Was thinking about a mod that turned all foods into “food”, all drinks into “water”, boiled down vehicles into simple classes, melted down firearms into simple forms (pistol/shotgun/smg etc)… Simplify a lot of the clothes/armor down too… Gotta leave at the moment so this idea is half formed and rushed, but a mod like this would take away the cluttered aspect of cata (which I personally enjoy) and streamline a lot of stuff (like if you just found “shotgun”, you’d know you had the best shotgun in the game (well, there could be different models inside the simplicity, like single shot/double barrel/combat shotgun…)…
Okay, I’m not doing the best job explaining the merits of this 
I generally hate simplicity, but with a game as varied as Cataclysm I’m (for the first time) thinking of simplification instead of my usual “Blah, this isn’t insane enough!” complaint… 
I’m gonna assume you’ve been playing DoomRL recently.
I think it too.
But it could be… like a “coffeebreakroguelike”. Soo, why not.
Once we have mod manager (which should be as soon as I catch up with merging the backlog from the 0.9 release), this would be pretty easy to do, all we need to do is go through the items and pick a representative item from each category and mark it “simple”, then you configure modmanager to only load “simple” items. Boom, the spawns implode. Can also annotate e.g. natural animals, probably leave the actual monster types alone, or mark them all simple.
Why anyone would want to play this, I have NO idea
Okay, I'm not doing the best job explaining the merits of this :D I generally hate simplicity, but with a game as varied as Cataclysm I'm (for the first time) thinking of simplification instead of my usual "Blah, this isn't insane enough!" complaint.. :)
Why not? Narrow down the pool of monsters, items and resources, rework the map generation process for challenge ratings and powerful items placement, and you have more of a classic roguelike.
Vanilla Cataclysm is enjoyable, perhaps alongside several NPCs, and a wider brush stroke for key skills bonuses.
I have actually long intended to make almost exactly this once the mod manager is complete. Basically a far more gamey version for those who want to play with a bit more of a traditional abstraction layer, where choices are important and the value clear.
Cough Rogue Survivor Cough
