Generators - Low Tech Electricity and Lighting

[Xidian]

That is true, but I think for it to be a true sandbox we will get to chose how we want to progress.

[Book]

I think we should start off with farming as our first advancement, which should only be accessable to tribes that are advanced enough to discover it. Then animal taming after to plow the farms ..... we EVENTUALLY discover internal combustion engines.

I could see large scale farming being limited to large tribes with the land and labor to manage it, but in the long run, a homestead without a vegetable garden, a horse, a couple cows, chickens, and perhaps some honey bees, isn't much of a homestead .
Far as the combustion engine... shouldn't we wonder what caused the apocalypse to begin with before we consider pollution-producing technologies? just sayin'...

[Shaggy]

Glad I searched rather than start a new thread. Figured I'll just give my idea of how electricity could work with this game:

I noticed other people keep mentioning farming has to come before electricity, and technically it does not. Electricity can be captured by wind or water currents so one could easily build a water wheel or a windmill out of scavenged parts that powers a little generator. You could scavenge pieces of wire, splice them together (extremely fast and easy to do in real life, so it makes sense here) and run them from the generator to anything that needs it, providing that generator is producing the right amount of power. Maybe there could be a 5th resource on junk piles called "electrical parts" or something along those lines. Bigger water wheels/generators could affect the total power output. The first things that we'd get should be basic, like lights, basic heater/ac, microwaves (assuming cooking will come before them), things of that nature. Later on (weeks/months) we "discover" how to piece together alarms, motion detector, or even some sort of communications tool (radio).

To those who think electricity should be no less than a year or two away would add to the realism of a post-apocalyptic setting: if you're trying to survive the fallout from an apocalypse that you were alive before the fact, and for multiple years you continue to fail to produce electricity, you will be at a serious disadvantage from anyone else that is competing for resources because they will likely try to get electricity themselves. Whether it's from a simple portable generator that runs on fuel, some sort of solar panel, or a mechanical means of production (water wheel, for example), an adult survivor should definitely be able to produce electricity or figure out a way into a working grid (finding a working power outlet somewhere, not that that necessarily applies here though). Our characters are supposed to be at least close to twenty years old around ~2012. Don't you think even people as young as 14/15 would have heard of generators?

[Neo70]

Better use the alcohol for drinking and for motorbikes and small cars