Hey! I’m Esther, and this is the mod I’ve been working on after taking up ownership of it from its previous author, who was no longer interested in maintaining it.
Aftershock has two core principles:
To restore old content that was taken out of the game for being unrealistic. Right now, this includes things such as the Solar Panels CBM, crafting recipes for bionics, bone armor, and more.
To add more interesting content to the game that meshes well with it but would typically be rejected from the base game due to being unrealistic or slightly imbalanced.
Aftershock is slowly growing with new content that integrates seamlessly into the main world. It includes new professions, items, map generation, bionics, and recipes, among other things.
Some current content can be found below, but some things are excluded to avoid spoilers.
Items
Basin - Crafted with a sheet metal and a hammering tool. Meant for catching rainwater or moving a lot of water from place to place, it can hold 50 liters of water, but doesn’t reseal.
Crude Plating - Not an item on its own, you get this by welding sheet metal onto a vehicle as armor. It’s the least protective of any armor (including wood plating), but cheap and lightweight, and effective for its cost.
Nutriment - These pills were common in laboratories before the Cataclysm, and weren’t secret, but they also weren’t publicly available. Though chalky and hard to swallow, they provide an entire day’s calories in capsule form, and are packed with vitamins and nutrients.
Quilt - A wooly, snuggly blanket found in bedrooms. Very, very warm. You can also craft your own patchwork quilt using felt patches.
Rolling Pin - Find it in kitchens, or whittle one from 2x4s. You can create dough with this using flour and water, which bakes bread more efficiently. And, more importantly, cake! You can also strap barbed wire to it for a decent melee weapon.
Rope Lighter - A flameless, windproof lighter, specialized for outdoors use. Crafted with some copper scraps and a short rope, it lasts for a very long time (300 uses) but is much slower to use than a normal lighter.
Vehicle Refrigerator - A new construction recipe can convert the power supply on a furniture fridge to that of a vehicle’s, and you can deconstruct it to take it down and move it. Mounted into a vehicle, this variant consumes about three times as much power as a minifridge, but holds 300 liters worth of stuff! You can also further convert it into a vehicle freezer with another construction recipe, which does the same thing.
Verum Remedium - Adopted from Bright Nights, this panacea spawns in labs, and can cure all ills.
Monsters
Headless Zombie - Kevin has confirmed on GitHub that decapitation doesn’t canonically stop blob reanimation. The result is the headless zombie - mostly harmless, it shambles aimlessly, incapable of sensing anything around it, but it can still feel you if you get right next to it and will swipe at you. For obvious reasons, you can’t headshot it.
Headless Horror - The evolved form of the headless zombie. Still oblivious to its surroundings, but it poses a much greater threat…
Armor & Weapons
Daypack - In real life, high-end camping backpacks would be a Cataclysm survivor’s dream come true, with great storage space and ultralight frames. The daypack is an example of this, weighing less than a pound but holding a whopping 20 liters for only 10 encumbrance. You can find this treat in sporting goods stores or on the bodies of campers.
Survivor Utility Belt Tweaks - The survivor utility belt can now be freely crafted between a sheath and a holster variant at no cost. The sheath holds a knife, like default, and the holster can hold a tool like a crowbar or wrench.
Welding Mask - An alternative to welding goggles, found in the same places. They’re a very good armor, but inhibit breathing and eyesight by a large margin. You can also craft a makeshift version without needing any books that completely blinds you but lets you weld stuff.
In addition, miscellaneous content includes things like
Restored bionic crafting recipes, and some new ones!
Restored Solar Panels bionic!
Restored bone-reinforced leather armor!
Restored recipes for mininukes!
Recipes for a bunch of items without them, like micro motors and thermometers!
The replacement of the useless lab journal-Gustav with lab journal-Curie, with a bunch of nuclear-powered recipes!
New professions like Technician and Linux Patron!
New bionics like the Deployable Grenade Launcher!
New rooms for labs, such as the weapons range!
If all of this sounds up your alley, I’d love it if you tried the mod and gave your thoughts here. I’ve made it a point to balance the mod with the main game as much as possible, and to make it a seamless integration that wouldn’t feel out of place in a regular Cataclysm.
I’ve noticed with 0.D in its final stages before release, the commit logs for new pull requests has become all sorts of convoluted. Should I be waiting until 0.D finalizes before I do that? I’ve been making pull requests under the name Ilysen (Esther was taken) and I’ve noticed issues with it.
You can take down the vehicle fridge furniture item, but not place it back. It seems like a weird choice on paper, but it’s intended; because it’s primarily intended for vehicles, I included that as a fast way to remove it, but I didn’t want people rebuilding it as furniture.
I really appreciate the idea! Bringing back some axed stuff into the game was a long requested move by a lot of people from old versions and who just plainly enjoyed the ideas that the content presented.
Great work!
Wait Bone armor of all things got removed for being “unrealistic?” What? That doesn’t make a lick of sense, especially since I see it in my crafting menu right now. At a ridiculous 6 tailoring skill but there regardless. Unless one of my mods already added it back in, can’t imagine for the life of me why something like what would get removed though instead of expanded on.
Regardless, the Sci Fi and future tech of cataclysm is definitely a titanic part of the appeal of cataclysm so I hope for all the best for this mod. More cool tech is good new tech if you ask me. Way too new to know what was removed though.
I’m not one to judge a project that isn’t mine, but as far as I’m aware, the removal was due to a misconstruing that the armor was purely made of bone, instead of leather with bone reinforcements. As a pure armor material, bone would likely be excellent against cuts but fragile against other things, and serve mainly for intimidation purposes.
Leather reinforced with bone might not be much better, but hey - it’s a mod, and we care about game logic here more than realism. What’s the harm, I say!
The issue isn’t whether you can take down the item or not, but that you always get prompted to take it down when examining it to see what is inside. Or so I gather.
That makes sense. I still have no problem with it, because it’s meant to be taken down and not to be used as furniture; if you undergo the construction, then you’re interested in moving it to a vehicle anyway. I’ll consider changing it.
tl;dr no, that’s not the reason, and also my reasons for not wanting it in the main game have no bearing on you putting it into your mod.
The main reason is that there is no evidence that there ever existed a bone armor like the one in the game in history. The in-game item is a set of armor that covers the user’s entire body, the historical examples are all breastplate levels of coverage at best.
As for nerfing it instead of removing it, it’s still a pretty nonsensical thing to have in the game, it’s very nearly the worst possible armor you can make, but the difficulty of making it is in no way commensurate with how bad it is. Where the hell is the player going to find out how to make the stuff? Finally, it makes no sense for me to try and nerf it, because I don’t think it should even exist, it needs someone that thinks it’s a good idea to find some kind of compromise or something to make it work, but I’m not interested in putting in that effort.
I dunno, tieing or duct taping a few bones haphazardly on yourself if you have em available is still some protection. Doesn’t need to be good armor, probably shouldn’t be, but it’s still be more protective then a T Shirt and that’d be the main point of it. Ought to be simple to make with low durability, just something you strap to yourself early game. Not like it’d be any harder then duct taping some branches or two by fours to yourself and we can already do that (minus the duct tape). I think you’re overthinking what bone armor should be.
There was some discussion about reintroducing it with the skeletal juggernaut’s bone armor as a material, which would make sense since those things’ bones are incredibly strong, but nobody’s volunteered to do the work of differentiating the good bone from the brittle, easily-broken normal bone and reworking the recipe.
I like the idea of doing that, so I could probably put it in Aftershock at some point, but I want to get some other stuff finished first. I’m working on power saws at the moment.
Are you the same guy who made a blacklist mod just for molerats? I’m asking because I’m wondering if I downloaded the original copy of the mod or not. Should I uninstall my current copy of Aftershock and download it here?
