5 Cents on ENGINE STARTER SPRAY and the Generator

[Snorrsenkel]

Have you guys used a mower, chainsaw or a gernerator? Those engines are of wayward behavior an can easily ruin your plans in real life. ...unless you have a can of engine starter spray nearby!
 

The common pre-used generator like the one in the game would need several attempts to start. A lay person would have a rather low chance to get this device running, and keep it reliable in the long terms. That because a small carburated cold engine like this is almost impossible to start in cold or moist conditions. And it will stay off once the carburetor and spark plug have been exposed to air mosture (=rain ingame).

My 5-step suggestion-suite on how to improve generator:

 

1. when engine is OFF -> add status winter, cold and hot engine

• cold condition = engine been off for more than 2 hours
• winter condition = engine been off for more than 2 hours + winter season
• hot condition = engine been off for less than 2 hour

2. add aditional status dry and wet engine

• dry condition = cold engine stored indoor / hot engine stored indoor /
• wet condition = stored outdoor + exposed to rain / keeps 'wet' even when stored indoor afterwards (wet inside spark plug + carburetor)

3. add chances

• winter + wet = 1% start chance
• winter + dry = 3% start chance
• cold + wet = 5% start chance
• cold + dry = 10% start chance
• hot + wet = 30% start chance
• hot + dry = 50% start chance

4. add item engine starter spray

• spray in inventory -> right click generator -> 'use engine starter spray' (adds 40% chance of successful engine start)
• engine start spray maybe be replaced with with placeholder 'hairspray' ?

 

You may now think this topic is authistic and its going too far / just annoying /going to raise frustration? Way off the mark! Its a very common and realistic problem actually...
The other day I accidentally came across several hundreds of lay Youtube-homevideos on how to deal with generator or chainsaw coldstart problems. You may watch for yourself and rethink your chances of hanging out in the apocalypse without sweet, precious engine starter spray!

[thiosk]

This is neat and could definitely be frustrating. I would have no idea how to start a motor in this way.  My parents have agenerator in case of power outage in the winter-- i've never even seen it because I moved to a warmer climate. If i went home to KY in the winter and tried to start it, I'd be hella confused and possibly dumb enough to turn it on inside (thank goodness for pz teaching us that that is deadly

 

this is beyond my modding capability but everything you suggest seems mostly incorporable. the items and involved recipes would be preparable through itemzed in a fairly straightforward way.  There would need to be the scripting put in through lua to handle the various conditions but from my vantage it looks like nothing more than a bunch of if then statements from here  

 

edit: current mondoid (eastoid) suggests trouble starting a car will already be coded. it may be straightforward to port that to generators with some tricky coding, depending on how it gets implemented in lua.

Edited April 17, 2017 by thiosk