[Dark Skies Above] Alien Animals 1, Stray Tweaks

[ephemeralstoryteller]

Summary

SUMMARY: Mods "Adds new alien fauna, tweaks Strays"

Purpose of change

Adds some new alien animals to spice up the wilds, and changes Strays slightly. Mostly buffs to make them a bit more comparable to regular z's, they're still a bit weaker than vanilla zombies.

Describe the solution

Alien Fauna

• Lake lurkers are sewer lurkers who have grown to inhabit bigger bodies of water. They lose their ranged abilities and speed in return for a more powerful bite and more health. They spawn rarely about at the rate of zharks in vanilla, though never specifically in packs.
• Lizards ... aren't really 'lizards' so much as versatile alien-Earth hybrids, but survivors probably call them such anyway because they look a bit similar.
  • Moss lizards are generally peaceful herbivores that start spawning rarely around 3 days in, and slowly increase in spawn chance as time goes on. They're gentle and trusting enough to be tamed and ridden, and will run from aggression.
  • Pack lizards are more aggressive but still not immediately hostile at first sight. They're pack hunters that spawn about 4 days in, and increase in spawn chance as time goes on. Fairly quick, but not as fast as wolves.
• Wisps are social critters capable of limited pollination. They are capable of eating sugary foods like fruits and more processed sweets, likely as part of their self-propulsion system. They're peaceful and curious, and can be tamed with bird food (or, pending JSONized animal feed, candy/sweets), and provide a little bit of light.
• Bileworms are burrowing scavengers that generally will leave the player alone, though will get aggressive if the player is weak in order to score a quick meal. They vomit acid, as their name suggests. Quite cowardly.

Stray Tweaks

• Removes the attackmon flag from bruisers and titans. Given how often they spawn because of a relatively limited upgrade pool, their proclivity to start throwing each other around like pro wrestlers tended to lag the game (smashing through vehicles to get to each other in particular) and clear out streets single-handedly. From a lore perspective: they're not really as chaotic as blob-mutated critters anyway.
• Bruisers can no longer push cars.
• Makes many monsters about as fast as their vanilla counterparts and a bit healthier.
• Makes wretches a little less fast and less healthy, to bring them about in line with z dogs.
• Makes creeps faster, but weaker.
• Buffs the tender's armor slightly.
• Gives some Strays new special attacks - just boring things like "scratch" and "bite", but varies their attacks a bit rather than just spamming things like "scratch" (the prowler in particular was guilty of this).
• Stray evolution now wraps back to the normal "stray" if it doesn't select a special evo. This will be temporary until I implement more Stray variants, but I was very unhappy with how many toughs were spawning during playtesting.

Testing

Loaded file and played through it. Looked for new fauna. Upped the fauna spawns to make them uncommon but not as rare as they were. Rejoiced when I saw moss lizzies. Tested the capabilities of various creatures: taming, etc.