Looking for creative mods

[Geizkragen]

Hello everyone. Not sure im in the right forum, so sorry if not.

Im love some unque aspects of the game, like fully destructible map or structure integrity. The world is amazing, very realistic and force me to try new things out. its most custom and realistic world i know in my gaming. Killing Enemies is not absolute cusom but there are plenty of possibilities.

But the items in the world are the opposite ot that philosofy. The items are static and dont let me "play" with it. They are here, I can use it as it is or avoid them to use. Nothing more. No customizing, no "creating new stuff", nothing.

So I look for mods to get as deep as my mind it allows in those cathegories of the game:

 - cooking: let me cook my own recipes, let me be creative cook! I want backe a pizza, I want choose ingridients for the douth, i want choose salami or mushrooms or tuna etc. Let me make a salad of tabac or sugarize ecstasy pils.

 - buff system: it is already good, but... We have "brocken leg", which let us moving very slow. Why not brocken hands so we can nothing do? let me sniff glue because of addiction from suggarized ecstasy! Maybe some protheses like a pirat with hooked hand and peg leg?

 - farming: implemented way is not bad, but there are no variety. Only few plants. How about an olive tree to make an alternative to "animal fat" or lemon tree to get access to own acid? etc.

 - ranching: is not in the game. It is a survival game, let me ranch rats, feed them all the junk i dont need (leather?)  or feed rabbids with grass or ranch chickens for feather, eggs and meat. 

 - taming: Let me have own dog that follows me everywhere like dogmeat in fallout.

 - weapons: let me craft my own silly apocalyptic weapons. Not from recipe, own creations. Ever played "Dead Rising"? A nailed bat, a lawn mower on a wheel chair, a leaf blower shooting dildos etc. These are recipes, but good examples for "crazy apocalyptic weapons". Let me create my own weapons!

 - cloth: the same as weapons above. Material, design, color - as result a buff. Maybe a steelplate on top as armor?

 - vehicles: same here. Let me create new stuff!

 - traps: look at weapons.

 - survivors: let me find other (NPC) survivers which can live (after some quests?) in my base and work for my base, like digging holes or farming my potatoes.

 - workbenches: I HATE ALL WORKBENCHES! Why? they work alone, without the player on them. MAGIC! they need a complete overhaul. Maybe let the survivers work on them?

 - perk system: back in the days we got better at digging by "doing" digging. Today we kill zombies to get better at digging. It was not perfect leveling and progression system but it did more sence as the actual state.

I dont look for easy cheesy game,  I dont look for balance. I look for a maximal sandbox, maximal creativity.

Modlets I know create / alter existing recipes / items. I know that I want a bit more. But maybe you know mods which come close to what I search for.

Please, gimme suggestions which mods are worth to install and why. Which of them let me be more creative. Which of them removes or push away limits the game set.

TY, Geizkragen

 

[doughphunghus]

I’m not going to speak for everyone, but I believe a lot of what you’re asking won’t work on the game the way it’s designed today .  I’ll do my best for a quick overview, and maybe someone will point out if I’m wrong or not.

- cooking: the recipe system hard codes the ingredients , so you can’t just craft something with arbitrary ingredients. If you make a mod. You have to make each recipe and state the explicit ingredients.  The only way is just to add mods with more food recipes (there are several). “More vanilla food” is one I’m aware of. 

-buffs: it’s probably do-able to make broken hands but I have not seen anyone do it. For glue sniffing, also doable, probably, but o have not seen anyone do it. The pirate and hand changes are probably not do-able in the current game unless someone knows how to make a custom character and UMA... but I know no one who has done this. It has been requested before though,
 

- farming: there are mods that add more farming stuff. I don’t know their name off the top of my head though.

- ranching: probably in the farming mods, but I have not seen rats or a way to feed them with random items. I know it’s possible to “junk random items” as Gnamod horde mode has a “trash can” container to dispose of stuff, so I imagine an animal could be made a disposal.

-taming: guppycur has a robot dog that will follow you. I know people have made mods to get an NPC to follow you (might be in the creature packs)  I think someone has made a dog pet somewhere. The Sorcery mod has “familiars”

which I believe are pets that follow you and you can command. Have not tried it, but it looks like an excellent mod. 

- weapons: same issue as with recipes.  You cannot just make weapons out of. Anything that hasn’t had a pre-built model for a weapon.  You can use some items as clubs (like the flashlight) and you can throw rocks/snowballs.  But anything you just pick up cannot just be made into a weapon, by design, likely unless it’s “Meele” and can be used just to hit stuff in your hand.

-cloth, vehicles, traps: same issues as weapons. example: You can’t take a club and tie it to a door and make a trap, unless someone has premade a “club string door” trap model.  There are vehicle packs to add more vehicle models.

- survivors: the creature pack has hirable NPC characters. There may be more. TFP has recently stated that they aren’t going to make the game into a RPG with all sorts of NPC characters running around. There will eventually be bandits in the vanilla game, and maybe friendly NPc’s, but not like a whole lot of them running around.  The creature packs add some bandits and NPc’s.

- workbenches: not sure how to answer this. I doubt the animations will get more immersive for this.

- perk system: there are some mods that put this mechanic back.  One overhaul mod is Undead Legacy.  There are some more mods I’ve heard that do this but I cannot remember them at this time.

I think the short answer is: theres no mods that will make everything you pick up a weapon, or a recipe ingredient, or something you can wear as armor, etc to “increase creativity”.  The game mechanics of this game are hard coded to have guns/clothing/recipes made basically how they are made to function  and be used today. I doubt a modder would even be able to make every item do something like this as a lot of the in game items are just “bags” when placed on the ground because they don’t have a 3d model (either because TFP doesn’t have time to make the models, or because it saves memory/increases performance, I’m betting).

if anyone disagrees, please feel

free to make corrections or refutations to my statements above.  They are just my beliefs as a player/modder. I do not work for, know anyone at TFP, nor am I part of the development of the game or have any inside knowledge of where the game development is headed.  I just read these forums.

 

[convergent]

I agree with doughphungus - although some modders have really pushed the boundaries with workarounds, xml editing is mostly adding or changing content. The mechanics are built into the game.

 

[Geizkragen]

TY all for replying. I waited before answering in the hope someone will post something besides usual mods like "create 5 more foods, vanilla mechanic".

So one way I could imagine more "creative" way to make something, will use 3 in game mechanics.

 - First, the use for mods-slots like weapons or tools - but for the ingridients.

 - Second, the use of "groups" of items. So we dont use an item as ingridient, but ANY item of the group.

 - Third, creating the item with adjustable properties. Like looted tools / wepons have different durability.

An example: we want to create a pizza.

Pizza is made out of dough, tomato paste and cheese. Options: some other ingridiends like salami, tuna, arugula etc. Some backed with the pizza, some got on top after the backing.

So first we want to make the dough.

Create an Item "dough preparation". Cost: 1 empty can. The "dough preparation" has 2 mod slots.

 - Put in 1 edible meal /flour. ANY awailable meal / flour !  From corn, potatos, wheat or bean? doesnt really matters. This comes it the first mod slot.

 - Put in 1 edible liquid. Water, murky water, beer, smoothie. Anything we had declared in the group "edible liquid". This comes in the second mod slot.

Now we use second recipe, "dough finishing". Needs one "dough preparation" with full mod slots. Creates 1 item "dough", but with modified attributes - depends from ingridients. Attributes like fullness, + stamina maybe buffs ( like from yucca juice).

make the tomato paste the same way or find it in loot.

Make the cheese the same way or find it in loot.

Make item "raw pizza" out of dough, tomato paste and cheese. "Raw pizza" has 3 mod slots for things like salami or mushrooms.

Make an item "baked pizza" out of it. This one has 2 modslots for things like arugula.

Create now "pizza" without modslots. Pizza has various attributes and buffs.

Why is this way to create stuff better then vanilla? We can choose from a POOL of ingridiends, better use from loot / farm. We can drasticaly increase the variety of items without that it hurts the game - look at meal examples above.

Created things like food need much more user interaction. It is more realistic than throw a ton of eggs and meat in campfire an get 1 hour later 2 tons of edibles from it. And this way we could make specialized food for different needs.

Possible problems:

Ability for stacking with different attributes? I think is not supported. So special food with max 1 ipem per slot could get annoing. Maybe is it possible to stac identical food in one stack?

So the question on experienced modders: is this way of creating items possible?

 

[ShoudenKalferas]

Likely that Dead Rising game just has a much larger pool of already created variations that are hard coded into the game.