hey, been away from the game for a month or two, downloaded the latest experimental, and I cannot find the Stats Through Skills mod or the setting option to slow zombie evolution. What happened? Why was this done?
Stats through Skills was recently obsoleted, but I think it should still be in the project. Long term, obsoleted mods are removed from the project, and there’s no guarantee their code support remains functional or present. Justification is in the Pull Request, but basically in-repo mods are expected to provide some new way of play or other such structure, Stats Through Skills doesn’t really meet that. Read baseball book, have Strength 9 instead of 8 on day 1 doesn’t provide a meaningful new way to play, as reading everything is already the expected meta.
As for Settings, that ones a bit more controversial, but per this Pull Request, some of the difficulty options have been disabled, others moved to an external file expected to be configured by a mod for things like Total Conversions. Players are being presented a lot of options up-front, the misconfiguration of which can radically change or straight up break the game balance. Externalizing them allows it to still be modified, but with the implicit expectation that since its not a presented option, the game working as designed is not guaranteed, and that as a mod-file it really should be combined with other mod changes to make it ‘work’ as a fun gameplay experience. Its actually still being debated by various contributors if this is a good idea or not, so don’t take it explicitly as the way it shall always be forevermore, just the usual experimental “lets do it and see what happens” churn.
You can still make a personal mod to skew the numbers as you like in the meantime, its just no longer an exposed thing every player is expected to mess with. The files in “data/core/external_options.json” if you want to tweak it baseline, or you can make a mod that overwrites it yourself.
Do you have a name for the setting in external_options.json? I cannot seem to find it