The problem with acid rain:
Kills animals and leaves tons of corpses behind.
Butchering said corpses leaves pile of junk that is difficult to dispose of. Carrying this litter away is not fun. It is not ignitable.
One can argue that the piles of junk are actually gold mines,
but if you are relying on rare acid weather for bones and leather, you are doing it wrong.
I prefer the solution:
Acid rain doesn’t kill animals
QUESTION: What does acid rain currently do in the game?
Other than kill animals and cause the player pain, nothing. It should do damage to anything out in it, meaning not under cover of, say, under the shelter of a large tree. And animals caught out in it shouldn’t leave a corpse behind, because the acid would melt it.
That is really sad, I liked the old acid rain. It gave you an incentive to be careful early in the game while exploring, to stay close to possible shelters. One of the most fun play throughs I had was when the acid rain hit and I had no option but to go into a random cave, which was filled with sewer rats. It forced you into uncomfortable situations.
If its ignorable then an interesting part of the game is practically removed.
I’m all ears for proposed acid rain mechanics (or other dangerous weather for that matter) that meet both the goals of being consistent and acting as a source of danger for the player.
I say acid rain should be a danger (and high pain should be a danger too)
The simplest would be to have acid rain cause injury to the player, but animals affected by it would simply despawn (explained as them hiding / taking shelter).
When it comes to deadly climates I would love to see a some sort of poisonous fog that forced you to wear gas masks before wandering outside or forced you to climb buildings or hide in the subways. Would be a very annoying climate to have normaly, but if you confine it to the surroundings heavily industrial c9ities, it could make exploring and looting the place very interesting experience, something like the Sierra Madre Casino if you played Fallout:Nv, but with zombies (I didn’t)
Kevin, I definitely agree with you about consistency and that it doesn’t make any sense so I think you’re right to go for a different weather mechanic.
Perhaps it could just be re-themed though:
Radioactive rain (also known as Black Rain) could be one idea. With this, exposure could cause radiation effects, and a lot of exposure could cause the need for anti-radiation drugs (which might be an interesting incentive for players to explore labs/hospitals).
This would have the effect of not killing anything instantly, and so animals wouldn’t just all instantly die (and items would be unaffected). They could all either run away from the player (to simulate hiding) or despawn though, just to give the look that it’s hurting animals. However, it wouldn’t actually need too because radiation is a bit long term which would solve the main problems.
A few radiated corpses scattered around the place would give further consistency as well.
It would have to be run alongside acid rain, because of the many acid-rain dependent recipes that already exist in the game. I don’t think you could get away with a straight reskin, especially since they practically work the opposite way. Acid rain is immediately crippling, while radioactive rain would do long-term damage. I’m also not sure if it’s a good idea forcing people to explore hospitals and labs for a single obscure solution, I don’t think radiation is very well-explained in the game. The more I look at it, the worse an idea it seems.
It could run alongside acid-rain, and I don’t think that’d be much of a problem. It’d mean that acid rain could be less crippling whilst still having the elemental danger of Black Rain/Rainout.
Really though, I wouldn’t call anti-radiation medicine an ‘obscure solution’. As in, I can’t think of anything more straight forward. Granted, you might not know that anti-radiation medicine exists when you start the game, but you don’t know that zombie necromancers and flesh angels exist either. As long as it Rainout wasn’t too frequent and that you didn’t instantly get deadly/large amounts of radiation then I can’t see any problems with it.
If possible, it could be that Black Rain/Rainout only starts after a week or two to give the player time to get up to the level where they could take on hospitals/labs.
I like the radioactive rain concept. Dangerous, requires working to offset the effects of it (collecting gear & drugs), and you could even have it ramp-up in dangerousness as the game progresses for whatever reason. Maybe a factory is still somehow spewing gunk into the atmosphere and affecting the weather in a certain-map-tiles-radius and the player can either stay away or investigate and shut down the factory (which winds up being plot-twisty in and of itself - maybe its a secret munitions plant, or maybe nether creatures are running the factory into the ground, causing the pollution & rain, to try and terraform things more to their liking).
As for the current acid rain … just not having animals spawn while it is going on would help, wouldn’t it? They’re “hiding” from it so they don’t show up. Acid rain event starts = animal spawn rate is zero for a bit. Any currently spotted (by the player) animals are “stuck in the acid rain” and melt like usual if they get hit.
[quote=“WaffleEggnog, post:5, topic:5161”]I don’t know about you guys, but butchering for me is really not that big of a deal, like it takes a few seconds and it’s done. Whats grinds my gears is bones n’ shit all over the place.
Like, you only need so many bones before they become useless, and being 1 volume each, they aren’t worth taking. But having all these random piles of bones and crap all over the place really makes my stuff look ugly and clutters everything and lags the game.[/quote]
Solution: Craftable Skull-Throne. Well, there are a lot of bones so … uhm … Craftable Skull-Dinette Set.
despawning natural animals during dangerous weather is certainly a possibility.
can’t decide what I think about radioactive rain (or clouds, whatever), I’d like to see that as a regional thing.
I like radioactive rain and despawning animals during acid rain.
I’d like the corpse to decay like meat would. It makes sense. This, however, leaves the question whether they leave bones when they do. It would be realistic but there would be tons of bones instead of corpses everywhere. Unless we simulate their decay or simulated “dogs” taking them away and eating them. Then the poop, but nobody poops in games…I SHOULD STOP!
Despawning natural animals does sound reasonable.
I like fallout rain idea, however what of the rivers and shit? Wouldn’t most any groundwater or river be completely undrinkable? Unless you actually have a reverse osmosis filter and a Geiger counter the water I’d be fairly dangerous.
Would a fix for acid rain killing animals be considered for merging before 0.A despite the feature freeze?
That’d be great for the future, but I don’t think its necessary at the time of a radioactive rain implementation for simplicities sake. As has been mentioned before on many other threads, having rivers/bodies of water become gradually more contaminated seems like a good way to push the difficulty over time, so this could be a precursor for that.
Although I agree localised weather would be nice, I do prefer the ‘fear’ of acid rain/weather effects being everywhere. It’d make a lot of sense to be more fierce in some areas though, that would mean everywhere would get ‘light radioactive rain’ and ‘light acid rain’ (which might randomly alternate each time the weather event is called), whilst nearer certain places these effects could grow a lot more dangerous and immediate. This would be even better on a gradient towards places (like missile bunkers/powerplants)
[quote=“BollandP, post:34, topic:5161”]I’d like the corpse to decay like meat would. It makes sense. This, however, leaves the question whether they leave bones when they do. It would be realistic but there would be tons of bones instead of corpses everywhere. Unless we simulate their decay or simulated “dogs” taking them away and eating them. Then the poop, but nobody poops in games…I SHOULD STOP!
Despawning natural animals does sound reasonable.[/quote]I wouldn’t mind at all if the bones stayed behind, I’m always needing bones for superglue. I just get tired of having to butcher thousands of corpses to get them.
Good question.
As for bones, somebody on Git suggested they be treated as ammo, so bone [20] instead of bone x 20.
Yes, piles of dead animals killed by acid rain are really annoying.
As for the fix, just pick the easiest one for now, you can fine-tune it later 