Planning for Kraelman's Realism Mod

[Kraelman]

Different kind of wish list here. These are the changes I hope to be able to make in the future by modding the game.

When I first started playing TLD it gave this incredible atmosphere and feeling. The magic was real. I felt like I was in a frozen, dead wasteland and just scraping by in surviving. But as I continued to play the magic slowly went away as I became familiar with the game mechanics/maps. I didn't really feel like I was in a frozen wasteland anymore. Everything felt safe as I knew where the wolves would spawn, where to go to find "X" resource whenever I needed it, knew that I could go indoors and be safe and sound no matter what. I wish I could erase my knowledge of all the systems and start over with a blank slate to have that magical feeling once again, but I can't.

But I still love the game, I still love the idea of the game. I still stream it on twitch almost every day. I want the magic back. The devs have stated that they want to support mods and steam workshop after release, so I'm gonna go ahead and do this.

Now I've never done this before, and I don't know just how difficult this is going to end up being. I'm not planning on adding any actual content, simply re-balancing the tuning with a much more realistic take on the game in mind. Turning the game into the "Frozen Wasteland" that I felt it was when I initially played it. I want to bring back the magic for players who have played for a long time like me and are very familiar with the game systems.

There are several key points I hope the mod will address:

- The abundance of food means you'll never go hungry

- Building interiors are far too forgiving

- Too many wolves, too predictable

- Crafting re-balancing to slow the game down

Note that the mod will NOT be intended for the beginner player, but intended for the veteran player that knows the mechanics and the maps and wants a more challenging experience, that feeling that you could die at any time if things go south.

Features:

- Indoor temperature will be changed to a variable temperature based on the outdoor temperature

A house that sits in temperatures that are -10C to -20C for the majority of the day can't have the interior be -3C all the time. Interior temperatures will instead be variable and slightly warmer than the outside(they'd get warmed up a bit by the sun during the day). This change means that the cold weather environment will still be a factor and follow you when you go inside. This is by far the biggest change and will really serve to drive the point home that you are in a frozen, dead world.

- Warmth from fires will linger a lot longer

One thing that always bothered me was that the warmth from a fire disappears incredibly quickly when you start a fire indoors in a stove. I really like the idea of the warmth taking more time to dissipate as the walls and insulation ought to hold in the heat a bit, and I think this will be a necessary change with the variable indoor temperatures. The one issue is that I don't know if it'll be possible to differentiate between indoor and outdoor fires, obviously it makes sense that an outdoor fire's heat would dissipate very quickly.

- Blizzards will potentially last for much longer time periods. The frequency of blizzards will be reduced

Blizzards that last longer than several hours will cause some interesting cold weather predicaments. Imagine multiple days of -25C indoor temperature that could force you to break down furniture to keep a fire going and really strain your food supplies, etc. No more going outside, seeing a blizzard, and heading off to bed for a few hours to wait it out as you'll instead be thinking "Shit. Can I survive if this lasts for more than a day? What if it goes two days". To balance this out the frequency of blizzards will go down.

- Clothing degradation in blizzards will be greatly reduced, clothing degradation overall will be reduced

This is one thing that gets easier due to reality. I've worn the same winter hat for 5 years and it's as warm as the day I bought it. In TLD right now, that hat would worthless after 20-30 days, or after several hours in a blizzard. With variable interior temperatures taking away an element of safety, reducing the wear and tear on clothing makes sense.

- Wolf detection radius will be increased

You have to get pretty close to a wolf right now before it sees you. Increasing the detection radius also allows us to reduce the overall number of wolves without losing that feeling of danger when you see a wolf.

- The number of wolf spawns will be decreased

This will balance the increased detection radius. And the sheer number of wolves on the maps is pretty ludicrous anyway.

- Increasing the size of the area that wolves patrol

Right now wolves stick to small, pre-defined areas. Look out at Mystery Lake from the Camp Office. See that wolf between you and the closest Ice Shanty? He'll be there every single day in pretty much the same spot. Increasing the size of the patrol radius means that wolves will be more often found in spots that you don't expect them, which could lead to some very intense moments.

- Wolves will be slightly stronger than before

With the decrease in numbers, it makes sense to make the wolves a little more threatening. Increase the chance of them tearing clothing/causing injury, maybe make it so you can't bring them down with one shot to the butt if they are munching on a deer.

- Sneaking mechanic will be toned way down

Way too powerful right now. You can sneak down the road through Coastal Townsite on Stalker right now in broad daylight and have a 80% chance of just going right through with no problems whatsoever.

- Animal respawn rate will be greatly lowered

This solves a huge problem in TLD. Food availability. With the animal respawn rate reduced you could easily run into food scarcity issues on a map and be forced to migrate to a new area simply because all the game is gone. "Oh look I just shot that wolf a couple days ago and there he is again" will no longer be a thing. When you see a wolf take down a deer in a situation where you'd normally ignore it... you might not be able to ignore it if that deer isn't coming back for weeks, if not months. A big issue with this + the increased wolf detection means that deer might not survive long at all on the maps. Would have to figure something out for that.

- Amount of time for snares to trigger in rabbit spawn areas will be increased

Snares will reliably trigger every 24 hours or so every day right now. Longer wait times on this will also make food scarcity an issue.

- Amount of meat on wildlife other than rabbits will be increased

Realism adjustment, there should be more than 9kg of venison on that deer. Doubling up(which is still low) the amount of meat that wolves, deer and bears give will be a realistic change and also a necessary change due to the reduced spawn rates/availability of game.

- Guaranteed tool spawns will be removed

You are currently guaranteed to find one of each tool(knife, hatchet, rifle) on each map. Removing this guaranteed drop increases variance from run to run which IMO makes for more interesting runs.

- Certain "guaranteed" item spawns on some maps will be removed

The survival bows spawning in Hunting Blinds/Desolation Point will be removed for sure. Probably a few other things here and there will also go, particularly the high quality gear found in the Signal Hill building.

- Loot drops and the quality of drops found indoors(dressers, cabinets, etc.) will be lowered across the board on all difficulties. Amount of gear found on dead bodies will be increased

I like the idea that the areas and houses you are searching have already been looted by others in their own desperate attempt to survive. You're left with the stark remains of what they chose to leave behind... a questionable looking tin of sardines, an expired can of Pork'n'beans, the old ratty Christmas Sweater grandma knitted, etc. However, all this stuff has to go somewhere. Instead if being empty most of the time a dead body will be a premium loot spot.

- Condition recovery from sleeping capped at 1% per hour

You can no longer recover from a bear attack by sleeping for a day. If you are dropped low it is going to take time to recover from your injuries. Get used to not always being 100% condition with this one. You might need to take a day or two to simply rest and recover... but can you take a day off in this environment?

- Starvation will apply additional effects

If the Hinterland devs don't add some kind of additional penalty to starvation I'm going to add my own. When your body runs out of calories to burn in this kind of cold weather environment it should be a real problem for you. Dunno how easy it will be to implement this kind of thing though.

- Crafting times and material requirements will be adjusted

All clothing items will take 2-3x the amount of time to build and require extra materials. This change is due to my belief that the player character is not an experienced seamstress or bowyer and will probably screw up the crafting process once or twice and have to redo things and he/she will probably ruin some materials. Heck, I know that if you gave me sewing equipment, a couple of deer hides and some intestines and told me to make boots I'd probably fuck it up on the first try. I'm also going to tweak the warmth values a bit.

The big intention here is to slow the game down. For veterans of the game it's not unusual to have all of the crafted clothing built in the first 10-15 days of game time, and after that what do you do with yourself?

The biggest change will be the Survival Bow. It's very difficult to build a bow capable of bringing an animal down. It's going to take a long time to build as I feel it's kind of the ultimate late game item, something you want to finish when the bullets start running low.

- Hide curing will be changed if possible

I don't really like the non-interactive "drop hide on floor and it magically cures" mechanic. The easiest way to change it and make it more interactive IMO is to move it to the Fire UI and make the player "Cook" the hide for the several hours until cured. Now... the player won't actually be cooking the hide as they'd be fleshing it and softening it and so on, but the final steps for hide preparation is usually drying it and smoking it, and you'd need the fire for that. This will also serve to slow the game down, and is a much more realistic(albeit imperfect) take on curing hides.

Oh, and I'll definitely be cutting the time it takes to harvest a branch.

Well if you'd read this far, congrats. These are all just plans, and how easy or difficult this will be to do is kind of up to Hinterland. I'm hoping I'll be able to come through on all of it once the game is released and Hinterland releases some kind of modding API or something. If you additional suggestions, post em. If you want to hang out and talk with me about it in real time I stream pretty regularly in the evening at http://www.twitch.tv/kraelman

[Patrick Carlson]

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!

[cowboymrh]

I Like a lot of your ideas and thoughts on the game. Keep em coming!

Some of the issues I really liked:

Variable indoor temperatures more connected to the outside temps, so that indoors isn't "always a safe zone"

Larger and more unpredictable wolf and bear patrol areas.

Less items to loot overall.

and especially......... much, much, longer recovery times for wolf and bear injuries! Seems to me, 2 or 3 days should be the norm.

[quinch1199]

+1

I really like the ideas here, there are some that benefit the player like reduced clothing degradation but those that, realistically, hinder such as indoor temperatures. In all it seems well balanced.

I do have a pretty open question though regarding Wolf "spawning".

Do they have to "Spawn" as such? To me the wolf mechanics should be more random and the mechanic I would like to see is that small packs (2-4) of wolves "Spawn" at a map edge and start a pre-set patrol of the map. They are now effectively trapped on the particular map until they make a kill or are killed.

During the patrol route they encounter, hunt etc just as they do now. If they make a kill the preset Ai should signal that they are to consume a set value of meat etc and then return to their map edge spawn point ... at this point they are also a much reduced threat (reduced detection level perhaps?). Predator animals rarely approach large creatures aggressively unless they have a reason to, hunger/need to hunt being the primary one.

Once they reach map edge they despawn. Then the game cycles and spawns another small pack at another random map edge spawn point.

You'll note that this adds a completely different Wolf dynamic. A player may now encounter two or more wolves working together, threat level is realistically more substantial and unforgiving. However, wolves travel in more compact groups, over patrol routes, meaning if you manage to spot the group and go to ground, they're more likely to move past and you won't see them again that cycle.

No longer will individual wolves inexplicably just hang about around areas of the map but be dynamic entries into the environment.

Further to this you could build in a preset value for the total number of wolves per map, giving a finite spawn...likewise linked to spawn values of prey animals...once they're gone they're gone.

[Scyzara]

I love your ideas, they're extremely similar to what I've been suggesting for months as changes to make Stalker mode challenging again. If it's of any help to you, I (and presumably a whole lot of other veterans) will gladly test your Mod and give you detailed feedback about it. Thank you in advance for your dedication and time investment!

I'll just copy some further ideas of mine here, maybe you'll find one or two appealing.

1. The average outdoor temperature might be dropping over time (e.g. -3°C each 20 days survived) to compensate the better clothing that you're acquiring. The temperature drop could be capped at some limit (e.g. - 15°C after 100 days) and remain at that level afterwards. Purpose of this change: Even best-quality clothes shouldn't make it possible to completely ignore the current time of day, outside temperatures and weather patterns.

2. Deer should get the ability to outrun wolves most of the time (like they do in reality). Purpose: I agree with you that it's necessary to prevent wolves from killing all deer as soon as they spawn if there are less animals, longer respawn timers and an increased wolf detection range. Giving deer the ability to outrun wolves 80 or 90% of the time might be a way to achieve this goal. This change would also make it more difficult for the player to kill wolf-deer combos (and thus increase the value of successful wolf-deer combos).

3. Differentiation between torches (crafted, current burning times) and burning sticks from fires (much shorter duration & less light). Burning sticks should make it possible to carry a magni-lens fire into a house, but they shouldn't scare away animals or emit enough light to cross mines. Purpose: Make kerosine a more valuable resource and prevent the infinite acquisition of deer meat with burning sticks.

Oh, and something desperately needs to be done about the various campfire exploits in my opinion. (Both shooting bears through campfires and stealing meat from wolves with campfires). Not sure which solution would be ideal, but I personally would like it if injured bears and eating wolves would simply ignore fires. Trying to steal their food or hurting them should really piss them of enough to get past their fear of fire.

[Pegasus2]

This is ALL very good feedback that should be added into the game anyway.

I've thought the same about some of the stuff, but i've thought a lot about the inside temperature and the heat of fires dissapaiting so quickly, within 10 minutes of the fire going out in Trappers.

Indoor and stove based fires should remain embers a lot longer than they currently do and provide base heat from that. You could disable cooking and melting in this mode but the fire still gives residual heat, not to mention the large heat energy stored in the iron of the stove even after that. If you need to cook then you palce more fuel on to go into fire mode again.

The heat released over time could be proportional to the intensity and length of the actual fire.

The heat retention of the buildings could be proportional to their volume. This would make larger buildings take longer to heat and require more fuel.

This would also mean that huts such as Lonely lake and draft dodgers are a refuge but the lack of stove means they remain very cold.

Further to that, alternate sources of heat could be added for these situations, such as a gas stove (trade offs with weight/fuel forcing a player decision whether to carry) and candels. Even body heat could raise the temperature by 1 or 2 degrees over time.

Either way, it makes the temperature systmes behind game much more complex, which would be a nice addition.

I think the 1% heal per hour is good, but I think it might actually break the game since it doesn't scale very well with other fators right now. It might have to be implimented at 2% to begin with, so you get 20% in 10 hours. That's still two days for a wolf attack and four for a bear. It would certainly make the Herbal Tea item much more important.

[DoctorKajita]

Thanks for taking the time to post. I agree with it all.

[Eachna]

Different kind of wish list here. These are the changes I hope to be able to make in the future by modding the game.

Well if you'd read this far, congrats. These are all just plans, and how easy or difficult this will be to do is kind of up to Hinterland. I'm hoping I'll be able to come through on all of it once the game is released and Hinterland releases some kind of modding API or something. If you additional suggestions, post em. If you want to hang out and talk with me about it in real time I stream pretty regularly in the evening at http://www.twitch.tv/kraelman

Great suggestions and I look forward to whatever mod you produce from these ideas.

[Kraelman]

Do they have to "Spawn" as such? To me the wolf mechanics should be more random and the mechanic I would like to see is that small packs (2-4) of wolves "Spawn" at a map edge and start a pre-set patrol of the map. They are now effectively trapped on the particular map until they make a kill or are killed.

There's no way I'm experienced enough with C# and AI programming to make these changes. Wish I was, but that is definitely going to be beyond me. Hopefully somebody else takes that one up.

2. Deer should get the ability to outrun wolves most of the time (like they do in reality).

This makes a lot of sense. I don't know how easy it'd be to implement, but I can imagine it'd work like this: Instead of wolves "ramping up" their speed whilst the deer speed stays constant, you swap it so the deer ramps up and the wolf stays constant. After a while, the wolf would lose aggro. Wolves would still be able to get em if they sneak up on them or chase them into a wall or something.

3. Differentiation between torches (crafted, current burning times) and burning sticks from fires (much shorter duration & less light). Burning sticks should make it possible to carry a magni-lens fire into a house, but they shouldn't scare away animals or emit enough light to cross mines. Purpose: Make kerosine a more valuable resource and prevent the infinite acquisition of deer meat with burning sticks.

Oh, and something desperately needs to be done about the various campfire exploits in my opinion.

I was going to put something abotu torches in there, but I really think that Hinterland is going to do something about the torch thing before full release. IMO the easy fix for the other stuff is to put in some kind of 50/50 "fight or flight" mechanic in when animals are wounded/scared to take away the "when I do X, the animal always does Y" behavior.

I think the 1% heal per hour is good, but I think it might actually break the game since it doesn't scale very well with other fators right now.

It works pretty well actually. I run a "only sleep in one hour increments" rule on an outdoor-only challenge on twitch right now. You tend to kind of "slowly die" until you manage to find a bit of gear and start turning things around, but then you get attacked by a wolf and realize you have no way to deal with the infection so it all goes to hell again. Very entertaining.

The heat retention of the buildings could be proportional to their volume. This would make larger buildings take longer to heat and require more fuel.

If I can learn enough C# to make an "insulation" property work on interior locations this is do-able. At the start though I'll be happy with just getting the interiors variable temp.

[Casazzo]

+1

though i would wish, that most of theese changes would become vanilla ;-)

[Acies]

I agree with many points, especially the meat added. But the problem with that is the fact that you cannot carry all the meat. Because even early game you would have 10(ish) kilos of weight already. And late game you have like twenty. This is good if you want to force people to go on multiple trips.

Another thing, is that the Developers should probably add the drying meat option, and make it so that cooked meat deteriorates faster.

-Acies