devtrackers.gg
So I'm kind of new to this game. I've had it for a while but never actually sat down and made an honest go of it, so I've been doing that the past week or so. I have it on normal difficulty, zombies jog at night, ferals run, and everything sprints on a bloodmoon every 14 days, which I figured was enough for me to learn the ropes and get a decent setup going. I'll prolly switch it back to 7 when I know what I'm doing a bit more.
But I digress. Allow me to relate a tale of poor decisions and poorer reactions. About a man with no legs and a factory of woe.
So I'm set up in the burned forest, which has been pretty cool so far, and I'm learning stuff, especially when it comes to efficiently and thoroughly looting POIs, which is super fun so far, especially when the POI is laid out like a puzzle.
I'm about 10 days in when I decide to take on something a bit larger, and so I tackle the shotgun messiah factory, which is conveniently near my base (also using a custom world seed). Needless to say, it was damn rough. It took a couple days to loot it entirely, and while not painful, pretty tedious after a while for not a huge amount of gain. I tell my buddy that if I ever suggest doing something like that again to remind me that I am in fact an idiot.
So naturally a few days later I'm eyeing the Shamway Factory.
"It can't be nearly as bad" I think to myself. "It's MUCH smaller than the shotgun messiah place."
How wrong I was.
So, ground floor. I find all the crates and only break down one wall until I realized that the "path" the devs want you to take is above the acoustical tiles in the restaurant, but fortunately I didn't skip all that much. I get to the main factory floor and make my way up, through the first lab, making sure to jump to the elevator and get a few extra crates. Good stuff so far, nothing I can't handle has shown up. I take a few hits but I'm in mixed iron/steel and they don't do much.
Then I come to the part where you exit the building through the window and can optionally jump to one of the loot silos. No worries, done stuff like this tons of times, I got this.
So as I'm limping over to get a splint out of my staging area, having fallen and snapped my first leg, I reflect that I should really just start using wood frames to build across bullsh*t like that. I do the walk (and at this point, in unmodded heavy armor, I AM walking) of shame back to the jump, and like a schmuck I just bridge the gap. Fortunately 11 shamway crates in the silo take the sting of embarrassment away pretty well.
So, after that, I ascend ever higher, until coming to a point about halfway up the central silo, where a bridge spans through it to enter a higher level of the adjacent factory floor.
When I hit the ground, and the remains of the catwalk is dropping on my head I think to myself that at this point, maybe as I'm getting food from this place, the factory is eating me in return. Fortunately I didn't snap my damn leg again, but still almost died from all the debris.
After having a bit of a lie down to grab a snack and heal up, I soldier on. This damn factory won't beat me. Surely it'll be worth it at the end. I abscond with the top-secret Sham recipe, which is pretty neat, and it felt good to ruin some dead office workers' faces with my sledge. I'm on the roof. The end is close enough to taste. I'm back inside, seemingly in some sort of control room, having fallen through (yet another) false catwalk. It was a short drop but the dead are pouring through the walls, and a LOT of them are glowing. I panic, trying to retreat enough to fire, as hopeless as that is with only a hunting rifle and pistol.
So this time, I'm falling through the entire factory, hitting one pipe, then slipping off to hit another. My other leg is thoroughly trashed and I'm basically f*cking Goofy from one of those slapstick animations. In my panic, I had managed to back off the control room platform. Fortunately I am not dead, and where there's life, there's hope. I'm also in a fairly decent spot to pick off the dead, which are now all around me, frantically smashing things in a vain search to get to where I'm perched. I kill what I can, and limp back outside to make another damn splint.
Making my way back to the control room is, fortunately, fairly uneventful, with only a few stragglers, easily picked off or mauled. I enter the last silo, and notice a hidden stash crate below the ladder. Nice. Unfortunately in trying to get back to the ladder, my character doesn't quite attach, and surprise surprise, I fall yet again, breaking my (third?) leg. I've thoroughly had it at this point. I'm completely out of bandages, but somehow still not dead (though at this point kind of wishing I was). I build a ladder back to the roof, and finally, after something like 4 in-game days, I stand before the final loot pile.
I got a decent haul, all told. 3.5 storage crates worth of stuff, including more sham than you can shake a stick at... but at what cost? Needless to say, the factory ate its fill as well. Thanks, Shamway, even in the apocalypse you still manage to make people completely lose their appetite.
I'm going home.
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