The Monster difficulty setting in world options, what does it do exactly? I’ve set it to 10x for a new game and I’m not having too many difficulties, doesn’t seem different.
Fairly certain that setting increases the rate at which you’ll start finding stronger zombies all around. The weaker ones will “evolve” into tougher ones sooner, and tougher ones will spawn in new areas you visit.
Progressive difficulty sounds really nice. I wonder if it’s based on kills, time or uncovered map tiles. For now I’m still getting a good fight and I’m fairly mid-game and enhanced already.
it is based on time, and I believe it scales by your chosen season length
I think (THINK) that it’s an integer related to the time it takes monsters to evolve. At 1.0 they evolve normally. At 0 (if I’m reading it right) then EVERYTHING is in maximum hardcore Charizard mode from day one. Setting it to .5 would probably double evolution speed. Setting it to 10.0 (again, if I’m reading it right) would probably make monster evolution take 10x as long.
I don’t know for sure, I’ve yet to play around with it much (or survive more than 3 days trying to escape these accursed laboratories).
[quote=“TheWumpus, post:5, topic:9615”]I think (THINK) that it’s an integer related to the time it takes monsters to evolve. At 1.0 they evolve normally. At 0 (if I’m reading it right) then EVERYTHING is in maximum hardcore Charizard mode from day one. Setting it to .5 would probably double evolution speed. Setting it to 10.0 (again, if I’m reading it right) would probably make monster evolution take 10x as long.
I don’t know for sure, I’ve yet to play around with it much (or survive more than 3 days trying to escape these accursed laboratories).[/quote]
Putting it at 0 turns it off. Putting it at 100 makes them upgrade 2x as fast.
Note, this is something that has changed in the time from the stable to the latest experimental. Depending on which you are using it will have different meanings. (Notably we inverted it to do things sensibly). In the current experimental the formula is basically “upgrade time”/“difficulty setting”=“new upgrade time”, with a difficulty setting of 0 completely disabling upgrading (so a setting of 100 would make everything upgrade 100x faster). It’s basically the opposite in the stable version (though it doesn’t make near as much of a difference there since we don’t have actual monster upgrading in the stable).
Oops thanks for the correction!
Really interested how this works out. I’m on a nightly build and with 10x monster difficulty. A melee specialist with 17 Str (from granade and the +2 CBM) and the hulks and hunters are still no pushovers like they used to be. The game seems to be well balanced now in general.
If it’s time-based progression, after how much time are the monsters supposed to reach their maximum?
There is no hard limit, but the hardest zeds are unlocked for evolution after 2 weeks. Zeds have a random chance to evolve.
Please, PLEASE, change the setting’s in-game description, too, to prevent confusion among new players (and possibly experienced players). And make it crystal clear which way the setting works.
- Explain what does setting 0 do
- Explain which setting doubles the default rate of evolution
- Explain how to turn off evolution completely (in case 0 isn’t supposed to do so)
- Explain how to get peaked out monsters from the start (if that’s even possible)
- Even provide a crude example such as "At default setting, 99% of normal zombies will have turned into Feral Hunters after 30 days, which is just their second evolutionary step. The remaining 1% are still either zombies or will have evolved beyond the Feral Hunter stage. There are multiple other steps after that, but you’ll have to read about it in the forums or the wiki under the article named “Monster evolution” "
This particular setting is such a longterm AND a core thing that it needs to be made clear to anyone starting a new game. Whereas most settings could be found out via quick experimentation, this is the opposite of that, which is why it’s important to state the setting’s function in no uncertain terms. Will somebody please think of the children?
One cool thing might be to learn the precise monster evolution trees while playing the game, possibly with specialized non-mobile equipment, blood samples and skills… Or literature (found research reports).
Not sure how would all that info fit in a 2 line description.
The description is already as clear as it can be: 0 stops upgrades, 100 makes them upgrade 100 times faster (implying linear correlation).
Rest is details that could go on wiki, but not into in-game descriptions, except maybe some lore stuff like survivor notes.
seems like a section in the general help screen that was for game start settings could be useful for more in depth descriptions