Faction Priorities

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

It’s been a few patches since I last glanced at the faction screen, since I don’t play with NPC’s, and I noticed that something had changed about the way I remember it looking previously. Last time I looked, it was the Old Guard that were interested in spreading the fungus. No, now it says they’re interested in cultivating knowledge. Apparnetly the merchant faction wants to destroy the world, which is capitalism as per usual I suppose, and that my followers (of which there are none) want to spread the fungus.

Nnnnooooooo, no no no, no. That sounds like a positively horrible idea. I do not want to assosciate nor ally with the behavior-manipulating hyper-parasitic scourge that is the fungus.

That is just me, however. Maybe someone has taken that one fruit thing and decided they want to be mushroom people or something, but not me. Fuck that. I want that shit to burn and get the hell off my land; those fungus fucks scare the crap out of me.

So I was wondering in the future if there would be some way to designate your priorities as you form your own faction. It seems reasonable enough - some people want to play fungus friends, some want to rebuild civilization, some want to burn whats left of the world, some want to be super-mutant god warriors. Is that something that is in the works or am I going to have to go against the grain and stay way the fuck away from anything fungus-related?

Another question: is the priorities of the factions currently randomized? Because it looks strange the way it is in my game.

2

Yes. It’s all randomized and none of it means anything except the faction names. And the current faction system is essentially just placeholder for future work.

3

How would priorities affect the behavior of the AI’s of its members? If a faction wants to spread the fungus, are they going around popping open canisters of spores in open areas or in forests? If some group wants to rebuild civilization, are we going to see the locking down of existing areas, or the erection of even more? What do we have to look forward to?

4

At the moment they don’t do anything yet. Some of their behaviors are slightly altered (how they value items etc.).

A great deal of NPC code is just pure placeholders. I think early on in the development someone had an optimistic vision of how things will look like, but then it didn’t work out. Since 2013, the changes to faction code were related to coordinates, translation and text lines. No new features.