Faction Camps

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Guide initially based on 0.E (Ellison)
Some of the information present here might not apply to future versions.

“ Basecamps are mostly vanity projects that aren't really worth building. - mlangsdorf, author of much of the Faction Camp code  ”

Faction camps are a new feature that provide a way for players to build a community for their NPC followers and would-be generals an army to send to their deaths against hulks and psychopathic cannibals to keep the meat fresh and in one place

Creation

To create a faction camp, do the following:

1. Go to an eligible overworld tile with a follower NPC
2. Talk to NPC C
3. Say There's something I want you to do
4. Say Let's talk about faction camp
5. Confirm location.

If current tile is ineligible, the NPC will suggest other tiles. If follower refuses to build a faction camp without providing a good reason, they are probably a Hallucination.

Locations

The easiest way to create a faction camp is to take over an existing building. Currently buildings supporting this include fire lookout towers, helipads, lighthouses, light industry, mansions, military outposts, pottery cottages, radio towers, small sealabs, and fire stations.

A single empty field tile is necessary for starting a modular base; it is recommended that the 8 adjacent tiles be grass as well, to leave room for future expansion. Placing a base near sources of wood and water (fresh and salt, ideally) is advisable as well, along with low zombie (and other hostile creature) activity, unless one desires a particularly lively base.

Your workforce

A single NPC is needed to create a camp; this is done by engaging them in conversation. Tell them you need them to do something, then tell them to start a camp. You'll get a warning message if you're not near water and forests, asking if you really want to proceed. If all goes well, a single bulletin board will appear, and from that humble board, you may order your NPCs to perform building projects or gather resources.

Likewise, NPCs can be assigned to the camp via conversation. You can assign them specific tasks, or just have them stand guard. You can also assign them via two way radios, if you and the NPC have them.

It is recommended to play with the "Disable NPC Needs" mod enabled; NPCs are currently not very good at doing the basic work of keeping themselves alive. See discussion of calories further down.

Depending on the source of your NPCs, they may not be very skilled. You can improve their skills by reading to them or having them read; currently martial arts skills and the (added in 0.F (Frank)) professions cannot be taught this way.

NPCs are capable of producing a small handful of crafts that benefit you or the faction camp. With the central building, they are able to produce a few wood products, and very simple foods. With a canteen upgrade, they are capable of cooking a number of more advanced recipes, capable of dehydrating fruit, canning meat, pickling vegetables, making pemmican, producing jerky, and a few other simple recipes. The Fabrication workshop is the only other building which allows NPCs to produce further crafts, from which they can produce a number of metal components and resources (used in other crafts, such as lumps of steel, pipes, nails, etc), a few different types of tools, and a very limited selection of arms and armor.

Zones

Zones are key to working with Faction Camps. They're how you can define what areas are storehouses. You'll be required to create a storage and food zone for the base, and it will likely be useful to create other zones to help you organize your supplies.

Auxiliary Structures

A number of different structures can be built. These include homes with beds and fireplaces, wells, radio towers, farm fields, garages, and dining halls. These can expand the sorts of tasks you can have your NPC workforce perform - for example, farming for crops, disassembling vehicles for parts, making food, or forging equipment. These are, like your central base, built from the bulletin board, and require similarly large investments in materials.

Types of Materials

There's no way around it - vast, vast quantities of materials are going to be needed to build out anything but a single room or two. Building a faction camp is far and away the biggest resource sink in the entire game - nothing else comes close. While there are a number of building projects that require special components or equipment, most of the basic structural work is done with one of seven different sets of materials. Note that as a consequence of buildings being built section by section, you're absolutely free to mix and match sections as taste or (more likely) available resources dictate.

• Wood: The standard by which all other methods "wood" be judged. If you pine for the old world, this material might just be for you. (Ok, I'll stop, these puns are knot funny.) Easy for your NPCs to work with, and not too difficult to acquire, particularly if you have access to a lumber mill. Fab 3, hammer/wood saw level 2.

• Logs: Wood's rustic, old-fashioned older brother. Logs have the advantage of being relatively straightforward to acquire, if you have wood cutting implements, NPCs, and nearby forests. Fab 3, dig/hammer/wood saw level 2.

• Wattle and Daub: Wood, nails, sand/clay, water, organic matter - a little bit of everything is needed here. A bit slower than wood construction, perhaps 10-15%. Fab 3, survival 3, cut 1, hammer/saw level 2.

• Metal: If you have a good source of steel, solid skills, and tools, this may be a good option for you. Roughly 50% longer to build compared to wood. Fab 7(!), dig/drill/metal sawing level 1, hammer/wood sawing/wrench level 2.

• Rammed Earth: Soil compressed into hard walls. If you've dug trenches around your camp, you likely have lots of soil to work with and no clear idea of how to use it - this is a good way to use it up. Seems to take about twice as long as wood construction. Fab 3, survival 2, cut 1, dig/hammer/wood sawing level 2.

• Rock: Good for indulging a Dwarf Fortress craving. Much like with rammed earth, you'll likely have a lot of rock sitting around if you dug trenches around your camp. Fab 6, survival 2, dig/hammer/wood sawing level 2.

• Resin Pods: If you've got a big pair of tentacles and don't care who knows it, this might be for you. Requires much less material and skill compared to other sets of materials, and no fasteners or other auxiliary materials, but can be difficult to acquire in useful quantities. Note that this is resin pods, not just the bits of resin you get from smashing the tower. Also takes roughly half the time of wood. Fab 2 and smoothing level 1 tool.

An interesting issue of scale...

Based on looking through the JSON (which can be tricky to understand) let's do some quick comparisons of wood and resin buildings.

To completely build the central building with wood:

• 5648 planks
• 27776 nails
• 1338 wooden panels
• 14 sheets of glass
• 72 hinges.

In terms of volume, that's roughly 25000 L of planks, 25500 L of panels, 70L of nails, 175L of glass, and 3L of hinges.

Meanwhile, building the central building out of alien resin pods should take 1046 units, which is roughly 23000L.

To put it another way, wood requires roughly 200 cargo carriers worth of materials*, while all the resin pods you need takes up about half that, which is still nothing to sneeze at.

(* - it's actually a bit worse than this, since good luck fitting all that stuff in neatly!)

Other Useful Materials

Vehicles

As mentioned before, vast quantities of materials are going to be needed for even relatively small constructions. What your player can carry, or even what you can tote around in a shopping cart, is just not going to cut it, even if you're trying to rely on log harvesting by your NPCs as a source of material. Fortunately, the problem of transporting large quantities of materials is an old one, and is adequately addressed by the humans of the early 21st century in the form of powered vehicles.

It is probably going to be easier to rely on found vehicles then building your own entirely from scratch. Some things to look for in a vehicle:

1. Cargo space, as much as you can get. It is a fairly simple operation to remove unneeded seats, boxes, trunks and other lesser forms of storage for the glorious 250L provided by the cargo carrier. This is your bread and butter right here.
2. All of that stuff is going to be heavy - perhaps really heavy. This is probably going to inflict fuel efficiency penalties on you, and may damage the engine if you attempt to go too fast - or it may refuse to move at all. A large diesel engine is likely your best bet. JP8 engines might work, but the fuel for it seems to be rarer. Gasoline can work as well, as long as you don't go hog wild adding new frames and cargo carriers to the vehicle. Electric vehicles are probably off the table, unless you're a real expert at vehicle design and understand the weight/storage battery/solar panel tradeoffs well.
3. Consider carefully the route you want to take. A route that gets you to your sources of materials via roads means you can get away with a less ruggedly built vehicle than one that has to do a lot of off-roading. Likewise, traveling across open areas is much less taxing than going through crowded downtowns full of stray abandoned cars and angry zombie hordes. Balance the weight of armor, spikes, heavy frames etc. against the fact that your vehicle is going to be weighed down with building materials. Scouting ahead and clearing a path of vehicles and zombies can let you get away with building less survivability in the vehicle itself.
4. Consider adding a bike rack to the vehicle. You can then attach a shopping cart - which you've removed the basket from, and added a cargo carrier to - onto the back of the vehicle, to help you collect materials at the remote location, as well as haul them when you return to base.
5. Finally, keeping an acetylene torch, superglue, a spare tire, some MREs, water or purification tablets, and ammo in the vehicle is never a bad plan, because Shit Happens, particularly during the apocalypse.

Pickup trucks are often close to ideal, but humvees, security vans, ambulances, and even Low End Cube Vans (all modified to have cargo carriers) can all be viable. Tractor trailers can be tempting for the large amount of storage they can provide, but can also be very unwieldy to drive. Most larger military vehicles have a lot of armor, heavy frames and hence, high JP8 requirements.

NPCs

NPCs are the heart and soul of all you do with Faction Camps - otherwise it's much easier to just take over a house and arrange it to suit your needs. Building projects generally take several days, sometimes as much as two weeks, and many of these projects need to be done for a single square. This need for labor is magnified if you want to build a kitchen, forge, farm, etc.

You can, of course, with patience build an entire mini-village with the labor of a single NPC, but it will be completed much more quickly with more labor. Because of the piecemeal way in which most buildings are built, it typically seems that two laborers per square is about as much as you can build at one time, though there are a few exceptions (trench digging comes to mind) where you can exceed this. Depending on the square, you probably also have two or three jobs that NPCs can perform as well.

1. One way to recruit NPCs is simply to find NPCs in the world who ask you to do quests for them. After a few quests, they may be receptive to an invitation to come join you, and you can either have them start a new camp or take them to, or tell them to go to, an existing camp. However, there are a few other approaches you can take if you want to get a larger workforce in a hurry:
2. There are 5 beggars at the Refugee Center, which can be located from the computer in any Evac center. You'll need to do some quests for them - one is nuts and won't join you, but the other 4 will join if you you complete their quests. In my play-through, two of them had long lists of negative traits, which can make them suboptimal combatants, but building projects don't seem to care much about most of the negative traits.
3. Another way is rescuing prisoners from Mi-Go structures. This can be challenging, for two reasons. First, the Mi-Go towers are dangerous environments - hot and difficult to breathe in. Second, the materials Mi-Go use are incredibly durable. A jackhammer can free prisoners from their cages, but takes time - which is in short supply, unless you're extremely well protected from the hostile environment. The Sonic Resonator CMB can bust open the cages, though it might take a few attempts, and is a rare drop - it's possible to loot an entire underground lab and not find one. Finally, plowing a sturdy vehicle into the tower can work as a "brute force & ignorance" method, but you need to aim carefully so as to not kill the prisoner you're attempting to save.

Beggars and Prisoners in particular start poorly-equipped. This (probably) isn't a huge problem if you intend on shepherding them to the camp yourself - you weren't planning on taking them through the Acid Ant Fields or through Downtown Hulksville, right? - but you may want to give some thought to equipping them. By talking to them, you can find out what sorts of skills they have, which can suggest how you might want to equip them. Army gear, either looted from zombie soldiers and friends, and then washed & mended, or else in pristine shape from the barracks lockers found in labs, is a solid starting choice. Depending on whether you wish to use them in combat, upgrading them with armor, either found or fabricated, can help improve their odds of survival.

The other thing to keep in mind is that while occasionally NPCs will start with useful skills, most of the time they won't, and even when they do, might not have all the skills you'll need for construction. You'll generally need at least 4s in Fabrication, 3 or 4 in Survival, and at least one with advanced mechanical and electronics skills. Fortunately, it's not hard to round up your NPCs for storytime. A few days of reading books to your gang can turn them from useless layabouts to a skilled construction crew, capable of mysteriously disappearing for days at a time and then suddenly making buildings pop into existence. In between jobs, you can read to them to improve their ranged or melee skills. 3 is all you can do for combat skills, and you can't teach them martial arts, but that's not terrible if you get Marksman and Rifle or Shotgun to that rank.

Tools

See above section. But seriously, there's not too much to say here. The same sorts of tools you'd want for yourself are going to be needed here - axes, saws, hammers, shovels, and pickaxes are all going to be needed - keep several of each in case your NPCs are sloppy about returning them, or you want to work on multiple projects as once (which you do.) An arc welder is needed if you're working with metal - building a small pseudo-vehicle with a few solar panels, a battery, and a recharging station to chuck batteries in should keep you in business. A metal smoother is necessary if you are working with resin, you brave soul. NPCs can use vehicle powered crafting stations if they are placed in a 'Basecamp: Storage' zone. This means that they are able to use a FOODCO to dehydrate food, an arc welder for repairs, etc.

Calories

Even with NPC needs disabled, your NPCs will need 2500 calories per 24 hours of labor performed. However, the source of the calories is less important: you don't need to worry about balanced diets or enjoyment very much. Rotten or old food has reduced calorie values, and anything with -6 or lower enjoyment will be rejected. Foods that require processing (like most nuts) also need to be processed (i.e. shelled) in order to be consumable by your NPCs.

The obvious thing to do is gather the same sorts of food you'd feed your character and dump it in their food drop off zone. More sneakily, you can use sources of food you might want to avoid yourself (candy, other junk foods, anything your character is allergic to) as food for NPCs. However, it's possible to use even more unorthodox sources of calories if you wish. Historically, fermentation was a way of preserving food - including fruits and grains! - and indeed alcohol has calorie content in Cataclysm DDA. A keg of beer possesses around 22000 calories - roughly 9 days of labor for an NPC. Wine and liquor barrels are also available. Beyond liquor stores and bars, mansions, private resorts and even the basements of regular homes can provide delicious liquid calories for your workforce.

Benefits & Drawbacks

It's worth asking, why go to all this trouble?

Currently, it's possible to construct/convert a home to you liking, and by having "Disable NPC Needs" and telling them to stand guard you can populate your base however you wish.

One advantage Faction Camps offer is the ability to assign tasks to NPCs: foraging for food, farming, cutting wood, etc. that some players may find tedious to do on their own. Likely, as features continue to be added, more possibilities will open up.

Another advantage, perhaps more appealing to role-players, is the idea of leading a community to build a new start in the world, instead of inhabiting the monster-filled ruins of the old. Building structures requires large amounts of resources, and Cataclysm is very much a game where the fun is emergent: Getting enough wood to build a cabin challenges you to find or build a vehicle with enough capacity to carry large amounts of cargo from a distant location, to scout such a location (hardware stores, lumber mills, etc.) out, to have a reason to keep raiding grocery stores or gun shops or start farming (to feed and arm your people) and so forth.

See also

• NPC
• Construction