Prybar forging please! (or forge aided prybar repair)


killfixx

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The title says it all, but I think being able to forge a prybar would be clutch. Alternatively, if not forging a new one, how about repairing the prybar at the forge?

 

I stress about prybar health so much! I hate carrying a couple of them with me in case one breaks.

 

I guess I could always just plan better, but but...

 

 

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That prybars can break so easily is ridiculous... Granted, metal tools break sometimes but usually in extreme conditions. Heck, I was even thinking that in addition to prybars, we should be able to refill the sewing kits with thread made either from guts or broken down from fabric.

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Well honestly - I think this game approaches tools wrong. They aren't a consumable. They are a tool. Care for and maintain a tool and it will outlive you. I think they should be something rare. Something thats its a godsend to find. Crafted tools should be the main go-to, until you find a real tool. I don't know what I could do to a jimmybar to 'break it' short of cutting it with a grinder.

Getting open a locker/case/etc early/mid game could involve basically having to set up shop next to it for a day to get it open without a crowbar. Once you find the correct tool it should be a easy thing to accomplish. I sort of see it like that game should start off easy because of the plethora of 'low hanging fruit' - stuff on counters basically - that doesn't require tool. Over time as the margins become thinner and thus the games get harder, finding a swissarmy knife, or the crow bar would be the elements that keep pulling it into your favor. I'm all for certain items decaying over time - a homemade bow seems like something that would lose power over time - but things like a hammer, a crow bar or a can opener are going to outlast any person.

Maybe change the decay on tools from a 'its broke' to 'its dull/worn/etc'. A 100% knife would be quick to use, harvest a lot of meat and always work. Using a 10% knife would take longer, harvest less and have a chance to injure the player. At 0% instead of 'being broken' it would just be considered 'too dull to use'. A stone could bring it back to 100%.

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2 hours ago, Mikhail_Reign said:

Well honestly - I think this game approaches tools wrong. They aren't a consumable. They are a tool. Care for and maintain a tool and it will outlive you. I think they should be something rare. Something thats its a godsend to find. Crafted tools should be the main go-to, until you find a real tool. I don't know what I could do to a jimmybar to 'break it' short of cutting it with a grinder.

Getting open a locker/case/etc early/mid game could involve basically having to set up shop next to it for a day to get it open without a crowbar. Once you find the correct tool it should be a easy thing to accomplish. I sort of see it like that game should start off easy because of the plethora of 'low hanging fruit' - stuff on counters basically - that doesn't require tool. Over time as the margins become thinner and thus the games get harder, finding a swissarmy knife, or the crow bar would be the elements that keep pulling it into your favor. I'm all for certain items decaying over time - a homemade bow seems like something that would lose power over time - but things like a hammer, a crow bar or a can opener are going to outlast any person.

Maybe change the decay on tools from a 'its broke' to 'its dull/worn/etc'. A 100% knife would be quick to use, harvest a lot of meat and always work. Using a 10% knife would take longer, harvest less and have a chance to injure the player. At 0% instead of 'being broken' it would just be considered 'too dull to use'. A stone could bring it back to 100%.

This is pretty much exactly what I was going to write. I too would like to see the game's approach to tools turned on its head.

I'm not sure about being able to forge prybars, to be honest (would a novice smith like our character really be able to make something that was strong enough out of bits of scrap metal heated up in a furnace?). But in answer to @Patrick Carlson: yes, I think greater longevity of tools could be balanced by making them much rarer to find in the first place, alongside having deterioration of effectiveness (time/yield) go with their condition - this could also tie-in with how much stamina or fatigue you lose while performing the action. I think the possibility to 'break' them should remain (you could snap a knife blade, chip a hatchet or break a prybar). I'd also like to see a separation of tool blades from their handles, with separate condition and maintenance/replacement - both to make it feel more realistic and also to give the mechanics a bit more depth.

Finally, I'd like to see a bit more diversity of use from tools, so that you could, for example, bash open a locker with a hammer. Again, choice of tool for a task could be linked to efficiency in terms of time spent and energy exerted (and tool wear).

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11 hours ago, Mikhail_Reign said:

Well honestly - I think this game approaches tools wrong. They aren't a consumable. They are a tool. Care for and maintain a tool and it will outlive you. I think they should be something rare. Something thats its a godsend to find. Crafted tools should be the main go-to, until you find a real tool. I don't know what I could do to a jimmybar to 'break it' short of cutting it with a grinder.

Getting open a locker/case/etc early/mid game could involve basically having to set up shop next to it for a day to get it open without a crowbar. Once you find the correct tool it should be a easy thing to accomplish. I sort of see it like that game should start off easy because of the plethora of 'low hanging fruit' - stuff on counters basically - that doesn't require tool. Over time as the margins become thinner and thus the games get harder, finding a swissarmy knife, or the crow bar would be the elements that keep pulling it into your favor. I'm all for certain items decaying over time - a homemade bow seems like something that would lose power over time - but things like a hammer, a crow bar or a can opener are going to outlast any person.

Maybe change the decay on tools from a 'its broke' to 'its dull/worn/etc'. A 100% knife would be quick to use, harvest a lot of meat and always work. Using a 10% knife would take longer, harvest less and have a chance to injure the player. At 0% instead of 'being broken' it would just be considered 'too dull to use'. A stone could bring it back to 100%.

This!

I hate stumbling around like "oh... another hatchet. But I've already got 2, so.."

Same thing with can openers, knives, rifles, etc. All tool spawns need to be drastically reduced. Wouldn't it be so much more interesting to say "OH THANK GOD, A CAN OPENER! I DON'T HAVE TO SMASH CANS OPEN ANYMORE!" As opposed to "oh, another can opener. I think I'll leave this one here, I've already got 10 back at base."

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2 hours ago, Tbone555 said:

This!

I hate stumbling around like "oh... another hatchet. But I've already got 2, so.."

Same thing with can openers, knives, rifles, etc. All tool spawns need to be drastically reduced. Wouldn't it be so much more interesting to say "OH THANK GOD, A CAN OPENER! I DON'T HAVE TO SMASH CANS OPEN ANYMORE!" As opposed to "oh, another can opener. I think I'll leave this one here, I've already got 10 back at base."

I miss the early alphas when this was still a thing :D

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On 2/23/2017 at 5:34 PM, Patrick Carlson said:

If repairable, how would want to balance their availability in the world then? Make them much more rare? 

Turning tools into a consumable is not the answer to make the game harder. Go with real consumables like food and firewood to balance the difficulty. Make hunting a much more intricate part of the game, and get rid of magic warm houses are 2 logical tweaks to balance the difficulty.

Plastic tools break the realism

 

 

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On 2/24/2017 at 9:19 AM, Tbone555 said:

This!

I hate stumbling around like "oh... another hatchet. But I've already got 2, so.."

Same thing with can openers, knives, rifles, etc. All tool spawns need to be drastically reduced. Wouldn't it be so much more interesting to say "OH THANK GOD, A CAN OPENER! I DON'T HAVE TO SMASH CANS OPEN ANYMORE!" As opposed to "oh, another can opener. I think I'll leave this one here, I've already got 10 back at base."

Your reaction to can openers changes when you're playing interloper. :) I actually have said "oh wow! a can opener!" and I wasn't being sarcastic.

 

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6 hours ago, dbldrew said:

Make hunting a much more intricate part of the game, and get rid of magic warm houses are 2 logical tweaks to balance the difficulty.

Having a house be 28 F or even 37 F isn't really magical.  It does sort of assume that the house was properly built for the region, but that's just good code enforcement and common sense.  My furnace died 2 winters ago when it was close to 0 F and it only dropped down to 39 degrees inside and I live in a house that is so poorly built (its a converted summer "cottage") you stand in front of the windows to cut the draft down (thermal panes put in by a previous owner). -

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Just now, Jolan said:

Having a house be 28 F or even 37 F isn't really magical.  It does sort of assume that the house was properly built for the region, but that's just good code enforcement and common sense.  My furnace died 2 winters ago when it was close to 0 F and it only dropped down to 39 degrees inside and I live in a house that is so poorly built (its a converted summer "cottage") you stand in front of the windows to cut the draft down (thermal panes put in by a previous owner). -

Yes, but would the same be true if the temperatures were... tangent - I have no idea what 0F is but I know it's not -20C (use a proper system! :D)

Anyways, would your home still be warm when it's dark most of the time, stormy when it isn't with a temperature consistently below -20C? Just the act of living in a well insulated home (e.g. cooking, warm bodies) will help keep it warm and it will be very slow to cool down. However, it still gets cold inside. Perhaps not freezing cold but one winter during a blizzard we lost power. We were able to keep the house warm since we had a wood stove at the time but since the blower wasn't working you definitely needed to bundle up to be comfortable inside.

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On 2/23/2017 at 8:48 PM, Mikhail_Reign said:

Maybe change the decay on tools from a 'its broke' to 'its dull/worn/etc'. A 100% knife would be quick to use, harvest a lot of meat and always work. Using a 10% knife would take longer, harvest less and have a chance to injure the player. At 0% instead of 'being broken' it would just be considered 'too dull to use'. A stone could bring it back to 100%.

I tend to think that certain tools need two lifebars. Like the knife and hatchet. The first life bar is the integrity and the second is the condition. The integrity should cover blade sharpness, a knife that is at 100% you can cut faster, do more damage to wolves if you have to, but as the integrity goes down jobs take longer, and using it while the blade is dull will chip away at the condition. Using a Sharping Stone will increase the blade integrity but it too will chip away at the blade's condition. When the blade reaches zero condition its going to break.

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On 2/23/2017 at 10:05 PM, mystifeid said:

Irl your chances of repairing or making a medium carbon steel prybar would be about the same as breaking one - close to zero.

Not sure where you're getting that idea. Pry bars are a simple shape and require practically no skill to forge. If I had a hacksaw, or a set of tools, I could harvest a stack of leafsprings from a car and have a dozen pry bars forged later that day.

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Agree that tools should not wear like the do in the game. I have axe bits from the 40s that are still just as good as any new ones being made. I'm not actually so sure that tools like hatchets and knifes would be all that rare though IRL. After all, there are probably as many axes as people in Canada, and with all the people gone, there would probably be lots of them to go around. On the other hand, I really like the idea of good tools being an epic find that really changes your quality of life in some way, so I don't want them to be super commonplace either. I think one way to reconcile it would be to have a relatively high amount of cheap Chinese made tools that wear out fast, but there could be rare high quality variants that have significantly higher stats and are nearly indestructable. You might find a dozen cheap knives with rubberized grips and hardware store hatchets, but now and then, you could find something like a Leatherman tool that can replace an entire toolbox, a superb quality Hudson Bay Company axe, or a handmade damascus Bowie knife with a stag handle. They cut through wolves like butter, do tasks in half the time, rarely need resharpening, and last forever, but there's only one of each in the entire sandbox...

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4 hours ago, IanS said:

Agree that tools should not wear like the do in the game. I have axe bits from the 40s that are still just as good as any new ones being made.

Realism is not a valid point to evaluate gameplay mechanics in a videogame that strive to do something very specific.

I don't get the fuss about prybars, you use them for little tasks and then to break fishing hut ice. Why should you ever forge one? It seems to me that the topic originate from a desire to be able to "do everything", something that other videogames, sadly, do.

Your proposition about supertool + cheaptool is interesting but if you think about it you will see how much it will change the game in a bad and unbalanced way. You will just run around searching for the super tool because you need it since the others suck and then when you find it (soon, the game is not that big if you run around) you stop running completelly and the game implodes. Why? Just because is more realistic? Not worth it.

I agree though that the amount of loot and especially tools should be reduced in stalker. I once found 4 rifles in the valley. Way too much!

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6 hours ago, IanS said:

Not sure where you're getting that idea. Pry bars are a simple shape and require practically no skill to forge. If I had a hacksaw, or a set of tools, I could harvest a stack of leafsprings from a car and have a dozen pry bars forged later that day.

When I hear prybar, I think of the seemingly immortal tools that can lever up one end of an 800kg form panel away from a concrete wall. To be honest, I'd forgotten that flat plate prybars even existed simply because I would never use one but to be fair, for the purposes of TLD they would be fine.

This does beg the question of how an average person would go identifying a leaf from a car spring as being suitable for a prybar.

It may be a moot point since the existing prybars are more than sufficient to break into every car trunk and locker. The only practical use that remains is to open holes for ice fishing and for which other easily repairable tools like the hammer are available. Even in Interloper it is feasible to totally explore the sandbox in 100 days and then never carry a prybar again.

I think that desires for new tools/weapons etc are all very well but as an Interloper player I know that even if introduced these things will most likely never become available to me so above all else I value suggestions that not only add interest to the game but also increase the difficulty.

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9 hours ago, cekivi said:

Yes, but would the same be true if the temperatures were... tangent - I have no idea what 0F is but I know it's not -20C (use a proper system! :D)

Anyways, would your home still be warm when it's dark most of the time, stormy when it isn't with a temperature consistently below -20C? Just the act of living in a well insulated home (e.g. cooking, warm bodies) will help keep it warm and it will be very slow to cool down. However, it still gets cold inside. Perhaps not freezing cold but one winter during a blizzard we lost power. We were able to keep the house warm since we had a wood stove at the time but since the blower wasn't working you definitely needed to bundle up to be comfortable inside.

But then I'd have to change my game settings and I'm lazy.  There's a difference between warm and near or below freezing.  Since they haven't created a game mechanic that changes the house based on whether there's someone in it or not I've been figuring the temps were based on someone in it.  So to use an igloo as an example - with it being -45 C outside the inside of an igloo can warm up to 16 C just on body heat, though it would be closer to -5 C (quick math maybe a little higher, close to 20F) initially unless you have lots of bodies.  All in all it depends on a number of insulation factors, size of space, etc.  One of the reasons why I refuse to stay at Quonset Hut, you can't convince me it would retain heat.  I mean look at it, the RF value is practially nil and the thing is a cavern. :)

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9 hours ago, mystifeid said:

When I hear prybar, I think of the seemingly immortal tools that can lever up one end of an 800kg form panel away from a concrete wall. To be honest, I'd forgotten that flat plate prybars even existed simply because I would never use one but to be fair, for the purposes of TLD they would be fine.

This does beg the question of how an average person would go identifying a leaf from a car spring as being suitable for a prybar.

It may be a moot point since the existing prybars are more than sufficient to break into every car trunk and locker. The only practical use that remains is to open holes for ice fishing and for which other easily repairable tools like the hammer are available. Even in Interloper it is feasible to totally explore the sandbox in 100 days and then never carry a prybar again.

I think that desires for new tools/weapons etc are all very well but as an Interloper player I know that even if introduced these things will most likely never become available to me so above all else I value suggestions that not only add interest to the game but also increase the difficulty.

Just to be clear, I am talking about pry bars with crook necks just like the one in the game. After heating it up to cherry red, you can add all those bends in a single minute. The notches are equally easy. A pry bar like the one in the game would take 5-10 minutes to forge from a flat piece of spring steel. As far as how average people would know to use spring steel, I think that is a good case for why forging should have a skill metric associated with it and there should be skill books that open new abilities and harvestable materials. It goes without saying that your first arrowhead will be much cruder and take longer than your 50th arrowhead. Knowing what type of steel to use, knowing to quench it in oil, and understanding how to temper a pry bar so that the working edges are hard but the main body is still tough and ductile - those are all things that not everyone knows, but you can easily learn from a book.

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either way my thought is the Pry bar should be limited and indistructable. maybe forge one or two if needed?

yes it slows down the game in opening car boots etc, so maybe place one in their hands to start with? do I take this or not they may ask? either way if they don't they could be fragged, else they find or make some other tool in forgre to open stuff?

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The way I rationalize tools breaking in the game after repeated use is that in my headcanon I just pretend the only tools up in Canada are all from Harbor Freight and that my character doesn't know his own strength, so combined with "Made in China" craftsmanship and a guy who ate a lot of red meat growing up, you get tools that break a lot easier than in real life :P

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