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0XP RolMod A18

Let me ask this then. In your opinion when should ferals start making an appearance? I was thinking 2nd or 3rd week of the game but are you feeling like they should be appearing during the first week?
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I generally feel ready to take on some more powerful zeds by day 5 or 6. After starting a new game, I am getting some ferals mid to late week 2 so I think you are actually pretty spot on to your goal. I think it may be a bit skewed because your progression system, like I was saying earlier, makes for an easier start with a ton more points for the cheap skills and more difficult later as those skills get really expensive.

I would also note here there is another side effect of handling levels the way you have done as well - environmental protection now lasts almost the entire first week. Normally it is gone day 2. It is stark enough that weather is pretty close to being disabled as I do not think I have ever lasted until day 5 without finding a decent set of clothing. The jury is still out IMHO if this is better than vanilla or not though, lol.

I was also the idiot that played a16 on nightmare, 64 zeds, zeds always run and DiD so take my balance thoughts with that in mind :D 17 has a MUCH better difficulty curve though so I do play that on some pretty standard settings - warrior, day walk and 32 zeds.

So quests...... It's a tough choice. Here is why I decided to have quests award skillpoints:

1) I read a lot of feedback that quests were generally not worth the rewards especially the higher tier quests. I kind of felt the same way and I knew that there was little in the game as valuable as skillpoints. Making a skillpoint be part of the reward would definitely make them worth doing.
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Fair point. There certainly is never a point when quests are not at least somewhat pivotal. I always thought the rewards were decent enough but then again that is really only true in the beginning of the game when an iron pickax may men an entire REAL TIME HOUR saved to mine for some early building.

2) Quests involve doing activities that are "playing the game". You are exploring the world, clearing and looting a poi, and going head to head against zombies while trying not to die. So creating a situation where people would farm quests seemed acceptable because of the travel time, the risk, and the variety of activities involved. At least it wasn't the same as doing one action repetitively for hours.
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.....

this makes a crap ton of sense. I guess that is why 'grinding' quests did not really feel like the grinding that vanilla foisters on you. Variety.

3) There is a thematic connection between doing a job for the trader who is obviously an experienced survivalist and gaining some training from him in some area of your choice. So the skillpoint increasing cooking wasn't because you went out and killed a bunch of zombies and retrieved a package. The skillpoint increasing cooking was representative of you asking the trader, "So...what's the best way to cook up bacon and egss without ruining it?" And because you did him the favor he decides to help you out in area you desired some help.

4) Finally, I wanted there to be a way for players to gain points more quickly than once per day if they so desired. Go clear some zombies, then dig up a stash, and then retrieve a package will net you 3 extra points but they weren't free and you have to do all that traveling.
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I would say that you achieved both points rather well, integrating the points into quests does give the player much control over progressing and nothing about it breaks immersion.

The bad?

1) Quests right now are pretty meh... But that is just right now. As new quests are created and hopefully fan-made quests are also created this will get a lot better.
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That would really integrate will with your mod.

2) Trader becomes even more critical to the game which some people really hate. But I don't. The more I play the more I like the trader but I want his landclaim removed. I want zombies busting in while I'm trading with him and I have to kill them and help him make repairs. I want to live in his base and not get kicked out. For multiplayer with people you don't know of course you want an invulnerable trader. But for single player and playing with friends/family...nobody is going to try and kill the trader but everyone would want to protect him if necessary.

So I think removing the landclaim and the teleport away after 10pm is what I'd like to add next. But...at any rate I know that for those who don't like the trader this mod works against them because you can't ignore the bonus skillpoints for doing jobs very easily.
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MOstly a matter of play style here but I would agree. Having the trader as central does not really bother me and TFP seems like they want the trader integrated into core game play anyway.

3) Players could possibly easily outpace the gamestage difficulty curve by farming quests and earning skillpoints to the point that they become invulnerable long before gamestages makes things harder. I can adjust the economy of the attributes and perks to be more expensive but then that just makes the trader and quests become that much more important in the eyes of players.
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True. I think you are pretty damn close to an ideal split right now as well though a true perfect difficulty curve is not possible as there is a pretty wide variety of differing skill between players.

This was my experience as well. Plus it is really funny. I truly believe that I am up to the task for pretty much anything so I don't wait to do a quest until I get my skillpoints because I honestly don't believe that I'm going to die. I feel very optimistic and I want the skillpoint from the quest along with the ones that will be coming at the end of the day. So then I end up dying because I got greedy and over encumbered myself, or I forgot to craft bandages and a lucky hit makes me start bleeding, or, or, or.... When you were planning to get four skillpoints and you lose all four and now have to wait a whole hour to get one...Well, I was very angry AT MYSELF for not having the bandages on hand.
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LOL. Yes, as I have played DiD for awhile now, slot 9 on my tool belt is for bandages and only bandages. Never will there be anything else there but bandages. If there are no bandages in that slot the most likely reason is that I actually died and someone else is playing my character because there is zero chance that a bandage is not there when I am playing :D

I've been experimenting with trying to remove the protection from trader POI's. I suspect (but don't know for sure yet) that going to the trader might be a bit more interesting if zombies can start breaking in. You may eventually find that you need to do some repairs (or even upgrades) to the trader's base and it might be fun to even try a bloodmoon defending his base and keeping him safe through the night.
I have gone into the prefabs folder and changed all the settlement_trader_01 through 05 prefabs first by deleting the properties having to do with protection and teleporting and then just changing their values. Neither of those did anything. Next up is to change the property "trader area" from true to false which may break the "find the trader" quest but might turn off protections also.

If anyone has any other ideas or has already solved removing the protection and would permit me to use their work in my mod I would be grateful. Could be there is a hidden hard coded component to the trader protection....
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This could be interesting. There are 2 things that would make me hesitate on something like this -

1 - A persistent world. TES and Fallout had this problem with NPC's (and those game had extras). A persistent world with perma death NPCs means that the longer the world lasts the less populated it will become. As you point out, traders are rather central to the current game and your MOD increases that. Removing the protection would open the possibility that you are going to have no traders at some point and at the very least the one you visit the most and is likely close to home base will die. I hope your base is not too elaborate - you might want to move it at that point.

2 - Trader bases are designed like garbage from a defensive prospective. A singular horde would shred it and do so quite early before you could entirely rebuild a reasonable defensive structure for the immovable trader.

I like the idea but think that there would have to be some hefty reworking of the base game to have the player participate in making a defensive structure that actually has the chance at defending from the horde. I could be wrong about these 2 things though as the zeds would not be treating the trader structure as a primary target but destructive mode would still cause a ton of damage as well as the base being a primary target when you are actually in it.

 
khaine has in darkness Falls unprotected dealers ?
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Thanks. I ended up trying changing the Trader Area property to false and deleting the properties dealing with protection and it worked. I also looked at Khaine's prefabs folder and confirmed that this is what he did as well so at least I know it is a tested method. :)

I would also note here there is another side effect of handling levels the way you have done as well - environmental protection now lasts almost the entire first week.
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I will look into this. I might remove the buff entirely. I never liked it. If the Duke dumps you in the middle of the snow or desert then it will make it that much more satisfying if you come back from that without dying...

This could be interesting. There are 2 things that would make me hesitate on something like this - 1 - A persistent world. TES and Fallout had this problem with NPC's (and those game had extras). A persistent world with perma death NPCs means that the longer the world lasts the less populated it will become. As you point out, traders are rather central to the current game and your MOD increases that. Removing the protection would open the possibility that you are going to have no traders at some point and at the very least the one you visit the most and is likely close to home base will die. I hope your base is not too elaborate - you might want to move it at that point.

2 - Trader bases are designed like garbage from a defensive prospective. A singular horde would shred it and do so quite early before you could entirely rebuild a reasonable defensive structure for the immovable trader.

I like the idea but think that there would have to be some hefty reworking of the base game to have the player participate in making a defensive structure that actually has the chance at defending from the horde. I could be wrong about these 2 things though as the zeds would not be treating the trader structure as a primary target but destructive mode would still cause a ton of damage as well as the base being a primary target when you are actually in it.
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Now that I've got it figured out I'll be playing with it before I add it in. So far it doesn't appear that the zeds even try to target the trader at all.

 
I removed newbie protection and played day 1 with it off on three different maps.

Amazing!

There was a time long ago when there was no newbie protection. If you started in desert or snow you got out as fast as you could and sometimes it interfered big time with your normal start of game routine. Which is EXACTLY why it is genius. After testing it today I realized something that has been missing from the game for a long time. Meaningful biome differences. The newbie protection actually gives new players the wrong impression that they can enter the snow biome without any problem during the first moments of the game. In one of my plays the trader ended up being deep in the snow biome. I realized I wouldn't be completing that quest until I could find decent clothing. All of a sudden my priorities for the first few days had changed.

I also realized I will never play with newbie protection ever again. But if that isn't what you signed up for you can easily remove it. It is in my 0xp progression modlet. Simply remove the buffs file and you can experience the blandness of Samey Day One once again. For those who want this immediately here is the link. Just copy the buffs file and add it to the config folder in the 0xp progression modlet in your mods folder.

Don't be a newb. Do it without protection. Feels so much better.

 
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I have also been playing with trader protection turned off. I really like that too. With the higher number of biome zombies it is critical to clear out every last zombie from around the trader complex before going in. They can hear you opening doors in the trader complex from a km away it seems and they hate you for it. But I personally enjoyed the idea of clearing zombies first before going in. Despite my care I did miss one and she shredded the walls made of scrap metal siding (paper thin) in less than 10 seconds. But I killed her and plugged the holes with reinforced wood blocks which were an upgrade of sorts.

I like being able to harvest the trader's garden and to place blocks inside. Overall it is a positive change. I will probably add it next week once I make sure it is definitely a keeper. It would be a whole new prefabs folder so easily removed if people don't want it. But I think that it sort of fits with the added rewards my mod has for doing quests. Seems there should be a bit of a cost of maintaining and utilizing the trader and being smart about not leading a pack of zombies to destroying the complex.

I also realized that now I can destroy the broken workstations and eventually replace them with working ones. Wonder if I can make a quest out of it. Seems like I should get a skillpoint for doing something like that-- Even from that tightwad Trader Rekt.

 
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Soooo... are there servers with this mod up? Because I'm not used to playing with mods, but I wanna play online and have this mod.

Anyone?

 
Soooo... are there servers with this mod up? Because I'm not used to playing with mods, but I wanna play online and have this mod.Anyone?
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hmmm...maybe not when such sexy offerings like Sorcery are available ;)

 
Hey Roland :D

Me again. Since noone does it I'm looking to set up a small server by myself and some friends.

Do you know if it is compatible with other modlets? Or if there are any that are hard incompatible?

Also if I try and start your mod via modlauncher, the game doesn't even get to the startmenu and just stays at the blackscreen. Any ideas what this could be?

 
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Hey Roland :D Also if I try and start your mod via modlauncher, the game doesn't even get to the startmenu and just stays at the blackscreen. Any ideas what this could be?
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This sounds like you have EAC enabled. Make sure that's not checked.

 
This sounds like you have EAC enabled. Make sure that's not checked.
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thanks! yeah that solved it. The weird thing was, that it was grayed out when I tried to remove it, so I thought maybe its necessary for the launcher.

*compatibility question still remains* ^^

 
You will have to use trial and error I’m afraid. If another modlet messes with the same things mine does then there may be some compatibility issues. Since there are 100s of Modlets why not post a list of what specific ones you are wanting to include.

Roughly, if the modlet messes with quests.xml that will be the most risky. In one case when I was making a change there was a conflict in entityclasses but when I combined the xpath code from two separate modlets both accessing entityclasses into one it worked just fine.

 
You should continue this minimalist theme and make another mod that eliminates almost everything except essentials. Bare bones, pure primitive survival. No POIs, no farms at all, so bases must be made form scratch and farms from scratch using the few seeds/spores you might scavenge. Dare I say no traders? unsure. Include this 0xp of course.

 
You should continue this minimalist theme and make another mod that eliminates almost everything except essentials. Bare bones, pure primitive survival. No POIs, no farms at all, so bases must be made form scratch and farms from scratch using the few seeds/spores you might scavenge. Dare I say no traders? unsure. Include this 0xp of course.
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I think this would be an interesting approach but until the devs are done adding some things and removing others I would rather wait to try doing it as it seems like a lot of chasing and reworking. But the minimalist approach to true wilderness survival is definitely of interest. I'd like a game version that was truly challenging to survive even without zombies.

 
Having a hard time quitting tha game I decided to come back to check on 17.3. Some of my major issues turned out to be addressed and reading about A18 got my hopes up even more. So I'm back, for now

Then I would like to say that I find above idea quite interesting. Raises some problem though with what loot there could be. No POI's seems pretty OK and standard to this type of approach, but what about cars, trashbags and such? I'll have to think abou that a bit.

Now to this mod. I. DO. LOVE. IT. Stay alive and you learn and progress with life. Thats where focus should be. Ignore Z's and such if you want or clear them, choice is yours. Plenty of Z's in the streets wich is great. A bit more lootbags wich is great.

There is only a few issues I have.

1st. I think the death penalty shoul be a bit tougher. Making it 1,1,2,2,3 skillpoints instead of 1,2,3 maybe?

2nd. Horde nights are not very rewarding. Dodging them seems like a good idea atm. Maybe get some quest to kill X amount of Z's on horde night for dukes/skillpoints/ loot or something. Or just up the dropped loot bags for hored nights.

Just my 2 cents. Thanks for the mod:encouragement:

Shin

 
Having a hard time quitting tha game I decided to come back to check on 17.3. Some of my major issues turned out to be addressed and reading about A18 got my hopes up even more. So I'm back, for now
Then I would like to say that I find above idea quite interesting. Raises some problem though with what loot there could be. No POI's seems pretty OK and standard to this type of approach, but what about cars, trashbags and such? I'll have to think abou that a bit.
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One thought would be to remove all such things from the forest, burnt forest, desert, and snow biomes and limit cities and poi's to the wasteland biome and then have cars trash etc in that biome. Then increase the zombies by x8 in the wasteland/city biome and have no biome spawning zombies in the others (but still wandering hordes).

Then increase the difficulty of wilderness survival so that it is tough to live in the wilderness and the only place to loot anything or scavenge is in the wasteland where the only POIs are but also massive zombie counts...

Now to this mod. I. DO. LOVE. IT. Stay alive and you learn and progress with life. Thats where focus should be. Ignore Z's and such if you want or clear them, choice is yours. Plenty of Z's in the streets wich is great. A bit more lootbags wich is great.
There is only a few issues I have.

1st. I think the death penalty shoul be a bit tougher. Making it 1,1,2,2,3 skillpoints instead of 1,2,3 maybe?

2nd. Horde nights are not very rewarding. Dodging them seems like a good idea atm. Maybe get some quest to kill X amount of Z's on horde night for dukes/skillpoints/ loot or something. Or just up the dropped loot bags for hored nights.

Just my 2 cents. Thanks for the mod:encouragement:

Shin
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Both are great ideas. I'm definitely up for changing the daily skillpoint generation to something that takes longer to build up to the max of 3 skillpoints per day and 1 1 2 2 3 sounds good. 5 days to build back up to 3 skillpoints per day definitely would be a blow. I'll plan that for the A18 version or maybe the A17.4 version if I have time.

I have actually thought a lot about seeing if bloodmoon could trigger a quest of some sort. If it was possible I'd make it be a clear the area quest centered on your base. You could then avoid if you choose but you'll fail the quest and miss out on the rewards. Not sure if it is possible but I'm open to discussion on how to integrate a quest in conjunction with horde night.

 
On a side note I wonder if it is possible to make it so you can only do one quest per day per trader? In another thread someone commented that the trader quests would incentivize him (if he were to play) to do quests all day and farm skillpoints as quickly as possible. Personally, I haven't really felt a NEED to spam quest with the traders but has anyone else who has played this? Are the skillpoints earned from quests overwhelming the time based skillpoint generation for anyone who is actually playing the mod?

 
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