Camps

Player-owned camps are one of the more involved aspects of Darkwind. Generally speaking they require a much more long-term outlook, and incorporate a lot of logistic and strategic play not directly related to the 'cars with guns' play that is most of the game.

Camp Features

Camps have the following characteristics and capabilities:

Ownership

One player has overall ownership of a camp. Other players request to join the camp, and can be rejected, accepted as associate members, or accepted as full members. The owner can demote or kick out other players (kicking them out takes a week though, giving them time to evacuate their stuff).

There a couple of ways to become the owner of a camp:

• Buy an existing camp
• Request a new camp

Buying an existing camp

This is the easiest way to become a camp owner, because often times all of the 'hard' work has already been done, and the camp is already producing goods for sale or use.

Request a new camp

Requesting a new camp starts a process of surveying for a camp site and then auctioning the surveyed site.

Requests for surveys are made to the development team, should include the following information:

• Camp size
• Camp location

Size and location are competing factors. In almost all cases larger camps will have to be in the Southern portion of the continent, while smaller ones will be up North. Nothing prevents you from requesting a small camp in the South, but requests for a large camp in the North will most likely be denied, or at least negotiated to a smaller size or a different location.

You will then pay the 'survey fee'. This is usually multiple millions of dollars, and is both an up front cost, and non-refundable.

After the camp is surveyed it will be put up for auction. This is a public auction, so anybody can bid on it, and win it. Yes, it is possible you will have paid the mult-million-dollar survey fee, and be outbid on 'your' camp.

If you win your camp you'll need to start construction.

Membership

There are two types of camp members: Full and Associate

• Full Members have access to all camp features: Market, Tavern, Mechanic, Message Board, and pooled resources. In addition, they are able to see all of the camp details: stock levels, and manufacturing and mechanic information.
• Associate Members have access to the Market and Tavern only.

Hours of Operation

The camp owner decides which hours the camp will be operating, in a 24-hour period. This is set 2 days in advance. The more hours it is open, the more effective the factories and extraction plants will be, but also the more time you will need to be willing to defend the camp from attack.

Local Resources and Extraction

Each camp has a rating describing how abundant local resources are, ranging from excellent to none. Near Somerset, there will tend to be excellent food resources and reasonable water resources, for example. Near Texan there will be excellent fuel resources. These resources determine how effective extraction facilities or crop fields will be, if used in this camp. Extraction facilities produce fuel, water, food, and car parts.

For instance, in the example here:

Local Resources:

• Water: low
• Food: good
• Fuel: none
• Metals: none
• Stone: none

There are no resources for Fuel, Metals(Car Parts) or Stone. There will never be an option to build an extractor for these materials in this example. However, You can build a Pumpkin Field for Food production using up to 5 NPC workers to produce food at a 'good' rate. (Approximately 100 units of food per day with 5 workers.) You can also build a Water Tower and drill for water using 5 workers to produce water at a 'low' rate. (Approximately 30 to 50 units of water with 5 workers)

Other camps can have production rates of Excellent, good, poor or none in ANY of the local resources available at the current camp site. In the case of 'excellent' local resource recovery, you can expect upwards of 200 to 400 units PER DAY using your NPC workers!... VERY lucrative!

Buildings

Various types of camp buildings exist: houses, lockups, extraction plants for fuel, water, and metals, crop fields, factories, mechanic shops. Buildings are bought and placed by the camp owner on an overhead graphical view on the website. They take typically several days and quite a bit of $ to build. The placement of the buildings will be replicated in the 3D game when you have a combat there.

Buildings each require a specific amount of Upkeep and the amount of upkeep a camp has available is based on the Camp Fame X 100. Example, if Fame is 348 then the amount of Building Upkeep the camp can support is a maximum of 34800.

Upkeep costs are the same for all camps, and they are simply a linear calculation based on % activity.

The amounts listed in the table below are per week and are based on the building running at 100%.

Building	Upkeep Cost
Mechanic Shop	3000
House	750
Lockup Building	500
Water Plant	1000
Oil Plant	2000
Factory	12000
Pumpkin Field	250
Metals Plant	3000
Stone Plant	1000
Plastics Plant	2000

Mechanics

Each mechanic building can facilitate 4 mechanic characters. So if you have say two mechanic buildings, the best 8 mechanics in the camp will automatically use them. The number of mechanics and their skill levels determines two things: (1) how much work they can do in each 24 hour period, and (2) the camp’s overall mechanic rating which determines which items the camp can repair or manufacture. Rare weapons for example will require a high mechanic rating to produce, and also a badly damaged rare weapon will require a high mechanic rating to fix. The camp maintains a public supply of fuel and car parts. This is controlled directly by the camp owner. When any camp member wants to refuel or get mechanic work done, it is this public supply that must be well-stocked enough to facilitate it. There must also be adequate mechanic workload available to do a piece of work. The mechanic workload rating of a camp also determines how much total CR of cars can be housed there. If there are more cars than this, they will start to take damage due to being inadequately protected from the weather and inadequately worked on for maintenance.

ALL work done by the mechs in camp cost nothing! ie: in Somerset, you are charged to repair your armor and chassis components. In a camp that you are a member of, it will not cost you anything! Ask the camp owner the best time to schedule your repairs since the MR (Mechanic Rating) of the camp is affected by the Factory production AND ANY repairs being done to the members cars!

The camp owner will likely ask you to NOT repair your vehicles or components until later in the day (usually after 20:00 server time) Because the Factory production will have finished by that time and the full weapon production will be finished.

Camp Owner’s Stock

The trade goods stock (fuel, car parts, water, food) in the camp owner’s lockup is known by all camp members (although they cannot access it). This is because all payment and all production is fed through the camp owner’s lockup: it is up to him to negotiate with the other camp members how much they must pay him and how much he must pay them or which manufactured goods they should get.

Lockups

Every camp member (associate and full) gets the use of a lockup. However, if the total bulk of goods in all lockups exceeds the amount of space available in Lockup buildings, some of the stuff will start to take damage due to lying out in the radioactive rain. The amount of bulk used by each member’s lockup is shown publicly to all camp members. So you can bitch at each other when your stuff starts to rust

Pooled Resources

Full members can flag any vehicle and character that they own as ‘pooled’. These vehicles/characters are then available for other full members to use in their squads.

Manufacturing

Factories are used to manufacture chassis, tyres, weapons, ammunition and engines. It costs $ and time to reconfigure a factory to make a different type of item. The items that can be made are determined by the mechanic rating of the camp.

NPC Workers

Oil plants, water plants, crop fields, factories and metals plants all require NPC workers. To get these workers, the camp owner must ensure that there is adequate housing, food and water available on a daily basis. Each NPC worker also must be paid $10 per day. A large camp would probably have no more than 100 or 200 NPC workers in it. A small one could have as little as 20 or 30. Player characters are also fed in the camp, and will have no weekly food/water fee while staying there.

Message Board and other Info

Each camp has a private message board, for discussion/planning. There is also financial and production information made available so all full members are aware of how much stuff is being manufactured and how much profit/loss the camp owner is making.

Marketplace

It is free to list stuff for sale in a camp marketplace. The marketplace is available to full and associate members of the camp.