[Outdated] Marvin's Hot and Cold Pack IV

[Kaballah]

You know what, you should do a "Hot Pack" that does similar balance changes for arid scrubland and desert.

[RemingtonRyder]

Well the closest I've got to that so far is the Wastelanders addon. But sure, I'll have a think about it.

[Kaballah]

Oh dear.  I started a desert scenario and uh, visitors are coming in wearing parkas.  Do all the WIH/HT etc mods need to be disabled if you're not playing cold biomes?

[Kaballah]

Yeah, this is a problem.  If it turns out to be hard to have biome-specific gear sets for pawns, I suggest you split out the kit construction and turret enhancements into their own mod, because those are neat and probably should not be tightly linked to Winter Is Here etc.  Then they could be toggled separately from everything else.

[RemingtonRyder]

Um. So yeah, that's what I designed the Wastelanders add-on for, so that the pawns use the same point values but arrive not not winter gear. You just need to load and enable it after Winter Is Here.

[Kaballah]

Oh, oops, thanks I'll do that.  Durr.

[Kaballah]

I still have visitors coming in wearing heavy dusters, thermal shirt/pants and tuques in 35C heat.  Is that right?

e: Here's my mod order:

[RemingtonRyder]

Perhaps check and make sure there isn't an extra folder level in there. It should show up in the mod order as Wastelanders, not A9_Wastelanders.

[Kaballah]

Yeah that's what it is, I guess I unpacked it wrong /shrug

Thanks!

ps: FYI "cactus" is a really good seed for producing a lot of desert biome tiles.

[Kaballah]

Man, I had really forgotten how much meat and leather the game throws at you in vanilla biomes.  Ice Sheet is so gratifyingly challenging compared to any of the more comfortable terrains.   

What do you do when you want to play tundra/ice sheet again, disable Wastelanders mod?

[RemingtonRyder]

Yep. Just disable it. The actual pawn defs are in Winter Is Here, all the Wastelanders mod does is switch in the faction def which uses the warm weather pawns.

[Kaballah]

Okey doke, working well so far.

[RemingtonRyder]

I started making harsher Arid Shrubland and Desert.

• Arid Shrubland has less soil and more sand
• Desert has no soil at all, and no trees (cacti remain).
• Plant density reduced for both biomes.

I'm testing these changes for Alpha 10, but there's no reason why I can't back-port them for Alpha 9, so I'll do that.

[Kaballah]

All good ideas, I think desert and arid shrubland need some fairly heavy nerfing anyhow.  Desert is a little bit hard but not terribly; arid shrubland is so comfortable that it feels essentially the same as prime forest biome, you just can't find an inhospitable embark location in vanilla arid shrubland.  Animals are way too plentiful as well.

I think it would be fitting to leave a few very small patches of low quality soil in desert, spread far apart, sort of like oases, if this is practical.  It's totally fine to have no growable soil at all though, to make it comparable challenge-wise to Ice Sheet.

Looking forward to what you come up with!

e: You should consider making Biodiversity mandatory, and tweaking a version of that for use with whatever you do for desert/shrubland

[RemingtonRyder]

Interesting testing session today!

I had a play around with creating oases. The frequency on them is quite low so they may not show up at all. When they do... well, there's a fair bit of water, growable soil surrounding it, and the rest of a desert map is usually sand.

I'll try and get Biodiversity added to the pack, so that at the very least there's less separate downloading needed.