#killing corridor

Upgraded to reinforced concrete or better, and painted with JaWoodle purple and black stripes. :) 

Also added a pair of turrets with a switch. I don’t expect to use those much, and I leave them off between horde nights. They’re just there for backup.

Since I took these screenshots I’ve moved the claim block forward to cover the entire structure, and I’ve also saved a copy of the structure as a prefab.

I had previously tried keeping the zeds away by using arrow slits, with some limited success. (You can see one Killing Corridor with that configuration in the background on the left side of the first picture.)

I tried letting them down easy. For some reason on that corridor they stopped seeing the corridor as a path to me and started beating on the pillar under my cage.

So... back to Jaded’s 8k server after a hiatus. After watching a couple of JaWoodle’s videos (this one and this one specifically), I got an idea for another Killing Corridor. I had a lot of resources on this server, so it seemed like a good test bed.

This one combines the sloping walls idea with the “let them down gently” idea plus the Killing Corridor itself plus a tiny bit of arrow slits force field (just to keep them away from my ladder) and boom, I practically slept through the Day 476 Horde. 

It was awesome! I just needed a junk turret facing inside the cage to protect me against spiders and I’d have been set for a nap.

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?

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. 

The updated murder holes! It’s a bit of overkill -- you can’t really get a good angle from inside except towards the center and in front of the cage. But the view isn’t blocked, and the underside looks like somebody took some time to make it look good. Or so I like to think. And now I get a clear view of the support!

There are also a couple shots of the bit of cage I wrapped around the turrets, and how easily you can access them now from inside for reloading.

So I did some testing last night, using Katana’s admin privs and the ability to generate zombies, and I have to say they didn’t attack the supports at all. There was something else going on for a while where they all turned and attacked one of the blocks near the entrance to Corridor, and I did get a spider attacking one of my side doors. Not sure why they all decided all of a sudden to turn away from me, but they came back after I shot a few of them.

It seems like kind of an odd place for them to attack. There’s something not 100% about the Killing Corridor and I’m not sure what it is. Could be the moat -- I’ve seen some weird, non-obvious behavior after adding arrow slits. Contrariwise, it could be related to me building into the bank instead of using stairs. 

I’ve been thinking of adding stairs to the bank on either side of the Corridor; they supposedly path better up stairs than ramps, but I don’t know if they path better up stairs than hillsides.

As I mentioned, I based the cage on the design that's working quite well on the roof of Ostrich Hotel. 

Previous cage designs started with the assumption that I wanted to see all around me, and so everything was made of bars. I've found over time that, in fact, having bars all around means that cops will attack you from the dark and from all directions. The result is a rapidly eroding cage that needs constant repair and upkeep, distracting you from killing the zeds that so clearly deserve it. This includes the cage in Katana's original Ostrich Hotel conversion, which sometimes got shot by cops standing on the ground. (Not on the roof. On the ground.)

The cage in Noise Eater's Ostrich Hotel base is made of solid wood blocks with only a catwalk (around the outside of the cage and part of the Corridor) and the cage roof being made out of bars. The roof bars give easy access to any vultures flying around. The catwalk is for easy maintenance and an alternate way to access lines of sight outside the Corridor. (Something I forgot about during the first horde night of the new Killing Corridor, using a rocket launcher through the drop zone instead of running outside on the catwalk.) It turns out that if the cops don't see you, they won't use their ranged vomit attack, and you don't care about killing anything until it's in the Corridor anyway. The bars on the roof are traditional, though there's little reason to have them, either. The cage is mostly there to protect against vultures (who don't need to be shot if they can't get to you, right?), cops, and those creepy leapy spiders.

Yeah, I'm going somewhere with this. So Noise Eater's cage works pretty well. It's got a doorway on either side for quick access to the catwalk, and a double doorway on the back for the same plus the ladder. In fact, the back catwalk access came first; I added the side doorways for convenience. Just seemed to make sense.

No problems, so I cribbed the design for the Snowbound Killing Corridor* (yeah, I just coined that nickname -- calling it "Rod Rescueman's cabin_04-adjacent Killing Corridor built into the side of a hill in the snow biome on Jaded_1_99's Fun Server" is a bit of a mouthful, yes?) and ran it for horde night.

It was an utter disaster. ...Hah Hah No, I'm lying. It worked pretty well, except for two things. One, I got a spider zombie inside at one point, an attack from behind. Two, at one point several zeds attacked from behind (on the ground), including an irradiated cop using his ranged vomit attack. The spider was simple to dispatch; the others I shot at for a while, then moved out of sight until they pathed to the Killing Corridor.

So what's the difference between the Ostrich Hotel KC and the Snowbound KC? Well... the Snowbound KC is fairly traditional other than being built on a hill. Otherwise it stands on the ground as normal. But the Ostrich Hotel KC is, well, built on the roof of the Ostrich Hotel. The zeds climb the stairs to the roof, where they're immediately greeted by the open arms of the Killing Corridor stairs. At least 99% of the zeds simply climb the extra flight and take the Killing Corridor route. If they survive to the end of the Corridor, they drop through... all the way to the hotel lobby, at which point they climb all the way to the roof again.

It's actually very effective at containing the zeds without using force. They rarely wander around the roof unless some doofus hangs around against the advice of several people shouting at her to come inside the cage... or occasionally one will glitch, or something else will cause them to fall outside the Corridor. At which point they virtually always make their way back to the stairs anyway.

Chances of being spotted from behind the cage by incoming? Not zero, but approaching zero as a limit. Whereas when your KC is built on the ground normally? Yeah, chances are pretty good.

I considered adding doors, but in the long run I concluded that being able to step out the back was a luxury not worth indulging. I didn't want to move the ladder forward (which would effectively make the cage smaller), so instead I moved the back wall of the cage back by one block and sealed off both doorways. The side doorways are more convenient for catwalk access anyway. I will probably add doors to those. I may restore the single back doorway (now that the back wall is behind the ladder, we don't need the double doorway) and add a door. Meantime, this is what it looks like now.

Conclusion: Nothing wrong with the design after a couple tweaks. Bars on top aren't needed but feel... right. I like them. Bloodmoon zombie vultures may have ranged vomit attacks, though, so I may consider migrating to a solid roof. Still, it hasn't been a problem, so for now I'm leaving the bars in. It might make sense to also convert a couple of the floor blocks to bars; murder holes will make defending the supports easier. Adding hatches will provide protection against the aforementioned ranged vomit attacks from cops that survive a pass through the Corridor.

Meantime the entire thing is made out of wood and rarely takes any damage; that all happens to the Killing Corridor, which is made entirely out of reinforced concrete, except a few key points.

P.S. Looks like I forgot to paint the new catwalk section in the back. Oops. Luckily that’s easy to fix!