Zabuzaxsta

This is also something I thought would be cool. Someone in another thread posed the idea of using lawnmower blades in a recipe for an improvised sword.

My original post was about incorporating something into the game, you said the idea was ridiculous, we talked about probability distributions for a while, then I responded to your lengthy critique (in which you asserted I must not know anything about this) by saying actually it's I've done some stuff like this with friends before. That doesn't seem odd at all. You're right, it has been a couple of pages, but as someone else pointed out we're being verbose. Also, there does seem to be some room for "artistic license." Maybe you disagree, and think the only things that should be included in the maps are things that are actually present in the locations they model. That's certainly a viable opinion, and one that is obviously striving for exact realism. The thing then would be to drive to Muldraugh and check each person's residence and farm and see if there's anyone who practices smithing. I think this is a little extreme, and my position is more that "Eh, there's a not-too-ridiculous chance that someone who knows how to smith and has some basic tools lives in small-town Kentucky", but you obviously disagree. My point with the logging company is that there are rare things in small towns sometimes, that's all. I think we'll have to agree to disagree on how many smiths are registered. I just don't think that there's a high rate of that amongst people doing it for basic, utilitarian metal shaping in their rural community. I'm a homebrewer, and I've turned several friends on to it, and none of them joined any organization. I understand that's not perfectly analogous to smithing; I'm just trying to say that enrollment in clubs/associations is always going to be a part (large or small) of the total amount of practitioners. I've bolded these parts because you're definitely right about them, and so few people observe them. I linked to at least one discussion where several people admitted to having a forge that wasn't strictly speaking legal. You're right, you can do this sort of stuff in the city limits if you get it up to code, but most people don't want to waste money on it and give up on the idea or move to somewhere more conducive (i.e. more rural, less nosiness). I suppose we should both look up statistics on the distribution of smiths across rural and urban areas. Ok, so I'll try to make this point more clear, as I (admittedly) don't think I did a good job the first time. If I said days, I was in error. I also was not aware that the distance was that short IRL. However, I still think it is unrealistic. I don't have such a character, but I've seen YouTube videos (unfortunately, I do not know if they were "hacked" or not) of someone running to West Point with level 5 sprinting and whatever perk it is that lets you run longer. They had to stop around 7-8 times, I believe, and perhaps less. Given that the distance is 6 miles, this means that character was sprinting a little less than a mile at a time, which is unrealistic. Olympic athletes cannot sprint that long; I believe 400 meters is usually taken to be the longest sprint in such events. Also, one's character can do the sprint to West Point and still stay awake for 12 hours or more that day. This is also extremely unrealistic. I'm not complaining, just trying to point out fudges like these make the game more fun, and that it's not perfectly realistic (which is your main argument for why forging should not be included - it's excessively unrealistic). When I said run, I meant sprint. And yes, lots of people are incapable of doing anything more than a jog. If we're talking about the average American person, it's not at all unrealistic to assert that this is exceedingly difficult for most people. And no, one does not start off the game with it being exceedingly difficult to sprint. There are lots of studies out there about how high in fat our diet is, and how increasingly sedentary American society is. Your assertion that the "average person" can sprint for a couple blocks (at first, later in the game close to a mile as I noted above) is simply false. As for the first few sentences, I'm saying the same can be done with basic smithing. My reference point was the popular mechanics article where the guy with no prior experience or knowledge of techniques was able to do some really basic stuff. I'll have to go look up your response to the article, as I'd like to see how you debunked the proof of concept it provided. And yeah, sure, there would need to be some simplifications of the process to implement in game and you couldn't quite do as much as in real life but my whole point with sprinting/farming/carpentry was not to say they are similarly difficult but that there are similar simplifications. Again, not saying it can be simplified to a comparable skill-level-process, just that those other things involve simplifications in game that one could apply to some of your objections about smithing. So the whole "dawn of time thing"...I'm not over-simplifying, you are. My whole point is that you can't deduce that something is impossible for a modern person to do simply from the fact that it took humanity millions of years to figure out. These numbers are probably horribly inaccurate, but I'm just going to throw them out there to paint the picture: it took us 2 million years to figure out how to farm, 2.1 million years to figure out how to do carpentry, 2.2 million years to figure out written language, and 2.3 million years to figure out how to shape metal. What I'm trying to point out is that "it took humanity a long time to figure it out" is not a good argument, as it took us a long time to figure out pretty much everything that can be done with ease today. If this sort of argument DID establish the truth of what you are trying to claim, it's a good argument for why (for example) a modern person shouldn't be able to figure out written language, which is clearly false. Learning a language also requires millions of years of tradition and depends heavily upon your ancestors. I think you'd be better served just sticking to the inherent complexity of the process argument, as smithing admittedly ain't simple. My point with the charcoal is that it is readily available now and it wasn't back in the day, which makes it easier to make a fire of appropriate hotness nowadays than back in the day. I never said people couldn't do it back in the day. As for the part about quenching, read the article - the guy has no idea what he is doing and manages to shape some metal. Again, I'm not arguing for being able to forge an engine block, just something like pull an iron bar out of a fence and pound it flat or turn it into nails. Hell, iron is malleable enough you could probably do it without/with minimal heat (though I have to admit it's just a guess), as XxZeraphinexX noted above. The last thing I should point out is that I'm not trying to argue smithing is easy, or that these other things are just as difficult to figure out, or anything like that. I'm trying to establish that there is a range of difficulty in skills in Project Z, and that people are WAY oversimplifying them. I'm not saying they're not doable for the average person, though to be honest I think most of you are rather capable individuals and are overestimating the average person (when I grew some tomatoes a couple years ago, the most common response was "OMG! How did you do that!? I could never do that). What I'm trying to say is something like this - sprinting is unrealistic, cooking more complicated than it is in-game, farming significantly more complicated than in-game, carpentry (especially for multi-story buildings) extremely more complicated than in-game, so maybe basic smithing isn't that much of a stretch. Warned you to drop this, it's detracting from the conversation This kinda crap pisses me off. In one of your other posts, you said I was misusing "ad hominem." There's no other way to describe comments like these. Insinuating I am stupid is ad hominem. You can't just hide behind the fact that you never said anything directly in earlier posts (these are pretty blatant). Since the beginning of this discussion you have been demeaning, insulting, and degrading. You trying to say this is not ad hominem and that I shouldn't be allowed to use the phrase (I mean, do you even hear yourself? I haven't even said anything rude to you) is yet another ad hominem. I have not ONCE done this towards you in our discussion, and I simply do not understand your need to do this.

I do know several, actually, and the 3,000 number is actually off (it's closer to 4,000), and is only the number of people officially enrolled in the artist's-blacksmiths association of north america. None of them are enrolled in the association; I think it's a safe bet that there are far more than 4000 blacksmiths in the country right now. I think it's interesting you would assert I know none when I actually do. Furthermore, you completely ignored my point about the logging company. The chances of there being a major logging company in a tiny little town in Kentucky are similarly slim (with regards to the blacksmith possibility). If you'd take the time to read what I said, I specifically said that they were often around the outskirts of cities, ie not in the city limits. And for the record- there's no law that says you can't have an anvil and a small forge in your garage. Maybe check your facts before making such claims =\ I have checked my facts. The sort of open fires necessary for a forge are illegal within city limits. I get what you're saying, that people would obviously move just beyond the city limits to do their stuff, but this really isn't an economically feasible business model. You'd be far from your customer base. The people that do this are probably the ones smithing for art and whatnot, and your assertion that this represents all of the smithers in existence needs to be backed up. You need correct zoning or permits to do so in large cities, and if you're saying people do it outside of the city limits you've just proven my point - that people don't do this in big cities. There are absolutely laws against having this in your garage, as it could easily cause a fire in such an unventilated area and burn down half of your neighborhood. I've had the police called on me for making charcoal once, and they politely requested that I stop doing it or they'd arrest me next time. Here's a reference to some people griping about it within the city limits: http://www.iforgeiron.com/topic/1253-neighborhood-blacksmithing/ I'm not desperate, and this isn't hyperbole. Ad hominem is not very polite, IMO, and I'd request that you address the substance of my claims instead of resorting to insults. Being able to run 5-6 miles is something that the average American can't even hope to do. I live in a dense, urban walking area and going 1-2 miles in the heat or cold can make you pretty damn tired (and I'm in decent shape). Most people aren't in shape like that, and couldn't get in shape like that within a few weeks. Additionally, you never addressed my point that lots of people lack the coordination to run. I've been to run clubs numerous times in my life and trust me, there are PLENTY of people who just lack the basic coordination to do anything more than a fast jog (and these people are in shape). But fine, we'll assume the character is fit enough (against all statistical evidence about people in the US) and has the type of body (coordination, posture, running form) to make sustained sprinting while carrying tons of crap feasible due to your "it's the way the game is designed to be played and the way it's meant to be balanced" argument. Again, I'm not making wild, unfounded claims - ad hominem again. Cooking is completely unrealistic, and I'm not quite sure how you can possibly argue otherwise. Yes, some nice cooked vegetables would be good in the apocalypse, but vegetables boiled in water would not. They'd be god awful, and the water would taste unbelievably bad. You need stock (which is itself a whole 'nother process) and some salt to make it at least halfway decent. Finally, you don't make soup by boiling vegetables. You cook the vegetables in some way, then add them to the pot of stock and salt to make soup. Again, boiled vegetables in water would taste terrible, no matter what your situation was, and it wouldn't make the vegetables somehow magically "better" as it does in the game. Fresh tomatoes would taste waaay better than if you put those tomatoes into a pot and boiled them for an hour. Also, pretty much all vegetables need to dressed in some way before being put in the pot, another thing which is left out. But again, let's go ahead and let all of this slide according to your "it's the way the game is designed to be played and the way it's meant to be balanced" argument. Most varieties of vegetables and whatnot are seedlees, or contain inert seeds (this is to encourage you to come back to the store and buy more). Learning how to harvest and dry seeds is extremely plant-specific and something that is completely outside of the skillset of most people. It's something, in fact, most people couldn't figure out without training (to one of your own arguments) - they get moldy, aren't harvested at the right time, etc. I've tried growing numerous things in numerous places (such as tomatoes, citrus, eggplant, squash, etc.) and without fertilizer or top quality soil it was HARD. Maybe you're just projecting your skill onto other people when you assert all it takes is putting some water on them. My tomatoes have had early blight, late blight, septoria, aphids, and so forth and without fertilizer would rarely produce and when they did the yields were super small. It also doesn't take 5 days to grow cabbage. Now the developers have incorporated some of this (such as the diseases), but they've streamlined and easy-fied it for fun. Yet another of my arguments that can go under your "spirit of the game" argument. I think you are radically underestimating the trial and error process. Try different things, see if they work/improve your result, then remember said things. Also, you didn't respond to my point about how "the technical knowledge behind smithing was learned over millennia and is not something you can magically intuit" is not a good argument. The same can be said of carpentry, which is definitely in the game. Additionally, learning how to build multiple-story structures and how to support those structures adequately is something that typically takes an engineering degree, and along the lines of your argument should therefore be unlearnable in the game. If you gave someone with no carpentry experience a log and a saw and said "cut a board" I really doubt they'd be able to do it until after months of practice, but your character starts off being able to do this. Also, here's a great Popular Mechanics article on how easy it is to make a nice backyard forge (it'd be easy to make a simpler version out of the more common tools in zomboid): http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/how-to-plans/metalworking/4303543 As you can see, there is nothing difficult about it at all. There's also nothing about quenching techniques and the tips for techniques for shaping metal are things that are easily intuitable. Making a flat piece of metal is actually (now, this claim is backed up with evidence from smith friends and numerous articles) just whanging on a red hot piece of metal until it flattens. You constantly asserting that this isn't the case not only violates the researched truth, but common sense as well. Here's a forum post about a guy trying to make a forge out of a weber grill and numerous people telling him how to do it: http://www.swordforum.com/forums/showthread.php?80973-weber-grill-as-a-forge They also mention making them out of metal barrels/drums, so the trash cans in Zomboid could be used. And here is why I kept granting all of your simplifications - when you look at them in their totality, every sort of simplification required to get smithing in the game is already something the devs have done with another skill in some way. So no, smithing does not violate the spirit of the game, as it were. And yeah, it's really easy to build a basically functional forge and to do rudimentary metal shaping - I've actually done some of it with my friends before, and it takes just a bit of intuition to pick up unlike the PhD-level amount of knowledge and research you assert it requires. To make really good stuff? Absolutely. To make nails or a flat piece of metal? Absolutely not. Go give it a shot sometime, you'll find out it's not this big, mystical, highly complicated thing you make it out to be. In this day and age, people have a whole bunch of generally applicable background knowledge to work off of. The materials are all present, too, which wasn't true back in the day. Sorry about the quotes, I couldn't figure it out before I wanted to post this reply.

I actually quite disagree with this. It also took the human race thousands of years to learn-just to start to learn-how to grow plants. This, however, is something everybody thinks they can pick up with ease. Have you ever tried to grow plants? It's extremely difficult, depending on the plant and environment you are trying to grow it in. I could use your argument to establish that farming shouldn't exist in the game. Smithing is actually quite easy to do at a rudimentary level. The reason it was so hard for earlier humans to do is they didn't have charcoal you could buy at the corner store, lighter fluid and lighters to instantly set it ablaze, knowledge that oxygen was key to producing heat, and so forth. These are all things the everyman understands. And yeah, maybe you would make really brittle and crappy stuff at first, but presumably (as with all the other skills) you could improve on techniques with time. I mean seriously, it's completely impossible to saw planks from a log with a hand saw. That fundamental presupposition completely invalidates the entire carpentry skill - you need way more advanced equipment (powered for really good stuff, or multiple-person saws for ancient age but still usable planks) than is currently available to make the stuff you can make. And come on, making a dowel from a plank with a saw? That's a HUGE jump! You simply can't do it. All the blacksmith arguers are asking for is a similar leap with regards to metallurgy. If you think there are a bunch of skilled craftsmen who create all of the perfectly flat wooden planks you buy at home depot, you're wrong. Machines do that; machines that would be dead in the zombie apocalypse. It is, however, possible for someone to learn through tons of trial and error and with a basic modern background knowledge of materials and elements. I mean, again, it's not like you get soup by putting broccoli in water and boiling it. You just get crappy, soft brocolli and nasty-ass water. You have to make stock first, which takes hours, and then add broccoli and a host of other ingredients in order to make even a boring-ass simple soup. This game already simplifies multiple crafting processes, so asking it to simplify smithing/metallurgy isn't that big of a stretch.

So I'll address these one by one. 425/60 = (approximately) 15%. That's really not that ludicrous of a number. The same as say, perhaps, a major logging company being located in any given city? Actually, I just checked - there's about 10,000 logging companies in the US. So yeah, that's three times larger, but still a pretty small margin for implementing in a random city (and yet, there's one in Muldraugh). And yeah, we should definitely rule out the big cities. Why on earth would you think that there would be blacksmiths in dense urban centers like New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Miami, Houston, etc? There are laws against having those sorts of things on your property in cities without proper zoning and qualifications. In rural areas, the requirements are much less severe/aren't really enforced. Like some dude would have an anvil and forge on his apartment balcony in the middle of NYC, lol. Running through a bunch of zombies (the equivalent of running through a bunch of sandbags) is not something you do in project zomboid; you must not live very long in your playthroughs if you're running that analogy. One typically wants to avoid running straight into large groups if one wants to survive. Again, run your point against soldiers in a battlefied..."Would you try running through a bunch of soldiers with a shield? Lol you would totes die instantly it's like running through sandbags you should do it without a shield" is a god-awful argument. There's no reason to think that armorless, weaponless, moronic zeds would somehow be more effective than armored, weapon-bearing, intelligent human soldiers. The sandbag analogy is a terrible one - of course against a horde of zeds swarming you, nothing would be effective. That's not a good argument for why any given item would not be useful in the zombie apocolypse. Also, sprinting is not something anyone can get good at. I've had numerous friends that simply cannot run well. They are uncoordinated, and lack the physical structure of a runner. Asserting that anyone can be good at it is simply false. The idea about West Point was that you shouldn't be able to sprint there in a day or two in real life, but you obviously can in Zomboid. Zomboid does not equal perfect realism. Being able to create an amazingly tasty soup out of brocolli, carrots, butter and water on a campfire seems to be the talent of a world-class chef. I'd like to see you make some awesome stuff you'd never get tired of with those ingredients.

Hrmmm, good point, the pain prolly wouldn't do anything. What about inflammatory responses, though? If you threw a jellyfish into the face of a zed, don't you think that would cause some swelling, puffiness, etc.? If so, then tear gas should at least make zeds blind. Additionally, if you think zeds need oxygen to breathe (definitely debatable), the tear gas should irritate their lungs and make them incapable of exertion for a bit. Or perhaps give them the exhaustion moodle.

So If we did a perfectly even distribution across the United States, that would mean that there were 60 blacksmiths in each state. If we eliminated the unlikely states (those with extreme weather conditions, highly developed states in which such a hobby would be antithetical to the everyman, etc.) we could probably rule out Hawaii, Alaska, the densely populated northeast, and probably reasonably assert there would be a low concentration in the midwest. Most likely, there would be a higher concentration in the southeast, southwest, and perhaps west coast due to its high population. This would mean the amount of blacksmiths in Kentucky would probably be over 60. Of the towns likely to have a blacksmith, we could probably rule out the big cities. So, there being a smith in small town Kentucky actually doesn't seem that unlikely to me. Regardless, there's a certain dimension to the game that isn't realistic. How many people do you know that are excellent sprinters, sneakers, are extremely light-footed and nimble, who are world-class chefs, carpenters, marksmen, reloaders, and so forth? Further, what is the chance that there is a person in Muldraugh, KY who can sprint all the way to West Point without taking a break? What about there being an excellent chef in one of those towns? A marksman who can take down five people with one shotgun blast? This game definitely bends the realism of such situations. I think the important thing to focus on is whether or not smithing is learnable through trial and error (as others have mentioned), and it most definitely is. You can gather a bunch of coals together, light them on fire, and then stick a piece of metal in there until it starts glowing red, then bang on it with a hammer and stick it in some water to cool it off. From there, everything is just refining.

Fair enough, I definitely worded my original post poorly. I meant more of a serious police precinct, that was more significant as far as the "we're trying to survive a zombie outbreak" backstory goes. It's an opportunity for a unique experience. All the other points I mentioned are not implemented in the current cop shops. As for tear gas being strange for affecting zombies, I couldn't disagree more. It affects your neurological system in various ways, which zeds obviously still have, causing inflammation and teariness. I mean, I understand they're dead, but that doesn't mean that whatever effects the living has no effect of them - law of the excluded middle and whatnot. If you shoot them in the head, they die, just like living things. So why would tear gas not cause them to go blind, be unable to breathe, and be generally incapacitated for a while?

So this is definitely a topic that has been brought up a few times, but I want to aim at presenting some original ideas to the whole process and dispelling some mistaken assumptions about the reality of the effectiveness of some of these ideas. Let's talk about shields before we get to the good stuff. Numerous people have proposed the idea, and numerous others have responded with comments like "oh zeds would just pull it out of your hands" or "shields were designed for intelligent human combatants and not unintelligent zeds, and are therefore more effective against the former and not the latter." Sorry guys, but these are terrible arguments, IMO. As for the first, which would you rather face while being bare-handed, a guy with a short sword AND a shield, or a guy with a short sword? People who make the first comment, according to their own line of reasoning, should respond to this question by saying "Well obviously the guy with the sword and the shield because I'd just grab the shield and pull on it and throw him off balance then pwn his face." This is quite ludicrous. Not only would you lack the requisite leverage to do so, but in so doing would make yourself extremely vulnerable to any number of killing blows. In addition, the shield-bearer could bash you in the face the moment you approached and trust me, you'd have absolutely no possibility of catching the shield and wrenching it free with your bare hands before you were dead. If this could at all be done with reliability, the shield would never have arisen as a reliable armament. As for the second argument, I have to say I can barely understand it. If an intelligent person is incapable of doing the aforementioned skillful actions, then surely a stupid-ass slow zed would be incapable of doing them. Yes, they may have increased physical strength but again couldn't really do anything about the shield before you murdered them in the face. Again, it's not like you could just dispatch a shield-bearing army by raising an army of really strong bare-fisted fighters (I doubt unarmed Shaolin monks did well against shielded/sworded opponents in Chinese history). Yes, jujitsu was invented as a martial art for fighting unarmed against an armed opponent, but it was designed to try and maximize your chances of survival in a non-ideal situation - it's not like zeds are jujitsu masters anyway. Furthermore, as has been noted, there's the large chance that the zed wouldn't even recognize the shield as a thing that needed to be contended with. If he didn't, you could bash him with it, and if he did, he'd be distracted by it, and you could slice his face off. Which leads me to my next point - swords don't have to be sharp. During the days of cavalry, sharp swords were a huge bane to the cavalryman. Imagine swinging a sharp-ass sword down on top of a guy's head with all your might and then THWOCK! your sword gets wedged in his skull. As you're trying to pull it out, numerous other dudes stab you to death. They didn't use sharp swords, they used blunt swords - big pieces of metal that shattered your skull or arm bone or collarbone/shoulder that wouldn't get stuck in your body so the cavalryman could keep riding, keep moving, and keep fucking people up. If we made swords smithable, we could do blunt swords at lower skill levels and sharp swords available at higher skill levels (the former leveling up blunt and the latter leveling up blade). A legitimate way to incorporate smithing would be to (again, as other people have noted) make only one or two anvils in the game. I respect that you can use any sort of sufficiently hard surface (like a granite countertop, as one has suggested, or a cinder block, as others have suggested) to temper red-hot metal - that's a possibility, but would be hard and counter-intuitive to implement. It would also be impossible to make anvils "craftable" unless it was a level 5 tier skill, but that's still pretty implausible. Instead, I say there should be an anvil or two on the map in the various farms, randomly generated and extremely scattered (so you'd have no idea where it was). You could then go one of two ways - immovable, or extremely difficult to move. The former would force trips for forging and resource expenditures to make the smithing area safe (or building an entire safehouse around the anvil), and the latter could be easily implemented by making the anvil ignore weight reduction penalties (or make it so damn heavy it could only be carried by putting it in the highest weight reduction bag...the big hiking bag I think?). Regardless, it would take ages to put into/take out of your inventory and make you super encumbered and exhausted by carrying it, effectively making you vulnerable to anything other than a 1v1 or 1v2 encounter (and making you unable to flee if you encounter more). This would then make retrieving the anvil a late-game "quest" as it were. There could be various tools required, such as a smithing hammer, tongs, or bellows; you could be required to make a forge out of masonry components (using a hammer to break down brick walls, using concrete bags to make morter, trowel to assemble); and then either logs or charcoal to fuel the forge (charcoal could just be a potential left over thing from campfires for easy implementation, or a specifically crafted item for difficult implementation). If you don't like the forge idea, heck, you could use a grill - hell, with enough coal and air, I've gotten zones within the coals over 1000 degrees before, and you only have to hit like 1500 or 2000 to be able to shape steel. It's doable...but dangerous! And that could be the trade off for this potentially game-breaking addition - the danger. Fires should be extremely common or possible without adequate preventions (e.g. babysitting your shit, not using excess fuel, skill level when forge was built, etc.), and only really definitely controllable at the max skill level. There could also be a trough required for quenching meta, which would consume extremely valuable late-game water at a high rate. Needless to say, one could make all sorts of things craftable with this skillset - tools like axes, spades, trowels, sledgehammers, or items like nails, screws, rivets, barbed wire, metal posts, or even nebulous "part kits" for various items (like "car parts" for when they incorporate vehicles, I used a soda can to help fix my engine once, or "gun parts" to repair firearms, or whatever). I'm gonna stop here because this is ridiculously long already. TL;DR - shields are definitely combative effective, swords don't need to be sharp, anvils are implementable, and the whole system can require various max level skills to balance it out and make it late-game only

So one thought I had, after checking the various suggestions and seeing that it was not present, is to incorporate an amped up police station into the map. There could be several unique and powerful items in this police station, thus making it a high-value looting location, but I think the devs could balance this out by making it extraordinarily difficult to loot. For example, it could be construed as a failed "safe point" for evacuation. This would make it heavily fortified and difficult to get in and out of, but absolutely infested with large numbers of zeds. Some of these zeds could potentially be armed (ex-police) or a few could be armored (i.e. wearing body armor). This would obviously include one new item, body armor - it could give the player the equivalent of a "tough skin" perk even if they hadn't selected it in character creation. It should, of course, have durability, and probably be irreparable (I don't think it's plausible that you could find new kevlar to patch the vest in the zombie apocalypse). This could also be a (the only? IDK, it is Kentucky) location to find assault rifles, and perhaps something like tear gas. Tear gas could be done in a bunch of different ways; it could completely knock zeds out for a certain time period, it could knock them out for 30 minutes then they could become crawlers for another 30 (stuff messes you up) then could become walkers after that, or any other possible combination. This item could be valuable for incapacitating groups without drawing large-scale attention. As for the station itself, with so many goodies and being an ex-safezone, it should be difficult as crap to get in to. There could be the aforementioned armed zeds, multiple locked doors and everything hooked up to alarms, a high spawn rate around the station (everyone went there to be safe and is now a zed), numerous hidden "bathroom" zeds, a confusing layout, a solitary entrance so that when you set off alarms your retreat path is quickly cut off, and a linear path throughout the station leading through numerous zed-infested rooms in order to get to the armory at the end. Like, you could enter into the general grounds and a lobby full of survior zeds, then have to go through booking/cells full of prisoner zeds, then through offices of ex-police zeds, then a motor pool, locker room, and bunk room full of surprise zeds. At the end of it all, you'd finally get into the armory (the door to which and other various doors you'd have to bash with a heavy ass sledgehammer), but the moment you got into it you'd set off a LOUD-ass alarm that would pull zeds from everywhere. The only way out would be back down the path you came, now infested with zeds - you'd have to use pretty much everything you got in the armory to get out safely (unless you were super creative). I know this suggestion proposes items that have already been suggested (assault rifles, body armor, etc.) but I think that this would be a neat scenario in which to implement all of these items, would give them a legitimate context, and honestly add a bit of plot/imagined backstory to the game. As I also suggested, it would be quest-like; the player could find notes or graffiti that indicated there was some sort of safe house at the police station, only to find it overrun when they discover it. Also, given that it was a failed city-wide safehouse, there could be numerous medications and foodstuffs found on site in tents set up around the police station, as well as sandbag barricades and whatnot that could be deconstructed and then reconstructed at the player's safehouse (for those who want to play it safe and not risk the armory). EDIT - Just wanted to say thank you to the developers for making one of my most favorite games in history, and for being responsive to the community suggestion-wise. You dudes rock! And re-worded it so that it was "amped-up police station" and not just "police station" as I originally said, which was confusing.