Hostile Rabbits and Mutators?

[Piers Arkan]

I make this thread partially in jest, but also because I want to discuss that second point in conjunction.

 

My first point, the Hostile Rabbits bit, is based around the idea that the geomagnetic storm does cause wolves and bears to be unusually aggressive. I get this, accept it, and play the game, but I once thought that the deer or rabbits could be similarly affected, and that this could cause them to initiate struggles against the player. Deer could gore players fairly easily in some cases, if not kick them, and rabbits could swarm animals, even if they are not suited for a diet of flesh. I believe that the geomagnetic storm should, in most animals, cause a fight instinct instead of flight. 

 

The second point is related to the violent rabbits and deer, in that I would like that to be integrated through a system of mutators. In games like Payday 2, Killing Floor, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown's Long War mod, players can customize their playing with a set of different options that make gameplay different. In some ways they can make things easier arguably, and in other ways it can make the experience much more difficult. One example that I recall from Payday 2 was that a mutator made it so that police would only die from headshots, and on the other side in Long War, there was a mutator that made the game timer last twice as long, so that you could stand to make more mistakes. I believe that an option for marking deer and rabbits as hostile would be interesting to the long dark, but controversial enough to be integrated as an optional change that a player could choose at the start of a new sandbox. 

 

Other mutators that I have considered are: 

1. Reduce or remove all NPCs from the sandbox world, in the event they are integrated.

2. Remove Cabin Fever.

3. Cause houses throughout the world overtime to collapse due to increasingly hostile weather, forcing players to search fast. 

4. Removal (for difficulty levels under Interloper) of Prepper Caches.

So what all kinds of mutators or optional yes/no settings would you like? 

[Mroz4k]

Pretty sure customizations were suggested before, and while I would like to see them I don't think they are necessary that much, and would likely require some major changes in the code (but I wouldn't know).

As for the "aggressive rabbit" status - no. A big no. 
The game strives to be realistic, I don't see a point in making it a fiction. If you want a realistic answer, consider this - humans, rabbits, and wolves are all totally different creatures, driven by completely different drives. If the wolves were influenced by the EMP in a way that makes them more aggressive, it does not mean all the other animals or the humans themselves were influenced the same way as well.
Besides, the aggressive explanation is not an argument I like at all, it feels very unoriginal and lame, probably was thought of in haste to explain something that a lot of people had questions about.

[Piers Arkan]

1 hour ago, Mroz4k said:

Pretty sure customizations were suggested before, and while I would like to see them I don't think they are necessary that much, and would likely require some major changes in the code (but I wouldn't know).

As for the "aggressive rabbit" status - no. A big no. 
The game strives to be realistic, I don't see a point in making it a fiction. If you want a realistic answer, consider this - humans, rabbits, and wolves are all totally different creatures, driven by completely different drives. If the wolves were influenced by the EMP in a way that makes them more aggressive, it does not mean all the other animals or the humans themselves were influenced the same way as well.
Besides, the aggressive explanation is not an argument I like at all, it feels very unoriginal and lame, probably was thought of in haste to explain something that a lot of people had questions about.

To this I say again, I made this initially as a joke. While this game certainly looks and feels in some ways real, it Ain't. And that bush I assume has been beat for quite some time. The Geomagnetic storm to me is the big reason why, if at all, it might be. 

 

To the idea that we don't know if human behavior patterns were altered by the geomagnetic storm, I suppose I would just say....how many other people have you seen to ask that?

[Mroz4k]

Spoilers incoming:

Quite a lot, actually. Most of the trailers feature other survivors, from that you can pretty easily deduce that the human behaviour didn't change that much. It's just an apocalypse after some EMP massive storm which threw the civilization into a dark age. I also assume there were some earthquakes given the state of the map but that's more of a speculation.
You can see people murdering each other in the trailer, I feel like that is pretty typical human behavior during an apocalypse, but the dialog with the male survivor shows no behavioural effect of the storm.

Also, of all the apocalypse scenarios out there, TLD is by far the most realistic one I have seen. And the game keeps to a pretty solid realism as well, as far as I can tell and I have been interested in survival, apocalypse scenarios and off-the-grid survival for solid 15 years.

[Piers Arkan]

I watched that too, and the blind woman does say that people went kind of crazy. 

 

As to your experience with the theoretical: good for you. You must feel proud. As I said, much of this was a jest to find an easier way to kill rabbits by making them come to the player, as opposed to throwing a rock. 

[Starving_Deluxe]

Big ups from my side for more sandbox customization options.

Killer rabbits are not my cup of tea. This would remind me of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". On the othe rhand: if they would implement the Holy Hand Grenade...