Zombieland Mod (RimWorld)

About

Do you like The Walking Dead? Are you afraid of The Undead? Good. Because this mod will give you the Heebie-jeebies!

This is not your average Zombie mod. In Zombieland, Zombies are everywhere! They crawl out of the ground in masses, hunt you down, bash your doors and eat you alive! At night, their blood lust will steer them towards your base. So better be prepared!

Zombies attack anything that moves, smells and makes sounds. They do not discriminate and attack your animals, your enemies and even traders. There are rumors of maps with well over one thousand zombies. Shoot them and they keep going, kill them and they respawn.

This Mod features custom controlled Zombies with simulated instincts. Most default RimWorld functions have been disabled on them to allow for a smooth game play experience. Therefore, you cannot select or harvest them.

Design and goal

With zombies in Zombieland you won't get the normal planing and attacking behaviour like with other mods. Zombies are dumb, get stuck and in general slowly radiate towards your base than to attack it. There are exceptions though: special zombies (depending on type) are smarter and will find you but the big masses just wander around. When they hear, see or smell you they will start following your trail and if one zombie starts to track that way others around it will follow thus resulting in a group behaviour that you would expect from animal packs.

So when you see that zombies get stuck in a cave or near your base, don't get fooled in underestimating the danger. You can use the mechanics to your advantage too. Try to kite them around or lead them away while another colonist rescues someone. In general, zombies add a chaotic moment to your base Rimworld experience that changes the game substantially. If you expect normal gameplay you will be disappointed.

Handling Settings

There are 4 ways to edit settings in Zombieland.

Default settings: If you go from the main RimWorld menu and select Options->Mod Settings->Zombieland defaults, you can set the defaults for all new colonies you will start.

Initial game settings: When you start a new colony, the settings dialog will appear after the world is generated. It will be prefilled with the settings you have defined in the default settings.

In-game settings*: While playing, you can choose Menu->Zombieland and edit the current games settings. They will apply immediately and will be saved together with the game when you save it (don't forget to save!).

Cloud settings: While in the Zombieland settings dialog, you can load and save your current settings with the Download and Publish buttons. Publishing will ask you for a name and a description and will save the settings with your steam name. Downloading presents you with a search dialog where you can search for steam user name or settings name. You can see and download other steam user settings too.

Settings Options

Zombieland has a huge amount of customization, so lets go through all options:

When do zombies appear?

All the time
No restriction

When it is dark
Zombies will spawn at cells that are considered dark. This can be during night or anywhere where there is no light. Lit areas will prevent zombies from spawning, even at night

Only as events
In this mode, zombies will come in groups and the center of the group spawn is random but follows the next setting

From where do zombies come?

Where there is soft ground
They will spawn anywhere on the map but only if there is no hard ground and you did not build any floor or wall there. Some mods introduce new types of ground/floors and Zombieland tries to do its best to identify them

From the map edges
The classic way raiders or visitors appear in RimWorld

What will zombies attack?

All creatures
No restrictions

Human-like creatures
All humans (mods that introduce robots usually make them based on humans, there is no easy way for Zombieland to see that they are not)

Only colonists
Just your beloved settlers

Enemies attack zombies
Make your raiders fight zombies or let them try to ignore them as long as possible

Animals attack zombies
Make any animal on the map fight zombies (if they are a predator or have to fight back) or let them ignore them

What will zombies destroy?

Nothing
Zombies leave your things alone

Only doors
Zombies will attack doors if they are happen to be close to them.

Everything that was build
Zombies will attack anything, even ancient danger walls (surprise!)

Only when they are agitated
Restrict damaging to zombies that are raging (red eyes; triggered by too large tight groups of zombies)

Zombie senses

Note: Zombies smell and hear you, even through walls. Weapons will be heard within the shooting range but only if they make clear sounds (bows won't)

Limited
Close range, roughly 3-5 cells, traces fade away fast

Normal
Normal range, about 6-9 cells

Elevated
Larger range, 10 or more cells, traces fade away slowly

Zombies rage when a group gets too large
Makes extra angry zombies (red eyes) that know where you are and will follow you (and destroy things if previous setting allows it)

Rage level
This controls the difficulty of raging. Set to low, raging only occurs in very large groups and does not last long. Set to high, raging will happen in smaller groups and the effect will last longer.

Zombie health

Zombies recover from injuries
Since zombies are dead, this will activate slow continuous random injury healing to simulate that they are undead

Zombies are easy to kill
Is Zombieland way to hard to play? This is the #1 option to turn on. The slightest injury will kill zombies and they won't get down but die immediately

Zombies will eat

Injured creatures
Normally zombies only start feasting on corpses but turn this on and see your downed colonists being eaten alive!

Corpses
Turn this off if you don't want zombies to eat anything

Special zombies

Zombieland has six special types of zombies and the rest is either fat and slow or slim and fast.

Suicide bombers
They have a explosive vest on their body that explodes when they die or when they get close to your walls

Toxic splashers
They consist of toxic goo that will be spread around them when they die. Do not walk over it because it creates toxic buildup and is extremely sticky. Can be cleaned and will wash away when it rains.

Tanky operators
These zombies are slow but smart and very strong. They will try to reach your walls and will breach them easily. Just like your skull if you get too close to them. Their shield and armor will protect them so make sure you hit them many times with your long range weapons

Miners
Normal zombies but with a hobby. They like to mine through mountains

Electric
Electrifying zombies that are shockingly resistent to bullets or ranged weapons. You need to melee them but luckily they don't bite so you don't get infected by them. Their electric field damages everything close by that is electric/electronic - like power lines, appliences, powerarmors, shield belts - basically anything you build out of components.

Albinos
Very fast zombies that are easy to kill. They go for your doors and sabotage them so they stay open for a bit longer than usual. Will start to scream when getting close to your colonists which makes them vomit so you loose control for a short while.

Dark puffers When hit they produce a big cloud of defensive dark smoke that will prevent you from seeing them and their fellow zombies. They also leave a very sticky tar like substance on the ground that makes moving very hard.

Healers These cyan zombies will heal other injured zombies around them.

New game

Days until zombies come
To give you a head start, Zombieland lets you configure the number of days without zombies when you start your colony

Zombies on the map

Note: the actual number of zombies on a map is calculated by Zombieland based on the game difficulty and the combat ability of your colonists. It takes into account: number of colonists, their weapons, their armor, if they sleep or are injured, if they are away from the map, if they can only do melee, etc...

Never more than ... zombies
Maximum number of zombies per map. This is a hard upper limit and mainly to prevent the game from lagging too much. Fast computers can deal with 1500 or more zombies

Colony multiplier
If you play rich explorer or in general with few colonists and want more zombies, increase this number to get more zombies

Zombie events

Note: Events with groups of zombies will always appear, even if you play with "When do zombies appear - all the time". In that case, less often. Events are spaced out by Zombieland every few days

Zombies per colonist
This setting is only for calculating event size, not an overall restriction. Events have an internal maximum size (but aim to never exceed the maximum number of zombies on the map) so this setting mainly allows you to reduce event size

Extra days between events
If events are too frequent for your taste, add a fixed amount of days between them

Zombie speed

Note: this is the second most useful setting to make Zombieland easier

If they are calm
Normal zombie speed (fat ones are slower, slim ones are faster)

If they feel excited
The speed for agitated, raging red eye zombies

Zombie strength

Damage multiplier
Zombies deal different amounts of damage (slim/fat). This setting makes it less or more. Zombies always deal a good amount of stun so don't get caught up in a fight with more than 2-3 zombies or you won't be able to fight back

Game tweaks

Reduce turret gun consumption
This will reduce the amount of steal turret guns cons