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[Black Out:]

I was going to make a new request thread for a few horror-themed ideas, but it fits the "horrorworld" general idea really well, so may as well post here in the hopes that the modder will update for Alpha 4 so I can have my much fantasized battle between colonists, zombies, muties and mechanoids in the meantime!

Here are some ideas that might generally add to the "horror" elements of Rimworld, which I for one would LOVE to see explored!

Black Out: what if during night/eclipses you could only see the radius lit by lights and a small area around each colonist, but otherwise blacked out the map? That would be terrifying! Horrorworld! Maybe a few glowing ghouls or strange bugs/plants around the map making a small light oasis to tantalize/torture the imagination! Flashlights as items? Torches with the new wood economy?

Horrorman: it would be neat to have some kind of horrorman (ie. slendermanish non-moving entity) that would appear only at night in random spots of the map... any colonists who come close enough to see him simply don't make it back to base. It would be terrifying and you'd only ever see him for a brief moment before he's gone. Accompanied by the scariest noise ever that builds in volume as any colonist gets closer. So chilling.

Sacrifice: maybe on horrorworld, there's a giant fire-breathing beast who lives underground and you must make a sacrifice each month from your prisoners/colonists (ie. drop them down an untapped geo-vent) to prevent the beast from ravaging your colony by creating an event that sets half the map on fire... probably would have to make crashed survivors more likely here to keep the offerings flowing, but would be very cool for gameplay. Expand this with human traps to catch raiders alive and you've got me.

Ghosts: Maybe Bill who died of starvation comes back occasionally to eat your food stocks? Maybe Bob who died in a raid appears and punches the colonists randomly or opens doors? Maybe most just flutter in and out of existence from time to time, reminders of all the souls who died for the sake of this horrific outpost.

No Saves/Pausing: Hardcore mode with no saving or pausing allowed...

More Cannibalism: It makes sense for Horrorworld and would probably just need a human stove with recipes and a modification of the psychological effects (ie. starts off negative but after so many meals begins to become positive until a LACK of human meat is a negative!)

Hiding vs fighting: a lot of the game right now is just building turrets and moving around pawns to fight or flee... but there's no way to hide and I think this is integral to the horror experience! Maybe items like closets or panic rooms where you could fit only one or two colonists and wait out whatever horrors plague the colony, it would be cool to see something in the stealth/hiding category.


Anyway, those are enough for one post! Would love to see some/all of the above get into a mod! I think a Horror/Western theme would be a great to expand on!

i really liked how some of the zombies linger... gave me a frightening moment when I forgot about one near a corner.

the crematorium makes it much more interesting to rush and dispose corpses before they rise... I got hit with airborne right off the bat (1st event, lol) and then 3 simultaneous raids... by the end the zombies obviously won... the bites seem rarer, which is good.

What about zombie bait? Like something that makes noise or is meat that zombies would prioritize attacking, but would be horrific for colonist mental states? (ie. surround the base in a meat wall to keep zombies occupied, but everyone goes insane).

instead of a "workshop bench", what about making a small size (1 square) workshop table for each type of weapon?
(ie. pistol bench, rifle bench, machine gun bench, explosives workshop, laser weapons bench)

- the graphic for each table could be a disassembled version of that type of gun lying on the table
- would help it be more organized if compatible with something like Proj. Arm. because each table would have less items in it's build menu, and with the new "production tab" wouldn't kill the space there
- each bench could be it's own research project


...would be awesome to see the blacksmith table functions added to the smelter too.

hmmm, i just had a thought.

what about a common event: "a group of survivors is joining your colony"?

it fits more with the zombie genres of small groups of humans travelling together, solves the "depopulation via bites" issues by adding more colonists, more frequently... aaaaannnddd....

alternate event: a group of survivors is joining the colony... one looks a bit off...
(ie. one of them is already bitten- it doesn't say who though!)

imagine, you get a group of three joining the colony, but one is losing health over time and stealing medpacks. You decide to arrest him and schedule an execution, but this upsets the whole colony as a result and one of your best farmers decides to leave... only to be greeted by an onslaught of zombies at the gates... muhahaha. the drama.

so i finally played this... and it's fun with some really cool ideas. my favourite were all the random text events- just adds fun flavour to the game, well done. Tech tree felt more organized than stock. Love the turrets, art pieces, torture, medbay... earthquake made me jump. I turned off most of my usual mods (except shield) and it was refreshing to go back to simpler gameplay (ie. no 100 items to build) and in a much more challenging progression...

What I can't do with, is needing a gajillion different parts to build different things, with some only being available via traders who might not even have the bloody one part you need. It took so long just to figure out what I needed for each piece and where to build it- I think it was day 30 before I had solar (using dev mode to supply panels) and still didn't even have a battery because I needed some "battery charging unit" that could only be purchased from a trader...

I don't mind the complexity, but is there any way to simplify this just a bit? Like, instead of "medieval weapons core" and "comms unit module", just "computer chip". I like all the elements in there except the confusing nature of all the part-specific resources.

But really, what I'd like to see is you do a mod just dedicated to text events that could be compatible with other mods. Those were definitely the highlight for me- simple, yet they add so much spirit to the game. Not only did I have a laugh, but grew endeared towards the colonist who kept trying to eat cactus.

other than that, the game semi-freezes (still goes, but i can't do anything except watch) when i go to the loyalty panel on the colonists... maybe something to do with the fear tech? Not sure if others have this as well.

But Bravo! I like the mod overall.

-(i haven't installed this mod yet) but are there zombie spawns just idling around like squirrels or muffalos until colonists get close enough to attack? i want colonists going out on supply runs through zombie infested areas to be actually very dangerous.

he just added this factor in the game. when zombie raids appear, some will drift around dangerously.

-is there a way to fiddle around with the map generator and tile sets to create an urban environment? (ie: remove the mountains, increase abandoned structures, replace tilesets to make it look like urban/suburban/rural, etc) (increase spawn rate of metal to cope with the lack of mining areas, which would force colonists to go on supply runs)

Look at this mod for different landscapes (snow/plains/mountains): http://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=2910.0

I'm sure someone will come up with urban/ruins mapsets eventually... that would fit with the zombie theme... i like this idea.

-remove hydrophonics table and lower the generation of farmable areas. (again to force colonists to go on supply runs)

I dunno about this. I'd rather just see a random event (like "a turret misfires and the echo of the shot is heard all around") that would cause map-wandering zombies to all attack your base... that way you'd have a good motivation to go out hunting down the roving hordes (instead of on supply runs) and it wouldn't change the core game-play too much. 

wow, thanks for the inspiration kudos.

i'm going to try this out tonight... but I'd love to see a version broken down into elements.. specifically if medbay, "new events", "tech tree" were separate mods.

anyway, I'll play tonight and let you know how it goes!

cool man!

maybe the "cure tradeoff" could be that it has a 33/33/33 chance of either curing, killing or making a boss zombie via genetic mutation and doctor skill just reduces the boss chance to mitigate risk.

OR, maybe the "cure" only has a 5% chance to "cure" (and 2% chance to mutate to boss, 6% chance to just die and turn) but medpacks will simply restore your health to max, so you can delay the inevitable as long as you have them on hand... meaning after being bitten, you'd have to routinely use medpacks to prevent death/turning. You could have an entire colony of bitten people manufacturing medpacks in a desperate race to stay alive... making agave the most important plant of the zombie apocalypse.... (maybe agave + zombie meat is the recipe?). Maybe the bite reduced your max health by 10 per day, so with 100 health, you have 10 days of medpacks before your max health hits zero and you die? (ie. medpacks would cure 90 hlth day 1, 80 health day 2, 70 day 3, etc. with a 5% chance to cure).

I also like the idea of the "end-game" being that you have a working cure via medpacks, but zombie raids start happening at quicker and quicker intervals, meaning less and less medpacks until you're overwhelmed.

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i'd say that you'd want to focus on gameplay over staying true to "lore" as there's no real canon for "zombies"... are there infected, viral, mutation, gamma-ray induced, spiritual, possessed by demons, bacteria, genetic zombies?

There's so many takes on the genre. Might as well make a "new type of zombie" specific to Rimworld and focus on gameplay. Maybe the "cure" is really just a "phew, turns out it was a cactus scratch, not zombie bite",  or however you want to make it work, but it would be nice if there was a REMOTE chance of reversing the bite... even if just to give a false sense of hope before saying bye-bye.

My take on it is that the colonists landed on a world where there's an indigenous bacteria that enters corpses and instead of eating the material, reads the genes and re-animates the animal them to extend it's lifespan. Normally people avoid this planet, but there's a few outlaw colonies and raiders living on the planet because the zombie meat has magical healing properties- if eaten by a live creature, the bacteria will heal anything dead (ie. missing a kidney, not anymore after eating Zombiesnakz(tm))... the bacteria can be killed by a living host if they have a decent immune system, but anything dead they restore and take over... it's obviously banned in the galaxy because of the whole zombie outbreak potential, so everybody is  here risking their lives for the ultimate black market trade- the lucrative zombie corpse market.

That explanation would make sense with zombies + rimworld + the game mechanics i suggested above.

Now, anyone seen the zombie film "Fido"? It's basically Lassie, but with zombies. Zombie pets. mmmm

this mod is great- really adds a fun element. my colonists are like my own pets, and their pets are just... just... meta... it's great.

issues:
- my doges tend to die quite often, usually via wolfpack, boomrat blowback or raider bullet zones, it's sad. Can't they be incapped too? Or maybe they heal faster? Poor scruffy. ;(
- doges will eat any un/forbidden meat/animals, making a butcher table basically useless... maybe delay doges eating dead animals until starvation in lieu of cut up meat if it's on the map, like how colonists prefer meals over raw?

ideas/suggestions:
- "mark territory" like a home zone, limiting the doges inside this area
- meal from cookstove: doge chow (and maybe a "doge hopper" for these meals)
- doge dispenser: a food dispenser for doges
- breeding (maybe look at the muffalo breeding mod)
- alerts: doge is hungry, doge is mentally unstable and barking alot, doge is attacking!, doge is such wow
- Taming skill: after tamed, treats doge like a Warden-Prisoner relationship where colonist goes, interacts with doge (ie. walks the doge) to increase doge and colonist happiness. Maybe doge goes mental if he doesn't get his walks in a long time. This way you might have one dedicated trainer, or have everyone share in the doge walking, but it's got more of a cost than just food.
-doge door (powered wall/door that only doges can enter)

You might already have most of these planned, just throwing out ideas. Great mod here! Would love to see your take on other animals too eventually!

this mod is amaze. what about a coast/valley hybrid? I love having a beach but miss the snugness of the valleys.

hmm... any possibility of a "river/canyon" version with water in the middle and mountains on the side?

Only thing i'd say regarding coal as a heavy starting point (I voted yes for the record) is that it takes away from the typical solar problem of "no power at night", so there's gotta be a big "cost" to making it cheaper and easier to set up.

This might be a long-stretch, but what if there had to be someone MANNING the initial coal plants (until AI/Automated Power is researched), it would create new sets of problems.

Or at the very least, if it generated unhappiness to nearby colonists or damage over time, it might emulate the RL dangers of being a coal miner.

i decided to cheat a bit with dev mode to make it a truly massive horde to finish off my game tonight, but while building up my base got the event "ALL the zombies are attacking you" and quasi pooped myself. One raider shot my guy to death, it put a zed behind my lines and pretty soon it was over.

Anyway here's some pics:
http://imgur.com/XvALgeD
http://imgur.com/yXugzMv
http://imgur.com/POUTF9w
http://imgur.com/kFZH6I3
http://imgur.com/O1JlaDF
http://imgur.com/QHHJ0oh
http://imgur.com/HBzt1a4

i'll try and post some screenshots after playing tonight. gave it a rating on mod db.

love the idea of fresher = faster for zombies... also special infected reminds me of L4D and would be awesome.

i didn't mean animal-zombies, i meant zombies that roam like animals... but that could be some wanderers from a raid like you mentioned... just would be interesting to see zombies at play in the environment.

And yes, after my colony dies, it's much more fun to wait "after the end" and watch as your infected colonist begin to grow an army of undead followers... muahhahaa

awesome dude. good points as well.

it still gives the apocalypse feel to have the airborne be recurring - it would happen as often as solar flares/eclipses and last for days... but it would allow corpses to pile up in between making the onset of the event more "uh oh". Even if it was recurring for a long time and then the world is overrun and it become a permanent event after a certain condition was met (ie. number of days), that would be logical so you can build towards it. Or if permanent was a separate event that has an extremely low % (or maybe goes up in % based on your number of colonists? I don't know how the coding limitations are on this).

I've been playing this mod a lot for the past few days and the best moments were usually pre-airborne, when I desperately try to avoid getting bitten during zombie raids, or immediately when the airborne event occurs and the bodies all come up and wreak havoc. After that it's usually a matter of one or two raids before there's no more colony.

things that might balance it:
- slower zombies, or slow/fast zombies? (ie. Night of the VS 28days zombies)
- environmental zombies like packs of muffalos or solo zeds, with really small fields of vision/detection that roam around (more permanent zombie threat, but avoidable)
- some zombie raids come out of the ground, like a reverse raider drop
- zombies eat the dead/incapped
- zombies should leave the map after running out of food, so you can hide and cower
- chainsaw?
- a "boss" zombie would be cool every once in a while

But ultimately this is one of my favorite mods so far. I loved one called "Horrorworld" but the mutants are so goddamn unforgiving (I play with that and zombies on if I want a really quick game). This is much more balanced and interesting with it's effect on the gameplay. I think I'll have a tough time not playing with this on.

finally.

i'm going to build a row of hello kitty statues and gibbet cages, this is so exciting!!!