New mode suggestion: New game ++

[nickspaceman]

Hello all! I’m fairly sure no one remembers me. I lurked a lot and haven’t been on for like…. Two years? But that’s not why I’m here.
I haven’t played the game in about a year. But as I was wandering about the net. I had an ideal, I had been playing a lot of idle games that let one “Rebirth” to give up all the stuff they’d done in a “run” to get points of some kind to get long term buffs/items/etc to get better stuff etc etc.

I ended up heading to the IRC and rambling about it, chesthole was on at the time and seemed to like the ideal too, so I here we are. I don’t mean for the main game to be changed, nor am I sure a mod could do this but it wouldn’t be hard to make one’s own game into it. Set challenges/quests to get points, then use them by the debug buffs/code in items that are better of normal ones or new items. To be frank, i don’t think I’m the right guy for coming up with the overall rules one could default to. So thoughts? Ideals? Rocks to be thrown at me?

[mentos046]

Character & Vehicle Transfer Utility

I’ve never used it myself, so I couldn’t tell you precisely how to use it, but it should allow you to take your current character + vehicle of your choice into a different world. Could be used to take a well-established character into a world with more intense difficulty settings.

[nickspaceman]

[quote=“mentos046, post:2, topic:13731”]Character & Vehicle Transfer Utility

I’ve never used it myself, so I couldn’t tell you precisely how to use it, but it should allow you to take your current character + vehicle of your choice into a different world. Could be used to take a well-established character into a world with more intense difficulty settings.[/quote]

that’s something i’ve never heard of. thanks for bringing it, i didn’t even think of bring vehicles.

[kevin.granade]

Hiya Nick, how could I forget
The closest thing I’ve considered to this is a game mode where you build a settlement by recruiting NPCs, and if you die you get an “extra life” as one of the NPCs.

[Neversalimus]

I could imagine it that’s like, for every 1000 killed monsters you get for example 1 point, after that you can spend this point for example for 0.1% increased hp for every other created character, such example was in Neon Chrome and some other modern roguelikes. More like going from roguelike to roguelite(I hope i’m right) system

[nickspaceman]

I could imagine it that’s like, for every 1000 killed monsters you get for example 1 point, after that you can spend this point for example for 0.1% increased hp for every other created character, such example was in Neon Chrome and some other modern roguelikes. More like going from roguelike to roguelite(I hope i’m right) system

yeah something along those lines, it could also be “get x number of y item” “have a team of x npc” etc etc, also insteed of getting a 1% or hp or such, it’d be something one could do with the de bug menu, jsons so that it wouldn’t have to be a mod and something that anyone could do (That said if someone made it into a mod, that’d be quite awesome. but i dont think it’ll happen)

[Rysith]

I could imagine it that’s like, for every 1000 killed monsters you get for example 1 point, after that you can spend this point for example for 0.1% increased hp for every other created character, such example was in Neon Chrome and some other modern roguelikes. More like going from roguelike to roguelite(I hope i’m right) system

It seems like the problem there is that CDDA’s difficulty is heavily front-loaded, and by the time you get a character to end game there isn’t a reason or desire for more plusses at the beginning of the game[1]. The first time you play you aren’t really sure what you need to do and you get murdered by zombies, wolves, and/or a moose. You haven’t been able to kill a thousand monsters or gather any NPCs or really do anything of note. Once you learn how to handle those things, the early difficulty isn’t that bad and you can (within a few weeks) bootstrap to the survivor-armored midgame, and once you hit that the transition to late-game (invulnerable cybernetic mutant with a deathmobile) is entirely voluntary - you can go to labs, towns, etc. at your leisure and fully prepared, and the sorts of things that will kill you there will a) only tend to kill you once, since you’ll prepare for them after that and b) by their nature tend to kill you before you can react, which means that 1% extra health or whatever wouldn’t help. A ‘successful’ CDDA run is also long enough that I think I’d get annoyed if there were things or challenges that I couldn’t reasonably take on without having ground out several successful sessions previously.

You can also already sort of do this by starting a new character in the same world - I had a late-stage character die an unexpected death, started a new character, and after the usual early-game scrabbling made my way to the old character’s stash and helped myself to the books, CBMs, armor, and crafting materials that I had left there, basically removing a lengthy period of scavenging.

If something like NG+ was implemented, about the only way that I could see it happening would be to combine it with the suggestion about making things better: Take a character and opt to retire them, and the world gets a bit ‘better’, influenced by their stats and companions and how far they have gotten in the faction quests, or something. It could modify spawn rates in the area around where they retired, maybe build some buildings like the commune does, something like that. You would have the usual new-game-in-existing-world issue that all the perishable food has spoiled, but you (as a player) can probably deal with that…

[1] Except maybe QoL things like self-aware, robust genetics, and so on that experienced players normally opt out of because they can get them later or don’t need them