#horde base

This is what happens when you run the Cheese Wedge* base on horde night 70 with a friend and don’t beef it up. A lot. They went for the chewy caramel center while Donnie was shooting and I was frantically trying to rebuild at least some of the wooden core from inside using flagstone.

I finished the preliminary work on the Ranger Station on the same server (Jamestown PVE), but the Cheese Wedges were all regular concrete. Due to somebody running the clock out I nerd-poled up to the ceiling and waited out Horde Night 77 on top of the base. Yeah, turns out that didn’t work so well; when Horde Night was over and I nerd-poled back down, I found zeds beating up the inside of the base, having eaten their way through the Cheese Wedges.

Side note: I wouldn’t normally have done things this way. Three people came in a couple days before Horde Night; I had a sneaking suspicion they might run the clock out and then abandon the server, so I stayed up until 5am cooking concrete and ammo and putting the skirt on the building, and then nerd-poled to the top, as sometimes zombies will ignore you up there. Obviously neither tactic was completely successful, but one tactic that did work was assuming the other players would cut out and leave the horde night to whatever poor schmuck joined next.

... OK, I didn’t assume they would do that, but I anticipated the possibility, and made sure I was as ready as I could be. When I joined the next morning it was day 77 time 2300, so. Yeah. Turns out I was right.

Granted I cheesed it, but I think I was justified.

Anyway, between them breaking into that base reasonably easily and them nearly destroying the one pictured above, I’m thinking that this general design:

Is effective on the first few horde nights.

Is effective for idling during normal times. Good for keeping individuals and small groups from bothering you while you’re working or AFK, for instance.

Is not viable long-term as your sole horde base defense. OTOH:

Is probably just fine for protecting your live-in base while you battle the zeds in your nearby Killing Corridor or whatever other horde base you battle them in. So you can park the two next to each other without worrying about the zeds destroying your home. Probably. I haven’t actually tested it.

At this time I don’t intend to repair this horde base. However, if I decide I need to wait out a horde night in it again, I’m going to replace the core with reinforced concrete; upgrade all the other blocks to reinforced concrete; upgrade all the bars to iron (I ran out of forged iron last time); and upgrade the door as far as I can (I probably won’t upgrade it to a steel hatch, but just short of that).

And I might upgrade part of the roof. Looks like they were trying to dig their way to me.

Interesting that this time they did not destroy the ladder leading to the roof. They kept coming the whole night.

So, if I keep playing on Jamestown, my next move will doubtless be to flatten the ground near the base and start building a proper Killing Corridor. 

Oops.

Detonator got into my cage while I was trying to move some mods around on my guns -- something I should have gotten ready before Horde Night. Anyway, I was shooting to miss the detonation patch, which obviously failed. I hid behind a pillar (the pillar is there to support the ladder going to the roof) and so I survived without a scratch, but I immediately abandoned ship and rode a motorcycle out to the lobby base while my lone turret (a shotgun turret at my house) covered my escape.

Heh. I’m amazed that little junk turret survived. And the block under it was reduced to a frame. But hey, it was enough.

Obviously I will be rebuilding in concrete. And next time I’ll have my guns and mods organized ahead of time.

New lease on life, part deux. Jaded has wiped out the official server Lobby area and restarted several times. He seems to have settled on the Red Mesa installation as his starting point for the new lobby. (The bottom two pics were taken by Jaded.)

I started fooling around with saved prefabs, and he joined me out in the desert; I’d chosen a designated reset area so even if I failed to clean up after myself, it would eventually clean itself up. Then I went to Noise Eater’s base and recaptured it -- both the full base and, separately, the Killing Corridor. Then I imported the Killing Corridor in front of his Red Mesa base and we connected them together. I installed fresh solar cells and batteries and re-wired the turrets, refreshed the signs, and so on. 

So... Noise Eater’s base is saved to disk multiple times; Katana’s various base pieces were saved in a previous session, but now I know how to place them on a server; and I’ll probably be saving Noise Eater’s and Rod Rescueman’s new bases as well.

New lease on life?

There have been problems in the server. Not sure how many are stability problems and how many are people being assholes, though we’re quite sure about at least one of those. Those doors and stainless steel blocks didn’t place themselves. Looks to me like somebody broke into one of Coldan’s storage boxes and then just ran around spraying them like graffiti.

Anyway, Jaded has completely nuked his lobby and, for now, it pretty much remains non-existent. The original fabs are there. Since there’s no common or emergency backup horde base for everybody to use, I said, how about we use mine? I thought of this the other night when Horde Night hit and one of the (few remaining) players said, “Everybody get to Katana’s base!” half in jest.

Jaded was thinking about it when I left, including the idea of creating “/horde” and corresponding “/hordeback” teleport commands that would place you directly into one of my Killing Corridor cages (and then bring you back). 

With that in mind, I gave him coordinates to three of the Killing Corridor cages (Katana’s Amigone conversion; Noise Eater’s Power Station conversion, shown here; and Rod Rescueman’s new stand-alone Killing Corridor), and then I worked to restore this one to full operation. Mostly I finished some painting, upgraded the bars to iron, and added turrets. I also added some weapons and ammo to the unlocked case, then added a locked case with some maintenance materials. I did it all as Katana using Creative Mode, of course. The upgrades are for common use; no need to chew up private resources for a public facility, and Noise Eater already spent a considerable amount of time and work and resources to build the thing in the first place.

Will this ever get used again? Probably not, but after all the back-and-forth with Jaded’s “wipe (almost) everything” policy, he’s decided to grant some explicit exclusions. This is one of them. Since I’ve long-since given up on this being my base, it’s never been more than a nostalgia trap. Chances are he’s not going to implement the idea, and even if he does, it’s not going to last long -- Alpha 18 is on the horizon, if nothing else. So this is probably wishful thinking. 

I’ve wanted to make that large, flat area into a parking space for a while. The idea was to build the JaWoodle arrow-slits forcefield around it and park in the center. 

Turns out that reduced the space by more than I expected, though still leaving enough for a few vehicles, at least four. 

Since the previous photos, I removed the huge center pillar, because I decided it took up too damned much space in a rapidly shrinking parking lot. To compensate, I added two middle pillars on the long sides.

Since I also wanted to use that space for gardening, I decided to build a roof over it and make Yet Another Rooftop Garden. Because I have so few. (Side note: Noise Eater only had a small one on his first base, the Power Station conversion, and doesn’t have any on his second A-frame Cabin conversion, having dug up the lawn instead. Katana has a massive one on his Amigone Funeral conversion but nothing on his older A-frame Cabin. Noise Eater now has one on his Ostrich Hotel conversion.)

Problem is, my SI guesstimates were fine using concrete blocks until I put enough dirt on top, at which point the whole structure collapsed spectacularly (except the supports, of course). 

Then I tried doing it with lighter wood blocks, assuming that the SI strength of the supporting block was what counted, and lighter blocks would let me build farther out. Nnnnnnope, that’s now how it works.

After cleaning up yet again, I popped into a local test map and well, tested. I found out interactively what’s covered on this page. Except the “walking on them” limits, but that’s OK, I didn’t really need to build out 15 blocks. 

Turns out what I needed to do was build the top of the pillar out of metal, then extend the top out one or two metal blocks sideways. I also wrapped all the pillars in iron sheets (except the curved surfaces, but the outside edges weren’t the problem), which was the equivalent of adding scrap iron blocks. In other words, it gives full support in those blocks without filling the blocks, thus extending the pillar support without taking up any space.

What can I say? Voxel-based game logic. Iron sheets are awesome.

So with the 20/320 iron pillars with extra iron sheets as support, I was able to build the rest with concrete without breaking up the parking space with a center support pillar.

The first few shots show it before I painted them over. The scrap iron blocks on the roof are actual full scrap iron blocks. The scrap iron on the supports are actually iron sheets, as mentioned. In retrospect, if I did this exact design again, I’d extend the outside pillar supports to 2 iron blocks; but hey, this worked, so I’m happy. 

I do wish there was a way to see the SI of the structure in the server. I’d have to import the server files locally and run it as a local game... heck, I might try that, since I have access. In any case, I’ve been walking around on the dirt-covered surface, hoeing and planting, without any sign of it wanting to collapse. 

Next I planted the seeds I’d accumulated. Not many; I’ve just been storing what I’ve found, not creating any. After a while I checked on them and found that only a few had started growing.

...

I might have blamed the environment, seeing as how I’m planting e.g. desert plants in the snow biome, but some of the plants that started growing were aloe vera -- and some of the plants that had not started growing were aloe vera. All had pretty much been planted at the same time, though the growing ones had been planted first. 

I suspected possible Zombie Forcefield weirdness; I’ve seen it cause odd effects. Anyway, I checked later and everything seems to be growing. I’ll check later and expect my coffee to be ready! Meantime I stole some from either Katana or Noise Eater, I forget which, doesn’t matter -- they’ve both got resources out the wazoo, and since they’re me, they don’t really care much.

(Actually, come to think, I just harvested a bunch of stuff from Katana’s rooftop garden.)

The real answer with the blocks is that you can’t build more than 15 blocks out from the center with metal; more than 9 blocks with concrete; and with wood it drops to, um, I think it’s 7? You can extend the concrete by starting with metal, but the total will always be 15. So a metal pillar block, 5 metal blocks, then 9 concrete blocks is the maximum. And that’s just a straight line -- when you build 2D surfaces the calculations get more complicated, but the wiki page should explain it all. 

(If you build out 14 frames of metal and then add two of cloth “awning” blocks -- which have a weight of 1 each -- it will fail the same as adding two iron frames. There’s a hard limit of 15, period.)

It looked so much bigger before I paved it, and what I paved looked bigger until I covered it... Still, there’s room to park my stuff. Just not as much as I’d have liked. It’s that extra-big pillar in the center. I guess I didn’t have to do it that way, and I may change it. It’ll take a while to beat all those concrete blocks down.

Why was Joni Mitchell singing in my head the whole time I was making this? And she won’t shut up...

[edit] Holy crap, #big yellow taxi gets a lot of hits! 50 years after its debut (OK, 49, I’m rounding, it’ll be fifty in April, shut up) it still inspires and saddens people, and is more relevant than ever. 

Generally, when I show off pictures of my base, I do mostly exterior shots and neglect the interior. Part of that is that the interior is pretty boring; just a bunch of workstations and boxes with labels on them. Also, it’s difficult to get shots that really give a sense of the space and show the layout. But aside from the Killing Corridor, most of the work on a prefab is re-organizing the interior. (Except the A-frame conversion, where the Killing Corridor is the interior... :)

Usually I start by removing non-working cabinets and the like; either replacing windows with intact panes or sealing them off and painting them to match. I sealed off the kitchen windows but repaired the living room windows; most of the upper floor windows got sealed off, but I repaired the one next to the bed. Some of the cabins (like this one, and the A-frame cabin I’ve converted twice before) have a second-floor loft; in that case I replace the stairs with a ladder and extend the floor to fill the space.

I replaced the bed with an identical, working bed. I did the same to the spare bedroom next to the living room, which I don’t show here; I figure if anybody moves in there, they can redecorate how they please, but I left them a working (twin) bed. By “working” I mean that it serves as a bedroll, of course.

Most of the conversion is unremarkable: plenty of storage; room for expansion in the workroom; clothes, weapons, armor, vehicles and trader boxes are all in the living room where they’ll be handy when you’re leaving. Food and refreshments in the kitchen. I bought a bathroom drug cabinet to replace the broken one in the bathroom and stocked it with drugs; I bought the other style of medicine cabinet and placed it in the kitchen just outside the bathroom like a first aid cabinet, and stocked it with first aid stuff. One range and the wall oven are functional (thank you, Home Depot modlet!) and the other range is lootable.

I cheated a little by having Katana (who has admin privs) Creative Mode me some working bookcases -- and by “working” I mean “for storage” -- which I placed adjacent to the two lootable bookcases. (I only cheated because they’re not craftable and AFAICT not purchasable from the trader, and I wanted to more-or-less match the existing decor. Otherwise I’d have placed storage boxes or cabinets; it’s not like having these gives me any kind of real gaming advantage. It’s just for pretty. I suppose if I feel enough remorse, I can craft a set of cupboards and throw them away so that I’ve at least expended the resources. You can craft empty shelves, but they have no storage; they’re just, well, empty shelves.) Both of the campfires in the fireplace are functional.

The exterior shots are of the roof with the access hatch and solar panel and of one of the four corner turrets. Those are awesome; it’s annoying as fuck to be trying to work inside and have to drop everything every two minutes to deal with wandering zombies. Especially when you’re running the forges and getting screamers. With the turrets in place, all you have to do is pause every two minutes to laugh maniacally. ... Well, that’s what I do, anyway. YMMV.

Wiring is partly courtesy of the aforementioned Home Depot modlet, which adds some wireless wiring that keeps things looking neater and at the same time adds functional breaker boxes.

...Now that I read over the Home Depot modlet description again, I see that they may have added a “bookcase” texture which presumably would allow me to create a cupboard and repaint it to look like a bookcase. I’ll have to give that a try, and perhaps un-cheat the bookshelves. I don’t remember seeing that texture, so I’m not positive it’s there, but there are a lot of things I don’t remember. I’ll check it out.