Choose your Cataclysm

[Chiko]

I mentioned this in another idea but I think it would be interesting if the kind of enemies, events, and other gameplay features could be activated/deactivated via Mod List or in another tab for official modules in the World Creation menu. Some examples:

Undead:
-Zombie and skeleton version of humans and animals.
-Urban areas populated mostly by undead humans. They do not respawn.
-Wilderness populated mostly by undead animals. They respawn.
-Undead attack all living things and ignore the rest.

Nuclear Winter:
-Colder overall temperatures with winter being almost deadly outside.
-Harsh Storms and chance for radioactive rain.
-Radioactive areas in the world.

Steampunk:
-Weapons and electronics replaced by steam-powered and clockwork tech.
-Neo-Victorianism clothing, buildings and furniture instead of the normal ones.

In addition, some modules could offer extra features if activated along with compatible modules. For instance:

Blobs/Zombies:
-Blobs and Zombies are allies.
-Blobs can reanimate dead corpses.
-New type of zombies available.

Steampunk/Robots:
-Robots are replaced by steam-powered and clockwork constructs.

Zombies/Bandits:
-Urban areas populated either by undead or bandits. They do not respawn.

Of course, some of them would be unable to be chosen, like Nuclear Winter and Nuclear Summer, for instance.

[halberdsturgeon]

I’m all for increased modularity in the game. It’s one of the things that attracted me to the game to begin with, the extensive options list that let you customise your game experience.

[Binky]

Being able to turn on and off different enemies is a great idea and one that I think is already planned. I’d particularly like to play a triffid only cataclysm or a robot one. However, I think the problem is that currently the other monster types which aren’t zombies are too weak/tied to single areas to be a proper threat.

For this to work it’d require some pretty hardcore coding to balance out how many monsters were spawned depending on how many monster types you chose and require many of the monster types to have a significantly larger list of monsters.

I’d love to see this, and currently a simplistic version could be implemented (which would mainly just allow you to take out triffids/nethercreatures and so on) but I think we’re a long way off choosing a main foe.

[Chiko]

Indeed it would take its fair amount of time, specially the extra features part. Another simple way to achieve something like this would be like making a mod that replaces enemies and things instead of turning on and off content.

[kevin.granade]

I’m not that worried about the coding, the main thing we need is for there to be multiple threats per biome, so that there will always be something dangerous in various locations if you disable one threat.
the main thing is cities of course, if you turn off zombies the game becomes a cakewalk because you can equip yourself with great gear at minimal risk from the start.

[Chiko]

Hmm… so all these threats have their own spawn points/biomes. How about something like this:

If only one threat is active, like robots for instance, maybe they would also spawn in the now empty spawn points/biomes. And if all the vanilla threats are activated, they would occupy their respective spawn points/biomes. Another feature could be like if two threats occupy the same spawn points/biomes, like cities, there could be 50% chances of either of them appearing in a city.