Long story short: Interesting offer
. Play the mod for awhile and see if anything comes to mind. I'll likely need more stuff when a20 comes out *if* they beef up questing, so if they do I'll message you and see what we can come up with.
FYI: currently there are some limits to what this mod can (or should do).
- For "reading" stuff, there is a very small limit to what you can put on a single "piece of paper" (due to the size of the item description window). So a lot of the stuff has to fit on 1 piece of "paper" (or an item if it's an item description... like if you wanted to put a backstory on a gun or something).
- For "reading stuff in a particular order", the only way I know of how to do this (today) is to make a bunch of pieces of paper be named "note 1","note 2", etc.
- Since the game has you looting things and its randomly given, the only way to get multiple pieces of paper, in a nice order, is to open a "book" and have it be destroyed and give you all of the pieces of paper.
- The game has a limit on how many "items" it can handle. Its like 10,000 or something (someone correct me if I'm wrong). A lot, but not infinite. Every piece of paper that's a unique note or book holding notes counts as a separate item. Recipes count as items. I'm not sure how many items the vanilla game loads up, but I'd like to keep this mod under 500-1,000 items. There like 200 or so currently...so there's room to grow
- When you go on a "quest" (or mission) you can't be directed to a specific place or POI...today. You also cannot get a "quest item" from a POI quest that is unique ( currently its 1 of 2 hardcoded items). You also have to go to a trader to turn the hardcoded item in to get a "reward"
- Most of the loot is to be found in places where "paper items" or "peoples personal stuff" would be found. Mostly mailboxes, bookshelves, dressers, desks, trash. Basically all the places where crap loot is normally found
so you'll have incentive to loot them.
So, given all the above, I'm hoping to eventually add:
- Quests. Once the game allows having you go to a specific POI, some things really open up. If they can let you daisy chain quests, and the quest "item" to go to the next quest is not one of the hardcoded things you have to go back to the trader, I really wanted to load in a bunch of "stories" that unfurled as you ran through the quest. The "final quest item" would *not* necessarily be something useful (like some mega gun or a bunch of ammo) but instead may be some final note finishing the story, and maybe an item you needed to craft something (or scrap it for another note, etc), or just a collectable.
- Better books: I have a lot of books in the mod, mostly just to spruce up the book finding, and dilute out the loot tables to make finding perk books harder
. I would like to make a few book "series", that have several books in them (Vol 1, Vol2, etc), maybe 2-3 pages each. One I'm thinking of is a special series of recipe books that give you schematics and allow you to craft some special one off things that are mildly useful (never anything OP). Additionally, I'm thinking of a perk tree that would be just for fun...like "literacy" or "bookworm" or something that is completely useless and only gives a useful perk when you read all the books, or something.
- Collectibles: I'd like to make things "more collectible" vs people just scrapping all the stuff. Like maybe if you can collect all the pages/notes from a series you can then craft a book to get a final item or just more of the story.
Anyway:
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All of the "cool fun stuff" is likely to be in quests. I'm hoping in a20 that TFP beefs up the quest system to enable story driven questing. If they do
a lot of this will open up and I'll be needing some backstories.
I'll message you if you're interested if this is do-able in a20 as I don't have any stories for this yet
- I actually have been needing some poetry, as it is likely to be small and fit on a "page". It might make more sense if these were a set of books though, with the poem text just written in the description. I'm looking for stuff that fits in the game (like maybe Arlene writes the poems, and she has a series of books, etc.), or anything just silly/fun/puns/play on words to poke fun at the game ("Every picture on the wall, is the same six faces of them all..." or "So hungry! A question in my head is, if you look in every cabinet and every shed, why you'll never find, a loaf of bread..."). Hard to say, other than I am not a poet
-. Play the mod for awhile and you'll see the text length limitations that exist for the books/items/boxes and think about it.
I'll message you when I update the mod for a20 and see how many might be added and how they might fit in if you're still interested. (probably about 10 small poems most likely)
- TFP is actually planning on throwing in some backstory....someday There's fragments of what it might be on the forums (2 factions fighting, one you can join, etc). I don't know much about it actually. It's likely to come in later updates, as I believe when bandits are added it might come around then. Anyway, this is also kinda a block for writing backstory that fits in nicely with the game. Currently I've been focusing on just "little things people would have left around". I've tried to tie it to the names of the characters of zombies (a little) but some are just named "Nurse" in the game so that's not so easy. Any small backstory I've written is chaotic and piecemeal and completely fabricated from thin air.
