madaline in, sure. More then two people around would be nice. I'm sure she'll be awed by the sweet digs we've claimed for ourselves. If she tries anything, there's always the cannon-based rebuttal. Same votes, but only if we can put the cannon on the boat.
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Mar 1, 2022 22:26
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Some future survivor who is a metal working savant needs to build a Metal Slug style land battleship.
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Mar 1, 2022 22:35
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Ardeem posted:Some future survivor who is a metal working savant needs to build a Metal Slug style land battleship. Cut to Fatima spreading the word of The Prophet in an amphibious killdozer. silentsnack posted:my vote for comically impractical water vehicle would be hovercraft > amphibious tank > submarine Amphibious vehicles are possible, though they're a lot more work to make and have some drawbacks we'll get into. Hovercraft and submarines unfortunately aren't implemented. Hovercraft wouldn't be super difficult, but submarines are waiting on an overhaul of the way water works. worm girl fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Mar 1, 2022 |
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Mar 1, 2022 22:40
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sebmojo posted:PIRATE SHIP So, yes, the objective that gets us a boat. 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...
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Mar 1, 2022 23:05
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