Introducing The Wilderness Project Environments. Flora, Foraging, Fauna, Effects modlets, various tile sets and systems to flesh out the world into hopefully, a more captivating and enjoyable experience filled with much more to do then just taking on the zed hordes.
What started out as just an idea for making better maps dragged me down into the rabbit hole of further modifying and enhancing the world in 7 Days to Die.
It's a very large project and what I thought would only take a few weeks blew up in to literally months. No regrets, no complaints. Some of the things you'll encounter have probably been already done by other modders out there in some shape or form, and most definitely some of them not. I'm not looking to reinvent their wheels, but instead introduce a number of my own.
Flora, is basically the landscape itself. Trees, bushes, flowers, and various plants. The vanilla 7 Days to Die world looks pretty damn boring to me and it's not hard for me to pick up on the fact that there's only really a handful of vanilla assets. This is what started it all for me. Careful and creative planning has shown me that there can be minimal system impact on introducing this type of an expansion. There's well over 200 new items in this modlet and who knows where that will stop. The end result even in my testing stages have been simply amazing.
I wanted to put into use a system that players and system administrators could to some degree, tailor to their own tastes. Making those changes are readily discussed in the forums for doing so.
Foraging, is the big one. Survival skills in the real world I suppose I have very little to do with hunting zombies. Yes, 7 Days to Die is an apocalyptic zombie survival game. My line of thinking though and play style in these types of games almost always leaves me getting bored pretty fast if I don't have any sense of ownership in the game. Procuring weapons and blowing shit up doesn't last very long with me. If you like pew-pew weapons and just running around locked and loaded that's fine, but I like to explore, I like to experiment. Introducing the skills I have I think, is going to help with that. I've got over 300 items, recipes, food items, and other various resources alone, Still more to go.
I guess the key word here that you could use is immersion. Herbalism, Hunting, Woodlore, etc, are all things you would have to consider, learn and hone your skills in if you're really going survive out there. Hopefully this accomplishes that immersion that I'm chasing.
Fauna, is going to be probably the last part of the work that I'm going to be introducing here and will probably take the longest. Without going into deep detail, adding additional critters and NPCs is not an easy task with what we have in the current state of 7 Days to Die. I'm also no expert by a long shot with unity oh, and I have to compartmentalize my own learning so that I can do each thing required and do it well. This is going to take some time. I'm hoping the people that choose to use The Wilderness Project offerings understand that, and the only thing I'm asking for really is encouragement if you enjoy what I've come up with so far.
Effects, it's pretty simple. At least on the surface. Weather and environment change. It's the apocalypse. There's going to be some strange shit happening, and what can I say? There's a fog rolling in and it looks pretty strange. What's that smell?
Here comes that word immersion again- since deciding to introduce additional tilesets to create additional sub-biomes, it became apparent very quickly that the thing missing for me was stuff like fog, gases, emissions and other weird shit that could curl your toes and make a billy goat puke. Let's see how sick we can really make that billy goat shall we?
