More random data on devices

[S0ZDATEL]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

As far as I know, all the smartphones, laptops and e-ink tablets are empty when you find them. Why? Did the Cataclysm erase all the memory on electronics or what?

Solution you would like.

Populate these devices with random data. For example:

• Random photos of animals, places and items. Maybe even have some static ones that refer to the lore, similar to newspapers and stuff... photos of feral people, fires and blood from when the Cataclysm started, of otherworldly creatures, empty food stores, police fighting with riots, photos of static NPC's from before the Cataclysm...
• Songs.
• Books.

That way, when you find a laptop, it might already contain something interesting in its memory...

Describe alternatives you have considered.

No response

Additional context

No response

[NetSysFire]

Whats your version? In the latest experimental there are electronic snippets of just that.

[Qrox]

Did the Cataclysm erase all the memory on electronics or what?

Perhaps the portal storms converted them into human form:

https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/e94f440fe5259cc613575f5ce7d96a459a1aeee8/data/json/monsters/nether.json#L1167-L1190

[S0ZDATEL]

Whats your version? In the latest experimental there are electronic snippets of just that.

I'm playing on stable, and I looked into the new snippets, just glanced at a few to not spoil everything and I already love them. But snippets are not really the same what I mean. What I meant is something useful from the gameplay perspective. You can add the monsters from the photos to your collection, listen to songs to increase your mood and read books stored in the memory. While snippets are cool and can do much more for the lore than all of these, they are useless in a mechanical sense.

Perhaps the portal storms converted them into human form

Then why there is still data on SD-cards? And all the turrets and robots work just fine... if I'm correct, police robots don't attack the player if they are a police officer, and it's not just from the badge because wearing a badge as a non-police character doesn't do anything. So, they must have access to some memory of you to recognize you, which means at least not all the memory is erased.

[Qrox]

That was a half-joke and a half-attempt at explaining the lack of device memory. I agree that it would be nice to add some memory to these devices, probably by reusing the sd-card downloading code to add some content to newly spawned devices.

[ilovehans10]

I would like to add two things for consideration. SD card downloading has always kinda sucked because you can only do one card at a time. This makes it so that in order to download information from 100+ SD cards (all the phones I disassembled after using autopickup though my malls' corpse pile) for each one you have to hit 5 keys. If we are going to make SD cards even more useful, it would be nice if there was a menu similar to multidrop for selecting memory cards to take data from. It's been a minute since I last played, and whoever added this feature to the game, I love you. I also want to say that a similar solution could also make scanning books in after raiding a library less tedious if implemented for that too.

It could be cool to add maps to electronic data so that there are more ways to get maps of the nearby area other than just tourist guides, urban explorer's map, and the like.