Hey, I’ve been a player of Cataclysm for a while now, and I’ve always wanted the ability to “edit” some of the things in the game.
Essentially, the environment in almost identical every time you play. The enemies you face are often the same, and usually begin showing up in the same order: First you see zombies, then grabbers and skeletons, then spitters and shockers, and so on and so forth. Forests are always everywhere, rivers and swamps are a common sight.
So my suggestion? When you first create a world, have the ability to set parameters for the environment.
Such as, say you wanted to play in a MASSIVE city with no special zombies, but hordes of normal ones. Then, when you create a world, you should be able to turn of special zombies, and set it so that every tile is a building/road/small field.
Or, vise versa, and say you wanted to play in nothing but a forest, with only the rare special zombie attacking from the dark. You should be able to change parameters for that too.
So essentially, I’m asking for the ability to create the kind of Apocalyptic World that YOU want to live in.
+1 to this, I would increase replayability a lot. I do see it being rather technical, ala DFs parametres, so I would appriciate some default scenarios packaged with it such as the aformentioned neverending city, letting you choose the spawn rates.
It would also cut down on a lot of unnecessary minimods that change map generation, a good thing IMO.
Perhaps I’m wrong here, but this wouldn’t need to be too difficult. Just a menu with worldgen options, like monster spawn %, ratio of buildings, fields etc. Want to live day of the triffids? Turn off every monster but them. Want to live zombieclypse 1610? Turn off firearms, most buildings, etc.
I think a lot of the reason this hasn’t been done is that it’s handled by modded versions, as it’s a relatively easy change to make.
Right now most of the parameters are coded into the game regarding monster spawning, specifically referring to Defense Mode. It shouldn’t be that hard adapting it to also cover Survival Mode.