Dream Mod Request Gamestage & Weather Overhaul

[Loboling]

I was thinking about a fundamental game design that I'd like to change, but don't know where to start. So I figured I'd ask if anyone who's more proficient with moding could give me some tips. 

So the general premise of the mod is to remove gamestage from the 7 days to die experience and to transfer all difficulty scaling to locational and random hordes.

So what does this mean?

A player will no longer progress their gamestage based on levels or nights survived. Instead, there will be a steep difficulty shift between locations. For instance, tier 5 pois could have demos, even on day 1. But tier 1 pois will always be easy. 

Your loot stage will work the same. As in, to get good loot, you have to face harder gamestage opponents, because it can only be found in hard locations. Tier 1 would be primitive, tier 2 could be pipe, tier 3 ak47, tier 4 magum, tier 5 m60, etc, etc. Generally, the player would have full control over the level of difficulty he exposes himself to, and would not be subject to gradual scaling over time. 

So I guess the mod would remove level and days survived from the gamestage calculator, but greatly increase the scaling factor for pois. I think I'm starting to get an idea of where to go.

From there, I was also going to fundamentally change spawn rates in different areas, which I'm aware of how to do. And make wandering hordes be more randomized. Two types, one with lots of weak zombies, and another with a random amount of strong zombies. Basically, a strong horde early game should force you out of that area. At least without super creativity. 

The last two things would be to greatly change weather effects to be significant. I mean, even as far as taking constant damage when freezing or overheating. I basically want the biomes to also present their own environmental challenges, that will also reward with better loot. The snow biome will become more dangerous at night and the desert during the day, requiring more heat or cold resist to survive there. 

And finally, there would be quests that take you through the whole thing, encouraging you to finally construct a horde base in the wasteland, and survive the horde before pickup. 

Best case scenario, this whole thing is compatible with darkness falls, but the questing system is changed. 

Anyway, just dreaming about an overhaul that's more to my tastes for survival. I think I may have some ideas for the gamestage, horde and spawning things. But getting a quest system, modifying poi spawns, environmental damage, etc seems very complicated. 

Thanks for reading and if you have any advice on how to create such a mod, I'd love to hear it. 

ps: The recent Jawoodle mod made by Khaine that damages you when exposed to sunlight, inspired me a bit for the weather idea. But I've always wanted more insetting weather mechanics. 

Edited December 5, 2022 by Loboling (see edit history)

[Loboling]

Hey again,

 

I've been trying to figure this out more, but came to the conclusion that gamestage is calculated outside of the xmls. Is that true? Is there no xml that I can use to change how gamestage is calculated? 

I've found that lootstage is locational, but not gamestage. 

Does anyone know how to affect the gamestage calculation? 

I want the gamestage to work independantly of level and days survived, and be a constant value that is heavily impacted by location. (Biome & poi tier.)

 

I'm still dreaming, but for now I've reached an impasse. Is the only answer to work through the spawning xml and modifying each poi one at a time?

 

[theFlu]

55 minutes ago, Loboling said:

Is there no xml that I can use to change how gamestage is calculated? 

I think you're right, not an xml setting for that as far as I know. Then again I know basically nothing about modding ... the people who know more may well hang around here on General, but they have their own little hidey hole somewhere around there: https://community.7daystodie.com/forum/27-mods/

 

They should know better ...

[BFT2020]

Mu response to a similar question in the Mods Discussion area

 

 

Go to gamestages.xml and you can make some minor adjustments

        daysAliveChangeWhenKilled="2"

        difficultyBonus="1.2"

        startingWeight ="1"
        diminishingReturns ="0.5"

        lootBonusEvery = "12"
        lootBonusMaxCount = "30"
        lootBonusScale = "25"
    />
    <!-- the DifficultyBonus parameters are now flat multipliers. 2.0 = 2x the gamestage. Simple. -->
    <!-- lootBonus changes blood moon drop rates every x zombies, up to max chances, by scale -->

 

To make more changes, you would need to do some c# changes to the base code
 

and here is more information on the gamestage calculation (if you care)

There is a metric which maps a player or group of players to a game stage number.


daysSurvived:
    This is a running total, kept for every individual player.

    Every 24 hours GAME time 1 (day) is added.
    On every death "daysAliveChangeWhenKilled" is subtracted from the total.

    After this the daysAlive is capped.
    It is low-capped at 0, high-capped at "your player level".
    At player level 41 you can have a daysSurvived value anywhere from 0 to 41.

gameStage = ( playerLevel + daysSurvived ) * difficultyBonus

 

[Loboling]

Thanks everyone,

 

I was worried of such. No way to decouple level or days survived from gamestage. I'd want to have the formula work more like this: 

Difficulty Multiplier * (Biome Gamestage + Building Gamestage) = Gamestage

 

Then modify the biome xml to each have a corresponding gamestage value and the pois to also include that information. And adjust the difficulty multiplier to have a larger range. 

 

Maybe next step is to try and learn C++ haha. 

I'll also explore alternative methods I can do something similar with the tools at hand. If I make skill points come from skill books found, rather than leveling than I can at least lock gamestage. From there maybe with some work on the spawning & gamestage xml I can create a difficulty ramp that is more in line with location than time played. 

[Cranberry Monster]

An alternative approach might to make copies of the vanilla zombies, set it up so that "zombie_soldier_copy_level1" is always the same regardless of gamestage, then make additional groups of zombie sleepers where they're grouped by "_level1" etc, and change the spawns by POI in the POI editor so that level 1 POIs only used the new _level1 sleeper groups. It would be an insane amount of work, but it should give you level 1 POIs that were always easy, level 5 POIs that were always insane. As a bonus, you could set the level 1 POI zombies to only drop crap, and the level 5 POI zombies to drop better stuff, so that even if you couldn't control the container spawn by POI (well, you could, but it would mean copying all the containers, tiering them the same way as the zombies, and replacing them in the POI editor too), you could still reward players for taking on those tier 5 POIs instead of lower ones.