Is there a way to disable the NPC entirely? An not just the wandering NPC but the static quest givers and their locations too. Personaly I find there to be too many problems with them, and rather just do a run without them. If thats alright.
Either mod them out of the game (ie prevent their buildings from spawning, which is a lot of assets) or just ignore them like pretty much everyone else does.
Random NPCs can be turned off easily. Static NPCs will always be in the game unless you blacklist their spawning points.
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Tried the Innawoods mod which can take care of the buildings, and using the world settings can take care of the wandering NPC. But youâll always have a few persisting characters, like the NPC in the Migo towers. So youâll never be free of them.
Might be best for me to just make another sociopath run and just annihilate any NPC I run into.
I personally disable Mi-Go towers.
I donât know who actually came up with this idea, but all that POI is (aside being a slog to a computerâs resources when itâs on screen) is just an unbalanced, uninspired mess. Thereâs nothing in them other than a ridiculous number of hostiles that out-everything you and thereâs no consistent way to âhelpâ the NPCs if you want to. (And no, if your answer is âbut you can cheese these mechanicsâ, youâre just furthering the argument that the POI is poorly balanced).
Although, I am not quite sure what your exact problem is with NPCs given that you can just ignore them and they have no influence in the world.
Ow yeah, I agree the Migo towers are fucked. No matter how I approch it they always end up screwing me with their unbearable high temperatures, and thereâs nothing I can do about them except run in and hammer the walls in and pull the NPC out. But thatâs another nightmare because for some reason the NPC AI has them running in literal circles because of the âgasâ or high temperatures. All I know is it took me forever to herd them out, not lead, herd. itâs insane.
So far I have been ignoring the NPC like normal, thats easy enough to do. I just wondered if is such a thing to disable the entirely. Otherwise Iâd just keep doing what Iâve always been doing. Taking them out for their loot.
My problem with them is mostly just personal gripes, and a techical issue here and there.
For one, Important NPC clones. You find the same Unique NPC more than once. Which is a bit jarring sometimes. Especialy since this spawns their unique locations as well. Like having multiple refugee centers with the exact same people.
Then thereâs the wandering NPC always spawning with the EXACT same age, height and bloodtype.
Their traits donât balence well sometimes. Youâre either gambling for a literal mouth breather, below average and okay NPCs.
An like I said before, there navigational AI a bit screwed sometimes. Especialy in difficult enviroments and sometimes enemies.
So really just personal gripes, nothing to stress other people about.
Havenât tried it myself, but Iâve seen someone saying you can get Mi-go tower prisoners to get out by protecting them by giving them gas masks.
The temperatures are supposed to be less unbearable in winter (again, I havenât tried it).
The non unique âuniqueâ locations is a problem in that making them unique with the current game mechanics runs the risk of blocking significant contents for a player because NPCs/sites become wrecked or inaccessible due to to enemies, as well as the risk of simply not stumbling upon them because they spawned in the other direction from the one you chose to move (or was forced to move, due to natural or enemy obstacles).
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That makes sense. Not exactly an elegant solution but compared to either having repeats of a quest/NPC to having them wiped by a random enemy, it probably better to have backups then.
But is this the final solution to this or more of a stand-in solution?
Itâs not the desired solution. There are (slow, and not necessarily high priority) efforts to find ways to protect unique locations from being destroyed/blocked and essential NPCs from getting killed off accidentally/randomly.
However, itâs not a trivial problem, and it has a lot of sub problems, so it will likely take quite some time (may well be measured in years) before a sufficiently robust set of measures are in place to actually make the uniques unique with a sufficiently low risk of things getting messed up.
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Yeah its a bit of a weird situation as it stands.
What also surprises me is how someone somehow managed to put âVikingsâ in the game and literally no one looked at them and thought âWow, this sure seems like a very specific thing to add to a game that takes place in the USA, especially given the current conotations âVikingsâ have within a certain group of people there huh?â (ie dogwhistle). Especially given how rushed they seemed to be in particular and how uninspiring they are, but i digress 
Most things now are being foisted into NPCs to force the players to interact with them, trying to make new âquestsâ and new âtypesâ of NPCs, whilst completely ignoring the very basic aspect of the NPCs is so barebones it hurts. ie another case of moving things/adding new things to a specific feature while the feature itself has not been worked on and built up on a basic level, or has been in a very incomplete (or fragile) state for a while.
Not sure how youâll fix the issue with the NPCs getting blocked and killed. As you say, that will require some creative coding to keep enemies from wandering near them and their zones from being blocked.
Could putting unique NPCs into basements or roofs help? Areas enemies may not so easily reach them?
That, or make unqiue NPC have 3 conditions, they have to be Invincible, player actions are disabled around them (to prevent players from exploiting any tricks like fire or building to kill them), and finaly have them set to their zones. So players canât lure the NPC away to use them to kill enemy hordes.
Vikings? Like cosplay vikings or real historial vikings? Whats the explanation for that, they come from another dimension?
The game shouldnât block players from murdering NPCs. If players do, they have to suffer the consequences in the form of broken quest lines, although I believe there are some measures in place to appoint replacements.
I believe there are also some early measures to reduce the risk of important NPCs getting killed off (such as the refugee center back room zombies breaking out and killing refugees that ran to the commotion to get killed as soon as the quest was accepted).
The main cause of factions getting killed off comes in the form of area covering enemies such as fungaloids and ants that cover huge areas (I think fungaloids have a radius of 20 world tiles at the start of their expansion). These areas can also block access to locations by covering the approaches to them, including potentially the only bridge leading to an island where theyâre located. I assume hordes can also be an issue, but there are at least suggestion level approaches to that by core devs.
The Valhallists are silly, in my opinion. The story is that theyâre some sort of (norse mythology based) neo-pagans, if I understand it correctly. Thus, theyâre not vikings, but modern people that sort of want to recreate the âgloryâ of vikings. That sort of (more or less serious) neo-pagans exist, but Iâm not aware of the existence of any sect enclaves.
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Theyâre more cosplay Vikings, and just follow Old Norse and Scandanavian religions as a means of dealing with the apocalypse.
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Well always digged the norse religion. Gotta love a maniac with a death wish. And hey, if this faction offers a variety of melee weapons, Iâd welcome them with open arms.
Otherwise, definitly one of the quirkier factions Iâve heard of. More so than the food Boy mascot scenario.
As for the area covering enemies, could a distance be set on how close their zones can spawn to unique NPC areas? Not much of a idea, but its the last thing I can think of.
Thatâs one thing that has been discussed, and it could use different distances for different enemies (a wasp nestâs threat area is a lot smaller than fungaloid or ant ones, for instance). However, the unique sites would probably have to be placed after terrain but before other features, or they may be pushed uncomfortably far away by the lack of anywhere to place them.
Lots of interconnected moving pieces that should work together even when modified for other purposes (and there are probably ones I may have forgotten or never heard of as well)âŚ
As mentioned by another user, âcosplay Vikingsâ, who are âway too muchâ into the Norse Mythology.
Not wanting to bore yâall with this, but my gripe with their existence is somewhat politics related. tl;dr at the end.
Long Version:
For a few years now, and this isnât new, a lot of groups that are âa bit too much to the rightâ, have been using a lot of Norse Symbolism and Mythology as part of their beliefs. Nordic runes - very specifically tons of Viking terms and individual ârunesâ - are very much constantly used, being well known symbols these people as dogwhistles in order to recognise eachothers, in the same way other symbols are also used for the same purpose. This is something that is well documented, and a quick research on this topic brings up even more information.
The TL;DR
Hate Groups appropriated that particular culture as a means to identify themselves and eachothers without raising any suspicion from those not in the know.
Why is this a gripe for me? Personally, having something like that really makes me double-take every time I see that content being fiddled with. And even if we pretend its connotations arenât a problem, their existence in-game is a bit silly as it feels severely out of place in so many different ways.
Yeah, you would need some sort of priority listing for sites/zones/areas on which is generated first and last. And considering how many of those there are, thats going to be tricky to implement.
Like one of the forseeable problems is that you mark all unique sites as top priority for generation and they end up right next to each other each time you make a new map. I guess you would then need two types of distance listings for unique zone genrations. One that sets space from any perceivable zone with threats and another for other unique zones.
But thats putting it simply. In reality Iâm sure it be a bit more complicated than that. It usaly always is.
So the Viking cosplayers existed before the collapses? That does bring up more questions.
The way I could see them being more realistic is if they were more modernized in some strict sense. Mix in a bit of medieval mad max or a degree of a diffrent flavoured amish to make them more realistic.
I mean, the one thing I find odd is how thereâs a large enough sect of Valhalla worshipers in New london of all things. It be more realistic for this faction to form in places like Denmark, Sweden or Norway. Which I think has a handful of active worshipers for such a thing to happen. Especialy on a traditional scale, than some flight of fancy.
Maybe for the New london sect. These people should be more akin to naturalists or traditionalists (medieval historical kind, not the dogmatic kind), or a mix. Least then its not bound by some unrealistic religious formation that New London wouldnât have the population to support.
An that way you keep the stock of medieval weaponary, gear and tools avalible for players whoâd like to invest into such. Instead of the usual high tech or modern gear youâd get from other factions.