Craft: Shopping cart and box cart

[Qwar]

Do you make them? (assuming you have the mechanic skill). I do have it, but I've come to not bother trying to get one. First, you need the box, which is highly inconvenient to transport, and can only be transported as a vehicle, back to the point where you put the frame and the wheels.

Second, all the pieces, but specially the frame and the box, are not only very hard to find, but also are always found in mediocre condition (60% best one if found in the last 50 hours with the new patches).

Third, combined with the low durability of this two vehicles, anything you can craft will last for a low time. And unlike a travois, which can be remade on the spot, you will lose pretty much everything you had inside that cannot fit into a travois anyway.

As a result, I've decided to go only with travois or sleds (if I ever find one). Sure, they have less capacity, but tbh it's less of a pain in many senses.

[Trigon (The Trash)]

Basically. I've found one sled and one shopping cart in my last dozen plays. Never actually managed to craft one though. The parts are indeed hard to find. Except wheels. I usually end up with plenty of wheels and nothing else.

[danconnors]

I'll take the sled (in equal condition) over the cart any day. I believe the cart degrades more quickly than the sled. They're both so rare it's hard to run a test to be sure.

[Kaaven]

It does make sense though - a sled is a single, solid piece of plastic, there is literary nothing that can break in it. It is also made with "off-road" usage - for children's fun, but nonetheless.

Carts, on the other hand are made of lots of moving parts and were never meant to go much further that a parking lot in front of a shopping centre (I dare anyone to drag one of these through knee-high grass for a few hundred meters and not abandon it half-way through).

If there is anything that I would change, is the "height" of the sled's inventory grid - for the purpose of traveling on uneven, overgrown terrain (often running blind) it should load much less "goods".

[RalphRoberts]

The way I see it is you need to go up to the ATN and buy Travois from them every chance you get, and then stash them in the ATN exit hex so that you have a cache of vehicles to use. No need to pick mechanic at all! :)

[Qwar]

Kaaven: Not saying that it doesn't make "sense", but that doesn't make it better (also if you want to go that way, finding more of them would make sense too). Specially when we are talking about a skill that is nearly useless already. There's a way bigger chance that you'll find a whole shopping cart while scavenging, than there is that you find all the parts to craft one.

[Lin]

I can honestly say I've never managed to craft either one of those, in all my 250+ hours of playing. Admittedly, usually my mechanic builds are story builds (aka builds made expressly with many of the "lesser skils" that allow you to explore multiple encounter options) so they tend to be less resilient, die faster, do less hoarding and less collecting (no melee is easily survivable, but skipping tough does elevate the difficulty and shorten the length of a playthrough by a lot, I find). Still, I always try to stash away the ingredients in relatively safe locations, whenever possible, they just never seem to come all together. I don't really mind, I find it plausible.

But yes, you're right in a way Qwar, I think we can all agree that this is one of the recipes that are presumably very rarely used. It's not just that the ingredients are bulky, I think it also has to do with the fact that they aren't reusable for anything. When you need to prioritize survival, carrying them around for the very off chance that you'll collect them all is really low on the list of what to pack. However I don't believe making them more common is the answer, and I agree with Kaaven on the reasoning behind their low durability. I can't really come up with a better answer for this, so I think I'd rather leave things as they are. An ultra rare and difficult to craft recipe isn't a bad thing by itself, in my book.

[danconnors]

That rectangular grid representing the sled is a 2 dimensional layout attempting to approximate a 3 dimensiona object. When you look at it you can see that the sled has less volume than a shopping cart, more than a backpack. You can toss a partly loaded kiddy backpack in a sled and only use a fraction of its volume.

That's because a kiddypack will project above the top of the sled or travoice. As you fill up the kiddypack or backpack it will tend to want to fall over on its side (from the weight of material inside) taking up more room in the sled.

I had a good idea for a carrier when I first started playing this game. That was to take the rollers off the shopping carts, and substitute bicycle tires for them. Bike tires would get less debris in their innards, because the innards would be higher above mud level. The vehicle would also be much easier to pull than either a sled or travoice.

[Qwar]

Wrong thread Dan :D

[danconnors]

Oh, I thought we were all wandering off the thread.

On building a shopping cart, it's much more trouble than it's worth. I've never attempted it, and can't see a good reason to do so now. If I find a sled anywhere near 50% I'll empty my travoice out instantly, and use it. That 50% useful means it's good for a lifetime (for my players).

[Kaaven]

@danconnors Still, the loading space of a sled, even (or especially) when taking 3D space into consideration, should be 1/3 or 1/4 of that of a shopping cart. Because of the way that basket works - prevents items from falling overboard, unlike the flat surface of the sled.

As for the Mechanic skill in all of this - it allows the building of the Travois, which is extremely useful. I personally, did managed to build up both shopping and box carts - mostly due to actually being set to do so. But the main usefulness comes not from building a new one from grounds up, but from the ability to fix the one already possessed.

If one has both the mechanic skill and one of the carts (and tool) one can put those into the crafting (as if to de-craft it) to check which part is giving up. Doing that at around 30% should give one enough time to find the spares for the parts that need to be switched (usually the wheels). Without the mechanic skill one cannot do that kind of review, and is destined to drive that thing till the moment it bursts into pile of junk.

Not saying it is the most useful thing ever, mind you (it barely makes mechanic more useful at all), but it is the right way to use that particular ability, IMHO.

[danconnors]

At the grocery store where I shop there are two diffferent types of carts. One's big enough to pile the kids AND the groceries in. The other's got maybe twice the volume of one of those hand carriers--not much. It's also not deep. It is much lighter than a regular cart, and so could be pushed farther through grass, gravel, mud, fallen tree limbs, etc., before exhaustion sets in.

My thought is that pulling a sled or travoice would be much less tiring than pushing any type of cart. My further thought is that a big shopping cart, full to overflowing, would be next to impossible to push at all. Its wheel loading would be so high, the wheels would probably be totally submerged in ordinary mud.

Sleds and travoice have no wheel loading, because they have no wheels. The whole base of the vehicle is the load bearing element. So, a sled would practically float over 6 inches of snow that would bring a cart to a complete stop.

[Lin]

@Kaaven: Didn't consider the fixing angle for some reason, despite how obvious it is. You're right, that's an interesting thing to keep in mind and work towards.

[Qwar]

Weird, I've just noticed that right now I'm unburdened by a very little margin. If I drop my plastic sled (which contains 2 backpacks, a duffle bag, some ammo and night vision googles), I become burdened.

In other words my char feels ligther if he's dragging around a sled with some backpacks on it. wtf.

[Kaaven]

@Qwar - That is the way that vehicles work in the game - they don't make your stuff lighter/easier to carry, they simply rise your carrying capability. And it does not really matter where the items are located.

Example: You are carrying a backpack filled with junk that weights 50kg. That, along with your other equipment pushes you beyond the threshold of being burdened. Equipping a sled will add +50 kg to your carrying limit, counter-balancing the weight of the backpack and making you not burdened again. It does not matter if the heavy bag is on you or on the sled.

[Qwar]

Right, I guess it makes sense after the talk we had in the other topic about dropping th weight in the vehicle.