Ramp-up Difficulty in Better-Than-Wolves

[squ]

I had a discussion over this in the discord with some users including Zhil, which he really liked. The synopsis of the idea was that as the player reached certain milestones (Nether, Wither, then End).
Basically, the game gets too easy post-early game. There's virtually no danger once you unlock permanent torches and most activity you'll be doing after unlocking permanent torches is automating production of various items in your own base. Now, this idea included a fix to make players continue to visit mines even through these later phases in the game, as diamonds become essentially useless once you finished Level 4 Librarian and have full diamond armor and tools.
But to get on with the whole ramp-up difficulty-part of this suggestion, various changes would take place after getting by some milestones. This was mainly inspired by Zhils idea for Hostile mode having wither skeletons spawn at low y-levels after going to the nether, which I thought was a cool idea. But heres some changes that can take place for the various stages.

After visiting nether
- Zombies, and skeletons have a high chance to spawn in with padded armor or wool armor. In order to not clog item systems these shouldn't be droppable.
- Creepers have a chance to spawn charged. Charged creepers shouldn't be able to be sheared.
- Skeletons can spawn in with new equipment, one of which being a new item called the flintlock which will be a midgame unlock which requires gunpowder. It is a short-range high damage item. Skeletons can spawn with it, but if the devs arent interested in implemented this, they can spawn in with composite bows or some other item instead. Ranged weapons from skeletons should be able to be enchanted but will always have abysmally low durability as to encourage people not to use them.
- Spiders can spawn in with invisibility, strength, or swiftness as they have a probability to on vanilla hard mode. For invisibility, their eyes should be slightly translucent so players can still sort of see them.
- Skeletons can sometimes spawn without a ranged weapon, alternatively with a bone club or stone sword (probability of iron sword). They should have increased movement speed if they lack a weapon.
- When zombies burn in the sunlight, instead of dying they turn into skeletons. Skeletons will not burn in the sunlight.

After slaying the wither
- All hostile mobs enjoy increased health pools and have a 25% chance to apply wither on hit. Mobs may have the "infusion" appearance the infused skull has. (May be disabled on relaxed mode.)
- Wither status effect lasts twice as long as usual. (May be disabled on relaxed mode.)
- Pigmen will become hostile when players enter a 6 block radius of them.
- Wither skeletons will have a new appearance (looking more like the "infused skeletons") and will have a larger healthpool as well as increased damage. Knockback will also be applied on hit. Runed skulls drop more commonly
- New variant of wither skeletons can spawn in the overworld, this one looking less ashy. Cannot drop runed skulls however, but will have a bone club and high speed. (still applies wither on hit). Has a greater chance to spawn at low Y-levels.
- Mobs are more likely to spawn in with enchanted equipment as well as having better enchants.
- Endermen will agro automatically if the player is not using ender specs.
- Squids gain legs and can now pathfind onto the surface, they also enjoy much higher health and damage and will do 10x damage to your armor. Will have a very large agro radius.
- Blaze fireballs can destroy blocks in small explosions.
- Ghasts enjoy higher health and fireballs deal twice as much damage and have a bigger explosion.

After slaying the ender dragon
- All hostile mobs that can spawn with armor and tools will have a greater chance of spawning in with iron equipment. (Improves the grind of iron for SFS beacon as well.)
- As to make blight a threat. Blight will spawn from nether portals. Blight cannot be eaten by animals if it cannot already. Blight can effect farmland it spreads to and kill the crops. Mobs can spawn from blight regardless of light level. Mobs from the nether can spawn out of blight (including blazes, wither skeletons, pigmen (agro'd), and magma cubes.) To counteract players farming these mobs outside of the nether through blight, nether mobs can only spawn from blight in a short radius of the player.
- Mobs will spawn in larger groups and enjoy increased health pools, damage, and reach. Enjoy the curse of the Dragon.

These are all just some ideas to think about that would be interesting and increase the difficulty of the game as well as add some new flavor. But some of you more seasoned BTW players that have gotten beyond the midgame might be asking, "whats the point of all these changes if I rarely ever leave my base in the first place when I get to the midgame? I already have self-sufficient food production, and I have full diamond armor with only the rare need for more redstone which is already easily acquirable from short trips I rarely go on anyway. And I travel to villages through portals anyway." Well if all of that applies for you, then these changes most likely wont effect you that much, which is unfortunate because they really should. But I have a solution for that, making diamonds actually useful beyond diamond armor. In modern vanilla minecraft, there is plenty of recipes that require diamonds that makes them a lot more useful then just armor, as they are in BTW (with the exception of lens, but people only make that for level 4 librarian anyway.) So heres some ideas to make mining something more dangerous in the mid/late game as well as more necessary.
- Enchantment tomes are implemented, which are items that require books, diamonds, and lapis. They are necessary for enchanting any type of equipment from any source, including Priests, Enchantment Table, and the Infernal Enchanter.
- Machinery that involves diamonds. One of the suggestions I had was for something that mimics the function of vanilla hoppers and their ability to suck items in and out of storage blocks, which would be something interesting diamonds could unlock, as well as something the player would repeatedly have to make thus needing to do multiple trips.

[EpicAaron]

- Skeletons can spawn in with new equipment, one of which being a new item called the flintlock which will be a midgame unlock which requires gunpowder. It is a short-range high damage item. Skeletons can spawn with it

Fucking terrifying, I love it. A skeleton sprinting at you with the sole purpose of blasting a whole in your face, like a super fast creeper, sounds great. It also sounds super cheap. You'll probably be really angry if you die to one seemingly randomly. Perhaps the blast can be just enough to bring you down to a heart or so so that another mob still has to come finish you off?

Flintlock texture from Balkons:



Pirate skeletons?

EDIT: What you describe is like Terraria Hardmode, where the enemies that spawn in the world changes after reaching a certain hell related milestone.

[squ]

A skeleton sprinting at you with the sole purpose of blasting a whole in your face, like a super fast creeper, sounds great. It also sounds super cheap. You'll probably be really angry if you die to one seemingly randomly. Perhaps the blast can be just enough to bring you down to a heart or so so that another mob still has to come finish you off?

Yeah so that isn’t really the intention I have for flintlock skeletons. My idea is that it does a lot of damage but not too much that you’ll be left with no health lol. I was thinking more damage than a normal arrow and that with range it decreases in damage. This is moreso to bring back that fear of being overwhelmed as skeletons gang up on you.

[Sarudak]

This is something that has always bothered me about survival games in general not just BTW. You seem to always have an inverted difficulty curve where the game is hardest at the beginning and then difficulty drops off quickly as you progress. This is compounded by the fact that the better you do in the early game the faster the difficulty drops off as having more resources compounds your ability to get more resources. I have never truly been satisfied by any solution I've seen. The best in my mind is games where you have some kind of inherent advantage in the early game that fades or disappears over time an example of this is project zomboid where at the beginning of the game the power and water are working and there's lots of fresh food available but after some time those things disappear. Then there is winter to prepare for. 7 Days to die throws progressively loarger scaling hordes at you that you need to defend against. This is pretty good but the mechanics of the hordes aren't super fun imo. Valheim and Subnautica boost difficulty by having regional difficulty and forcing you to go to new regions to progress the game. BTW falls most in that last category with difficulty coming from danger of progression including caving 3rd strata for diamonds, going to the nether for netherrack and blaze rods and finally fighting the wither and end dragon. That said there is no pressure to progress like the 7 days hordes or the project zomboid water and power loss give you. Once you get renewable food and crucible the timer goes away and that is the reason the game feel suddenly easy IMO.

[AkoumTrailblazer]

I was inspired to talk about this when I saw the Mob Enhancement Addon (https://forum.btwce.com/viewtopic.php?t=10264). I don't know what the end goal is of this, but I would be happy if progression milestones just caused some of the Mob enhancements to activate. Just little things to keep you on your toes, and since that code has been written, it might not be too much work to roll it into the mod and/or build on it.

[cr1024]

- Skeletons can spawn in with new equipment, one of which being a new item called the flintlock which will be a midgame unlock which requires gunpowder. It is a short-range high damage item. Skeletons can spawn with it

EDIT: What you describe is like Terraria Hardmode, where the enemies that spawn in the world changes after reaching a certain hell related milestone.

never played terraria, but new enemy spawns tied to particular milestones does seem like a simple+easy way to slowly increase the general difficulty over time, absent a more elegant solution.

- open nether portals adds small chance for any zombie, skeleton, or spider to become a pigman, wither skeleton, or blaze; more open portals increases chance
- open end portals increases enderman spawn rate
- beacon+at least 1 open nether portal adds small chance for ghasts to spawn in chunks near beacon at night, higher tier beacons increase chance and spawn radius
- curing villagers adds small chance for zombie villagers to naturally spawn at night and in darkness, though would obviously need to be technically a different enemy that couldn't be cured and would despawn in daylight; more cured villagers increases chance
- curing a blacksmith add small chance enemy mobs spawn with the weapons they sell, more blacksmiths cured increases chance, higher level increases weapon quality (might have to disable drops on these guys in particular to preempt the flooding of mob grinders with exotic gear)
-curing a librarian adds small chance witches spawn outside of swamps, curing more librarians increases chance, higher level increases variety of potions used
- curing a priest increases chance of enemy weapons having offensive enchantments, more priests increases chance, higher level increases tier of enchantments enemies have (like blacksmith spawns, may have to disable drops to prevent rapid accumulation of extremely valuable enchanted gear)

basically tie difficulty increases to things in the world the player is already incentivized to do to progress, and the more of those things they do, the harder it gets
i just don't know how viable it is for the game to accurately track these sorts of things, particularly if they're not currently loaded

[Niyu]

This particular two go against one of the principles of the mod.

- open nether portals adds small chance for any zombie, skeleton, or spider to become a pigman, wither skeleton, or blaze; more open portals increases chance
- open end portals increases enderman spawn rate

They kind of remove the need to build separate farms in the nether and the end for their mob drops.

[Pot_Tx]

I'm currently working on scaling difficulty as a new feature for Mobs Enhancement Addon, but have only modified mobs' basic attributes according to progression and ran out of ideas... Your ideas are really creative I think, I'll probably try to implement some of them, thanks for sharing!