Ideas around looting, containers, items, and scavenging

[Modin]

I've been running into some frustrations:

 

- Looting piles of corpses to find where that knife was is annoying. Foraging and search mode seem like they were made exactly for that, but they won't show items in zombie corpses, only those on the ground.

 

- On the other hand, foraging shows stuff on the ground that nobody cares about. Those dirty rags you threw on the ground. The tin can you threw away after eating. The glasses and hats the zombies dropped when they died. It'd be nice if we could filter that out.

 

- Looting warehouses (and other places with lots of containers) can be a pain. If foraging somehow worked with containers, it could both remove some frustration from the game, and make it a bit more realistic.

 

And to solve these, I came up with a couple ideas...

 

What if we had a new skill called scavenging, which would borrow foraging's search mode but act on containers and items already lying on the ground. It would be foraging's sister-skill.

 

Taking the idea further, what if instead of magically instantly knowing what's in any container around themselves, your toon had to search them. Stand around a container for a very short time in search mode and it will be automatically searched. After all, it takes time to search a corpse's pockets, or a desk's drawers. Every container searched levels the scavenging skill. This would also act on dead zombies. Any container that's searched would from there on always be shown, to avoid running into problems with player-owned containers (like your car's trunk or glovebox... would be silly searching it every time).

 

A higher skill could mean searching faster, and finding more items. After all, scrounging for food and valuables from drawers and cupboards is an art, and an unskilled scavenger could fail to find everything there is.

 

Additionally, like foraging, one could focus on certain types of items. I'm not sure if it'd be wise to limit item types to certain levels like foraging, though. Focus on, say, food items, and now, in search mode, any food item on the ground will show and any container with food will be highlighted (and sorted first in the list of containers). Focus on weapons, and any weapon on a dead zombie around you will show as if it was on the ground, allowing you to pick it up quickly. Focus on nothing and you get nothing, only what foraging will find - no tin cans or glasses or dirty rags.

 

Not sure what else the skill could be used for, but there's more potential. For example, some special "hidey holes" could only show after a certain level, or roll a dice and the higher your level, the more chance you find them. Some of you might have run into houses with money hidden under a floor tile. What if there were many more hidey holes everywhere and they could contain valuables, but only if your toon is skilled enough to find them? After all, a zombie apocalypse team is not complete without an expert scavenger. And the longer into the apocalypse, the more stashes. Not many people hide anything apocalypse-relevant in their homes, but apocalypse survivors have lots of incentive to stash resources around.

 

Anymore ideas? Other frustrations about looting and containers? Please share

Edited November 17, 2022 by Modin

[getstoopid]

Love the idea! =)