Desert was temporarily disabled because some stuff needed fixing. Shortly after that the person who was actively working on it left the project, so it’s been in a kinda limbo for the time being.
As for the mall cop or other scenario stuff, this happens because the location that is required (such as a mall) doesn’t exist on that particular overmap. The more rare your scenario starting location, the more likely this is to happen. In addition doing things like turning city size up can also make this happen more or less, depending on if you spawn point location is a city building or not.
