I’m not sure what to tell you.
Imagine a school, a proper one. There is a front office and front entrance. The school is littered with windows on every room on all floors. There is a cafeteria to loot food and food-making supplies from. There are classrooms full of paper, cloth, backpacks, clothes, glue, tape, and so on. Books could be added to the game, which would either be used like notes to save a message for someone, or to be scraped into paper (which could be used to craft things, or just craft into cloth). These books could come in all the basic colors that everything else comes in as well.
There is the janitors closet full of cleaning supplies like chemicals, or cleaning tools like a broom that can be broken down into metal.
There is the gymnasium, where Nelson could potentially add silly little mechanics like being able to pick up a ball and throw it - and no, not just a re-textured grenade that doesn’t explode kind of throwing. If the gym is receiving power, then an air horn can go off if you make a shot as if the gym still functions.
The sports equipment could be scraped for metal. New sports clothes could be added to the game to accommodate for gymnasiums, baseball fields, olympic fields, and so on such as track clothes,easily recognizable baseball clothes, referee clothes, and so on.
The outside recess yard, if an elementry school, could have little wooden huts, chain swings, and the big fun structures like this. Why can’t this be in the damn game? I loved this as a kid. Unturned’s largest portion of the audience is literally kids. The playground could really be interesting cover for PvP, making players really think of where to stand instead of “go behind wall. go behind tree”. Its an interesting shape.
The bathrooms could contain easter eggs with something inside the toilet, or graffiti on the wall that conveys something important (or not). Perhaps another gimmick funny item could be a roll of toilet paper you can throw, creating a streamy mess that disappears after a while. Now you can TP other players houses.
“I wear a Fez hat, Fezzes are cool.”
Each of the school rooms are a potential base waiting to be made. All a player has to do is board up the door to the room and the windows on the wall, and place a safezone generator. Imagine science labs with chemicals, goggles, lab gowns, so on. Imagine the library full of bookshelves.Maybe they can be static wooden bookshelves that you can actually put XP into for the hell of it to trade with your friend. Might as well do it while you’re there, right?
Or maybe there can be new custom bookshelf models that aren’t the makeshift models. Maybe books could be left abandoned on the library tables, most will have gibberish text, but one or two has an easter egg for the title of the book. Example “Making Textures for Dummies, by Nelson Sexton” With the untextured player as the book cover.
Imagine a computer lab with lootable computer stuff (if that ever gets added to the game). That same computer stuff could be looted from military bases too, in towers or such (imagine the satellite tower in DayZ at the airfield, with the extensive computers and junk everywhere).
Imagine the deans office where kids get written up, have in-school suspension, and so on. For lore or easter egg, there could be a note on or under the desk written by the dean, with a list of naughty “students”.
There could be funny student-made posters and artwork decorating the halls. For the teaching lounge, front office, deans office, and other adult spaces there could be lame inspirational posters reminiscent of 2000’s with that classic bottom text.
For the teaching lounge there would be tables, stacks of papers to review and grade, a microwave, fridge, sink, water dispenser, maybe theres a hidden note under one of the tables from a mischievous, troubled kid that says “Danaby wuz here!”
Maybe before the apoc one room was taken over by kids as part of an after-school club, adorning memey posters and artwork on the wall, a console, chess and other board games, maybe its a robotics team and they have a robot in the classroom. Or maybe post-apoc a group of kids take over a room, board up the windows, and make it their little paradise for a while, maybe they live off of the hundreds of abandoned packages of school food still left in the cafeteria storage.
In my school we had “learning cottages” which were literally just trailers outside of the main school building that were extra classrooms for Social Studies. Maybe something funny like that could be added. Those could be a cool base because its “hidden in plain sight”
Maybe there can be a note by Mr Schofield, a social studies teacher, complaining about wanting real classrooms. Then a note beside it written by the principal guaranteeing Mr Schofield that those are in fact “real classrooms”.
Imagine there is a welding metal-working class with scrap metal and other metal things like cans. Imagine there is an art room wtih art supplies and more abstract Unturned paintings. Imagine there is a wood-working classroom with saws and a comedically badly made wooden chair, presumably made by a student.
Imagine there is a choir or music room, with instruments (maybe Nelson can ask to integrate that one workshop mod with the guitars into the game, just as he integrated free-form glass into the game from the workshop). There can be instruments people are familiar with, microphones with microphone stands, a frontal stand for the person who guides the choir. There can be posters with musical notes or sheet music (perhaps a set of sheet music can be a meme. One sheet could be the Unturned theme, another could be Rickroll).
NOW IMAGINE AN ENTIRE FUCKING COLLEGE CAMPUS? Long sight lines for sniping, so on. Paths, trees, statues, open courtyards, bush hedges,
Have I convinced you yet? All it takes is a bit of creativity. This is the kind of shit I wanted to make in my Delaware (or Brooklyn) map.