Bay 12 Games Forum

If anyone's interested, I did an overhaul of professions:
https://raw.github.com/GlyphGryph/Cataclysm-DDA/professions_changes/data/json/professions.json

Would appreciate people trying it out and telling me what they think.

Hmm. The only one that jumps out at me as needing a rethink is Tailor. Tailoring is probably the most powerful skill in the game - it lets you maintain and reinforce your existing armor, fit and repair armor you found from zombies, and craft up to the second best armor in the game (the first being power armor, which is... mechanics and electronics I think). When you consider that the starting shelter has 8 windows, each of which is basically 40 rags and 300 thread after you cut up the sheets and disassemble the string, you're looking at 320 rags and 2400 thread worth of armor before you even have to approach the city. Tailoring 4 also is high enough to repair shredded armor reliably, so anything you didn't have the materials to craft (like leather armor pieces) can be safely gathered, fitted, and repaired in town without risk.

Maybe drop the sewing kit and increase the cost to 2 points. Or leave the sewing kit and raise it to 3/4.

I typically use all the flu shots I find and take a handful of vitamins every day or so. Keeps the colds at bay. I mostly eat junk food and candy for the morale bonus.

The thing with batteries is that there are many better uses for them. Morale, once you have the skill you need, really only matters if really high or low. Flashlights, Welders, Bionics if you have the mods, and so many other things can use them so I think they are decent enough as is. I know that once I get a welder I never have enough batteries.

Unless you're scavenging is purely nocturnal, flashlight use will be few and far in between. Even without a vehicle welding rig you won't go through that many batteries in regular vehicle maintenance, and construction is a special case. The Battery System bionic will chew through batteries, true, but you have plenty of other options: Solar Panels, Internal Furnace, Ethanol Furnace, etc.

If you don't have enough batteries, it's because you aren't taking advantage of the myriad opportunities to obtain them. Disassemble cell phones for 200 batteries, unload every radio, doll, soldering iron, geiger counter, and extra flashlight/mp3/hgs you find. If you desperately need more, you can craft them in batches of 100 out of empty soda cans and vinegar. I routinely leave thousands of batteries at my shelters.

Not to mention that drugs have other uses besides morale boosting, such as getting an extra boost of speed or ignoring pain.

Fair enough. They also have fairly severe malus - painkillers slow you down, for example, and the addiction system in this game is extreme. Mp3 players have no such drawback, for 15 batteries I can have 50 morale straight up. No time cost because turning it on seems to be a non-action. Just turn it on, go about your business, and turn it off again a few turns later.

I'm not saying they need to be removed, but if listening to music for a few minutes put you in a better mood than smoking cannabis or getting drunk people wouldn't do drugs. It seems very backwards to me. Either capping the morale boost lower (say, 20) or making it much more gradual (so more like 50 batteries to get the full morale boost) would make it at least make sense.

If you turn the MP3 off after you hit 50 morale from it, you can get the maximum benefit for about 15 batteries. Same as the Handheld Game System 15 batteries per game. Batteries are more common than any of the drugs except alcohol, you can craft them by the hundred out of ammonia, rotten lemons, or vinegar, and if you disassemble phones and unload things like radios, flashlights, etc they're ludicrously common.

A possibility - rather than nerfing them, make it so you can't unload or reload them. Nowadays most MP3 players and game systems don't have removable batteries anyways. This would make the high electronics skill recipes for crafting them useful, you'd need to be fairly skilled to disassemble an iPhone and add new batteries without instructions.

Edit: Missed Grizzly's question. It takes a few minutes to get the full MP3 bonus, but you can do other things during that time so it's not a big deal. Typically I use both at the same time, turning on the MP3 and then playing a quick game on the game console. 30 batteries for 95 morale. Drugs give you the boost immediately, of course, but they're addictive and tend to come with penalties.

Something interesting I've found, when burning down a house to get some stone and rebar you can drastically reduce the burn time by lighting the house on fire during the rain. Once the fire has broken the ceiling, the rain will extinguish it in short order meaning you can burn a house down in under an hour. Just walk around the edges, ignite every third square of wall, and go hunt nearby or something.

Tripled spawns is interesting. Scavenging is more dangerous, though not significantly so, but the most frustrating aspect is the time. Just sweeping one house can take hours in terms of stabbing, smashing, pulping, and butchering. It also makes passive protection more effective - I had to switch to a Reinforced Leather Jacket because my arms were taking too much of a beating. Focus is another problem, I wind up using all of my focus on combat which makes training other skills such as Survival and Archery difficult.

So I started with a hobo character. Started hallucinating, then stepped on some landmines. !!Fun!!.

Zombies spawn in the shelter. Like HOARDS of zombies in the shelter. 20+, and specials. I grant a concession and wish in a filter mask if I see a smoker, but otherwise I've seen Feral Hunters and even Brutes spawn inside the building. It's brutal.

There's a reason it's not the default. I've managed to survive exactly once with a non-martial artist by grabbing a pipe and fleeing into the woods full speed, and only barely got away with a shred of torso health left. B.R.U.T.A.L.

One thing, to go back to the skills vs traits debate from earlier, skills are borderline mandatory if you start with Black Road. The only time I've managed to survive a Black Road spawn was starting with a Taikwondo character.

As a side note, Zui Quan and all of the Shaolin and Venom Mob martial arts are gone. Have they just not been converted yet, or is that a bug?