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Survivalism Mode - A brutal, carefully-balanced modded twist on vanilla survival


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Looking for something to put your survival skills to the test, rather than just your building talents or boss memorizations? Maybe you've finished exploring all of the added content? Maybe you're playing alone and want to push your own limits, or else you want to see if your group strategy is up to snuff? Or maybe you just want to see who can survive the longest in a trying circumstance? If any of this sounds familiar, here's the game mode for you!

To begin, you'll need to configure (Host) a new world with the following settings (tl;dr: most settings set to Less):

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  1. Forest:
    1. Flowers, Evil Flowers: Less
    2. Grass: Less
    3. Saplings: Less
    4. Tumbleweeds: Less
    5. Flint: Less
    6. Boulders: Less
    7. Mini Glaciers: Less
    8. Berry Bushes: Less
    9. Carrots: None
    10. Mushrooms: Less
    11. Cacti: Less
    12. Rabbits: Less
    13. Moles: None (exploitable)
    14. Butterflies: None (exploitable)
    15. Birds: Less
    16. Gobblers: Less
    17. Pigs: Less
    18. Volt Goats: Less
    19. Beefalos: Less
    20. Hunt Surprises: More
    21. Pengulls: Less
    22. Ponds: Less
    23. Bees: Less
    24. Tallbirds: Less
    25. Spiders: Less
    26. Lureplants: Less
    27. Bearger: More
    28. Deerclops: More
    29. Dragonfly: More
  2. Caves (all the above, in addition to these):
    1. Touch Stones: Less
    2. Failed Survivors: Less
    3. Trees (All): Less

 

Mods required (and their configs):

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  1. No Ice As Filler - No more (nearly) free winter meatballs.
  2. Recipe Rebalancer (or else if you prefer, Recipe Balancer Overhaul) - Tweaks crockpot recipe values, in particular nerfs meatballs. Fishsticks and Pierogis have reduced healing, also.
  3. Survivalism - Assorted difficulty tweaks. You'll need to modify the config to enable these two settings:
    1. Fatigue: true - When certain stats are below 20% speed will become sluggish.
    2. Wet Rolls: true - Straw and fur rolls can't be used when water-logged/wet.
  4. Working Body Heat - Despite the name, you'll want to modify its behavior with this tweak (hunger only; the default):
    1. Heat/hit: Negligible - No longer gives heat for doing work.
  5. Disable World Regrowth - Similar to RoG/SW/Ham, world growths are not automatically renewable, and some sense is needed to not totally expend local resources.

Optional (flavor) mods; use at your discretion:

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  1. Scaling Boss Difficulty - Adjusts bosses, either to be harder or else less annoyingly tedious to kill (your preference).
    1. Recommended: Reduce each value by 1 or 2 button clicks, unless you're playing this with lots of people who know what they're doing.
  2. Show Me (Origin) - Displays stats on monsters, foods, tools, etc. Recommend these settings tweaks (feel free to add your own):
    1. Food Style: Short
    2. Show Food Units: Yes
  3. Better blood-over - Shows a bloody overlay if you're low on health.
  4. Smarter Crock Pot - Takes all the magic and wonder out of blinding throwing away ingredients guessing at recipes without a wiki, an open spreadsheet, or else a million hours to expend at trial and error.
  5. Wormhole Icons [Fixed] - Labels matched wormhole sets by color. There may be other (better) mods for this function, but I haven't researched them fully.
  6. Caloric Countdown - Gradually increases hunger drain over time. Use this mod if you're not fighting for an endless survival state, but instead just want to see how long you last against ever increasing odds. Or maybe you think you can build up enough to survive against even starvation itself? Recommended setting (feel free to tailor):
    1. Hunger Growth Rate: Logrhythmic

Untested mods (in consideration; testing help is appreciated):

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  1. Thirsty for Tea - Adds a 4th stat to look out for: Thirst. I haven't gotten to play it yet, but this was recommended by CaptainChaotica.
  2. Actual Season Length Randomizer - "Causes season lengths to shuffle every year to give the true random season length experience." Also haven't yet tried it, but recommended by CaptainChaotica.
  3. Guarded Pig King [DST] - Makes the pig king a little less of a freebie.
  4. Hardermode rebalance public Delta HIATUS. - Assorted "hard" tweaks (and some nerfs, including major ones) to further brutalize your experience. May make some of the required mods redundant.

 

Brutal Mode

Does this still seem too soft? The following settings tweak will force you to plunge into the deep dark earth to fight cave spiders for your silk. No cheap and easy spider nest grinding to your heart's content. Note: Webber may negate this; recommend avoiding him, or else just his spider nests. If you REALLY want a challenge, play as Wes!

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Forest and Caves:

  1. Spiders: None

 

If you have any mod or settings suggestions, please post them.

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10 minutes ago, Terra M Welch said:

Oh look a mod of mine was linked, I should get around to updated the overhauled version to support the warly update recipes.

But I've been distracted as of late... Between Sevtech Ages in MC and a couple of my DST solo worlds.

Suprised my handicaper isn't one of the mods. >.<

What mod?

Also, does your rebalancer have config settings to reduce beneficial recipes?

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6 minutes ago, Terra M Welch said:

My recipe rebalancer is a bit outdated and lacks any config options. :s

Also heres my handicaper.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1839297490

None of those seem to quite fit with what I'm trying to do. Maybe Warly's debuff could have a place, but I just can't establish a meaningful reason foods are less nutritious just because a character gets bored of them or whatever. Maybe they could just lose the heal or sanity heals instead? Metabolism could amp things up a bit, but isn't really necessary (unless this challenge as is just isn't doing it for you for some reason).

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45 minutes ago, hamstar said:

None of those seem to quite fit with what I'm trying to do. Maybe Warly's debuff could have a place, but I just can't establish a meaningful reason foods are less nutritious just because a character gets bored of them or whatever. Maybe they could just lose the heal or sanity heals instead? Metabolism could amp things up a bit, but isn't really necessary (unless this challenge as is just isn't doing it for you for some reason).

The mod is customizable, not every feature has to be enabled.

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Ya know what's a mod I'm really surprised you didn't mention, considering this is about survival?

Thirst!  This, the newer version, is way too fancy for my tastes, but unfortunately the old version (which I used in my "March of Civilizaton" challenge) apparently crashes all the time now.  Anyway.  Don't let all the bells, whistles and pretties distract you--this is a mod that adds an ENTIRE NEW STAT that has to be _constantly_ watched, just like hunger, HP and sanity, and all the fancy things you can (eventually) make with it...only solve the problems that the mod itself created.  And you _can_, for example, just randomly drink out of a pond, but (a) uncleaned water lowers your health and sanity a tad and (b) you're likely to spawn a snake.  (Which barks like a dog,unless they've fixed that.  : P)  In fact, _cacti_ can also spawn snakes.

And there will be times when you're nowhere NEAR a water source for way, way longer than you anticipated.  So...yeah.

Also, do you find your Constant's orbit around its (presumed) sun a little too predictable? Want to be kept on your toes by nature itself?

Then say hello to the Actual Season Randomiser!  The in-game settings aren't truly random; they randomise the season lengths ONCE and then it _sticks_ that way for every year thereafter.  Want to go to sleep freezing in winter and then wake up roasting, frantically scrambling to prototype an endo fire?  (This has exactly happened to me, more than once.) This is the mod for you!  Also both spring AND summer have the trees turning green, so if they start doing that in winter suddenly, all you know is THAT something is going to happen.  Not _what_.

Season lengths can range from NONE, to 40 days (winter/summer) or 50 (spring/fall).  I once had a world with 40-day winters AND 50-day springs every year.  It does change up your gameplay style, lemme tell ya.

OBVIOUSLY the Season Clock and any other mod that uses it will negate the hell out of this.  So will living in the caves, to an extent.  This is for those idiots tough badasses who refuse to come in out of the...everything.  Or who don't like cave living.  : P

...Notorious

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46 minutes ago, CaptainChaotica said:

OBVIOUSLY the Season Clock and any other mod that uses it will negate the hell out of this.  So will living in the caves, to an extent.  This is for those idiots tough badasses who refuse to come in out of the...everything.  Or who don't like cave living.  : P

 

Not really, you would still need to prepare for whatever impending doom you see on said clock, that's for the first few years tho

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11 hours ago, CaptainChaotica said:

Ya know what's a mod I'm really surprised you didn't mention, considering this is about survival?

Thirst!  This, the newer version, is way too fancy for my tastes, but unfortunately the old version (which I used in my "March of Civilizaton" challenge) apparently crashes all the time now.  Anyway.  Don't let all the bells, whistles and pretties distract you--this is a mod that adds an ENTIRE NEW STAT that has to be _constantly_ watched, just like hunger, HP and sanity, and all the fancy things you can (eventually) make with it...only solve the problems that the mod itself created.  And you _can_, for example, just randomly drink out of a pond, but (a) uncleaned water lowers your health and sanity a tad and (b) you're likely to spawn a snake.  (Which barks like a dog,unless they've fixed that.  : P)  In fact, _cacti_ can also spawn snakes.

And there will be times when you're nowhere NEAR a water source for way, way longer than you anticipated.  So...yeah.

Does this mod have config settings to disable teas? Those sound like ways to recoup from the disadvantages, and then some.

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It does have a lot of settings...I forget what all does what.  Lemme check.

(boots up game and does so)

Okay, so I don't know about disabling ALL the teas, but you can set both kinds of tea _plants_ that come with this mod, to zero.  I think you can do that with the streams too.  And turn down the well spots, although those are already really spread out as it is--I had a hard time finding a place to base that was ALSO less than three screens' worth away from my well.  Also you can turn down the fountains.  AND, have the characters get thirstier faster and take more damage because of it! if you're feeling really sadistic.  And if THAT isn't enough for your masochistic little heart, you can also make it so that water goes bad faster.  : P

See, this is why I liked the original mod better.  It was just so much SIMPLER!  Yeah, it's nice to be able to make drinks that require water, a thing we never had before in DS, but things get SO cluttered.  I miss just scouring the forest for hydromatoes while dodging spiders, checking my little stick-and-grass filter at camp for a drink every morning, and sipping out of ponds only to be attacked by SUDDENLY, SNAKE!  Ah, those were the days.

Spoiler

poorurbanplanning.png.5d75c77b8580eedbe283ff3d07c33600.png

Here's a screenshot from the "Thirsty for Tea" version, at I believe default settings.  That's an ivan-chai plant on the right there.  You can disable them.  (I mainly took this particular picture to show how this poor rabbit had a river built straight through his home!)

dstcivday61summersigh.png.90b8722504a6c9da172fa47020dcc378.png

And here's a screenshot from the original version.  (This was during the "hunter-gatherer" year of my Civ challenge, hence that's why there's no base. Just a firepit and some traps I was in the middle of moving back to the rabbit holes from the frog ponds, since it was the first day of summer.  Technically I also wasn't allowed to make backpacks yet, BUT, I found a free one next to a rook.) The triangle thing is the simple grass-and-twig water filter.  It holds only three drinks, and takes a day to refill. Obviously more of a problem with multiple people.  I think the newer version still has it.

Thing is, the original just called "Thirst" mod apparently started crashing whenever people built/did certain pretty common things, sometime in fall 2018.  So...yeah.  I imagine it is also NOT new-oceans compatible.  Anyway the new version MIGHT still be viable for your Survival Challenge idea.  Like I said you can tweak even the basic settings (on both versions) to be really, really cruel if you want.  Bwahaha.  I'd recommend playtesting it a bit with whatever settings you choose to go with, so you can see what it's actually like in a practical, day-to-day way.

I do like the idea of this challenge itself, since I am NOT a combat person but I am aaallll about that person-vs.-nature thing.  That's why I spent an entire year without a proper base (multiple times!--and on the surface the whole year, too), and why I wanted seasons to be MORE random than what the game can provide.  I also once tried turning EVERYTHING down to "less" except meteors and meteor fields were at "more", to get a blasted, post-apocalyptic landscape.  (It didn't quite work.  But I still think it's a cool idea.) 

So in general, this sounds right up my alley.  :)

...Notorious

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