I have way too many screenshots of things I thought would be cool to add to the posts but ended up looking uninformative or bland. After deleting irrelevant and uploaded screenshots and renaming the good ones for clarity, I am ready to share some base building progress pics!
Part II is here.
The initial base is really barebones. Just 1 bedroom in the central building (more bedrooms = more camp buildings, up to 6) so far.
A few items of interest. The red item on the left is the bathroom scale to check player weight. I was "normal" while near morbidly obese on the scale, so my thought was that something in the calories system bugged out. That created a starvation diet for a while, but that's a story for another time.
The arrow looking thing on the white tile to the right of the log piles is the water pump. Free infinite water, one of the essential infrastructure needed for a camp. Never mind the fact that I chose camp right next to a water source.
With the single bedroom added, I chose to start a farm on the south side of camp. Here's the initial barebones farm shed and the farm plots.
Next are a bunch of optional side upgrades for the central building, the root cellar and radio tower. The root cellar maintains a permanent 6C temperature throughout the year, whether it's freezing in winter of sweltering in summer. Some foods like most fruits and eggs will become "mushy" after freezing and thawing out. Eating mushy foods gives huge morale penalties – only way to get around this is to use them as raw material for crafting – and thawing out after a second freeze will rot the food. Root cellars are mandatory for preserving those foods during winter and slowing down spoilage in summer.
I got the root cellar built, but the radio tower will have to wait.
Orville set up the second bedroom earlier, so I started on starting a second building. I chose the livestock stall. My cows and sheep were permanently lodged in my Deathmobile, and they really need a better residence.
Working on the third bedroom. These buildings drain an enormous number of building supplies. Logs can be acquired from sending someone off to cut logs from a forest overmap tile easily enough. The rest? Much better to find stashes of existing supplies than trying to DIY. DIY takes forever without industrial equipment.
The most common building that contains construction supplies is the hardware store. After that is the home improvement store, but those are much rarer and occasionally spawn as 3x3 megastores, which are incredibly dangerous and rife with evolved zombies.
To the hardware stores we go. For fairly large cities, the industrial area is usually generated clumped in an area, and multiple hardware stores can spawn within a block. They contain a really flexible inventory, from concrete materials to fertilizer, planks, pipes, nails, sand, and paint. We hoard everything but the paint.
There are plenty of ways to deal with clearing out megacities. I like to cheese with the automated riot control and police bots. There's a bit of lore about how these defense systems didn't work out during the Cataclysm but it's too complicated to explain here. These bots are infinitely spawning so long as you have an eyebot constantly taking your picture (and classifying you as dangerous so long as you aren't law enforcement/military and aren't wearing your badge). They failed us when the Cataclysm hit, so why not make them useful after the fall?
There are other ways such as napalm and guns and turrets, but popo bots are the most entertaining and sustainable.
With our loot, we can upgrade our livestock stalls. I even have a cute little pen for my chickens now. No more basement coops to make sure eggs don't go mushy. The cows and horses are now situated, but stalls are still needed for the sheep. Luckily the camp includes just enough stalls in the full building to house all my livestock.
I also got four bedrooms started in the central building, so it's time to add even more camp buildings. And I managed to set up the radio tower. Add in the radio console and it's time for Floretta to permanently be off finding new warm bodies.
After a few more upgrades to the livestock stall, I added two more camp buildings. The canteen is north of the livestock stall, and the fabrication workshop is east of the farm fields.
Housing the sheep is highest priority, so the livestock area takes all the upgrades.
By now, clearing a forest isn't efficient enough to keep up with upgrading so many camp buildings at once. It's time to go to the luckiest industrial building you can find in towns, the lumberyard. There are lumbermills that can spawn in remote forest areas but they are quite rare and you can't count on them to be within reasonable travel distant of the camp.
Luckily I had a lumberyard in the city I cleared out. It's MVP for all the logs I need. The extra logs in the yard is just a bonus, by the way. The real jackpot lies in the hoards of wood materials in the crates inside the warehouse. They contain tons of planks, logs, and other processed wood items. The warehouse inventory alone supplied enough wood for the rest of my building upgrades, and most of the supply still remains.
Another essential material in base building is rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. It seems like no matter what games I play, anything with a crafting component will always need tons of rocks.
Rocks are easy to obtain by burning down buildings or digging up craters. They're also in hardware stores but nowhere near the supply needed for upgrading buildings. I dislike burning buildings because fires are too unpredictable and easily go out of control, so craters it is. They're common enough on the overmap.
Here's some of the nice cooking options that open up once the canteen is sufficiently built. Pemmican, cornmeal, lard, hard cheese, and starch are the standout items that should be left to the NPCs to automatically process. Especially pemmican and cornmeal, which take forever if done manually. Smoked food and flour aren't as high priority because smoking racks can already afk batch smoke foods, and flour can be afk processed with water or wind mills. (There's some stuckup changes reviewer who adamantly refuses to add corn into the list of millable items because rEaSonS, so for now cornmeal is just annoying.)
After a lot of upgrading and waiting for construction to finish, the camp looks much more respectable. It's hard to see the new additions without zooming in but I'll give some details here. I only have a few upgrades left so I'll get some screenshots of the near complete buildings' looks below.
The canteen has a new area inside the kitchen with 2 root cellars (still need to build the root cellars, need more dead plant material). The outside area has a butchery and smoking area with charcoal kiln.
The livestock area got general fencing and a little shed.
The fab workshop had an expansion room with shelving and another charcoal kiln. I think it's obvious at this point pre-industrial era depended heavily on wood for almost everything. All hail deforestation \o/
And for more recent screenshots. I've managed to get the maximum number of camp buildings set up, so this is what the final overall camp will look like. Fab shop is still getting upgraded but it's already quite good.
The saltworks building adds 4 small pools of salt water. This is a game changer for the base, because salt water can only be obtained from small forest ponds (and it's a 50-50 whether the forest pond is fresh or salt water) or swamps. I have to drive a little ways to the nearest swamp, so this is great. Infinite salt/water access removes salt supply issues for food processing and special chemical production (tanning, lye). And once Merch expands to be more useful, my buying power is only limited by how much salt I can drop off to the trader at once.
The brewery is not as glamorous as I thought it would be. I really hoped that there would be a nice menu to allow NPCs to do all the menial labor involved in processing the initial unfermented brew, setting it in a vat, and finish processing the fermented brew. Instead, it just gives you a damn fermenting vat and keg. I'm so underwhelmed. When life gives you vats and kegs, make brew??
The biggest annoyance is that it's still above ground!! Urgh! In winter I'm still going to have the issue with bugged out frozen brew that can't be dispensed and unusable vat that can only be resolved by taking apart the vat and reconstructing it. I'll need to set up a solar space heater for this in the winter. There's also a little tool shed, but with how zones work, it's just for decoration.
The outside of the kitchen. There's a group of plants for some minor agriculture. The windmill I built and placed there myself. It allows milling specific items. Notable uses include flour from wheat, buckwheat, oats, and barley. Oatmeal from oats. Chitin powder from butchered armored beings like ants and crayfish, which is used to make liquid fertilizer. Best part is that it's afk processing like smoking racks, so you don't need to spend time waiting for them the way you have spend time crafting it manually.
That fermenting vat in the back I made myself before I got the brewery building finished because I got impatient. That white stuff is the curdled milk spilled from the bugged frozen liquid vat I had to break apart. Liquids can't be picked up, only mopped and removed. I'm hoping it'll last until winter when it freezes and I can pick the rotten frozen curdled milk to turn into cheese. Yes, this is probably the one situation in which using rotten ingredients will not yield a rotten food product.
As mentioned before, the kitchen area has stoves and pans. The outside area has smoking racks and a butchering rack, with charcoal kiln to easily top off charcoal supply for the smoking racks.
The new addition is the inside kitchen area, which is supposed to contain root cellars I haven't built yet. There's a also a nice little dining area and a little birdbath outside.
I think I'll be adding in a few more windmills somewhere. Not the highest priority since oats, buckwheat, and barley don't rot, but having extra milling power in case of a big food prep job is nice.
Now for the bottom half of the base.
The only new addition to the livestock area are cute kitties! UwU These iridescent kitties are "mutated" due to the Cataclysm and the fur shimmers like oil slicks. You can see the color change animation in game. Very cute. Can't wait for them to grow up into cats.
I think the next goal after finishing the camp is to run around with canned cat food and start taming all the different cat breeds. Shorthairs are very common. Tabbies are very rare, and there are some species (sphinxes :o) in the monster database I haven't even met yet. Same for dogs. But I collect cats first, they're much rarer and harder to find.
The farm's shed is now finished. I also fertilized the top left field so the plants are growing faster than the other fields' (faster growth with tradeoff of less harvestable yield).
Fab shop is still in progress, mostly because some of the tool upgrades want some obscure items I have to find in cities. A pottery room is on the left. That is a clay kiln, as opposed to the charcoal kilns in the rightside room. Clay is not particularly useful at this stage of the game unless mass crafting containers for liquid storage. Still nice to have. With each additional fab shop room, a ton of new NPC crafting options become available.
That drop hammer is actually good for something 😮
And of course, the central building area, where I spend most of my time. The bulletin board gives me access to all the mission and building menus, and the water pump is right there.
The biggest addition is the strange wiring and blue meshes snaking around the west bedroom wing. This is a stationary vehicle setup with some electric power tools and appliances installed. The blue meshes are solar panels to charge a bunch of batteries instead. Previously I retreated into my Deathmobile to craft things with high power demand because tools have limited battery charges and require constant battery recharging. Extremely annoying. Vehicle mounted tools have near unlimited power supply thanks to the vehicle storage batteries and are superior to their portable versions in almost every way. The tools give access to blacksmithing, cooking, firearm handloading, meth labchemistry, and other useful appliances for crafting.
I only added the vehicle mounted appliance grid now because there is a game breaking bug with upgrading camps while vehicles are within that overmap tile. Whatever the map generation does to add the new building and furniture terrain, vehicles bug out and are magically deleted. I had to revert to an earlier save and lose a few days of progress after the bug deleted all my vehicles the first time. That's also why my vehicles are parked outside the perimeter of the camp. With the central building complete, there are no more upgrades that could bug out the vehicles in the tile and I expect to add more to the vehicle grid soon.
And that's it! Reviewing the first few screenshots, from the humble little shack at the beginning with a barebones farm to now, with a bustling camp furnished with all the agricultural and industrial necessities, Kazdel has come a long way. I started the camp during winter, beginning or mid winter I can't recall, and it's now halfway through spring. It took over 3 in game months to built everything up, and it was a ton of work and supplies. But boy was it fun.
I learned that there's a rare item that allows "clairvoyance," allowing perfect line of sight for everything in range. Shame I didn't find it earlier. Here's a picture of the complete camp now.
I still have a lot left to do for the camp.
Bucket list:
- Transport some pigs I trapped in my first mansion-farm base over to this camp. Gotta wait for piglets so I can get an on-demand meat source going. Hermina, you're great, but every time you bring back a million corpses that take days to deal with, and sometimes I just need 1 deer.
- Add more windmills
- Work on building "greenhouses" around the farm fields. By enclosing the fields in a closed space and doing some trickery with solar panels and jumper cables, I can use a vehicle-mounted heater to bypass the planting temperature check and keep farming during cold seasons. Probably going with glass walls to keep the greenhouse roleplay and visibility.
- Create greenhouse area for brewery, place some stills, add more fermenting vats and kegs. All that real estate is wasted if only 1 vat and keg are going to sit in there. Easier to finish than farm greenhouse since there's a ready made building area.
- Start mining a downstairs basement. A basement is functionally similar to the root cellar, the temperature is a permanent 6C year round. The biggest advantage is that I can make basements as large as I need, and I can use vehicle mounted freezers to make a cold storage room. Perfect for storing corpses and produce for later processing. I can also do wintertime brewing underground without the hassle of space heaters.
You can also direct the heat generated by the freezers through a vehicle muffler into a different part of the basement. The heat can raise basement temperature enough to allow underground farming. I need this. - Construct some vehicles with plows/reapers/scoops and create a manually managed farm field south of Kazdel. There's a ton of opportunity to create huge agricultural yields during growing season. No greenhouses for these.
- With the fields above, it's time to experiment with some of the more advanced construction features available. How cool would it be to create a little railroad track from the fields that roll straight into camp? I just dump all my harvest into the train cargo area, then choo-choo into camp. The followers can sort out the harvest. Farming has never felt more swag.
- Become crazy cat collector. The dog collecting can wait.
- Run around all the farms in the overmap, collect all the corn (all the farms spawn with planted corn, don't ask me why), replant the fields, and blast produce in the irradiation plant. Irradiating them prevents them from rotting. Then I can make sugar, wine, or cornmeal with the corn on my own schedule. There is an irradiation plant I've cleared a reasonable distance from Kazdel so it's very convenient.
- I deliberately situated Kazdel near an apple orchard. In autumn, apples trees can be harvested, and then I can get start mass producing fruit wine and vinegar.
- Start boat construction. The river left of Kazdel leads to an adjacent overmap that I need to explore for a quest. The land route requires pathing around towns and forests, too difficult to manage for a day trip. Water route would be much much easier and efficient. (Also time to look into making an aquatic warship).
- In addition to boat construction, start a bridge construction project over the river. If the current land route is too much work, just build my own EZ. I can also choose to have the bridge close to camp so travel and logistics become much easier.
- The one downside of my river location is that no fish are nearby. Whether fish spawns on the river tile or a special pond tile is luck dependent. Fishing is incredibly inefficient for the time spent on it, so the farther I travel to fish, the worse it is. For my sushi chef aspirations, the only reasonable means of amassing fish is to find a shipwreck where giant mutant crayfish have taken over and harvest them. One colossal crayfish, the final mutant evolution of crayfish, is an enormous corpse, and should yield enough fish meat to last a few seasons. Would like to note, it's funny how despite they are clearly mutated, they don't give "tainted" mutant/zombie meat, unlike a lot of other mutated wildlife. Roe apparently exist in the game but they don't seem to spawn fish the way eggs can spawn birds.
Post-post (haha) draft addition: I made this post a few days ago and since then I have started boat construction and did some exploration. Boat post inc.