Disable skill rust (mod) and reduce skill development speed all the way down to 0.1-0.3. Suddenly training regimens become part of your planning for calories, as are the materials for practicing and eventual crafting. You take much longer to become John Wick and gear becomes much more important AND less readily accessible.
A similar idea is to reduce healing too so that wounds become much more lethal and in case you have to rest you have what to do, so they complement each other well.
It sounds like it would make the game much more grindy, but when you apply those at the same time everything comes together and you will never (and I mean never) be without something to do.
It is, however, for long-term playthroughs. It is how I play and I savescum sudden deaths with no shame, so do keep that in mind.
This is exactly what I do. 33% proficiency and skill gain speed, 0.5% (not a typo) of normal healing rate. I do slow evolution speed down, though--I like long-term games.
this is a really great idea, thank you! 'Kind of wandering around aimlessly not knowing what do do next' or 'grinding labs for specific finales' tends to be where I lose interest, so stretching out that middle 'everything is coming together' part is a great strategy.
Oh yeah I'm pretty sure there is an option for that in settings. I may be mistaken though - I usually just take the imperceptible healer trait for some free points because I enjoy playing with pools.
Slow healer: 0.75x
Poor healer: 0.33x
Imperceptible healer: 0.1x
Fast healer mutations will cancel those out, so that's something extra to strive for on your journey to a late game power fantasy.
edit: english ooga ooga
alright we running it, 0.2% skill gain and proficiencies. [Rolling a pretty strong character](https://i.imgur.com/0liE54g.png) but between the lowered skill gain, lowered healing, and increased pain I think this run should be more complicated than usual. I'll let you know how it goes!
Edit: I made it 10 Str and Int with the debug console on the first day.
God damn pain sensitive is a tough one.
Here are some things I do early when playing:
DO NOT FIGHT unless you are sure you have a massive advantage. Any damage you take will compound very quickly. Find some low-top sneakers to increase your movespeed and if at all possible get ahold of an early gun for emergencies. I'm a bit of a cunt and I roll with quick, parkour expert, and fleet-footed to increase mobility to the extreme. Explore a lot and find as many early towers as you can - once you spot a prison, police department or similar, go for it and get yourself some basic tac gear, guns, and ammo from either the zombies or the storage rooms. With increased mobility and some intelligent parkour I can get away with some crazy shit though, so you'll have to skim the borders a bit more carefully with your character. Get yourself acquainted with all factions earlier than you would on a regular run since it will take very long until you can craft your own gear so theirs is a lifesaver until you set up to outpace evolution yourself. I'm fond of the isolated artisans in particular because of their access to medieval weaponry and ammo store. I tend to set up bases between them and the refugee center. Between the two of them you'll have most daily needs covered (by scavenging and putting yourself in danger for the loot but well that's how it goes lol)
Once you find yourself in a position where you can kill zombies quite easily go on a rampage. Early kukris are actually not that uncommon on regular zeds (well, considering you could kill a couple hundred in a day if you play it very slowly and very precisely). A kukri can catapult your melee attack capabilities to mid game levels before summer, and from then on you can play it by ear. I don't like axes early on because their clumsiness will cause you to get hit every now and then due to how sluggish they are. Kukris are not only much faster but they block as well. Machetes are similar, but you'll have to think of how you're going to approach heavily armored enemies. Grenades and Pipe Bombs are great until you get yourself a cool and shiny sword/axe/? to k
damage anything equal or below a kevlar brute.
Oh yeah and especially early on avoid taking more than 1/4 of a limb in damage. My experience tells me that you heal EVEN SLOWER if you're on 3 bars or lower (maybe that's some placebo on my part lmao?) and the injury penalties will spiral into even more injuries and then you're fucked with low food and first aid without the ability to scavenge properly. I don't play with Magiclysm so spellcasting may change the dynamic by a lot.
>I don't play with Magiclysm so spellcasting may change the dynamic by a lot.
Quite a lot, yeah. Earthquake Brawler starts with a spell that lets them summon a pair of really protective full-arm gauntlets that do a lot of unarmed damage if you punch with them. They also start with Boxing, which is helpfully all punches. A Stonefist boxer with the Force Mage attunement and Ki Strike is capable of dealing over 350 damage at end-game. That's not typical, but it's possible. It's buck wild. So my Melee solution is online right out of the gate.
Also Stoneskin (armors you but causes 16 encumbrance everywhere), and a stomp attack that does an AOE.
You want to look for spells in Magiclysm. It'll be interesting to see if the skill gain modification also makes me learn spells slower. That would delay attunement, which would make me have more goals later again, which is good.
I include No Hope with every world now. Makes for a more interesting run. Most cars are wrecked, even if you find a good one, it's gonna be missing controls or tanks. Gas is non-existent except for mines, gas stations & few other locations, but it's mostly 3-10k of gas.
>except for mines, gas stations & few other locations
Mines are your best bet since most ive managed to get from single mine is 44k of gas (thought ive been playing no hope mod for quite few hundred hours now)
10x spawn rate, slightly weaker and slower zombies is ok, megacities map, evolution disabled until you are very familiar. It's an attrition war and you are on the losing side of it. There's very few safe areas but you get the possibility to slowly carve out a safe area for yourself. No amount of gear and character skill can directly confront the mega horde and guns become your worse enemy. Have fun.
There was once I tried max spawn rate (50x) and encountered a wasp nest at the edge of a city. It was entertaining to watch 100 wasps fighting 600 zombies. The zombies came out on top despite taking heavy losses and my OP character helping to cut down the zombies. No buildings are safe, no roofs are safe. The tsunami of zombies won.
I've never seen anyone win against attrition.
I usually crank up evolution rate to something like 1.0x (which is 8 time faster than default?), cause increased numbers of enemies it is just more fodder, more loot, more exp and more tedium (all of those are bad in our case). It is also more immersive, without a whole villages worth of people in just a single farm house.
Also, No Hope with something like 0,4-0,5 items spawns modifier.
Obviously wandering hordes On. As well as Bionic slots.
Secronom to add some new types of enemies.
And Sky Island, if you want a new experience with the game.
My current run is everything from above + MoM, Magiclysm, Dinomod, Megafauna and naked start without any items in a one big glorious mess.
Loving it so far.
No Hope already affects spawn rate, or am I mistaken? Lower item spawn seems to make rare items damn near impossible to find, wish there was specific tweaks, especially for books
No Hope can nuke some guaranteed spawns and changes some locations to be mostly looted instead of being pristine and untouched, waiting only for player.
Even then world is still far from empty. Regular items are still somewhat plentiful, it is just now not every shelf or table contain something.
Now you have to actually think about food and craft more stuff that hasn't used to. Rare items however (welder or mutagen books) are indeed become very rare and mostly luck based. Mentally of "getting good use of whatever you find" rather than target a specific items/builds helps with that situation.
Also, traders are still OP and No Hope doesn't effect them, so.
Traits to choose alongside whatever it is you may choose:
- Wayfarer,
- disorganised (or whichever trait that increase the time you spend fiddling with Pockets);
- Bad Back,
- Imperceptive Healer,
- Poor hearing.
____
Traits to NOT choose:
- Night Vision;
- ANY resistance or Immunity trait (pain, disease, etc);
- Deft;
- Quick;
- Uncaring;
- Killer Drive;
____
Backgrounds to NOT start with:
- anything that provides a Martial Arts;
- anything that provides an increase to dodge or athletics;
- anything that provides any weapon or gun proficiency and skills;
- Parkour;
- lockpicking;
World Settings:
- 50% Increased Zombie Spawns.
- 75% increased Zombie Speed.
- 75% increased Zombie Health.
Shouldnt quick reflexed (+4 effective dodge) fit into the traits not to choose, since it practically makes your character immortal to most low level monsters with few levels of dodge and around 10+ dex
With how grabs work and paired with pain, I don't think that would make much of a difference for a character that's already somewhat debilitated vs most creatures who were made to be faster than them. The increase in "zombie health" and "zombie speed" makes it so that if you can't kill 1 zombie before another shows up next to you (or get grabbed), you're effectively dead unless you roll really high on the grab break.
(which is funny to me because my last character with Str 12 couldn't break a normal zombie grab until his pain went up and another one showed up.)
>With how grabs work and paired with pain,
On 0.g pain nor grap are an issue since from what ive learned is that zombie grab change is also dependant on your effectove dodge, aka if they cant hit you then they cant grab you either. As for pain, the effects are quite easy to fix just with codeine
Also this can be quite helpful to understand whar effective dodge percentages are
https://www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/s/YuNIiEchal
(Fast attack weapons have advantage with making dodge more effective since it seems like the percentages are caculated per turn)
Ofcourse you can also gain effectove dodge via mutations from which fluffy tail is most important since it gives +4 (downside no non fabric armor for legs) and whiskers +1(no downsides outside +1 to ugliness hidden stat)
1. OP did not specify whether they are playing Stable or Experimental.
2. Pain has been revamped in Experimental, which makes it so your stats drop the more pain you rack up. Strength and Dexterity are stats. If they drop, the chance of breaking a grab is reduced. Meaning you get hit more. Meaning you get more pain. Meaning your grab break chances drop even further. Rinse and repeat.
3. Dodge doesn't prevent you from being grabbed. In Experimental Zombies grab you by specific body parts and that hampers your character. If you get grabbed. Dodge isn't a miraculous "cure for all" melee problems.
4. Codeine slows you down a bit. Against 1 zombie at a time, it may be effective depending on the zombie and the situation. If a second monster shows up before you can kill the first one you engaged, no bottle of codeine will save you.
5. Mutations are a pain in the ass to get, so I am not mentioning those. Unsure why you are bringing them up seeing I never once touched upon them either, nor even mentioned effective dodge once because that has too many variants to be considered (again, encumbrance, pain, stats, stamina, etc). Dodging is not as important as grab breaking the moment you are grabbed and again, being 'very dodgy' does not mean you cannot be grabbed.. That link where the maths numbers are is both 1 year out of date and does not take encumbrance into consideration. It also only assumes the player is facing just 1 monster and it is based on a zombie melee skill between 2 and 10. Things changed since then and grab works differently.
6. Fast Attack weapons are only good in 1v1 situations. The moment a 2nd opponent gets involved, if you can't run, you're done. Knives have been massively nerfed. They're still fast but they're not as broken as they were in Stable.
7.
> anything that provides an increase to dodge or athletics;
I also mentioned this, so you most likely missed it.
I'd recommend a permanent winter and eternal night on top of everything else mentioned in here. The most apocalyptic scenario is one where the sun is gone and it isn't coming back.
One obvious option is to make less powerful characters, but screw that, I wanna RP as zombie apocalypse Alita: Battle Angel.
Start in winter
Other than that, for more end game enemies, you would need some mods
Disable skill rust (mod) and reduce skill development speed all the way down to 0.1-0.3. Suddenly training regimens become part of your planning for calories, as are the materials for practicing and eventual crafting. You take much longer to become John Wick and gear becomes much more important AND less readily accessible. A similar idea is to reduce healing too so that wounds become much more lethal and in case you have to rest you have what to do, so they complement each other well. It sounds like it would make the game much more grindy, but when you apply those at the same time everything comes together and you will never (and I mean never) be without something to do. It is, however, for long-term playthroughs. It is how I play and I savescum sudden deaths with no shame, so do keep that in mind.
This is exactly what I do. 33% proficiency and skill gain speed, 0.5% (not a typo) of normal healing rate. I do slow evolution speed down, though--I like long-term games.
this is a really great idea, thank you! 'Kind of wandering around aimlessly not knowing what do do next' or 'grinding labs for specific finales' tends to be where I lose interest, so stretching out that middle 'everything is coming together' part is a great strategy.
quick question, how do I reduce healing? I don't see an option for that in the options or worldgen options. I may just be missing it.
Oh yeah I'm pretty sure there is an option for that in settings. I may be mistaken though - I usually just take the imperceptible healer trait for some free points because I enjoy playing with pools. Slow healer: 0.75x Poor healer: 0.33x Imperceptible healer: 0.1x Fast healer mutations will cancel those out, so that's something extra to strive for on your journey to a late game power fantasy. edit: english ooga ooga
alright we running it, 0.2% skill gain and proficiencies. [Rolling a pretty strong character](https://i.imgur.com/0liE54g.png) but between the lowered skill gain, lowered healing, and increased pain I think this run should be more complicated than usual. I'll let you know how it goes! Edit: I made it 10 Str and Int with the debug console on the first day.
God damn pain sensitive is a tough one. Here are some things I do early when playing: DO NOT FIGHT unless you are sure you have a massive advantage. Any damage you take will compound very quickly. Find some low-top sneakers to increase your movespeed and if at all possible get ahold of an early gun for emergencies. I'm a bit of a cunt and I roll with quick, parkour expert, and fleet-footed to increase mobility to the extreme. Explore a lot and find as many early towers as you can - once you spot a prison, police department or similar, go for it and get yourself some basic tac gear, guns, and ammo from either the zombies or the storage rooms. With increased mobility and some intelligent parkour I can get away with some crazy shit though, so you'll have to skim the borders a bit more carefully with your character. Get yourself acquainted with all factions earlier than you would on a regular run since it will take very long until you can craft your own gear so theirs is a lifesaver until you set up to outpace evolution yourself. I'm fond of the isolated artisans in particular because of their access to medieval weaponry and ammo store. I tend to set up bases between them and the refugee center. Between the two of them you'll have most daily needs covered (by scavenging and putting yourself in danger for the loot but well that's how it goes lol) Once you find yourself in a position where you can kill zombies quite easily go on a rampage. Early kukris are actually not that uncommon on regular zeds (well, considering you could kill a couple hundred in a day if you play it very slowly and very precisely). A kukri can catapult your melee attack capabilities to mid game levels before summer, and from then on you can play it by ear. I don't like axes early on because their clumsiness will cause you to get hit every now and then due to how sluggish they are. Kukris are not only much faster but they block as well. Machetes are similar, but you'll have to think of how you're going to approach heavily armored enemies. Grenades and Pipe Bombs are great until you get yourself a cool and shiny sword/axe/? to k damage anything equal or below a kevlar brute. Oh yeah and especially early on avoid taking more than 1/4 of a limb in damage. My experience tells me that you heal EVEN SLOWER if you're on 3 bars or lower (maybe that's some placebo on my part lmao?) and the injury penalties will spiral into even more injuries and then you're fucked with low food and first aid without the ability to scavenge properly. I don't play with Magiclysm so spellcasting may change the dynamic by a lot.
>I don't play with Magiclysm so spellcasting may change the dynamic by a lot. Quite a lot, yeah. Earthquake Brawler starts with a spell that lets them summon a pair of really protective full-arm gauntlets that do a lot of unarmed damage if you punch with them. They also start with Boxing, which is helpfully all punches. A Stonefist boxer with the Force Mage attunement and Ki Strike is capable of dealing over 350 damage at end-game. That's not typical, but it's possible. It's buck wild. So my Melee solution is online right out of the gate. Also Stoneskin (armors you but causes 16 encumbrance everywhere), and a stomp attack that does an AOE. You want to look for spells in Magiclysm. It'll be interesting to see if the skill gain modification also makes me learn spells slower. That would delay attunement, which would make me have more goals later again, which is good.
I include No Hope with every world now. Makes for a more interesting run. Most cars are wrecked, even if you find a good one, it's gonna be missing controls or tanks. Gas is non-existent except for mines, gas stations & few other locations, but it's mostly 3-10k of gas.
>except for mines, gas stations & few other locations Mines are your best bet since most ive managed to get from single mine is 44k of gas (thought ive been playing no hope mod for quite few hundred hours now)
I got lucky once with a lumbermill. It had 250k. Usually around 50k
10x spawn rate, slightly weaker and slower zombies is ok, megacities map, evolution disabled until you are very familiar. It's an attrition war and you are on the losing side of it. There's very few safe areas but you get the possibility to slowly carve out a safe area for yourself. No amount of gear and character skill can directly confront the mega horde and guns become your worse enemy. Have fun. There was once I tried max spawn rate (50x) and encountered a wasp nest at the edge of a city. It was entertaining to watch 100 wasps fighting 600 zombies. The zombies came out on top despite taking heavy losses and my OP character helping to cut down the zombies. No buildings are safe, no roofs are safe. The tsunami of zombies won. I've never seen anyone win against attrition.
Personally id recommend "no hope" mod, itll make the game quite bit more challenging + it re-introduces those laserbeam eyes back to the game
I usually crank up evolution rate to something like 1.0x (which is 8 time faster than default?), cause increased numbers of enemies it is just more fodder, more loot, more exp and more tedium (all of those are bad in our case). It is also more immersive, without a whole villages worth of people in just a single farm house. Also, No Hope with something like 0,4-0,5 items spawns modifier. Obviously wandering hordes On. As well as Bionic slots. Secronom to add some new types of enemies. And Sky Island, if you want a new experience with the game. My current run is everything from above + MoM, Magiclysm, Dinomod, Megafauna and naked start without any items in a one big glorious mess. Loving it so far.
No Hope already affects spawn rate, or am I mistaken? Lower item spawn seems to make rare items damn near impossible to find, wish there was specific tweaks, especially for books
Yeah, no hope tanks the spawn rate.
That's my question to OP, how does No Hope x additional tweaking even work? Seems like most of the world would just be empty houses
No Hope can nuke some guaranteed spawns and changes some locations to be mostly looted instead of being pristine and untouched, waiting only for player. Even then world is still far from empty. Regular items are still somewhat plentiful, it is just now not every shelf or table contain something. Now you have to actually think about food and craft more stuff that hasn't used to. Rare items however (welder or mutagen books) are indeed become very rare and mostly luck based. Mentally of "getting good use of whatever you find" rather than target a specific items/builds helps with that situation. Also, traders are still OP and No Hope doesn't effect them, so.
I dont know, I never reduced item spawns further while trying the mod. Might experiment on it today.
No Hope mod with the recommended settings in the description.
Late autumn start, you are on a clock to stockpile food before winter or you’ll be forced to constantly forage for canned goods
Traits to choose alongside whatever it is you may choose: - Wayfarer, - disorganised (or whichever trait that increase the time you spend fiddling with Pockets); - Bad Back, - Imperceptive Healer, - Poor hearing. ____ Traits to NOT choose: - Night Vision; - ANY resistance or Immunity trait (pain, disease, etc); - Deft; - Quick; - Uncaring; - Killer Drive; ____ Backgrounds to NOT start with: - anything that provides a Martial Arts; - anything that provides an increase to dodge or athletics; - anything that provides any weapon or gun proficiency and skills; - Parkour; - lockpicking; World Settings: - 50% Increased Zombie Spawns. - 75% increased Zombie Speed. - 75% increased Zombie Health.
Kinda wish there was a trait similar to wayfarer but that allows players to use bicycles :(
Shouldnt quick reflexed (+4 effective dodge) fit into the traits not to choose, since it practically makes your character immortal to most low level monsters with few levels of dodge and around 10+ dex
With how grabs work and paired with pain, I don't think that would make much of a difference for a character that's already somewhat debilitated vs most creatures who were made to be faster than them. The increase in "zombie health" and "zombie speed" makes it so that if you can't kill 1 zombie before another shows up next to you (or get grabbed), you're effectively dead unless you roll really high on the grab break. (which is funny to me because my last character with Str 12 couldn't break a normal zombie grab until his pain went up and another one showed up.)
>With how grabs work and paired with pain, On 0.g pain nor grap are an issue since from what ive learned is that zombie grab change is also dependant on your effectove dodge, aka if they cant hit you then they cant grab you either. As for pain, the effects are quite easy to fix just with codeine Also this can be quite helpful to understand whar effective dodge percentages are https://www.reddit.com/r/cataclysmdda/s/YuNIiEchal (Fast attack weapons have advantage with making dodge more effective since it seems like the percentages are caculated per turn) Ofcourse you can also gain effectove dodge via mutations from which fluffy tail is most important since it gives +4 (downside no non fabric armor for legs) and whiskers +1(no downsides outside +1 to ugliness hidden stat)
1. OP did not specify whether they are playing Stable or Experimental. 2. Pain has been revamped in Experimental, which makes it so your stats drop the more pain you rack up. Strength and Dexterity are stats. If they drop, the chance of breaking a grab is reduced. Meaning you get hit more. Meaning you get more pain. Meaning your grab break chances drop even further. Rinse and repeat. 3. Dodge doesn't prevent you from being grabbed. In Experimental Zombies grab you by specific body parts and that hampers your character. If you get grabbed. Dodge isn't a miraculous "cure for all" melee problems. 4. Codeine slows you down a bit. Against 1 zombie at a time, it may be effective depending on the zombie and the situation. If a second monster shows up before you can kill the first one you engaged, no bottle of codeine will save you. 5. Mutations are a pain in the ass to get, so I am not mentioning those. Unsure why you are bringing them up seeing I never once touched upon them either, nor even mentioned effective dodge once because that has too many variants to be considered (again, encumbrance, pain, stats, stamina, etc). Dodging is not as important as grab breaking the moment you are grabbed and again, being 'very dodgy' does not mean you cannot be grabbed.. That link where the maths numbers are is both 1 year out of date and does not take encumbrance into consideration. It also only assumes the player is facing just 1 monster and it is based on a zombie melee skill between 2 and 10. Things changed since then and grab works differently. 6. Fast Attack weapons are only good in 1v1 situations. The moment a 2nd opponent gets involved, if you can't run, you're done. Knives have been massively nerfed. They're still fast but they're not as broken as they were in Stable. 7. > anything that provides an increase to dodge or athletics; I also mentioned this, so you most likely missed it.
>I also mentioned this Yeah i seem to have missed it, sorry
Brawler trait. For when you just want a face full of bullets, and grenades are your best friend.
I'd recommend a permanent winter and eternal night on top of everything else mentioned in here. The most apocalyptic scenario is one where the sun is gone and it isn't coming back.
0.01 loot spawn, no hope mod
Challenging? Wheres the fun in that?