With the NPC survivor system coming out, I'm curious what kind of thought has been given to how any groups formed will be handling supplies among themselves. I've been reading a bit in the forums and the blog on how NPC interactions will work, so I don't want to get in to that too terribly much here, but have been chafing a bit during my sandbox mode of play in ways that I think could be a real headache if one was dealing with a community of folks. For example: I've been working on walling off a section of a neighborhood block to start a fortress of sorts large enough for a small group of folks to live, farm, and otherwise survive in. At its most straightforward, the player and NPCs could just move in to the existing houses, storing their own supplies where they live, and that's that. However, when it comes to maintaining supplies more generally, that doesn't sound particularly efficient. Light eaters, for example, could really stretch their food supply while big eaters would run out relatively quickly. As any group requires some give and take, it would seem reasonable that a general pool of supplies would be established to manage the differences in what's retained in individual houses. Weapons will follow a similar concerns whereas some folks are going to want differing amounts of personal weapons and ammunition to defend themselves and their families, but at the same time it makes sense to establish a community pool to draw on in emergencies. Along similar lines, building supplies would not be particularly efficient distributed across multiples houses within the community. Rather than having to collect a handful of planks, nails, door knobs, hinges, etc, from each house(some of whom may not even need or use them in the first place), it seems reasonable to establish a centralized location for these supplies where raw materials are dropped off autonomously and which is automatically the first point supplies are drawn from for community building projects. With all of that in mind, such a depot needs to be efficient and easy to both manage and interact with. Understand, I'm all for realism in a game like this. I appreciate that an important part of the game is time management and both distributed resources and efficient storage are not trivial components to the suspense and mood of the game. That said, I also appreciate that time management for the player character should not lead to tedium for the player. For example: I established an interim base in one of the big warehouses and have spent an exorbitant amount of time emptying crates, moving the items to other crates, destroying the original crates, building new crates, then moving the supplies into the new crates to organize types of supplies into general areas for future use. It's tedious both for me the player, and the character(they're constantly getting board despite me putting them to work smashing crates all day). Moreover, each crate's storage limit(while perhaps realistic) means I have to have a large number of crates(less than the warehouse originally had, but still quite a lot) to hold everything, making remembering where everything is later a real pain. I'd suggest a system whereby a room, or pile of crates, could be designated a cache or depot. This could be represented by a graphic(maybe that changes according to how many items are stored there) of the pile of crates. You don't have the ability to interact with the individual crates anymore(or the room just fills up with them), as it is treated as a single storage object with either have an unlimited storage limit, or at least a limit that is very high. Time management could be handled by assigning a timer to how long it takes to pull something out as a factor of how many items are stored there modified by how many different types of items. If it's a cache containing 200+ items ranging from matches, to food, to wooden planks, the "access time" to pull out one plank could well be quite high. However, if it contains 200+ planks alone, pulling out one plank would be pretty quick as you wouldn't need to sort through everything else(pulling the matches and 30 cans of food off the pile of planks) to get that one plank. With the addition of wheel-barrows or the like to get supplies from the cache to work sites, community building and management would be a lot less tedious. When NPCs come into play, they could be made aware of any caches that have been established in their area and set to interact with them autonomously as determined by their personalities and traits. Standard actions would be to drop extra supplies off in accordance with what kind of cache it is, but other interactions could include stealing from it(to the detriment of the community), organizing it(reducing access times), guarding it(reducing theft), distributing supplies to work sites(allowing workers to keep working and not waste time fetching), or cataloging them(leading to one or more survivors being a record keeper or being able to tell others where remote caches are and what they contain for later supply runs).
