I’ve been playing a few characters and messing with world’s options; after some… 3-4 characters, including a broken cyborg lab challenge, I’d like to hear some advice from more expert players!
For example:
Stable or experimental? I’ve been playing stable only so far. Mostly for fear of some horrible bug devouring my character.
Spawns: wander or static? Tried wander in my last game… dunno, makes for a different game but I’m not sure it’s more interesting.
Random NPCs? They look pretty bugged right now. But they sure make things more interesting.
Other things I haven’t been experimenting with? Mods, maybe?
Stable is far away from experimental that it’s difficult to suggest anything.
A year ago a had a blast by doing two wilderness survival runs. No cities, no books, no labs to loot. The only source of any loot are crash sites and special spawns of zombies. Character is illiterate and you had to use more makeshift tools mod to progress anywhere. But you can’t do that in the experimental out of the box as that mod is not available by default, on top of that there are many more different types of crash sites and probably other location which can spawn with city density of 0.
But I don’t really recommend it as at some point there isn’t much to do for you.
The Medieval Peasant run I did a while back with a blanket ban on modern vehicles, electricity, mutations, CBMs and guns was a lot of fun. You tend to have to get quite creative with how you deal with certain situations and enemies.
Experimental right now is pretty stable, because its been bugfixing for a while to prepare for 0.E stable release, so experimental now basically is 0.E stable, a good time to upgrade ( or wait until 0.E stable releases soon, if you prefer it all rubber stamped official )
After 0.E releases, experimental will be very experimental as the backlog of features that have been building up all get merged in.
Wander spawns do add an interesting dimension to gameplay, but they are currently not in the state we want them, and they are a bit broken so we plan to eventually rework them, if you dont mind the occasional weirdness with it, lots of people prefer playing with it on.
I would say play with Random NPCs on, they dont show u pall that often unless you go looking for them, I wouldnt say they are bugged, but they are certainly incomplete with how they behave, it also adds a new dimension to gameplay - some are aggressive, some arent, and with them you can build up a faction camp.
Mods - I dont play with any so cant really recommend any in particular personally, but others consider Magiclysm as a well integrated mod that changes up the gameplay.
If you aren’t familiar with Vorm, the CDDA streamer / YouTuber, he’s done a lot of random challenges. His Discord also includes a suggestions tab filled with them. Perhaps that’d be a place to start?
otherwise the experimental build, at least, has a whole bunch of starting scenarios to give a whirl.
That mod (or mods - you could be talking about makeshift items mod or more survival tools, they both had very little in them, and nothing that would have a large impact) is not available by default anymore because it had basically nothing in it.
It being gone won’t have much of an impact on wilderness runs.
I can only tell from the experience a year ago. Rycon was doing such run at a time and there where some small roadblock that mod helped to solve. I don’t remember details but it was small things like a metal file without which you where locked out of many metal tools. The other was absence of the wooden frame that you could make without nails, now it’s a part of the base game. I’m not even sure which things where added into the base because of the feedback and which where from the mods.
Glad to hear that it’s not needed anymore, could try a wild run again.
I think the biggest problem I have with wander spawns is it takes forever to pulp all those bodies! Maybe I could turn zombie revivification off… smashing all the corpses feels more like a chore than a gameplay feature, to me.
As for the NPCs I’ve had a couple of annoying encounters. Pretty much both ended with me running them over with a truck.
However, I guess I’ll give experimental a try, then!
