EDIT #2: This thread is a digression from What is your favorite QOL mod?. It has been split from the main topic by a moderator due to me going offtopic. Feel free to read the main thread for more context.
It seems this mod is already shipped with base game and called “No Reviving”, tagged as "obsolete": true so that it does not appear in the mod list by default. This is true for almost all mods downloaded with the game. There are almost 70 different mods in the directory yet most of them are prevented from appearing by being tagged obsolete, and they are all as simple as this one. Why?
EDIT #1: Now that I look inside the mod directory there are tons of mods here I remember using that are now marked as obsolete. No Religious Books, No Flaming Weapons, No Old Guns, No Medieval Items. Can those all be safely enabled and used in-game? I’m playing Stable 0.E-3.
There are some really cool exclusion mods in here. No Filthy Clothes, No Vitamins, No Big / Acid / Explosive Zombies, No Sci-Fi Equipment, No Mutagen. These are all disabled, yet utter garbage like My Sweet Cataclysm, a mod that adds candy monsters to the game, is allowed? What gives?
No offense, it is extremely difficult to understand this post without any punctuation. Is your mod choice Aftershock? It’s not a small QOL mod by any means, it is an entire game conversion adding new CBMs, mutation trees, professions, weapons and vehicles. This thread is about really small balance mods. I guess you’re requesting a QOL mod to buff the mininuke and nerf grenades?
This document is not an explanation as to why you would have your players download 70 different mods just to take away the on / off switch for most of them effectively rendering them unusable.
According to this document, a mod is removed if it is a burden to maintain, does not work properly, or turns off a feature that has completely been developed and considered to be a part of the game. So, the Fungal faction is not a “complete”, “developed” part of the game, because you’re allowed to turn it off, but certain types of zombies and insects are, so the mod to remove them is completely hidden?
Whose arbitrary decision was it to include 9 functional Blacklist mods, then hide 6 of them? They don’t need maintenance, they already remove the things you want removed. If you wanted to include all items in the game, why pre-install mods that remove them, then deliberately hide those mods? If the filthy clothing or revivification mechanics have been completely mainlined, and you don’t want your players to turn them off, why have them download mods that do, then lie about them being “obsolete”? “Obsolete” implies “broken”. Neither is “obsolete”, they are fully functional as of the current latest Stable build.
So the version players are meant to be using does not include the mods, where do they all go? They’re fully functional, working mods that have been included in older versions of the game and vastly improve playing experience. There is no list of them on the board from what I can tell and the Wiki does not feature them since they were shipped with base game up until now. What’s the plan?
What? The repo does not include the mods, and the next stable will not. 0.E includes the mods only as a means to prevent saves from previous versions made using those mods from breaking, and they are obsolete so people don’t add them for them to stop working in the next version.
They continue to exist in git history, but there is no plan to have.
I don’t understand, is the next game version going to be incompatible with all these mods? Otherwise I don’t see why you wouldn’t archive them, they’re all in working order currently. It’s a great assortment of QOL features, for example No Filthy Clothes or No Zombie Revivification. Will the next game version really break something as simple as removing religious texts or medieval weapons from the game?
It’s not that they will break and more that we have no interest in maintaining them and therefore can’t garantee they’ll keep working as is. If you want to take them on and maintain them yourself they’ll probably keep working for some time.
Those mods will not be packaged with the next version of the game. If you chose to copy them over from 0.E to the next version of the game, some may work, some may seem like they work and not actually, and some may not work.
These mods were obsoleted (made so you cannot select them in the mod menu for new worlds) because they did not meet our standards for mods that we include in-repo. After the 0.E version was released, they were removed from the repo, and thus all further versions of the game.
Again, we have a fundamental disagreement here on what constitutes a quality of life mod - I don’t think this game and it’s development model really enable them.
No Filthy Clothes makes balance changes by removing the requirement of resource expenditure to make use of the clothes that zombies wear.
No Zombie Revivification does so by making it easier to slowly kill hordes from range - e.g. shoot a few, leave and hide before the whole horde gets attracted to, repeat - having zombie revivification requires you to actually get to the bodies and spend time there to actually get the horde down.
Generic Guns also makes balance changes - by collapsing multiple gun, ammo, and magazine variants into single variants, it increases the ability to use guns because you’ll find ammo and magazines that are compatible much more often.
These are all mods that make changes that for some people will improve their enjoyment of the game, but I would not call them quality of life mods because they make significant alterations to game balance. I’m a big proponent of generic guns, and I do understand why people would want to do this sort of thing - but I don’t think that justifies them staying in the repo. Generic guns exists primarily because the guns system is legitimately an accessibility problem, those other two are not.
As for why we are not interested in packaging these sorts of mods:
Blacklist mods do cause a maintenance burden. They do cause bugs that need to be fixed.
We’re not interested in maintaining arbitrary sectioning off and disabling of stuff.
The more of them we have, the more we appear interested in having them, and the more we get, so the maintenance burden continues to grow.
If we’re putting in your face, every time you create a new world, of all this stuff for you to be able to disable from the game, it projects as though we’re not happy or confident enough with our features, when that is not true.
Never complained about mods being pre-packaged with the game, only that they were hidden so players couldn’t use them in a version that actually supported them. Every new version you download can break saves, with or without mods, and it should be expected of you to start a new world and generate a new character for it. I don’t see how this is an issue. They’re good mods and they work in 0.E-3, I don’t see why not fully include them now then remove them entirely the next Stable release.
What does this even mean? The game is chock full of unnecessary fluff that players could benefit from removing through a good assortment of optional mods. Always been this way. Zombies regularly drop useless articles of clothing, like cat ears, earrings, hair pins that do nothing for non-Fancy characters; constantly finding religious books and apparel for characters that cannot benefit from them.
You’ve introducing a condom item that is so rare there is no point in even using it as a water container once you find it, a material in one single obscure crafting recipe; a dildo item that gives a morale boost when used, because funny. There are literally like 18 different kitchen utensils that spawn in every single household and serve no purpose whatsoever.
You have joke professions that I’d wager only a small fraction of players would ever even try using. You have a piece of clothing (webbing belt) that literally does nothing - no encumbrance, no protection, nothing, and it’s featured in your Stable version that most new players will download and play.
I was looking through the keybindings menu the other day and found unbound keys for spellcasting, what the fuck is this? I thought magic was only allowed within the boundary of a mod? I don’t want to roleplay a wizard in my fucking post-apocalyptic zombie survival game. Stop pretending you figured it out, your formula of deciding what gets or doesn’t get to be in base game isn’t perfect and your view of what’s valuable for it is skewed.
No Filthy Clothes allows you to immediately scavenge and use articles of clothing instead of having to haul them to your base, then go through the process of crafting a washboard, which is so easy there is no point to this even being a step, then getting soap, which spawns in nearly every single household thus not a challenge to find, then finally wasting precious water (or having to find an infinite source) just to wash clothes you will scrap for materials later down the line anyway.
No Zombie Revivification removes tedium by allowing you to kill zombies and forget they existed, instead of giving each special attention; [B]utcher or [s]mash them, and hope you don’t have to take on an opponent while doing so, as the process gets cancelled if you get interrupted at any point throughout it. Zombies revive weaker and don’t pose a threat unless left alone again. I don’t see why you’d ever find it fun to kill the same stuff over and over again, especially since they still cannot revive back into their loot, so now you have to go find the pile to see whether you’ve missed it or not.
Never used Generic Guns so I can’t comment on that, but each argument can go both ways. These are MODS, dude. They’re OPTIONAL. The base game is there, if you don’t actively put effort into picking and choosing which exclusions you want in your game, you’re still going to experience the precious vanilla you’re so desperately trying to defend.
I don’t use neither No Filthy Clothes nor No Zombie Revivification. I think the former is a really neat mechanic, actually. Options are always good. Why are you providing players with tilesets? The game always featured ASCII graphics and tilesets used to be mod territory, what happened? Aren’t all the monsters and items you’re adding with each update a “burden” to pixelate then PR?
Where are you getting this impression from? The only thing you’d be projecting is support for a thriving modding scene that allows great flexibility with world generation settings and tailors players’ experience to their needs. I loved not having religious texts or medieval weaponry in my world, I just wasn’t interested in finding or using those items. How is taking these options away from players a good thing?
I have read every single topic with the mod tag inside The Lab and The Bunker categories dating back to 2018, in an attempt to find more good mods (the initial point of this thread); I found exactly 3 new exclusion mods. I really don’t see how this causes “more [mods to] appear”, people made 3 of those the past 3 years (at least on the forum, don’t really have any business visiting GitHub).
My post is already too long and I know it is all in vain because you don’t give a shit, I guess all I’m trying to say is the arguments you provide are weak yet they still get cute little hearts from other developers who can’t be arsed to keep a small list of holy text items that was already provided to them by a different person as a no-maintenance mod for people who still want to use it.
The only valid statement you made is “eh, we’re not interested in maintaining these, you can get fucked if you don’t want some of those things we added”, which is understandable because it is your game after all, it’s just the rest of your post is a load of bull. Unless you’re rewriting the game from scratch I highly doubt a single item filter mod is going to break the game or stop working. How is it hard to maintain a complete list of unwanted items written by someone else?
Literally just keep the list in and don’t touch it lmao
Klipeh has a point. If obsolete mods are included in the game anyway, then why not add another mod category, called - yes, exactly that - “obsolete”, and let people activate mods from there? With a warning that they aren’t officially supported and may be dropped in the next stable. This will make enabling them easier for those who want to play with them.
My other posts clearly did not get this across, so I will say it a different way.
We make an explicit statement that a save you created in the last stable will work in the next stable.
Saves created in 0.D can use these mods, and removing the data would break those saves.
We are not interested in maintaining a variety of mods that existed in 0.D in-repo in 0.E and after.
To prevent us from having to keep this data around for the next stable, and create a maintenance burden, we made it so you could not create a world with those mods.
But because we provide compatibility for 0.D saves which may include those mods, the data must stick around for 0.E.
We’re not interested in creating the ability to select obsolete mod solely for stable versions, and having that feature for experimental versions is 100% a trap, as they can be removed at basically any point, and break saves.
Past that, I’m not interested in making it easy for people to break their saves.
Please be less antagonistic. I apologize if I came across that way, that was in no way my intent. I simply wished to explain why the actions that were taken were taken.
You deciding what does or doesn’t qualify as “quality of life” is infuriating. These are QOL mods. They do rebalance the game, but they can’t be stripped of this title because of that. Shortening lists is “quality of life”. If I go through a school and don’t have to find the Quran and Talmud I can focus on other loot piles before I get overrun; these books are literally useless to me. If I don’t find joke articles of clothing, I can read loot piles faster and also find things that are of actual potential use to me. The chance of me missing something lowers. Items I never wanted don’t appear on my UI. How is this not QOL?
The mods do their job and they work. What is going to change from 0.E to 0.F as to not allow a simple .json file to filter out a few items or monsters from the spawn pool? You don’t need to maintain these, they are already in place and ready to be used. These mods are 20 lines long, even I can read them without knowing code. If you can justify why these mods will be forever gone (not even archived) without saying the word “interested” I will drop my argument and leave the thread.
Lastly, I want you to think about this: you have included a mod with base game (that appears on the first page no less, newer players may not even know how to switch between the tabs) that adds candy monsters and buildings to the game. You think THAT doesn’t reflect poorly on the mindset of the development team, yet mods that remove Sci-Fi weapons or power / survivor armor, items that are of actual concern to players for balancing reasons, does?
You cannot be trusted with these decisions. The very first screen of new world generation is Mods, nowadays mostly containing total game conversions. It used to contain so many useful mods back in the day, now the category sits empty and you’re scrapping everything that could ever go in it. The 3 Blacklist mods in there will too be removed in the future based on some arbitrary dev decision.
This is what a proper mod list should look like. These all (excluding Faster Stamina Regen) came pre-installed with the game, I have simply re-enabled them through the files. Look at all the good stuff in there; I have not enabled a single content mod, only mechanics that were controversial and reverted back to former glory. You’re telling me you don’t want to have these settings in your game?
These mods are just there for older saves that had them included to prevent those specific saves from older versions from breaking.
Main reason why they aren’t there anymore is because the devs guaranteed that each stable version and their saves (0.C to 0.D for instance) can be ported over without breaking (at least when you go from a older version to a newer one).
Reason why these blacklists are flagged as obsolete is because while they work right now there’s no guarantee that they’ll work once stable 0.F or 0.G come out in the distant future, and the dev team essentially want their resources to be pooled toward things that will further the game instead of maintaining it.
I wouldn’t get too worried as people in the community like their blacklist mods and will fix it themselves and post it on the forums for people to use.
The thing is that if you want to use a mod that is no longer supported by a dev or dedicated community member, you take the risk yourself in using it or the burden on fixing it.
Also the fungal exclusion mod is only supported due to the fact that fungal monsters are really harsh on lower-end computers (I believe it’s because of their fungal spread mechanics) and the mod is only included and supported to prevent players from not being able to play the game due to hardware restrictions.
Great explanation, I should’ve just referred to this when I made my earlier post but I digress.
In any case I agree with your assessment and view point as a dev on the game about QOL mods, but I think that it ultimately boils down to player choice in what constitutes as a QOL. Blacklisting is what I would consider a QOL, as they’re not really the same as mods like Aftershock.
If you don’t want the tedium of counting your vitamins, washing clothes or having to make due with different guns, magazines and ammo types, it’s your choice. If you want a faster game experience in regards to upwards mobility then it’s your choice.
For instance, I find that pressing S and a direction key on every zombie that I kill takes away from my enjoyment from the game. It’s tedious, it’s a chore. The way I play is that I avoid combat for the first couple months, slowly build a character and once I get to the point I can contest with hordes, it’s meaningless to use hit and run tactics as I can directly slaughter hordes with ease. To summarize, reviving zombies don’t matter to me unless it’s very early game, I hardly notice the difference in play style until late game where the number of enemies I can kill in one sitting drastically increases.
