Just for clarification in case anyone wondering: the mod was merged a long time ago and now ships with the game. Mod from separate repository is no longer updated, sometime in the future most probably I’ll remove the mod repository altogether.
I’m happy to announce the pre-release of my “No Hope” mod - GitHub - Night-Pryanik/No-Hope: Home repository for "No Hope" mod.!
(The English name is temporary, as I still can’t find a good translation for my “Всё Тлен” 
name in Russian, which roughly can be translated as “Everything is Ash” or “Everything is Futile” or “Everything is Vain”).
The mod is based on the old lore where there was a full-scale war with China with many months of preceding marauding and civil disorder. Thus the world with the mod will be much more damaged overall, there will be much less loot etc.
Mod has two major goals. The first and the most important one is to make Cataclysm harder and harsher. To achieve this goal, I decreased loot spawn, made most houses spawn damaged, as well as most cars, and some other changes.
The second goal is to return back the original lore and content to the game. To achieve this goal, I returned many removed content, returned old descriptions to monsters, items etc, returned old snippets, and some other changes.
Despite I’m standing for realism side in “realism vs. gamism” debate in vanilla, in this mod I’m changing my priority for balance and gameplay. If realism is standing in the way of FUN, I’m throwing the realism out.
The list of changes so far:
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Returned most of the cut “sillynonsense” and other inappropriate (for vanilla) content, including, but not limited to: Rivtech and Leadworks guns, flaming melee weapons, tainted tornado and sewer brew, Fusion Blaster CBM, makeshift scrap firearms, underbarrel flamethrower, atomic cars, laser turret (rewrote description to mention it’s working not on the solar panels, but rather on compact yet powerful storage batteries; updated drop list to reflect that), chickenbot, tankbot and tripod and made it spawn in some military locations, bone armor (for vehicles and player).
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Integrated “Cars to Wrecks” mod. Also manually checked most of the cars spawn in mapgen and set them to spawn at least slightly damaged. Intact cars now are much, much harder to find, though not impossible.
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Radically decreased amount of ammo drop from turrets: 5.56 - 120, 7.62 - 100, .50 - 90.
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Returned old names and descriptions for turrets (they are manufactured by General Atomics and Leadworks), security-bot (Northrop), power armor (DoubleTech).
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Radically nerfed the ESAPI vest - no more “better-than-power-armor” stats. Also significantly decreased chance to spawn it on zombie soldiers (from 90% to 30%).
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Made ordinary walls hard to set on fire. Based on my old closed PR ([CR] Make ordinary walls non-flammable by Night-Pryanik · Pull Request #15537 · CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA · GitHub). Now you can’t set it on fire using a simple lighter.
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Updated domestic mapgen pallette so now any window in most houses will spawn shattered with 70% chance or fully smashed to frame (20% chance). Intact windows will spawn only with remaining 10% chance. The same for wooden doors: 60% chance to spawn open (imagine it was pryed open), 20% chance to spawn closed but damaged, 10% chance to spawn smashed to frame. Intact doors will spawn only with remaining 10% chance.
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Removed most of the guaranteed loot spawn in every location in the game. I tried to merge these changes into vanilla (Removed guaranteed loot spawn, part I: mapgen palettes by Night-Pryanik · Pull Request #44581 · CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA · GitHub), and in the end I’d say it wasn’t successful. But in my mod the chances to spawn guaranteed loot was dropped to 50-80%.
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Returned moose’s legendary aggression. Now it’s the good old machine of destruction as it used to be.
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Integrated “Mutant NPCs” mod. I like the idea, it’s fun, so why not?
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Returned back flaming eye’s ray of destruction (see below in comments for more info). Removed flaming eye’s
STAREattack. Added almost identical monster - staring eye withSTAREattack. -
Made zombies don’t revive. Reviving has some serious issues that can’t be easy fixed, so until these issues are to be resolved, I’m disabling zombie resurrection in my mod.
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Made hiding additional options when examining workbench-type furniture on by default. There is a separate shortcut for crafting, so duplicate crafting options when examining such furniture is annoying and useless.
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Removed one-tile puddles with infinite amount of water in forests. Such puddles are effectively breaking wilderness-survival balance, as you don’t need to constantly seek for water to survive. You find one such puddle - your search is over. It would be better to rework one-tile puddles into something like containers with limited amount of water in them, but until it’s implemented, removing puddles is better than having them.
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Made all gas stations have 0 - 5000 units of fuel instead of vanilla 40000 - 50000 units. Also made almost all locations in mapgen have the same 0 - 5000 units of fuel, including avgas. Also made almost all cars have zero fuel. There are places and cars where you could still find fuel, they are just very rare.
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Integrated “Extra Bandits” mod. Extra bandits of all sorts everywhere is exactly the thing I’d expect to emerge after the apocalypse.
Screenshot depicting houses with smashed windows, doors, and wrecked or damaged cars.
As one can see, this mod is more of a compilation of several tangentially of even unrelated features rather than it’s making accent on few specific and related changes. I like it that way, and I don’t plan to change this fundamental principle of the mod.
The current version of the mod is still Work in Progress. It’s far from completed (as I’m seeing it), and I’m constantly working on it, but it’s perfectly playable even in this state, so I’m sharing it to the community - maybe someone will be interested in it.
I have plans to bring the mod to list of the in-repo mods, though I’m not sure if it fits our criteria for such mods. If not, I’ll try to convert this mod into a fork (based on a 0.F. stable). No matter the state of the mod (in-repo or fork), I have plans to work on something that require code changes - for example, I’d like to return the nuke missile launch feature, or bring back the flaming eye’s devastating ray of destruction.
