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[Greiger]

You can increase the number of shelters by moving to the edge of a map, once you reach a map edge the game generates another map in that direction.  I think any shelters generated in the new map section also become valid spawn points.

[azmodean]

Afraid that won't work, the game currently is set up to only pick a random shelter on overmap 0,0, if you've trashed all the shelters on the initial overmap, you're going to have a hard start.

Increasing city size tends to squish all the shelters together, not sure if you've done that or not.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Afraid that won't work, the game currently is set up to only pick a random shelter on overmap 0,0, if you've trashed all the shelters on the initial overmap, you're going to have a hard start.

Well darn, that's inconvenient.

[Grendus]

Yeah, once I got a shopping cart from a grocery store and fit the contents of one military surplus, two grocery stores, six houses, an electronics store and a garage. Plus two military corpse drops.

something needs to get nerfed

Stores are badly understocked in this game TBH. Grocery stores IRL are HUGE, and not one of the stores in Cataclysm has so much as a 24 pack of bottled water.

They've been cleared out by panic buying and looting. It explains why people have such an eclectic selection of items in their house and on their persons.

Yeah, which explains why things like Water and basic food items are gone. Some stuff, though, like salt or sugar or trash bags should be in abundance. These aren't the types of things people grab much of when doing short-term hording. Longer-term looters will grab them later, of course, but that's basically what the player is. The cataclysm happens so fast I doubt many people would have gotten to that point yet by the time the majority of the population is zombies or monster chow.

Also, some items have an absurdly short rot time. I'm talking things like mayonnaise and soup cans. The mayonnaise should have a shelf life of MONTHS, at least, based on the ones I see in my store on a regular basis. And they're not refrigerated at all. Canned soup, likewise, can last a year or two. And yet I've had can of vegetable soup go rotten in just a few weeks in-game.

That's probably because the game treats mayonnaise and vegetable soup the same regardless of whether you made them yourself or looted them. Grocery store foods contain additives that lengthen the shelf life by killing bacteria attacking the food, but without those, mayo is just a big jar of delicious fatty acids for bacteria to chow on.

If it was boiled and then heat sealed, there aren't any bacteria in there to chow on it. Once you open a jar of mayo, it has the same shelf life it has in the game currently, but as long as it stays sealed it stays good for a very, very long time.

[Sharp]

Currently canned and sealed goods aren't ideally implemented, there is a quick workaround where you make an item which when used will create whatever items to try and imitate sealing such as the sealed bag of meat which when activated gives you meat but the initial bag itself won't rot and the rot timer will only start once the bag is activated and then unsealed.

For stuff like mayo and soup they would need extra items like "sealed botle of mayo" which then once activated will give you "bottle of mayo" and same for soup, many other canned goods don't have this problem as they don't have any rot timer and generally aren't able to be created by the player so will always be un-rottable.

[Mephansteras]

Yeah, it might be good for packaged foods to have an 'OPENED' flag that effects the rate of decay. Canned soup goods stay edible a long time sealed, but not so much after they've been opened.

[azmodean]

You can't simply boil homemade mayonaise to sterilize it like you do with preserves, it will seperate and/or cook and you're going to end up with something relatively safe but completely not mayonaise.

That having been said some of the spolage times are a bit agressive, but they're not out of line for the general time-dialation thing the game does.  I'm in favor of setting all times like this to be based on real-world spoilage times, and then accelerate them along with everything else by a standard factor.  However doing this would be quite a lot of work, and I'm the only dev that seems to be interested, so probably not happening any time soon.

ninja'ed: Agree about sealed vs unsealed, we have a kind of system in place for that, but it's really cumbersome... actually I think a sealed flag would do it....

[Mephansteras]

Speaking of the time dilation, does the game recognize how much dilation is happening based on the Season Length? Because I always have mine set to 90 days so I get a reasonably accurate year length. It'd be nice if the game didn't make assumptions about how much time is passing without taking that setting into account.

I don't honestly get why the time dilation is in, anyway. I mean, you have the day-to-day events all happening in standard time increments. Strikes me as really odd to then have a season only be two weeks by default.

[Grendus]

I think time dilation based on seasons is unnecessary. This is the end of the world, after all, one of the doomsday scenarios could reasonably have affected seasonal length. That wouldn't affect most bacteria (aside from possibly exterminating them). If we assume there is no time dilation, seasons could be wonky because of nuclear winter/megaearthquakes/giant asteroid/supervolcano/whatever. No need to go overcomplicating things.

[Mephansteras]

Also reasonable. But right now the game is an odd mix of 'real' time and compressed time in different areas. I'd like that to at least make sense or be controllable.

On a random note: I want to use one of these as my mobile base. Well, a manned version anyway. Don't know that I'd trust a robotic base. But, still, that thing would not care about bushes AT ALL.

[i2amroy]

Right now the only part that recognizes time dilation is plant growth. Everything else doesn't. I do agree that the spoilage times should probably be fixed though, some of them are a little out of whack.

Personally I think it's probably easier just to ignore time dilation for everything that isn't season-based (so spoilage wouldn't be altered, esle you would have meat going bad in hours/minutes).

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Another note: the game isn't really in real-time either; using cars as a basis, a square is about 2 square feet. These towns are rather small, and we travel rather slowly, and are rather near-sighted.

We're still playing a game, and games still have limits.

[i2amroy]

Another note: the game isn't really in real-time either; using cars as a basis, a square is about 2 square feet. These towns are rather small, and we travel rather slowly, and are rather near-sighted.

We're still playing a game, and games still have limits.

The average size I've been using for a single "square" is 1 m^2 by ~1 story (8-10ft).

[Mephansteras]

Another note: the game isn't really in real-time either; using cars as a basis, a square is about 2 square feet. These towns are rather small, and we travel rather slowly, and are rather near-sighted.

We're still playing a game, and games still have limits.

Sure, I'm all for breaking from reality when it makes sense to do so. I'd just like things to have some order and thought behind them when they do so.

[Krevsin]

Another note: the game isn't really in real-time either; using cars as a basis, a square is about 2 square feet. These towns are rather small, and we travel rather slowly, and are rather near-sighted.

We're still playing a game, and games still have limits.

like bushes that do not spell doom for anything vehicular. Or moose, the real harbringers of tbe apocalypse.