As tends to happen after a while, I find myself knee-deep in the bodies of the dead, corpses every which way. There’s always butchering and burning them, but that tends to become rather tedious after a while.
What if we could get the zombies and other critters to do that for us?
Here’s what I’m envisioning: a zombie or other critter is walking around doing its thing, and every so often it does a check of its surroundings for corpses, chunks of meat and tainted meat (for zombies, as animals seem to have some ability to detect bad food). When it spots a suitable object, the critter toddles along until it stands on or next to the tile with the target. The critter performs an action that degrades the target object by one level (perhaps with acid damage so that it gets the “partially eaten” modifier as is appropriate) and you get the message “The X tears a chunk out of the Y and eats it.” This repeats until the item is destroyed, at which point the critter does another check for food items and, if failing that, turns on you.
This does several interesting and useful things: it takes care of the glut of zombie corpses you’ll eventually wind up with after a while, adds some nice immersive behavior, and adds behavior that the player can exploit for their own survival (like killing one or two zombies and escaping while the others feast on the fallen, or carrying chunks of meat you can throw about as a decoy).
Support. Baiting hostiles seems like a good way to use up surplus chunks of meat (if one hasn’t got salt to jerkify them, since smoking meat isn’t an option).
I approve, and this is mostly planned. Zombies are never going to pass up the chance for some living breathing flesh though, but animals like wolves and whatnot will generally prefer to go for corpses unless you get too close.
So I guess if you move out of sight they would focus on the meat?
Why not take it further? Wild deadly animals should have a hunger counter, if it is high they won’t attack the player. If it is low it will eat anything nearby.
Then we implement a Pick-Apocalypse setting, as described in that thread.
More immediately, zeds are a significant part of the game. Souls, not so much; the “netherworld” is not clearly defined in the in-game lore.
And even if we remove my lack/belief in souls as a ground for hungry animals ignoring each other/other living (meat) opposition in favor of targeting the PC, that still leaves the primary objection that specifically targeting the PC is arbitrary and capricious behavior. As it is, I look at wolf packs as an annoyance: I just killed half of you and you still keep coming? Animals don’t pick* fights they realize they can’t win IRL, and after taking 50% casualties with barely touching my clothing, I think they’d figure it out.
*As distinct from defending young/den, etc. Out in the middle of the road is neither.
Not yet. Current character is the first time I’ve made it to Summer, 8 cooking, energy weapons, etc so I’m still on the 02 Feb. Will look into the new ones once this one dies.
hopefully this comes along with enemies fighting one another. I have seen an NPC kill some stuff, but zombies and other enemies should kill each other as well.
Some hostiles will attack anything that gets in their way, at least according to the wiki. Haven’t encountered any in the presence of third-parties to test the theory, though.
Mob infighting is planned, copbots will no longer ignore the hordes of rioters so they can arrest you for B&E, wolf packs won’t be tolerating no jerkasses walking into their territory, ants and bees will no longer exist in perfect harmony.
It’s just that its up there with the hundreds of other planned things.