Way to slow gamestage difficulty increase?

[USSMessier45]

So I love this game and have for years, but the one thing that always ends up turning me off from the game for a while is the fact that the game is made to progressively get harder and harder. Now, I absolutely understand that most, if not almost all, people prefer it this way and like it in order to keep the game interesting and that I am probably heavily in the minority in terms of how I like to play this game. I play the game not so much for the zombies as much as I do for the fun of exploring, building, looting, etc. but I do enjoy them enough to not want to completely turn off enemies in the settings.

I already play on the lower difficulty settings just so that it gives me a bit more of a chance to spend time what I like doing instead of worrying about zombies every 10 seconds which is generally fine, I just kind of wish I could keep the difficulty level stagnant or have it progress at a slower rate. My question then would be whether or not anyone knows if it would be possible in game or through a mod or whatever, to have the enemies act more like minecraft enemies where they don't get harder and harder as the days progress and the player levels up? Even if it ends up slowing the gamestage growth for loot as well, I think I'd still enjoy it more than I do the game how it is now. I know this is kind of a specific/niche thing to want so not sure if anything like this exists but if it does I'd love to try it out

[Shurenai]

Lower exp gain. Game stage is pretty intrinsically tied to character level; So lowering your exp gain to 75, 50, or even 25% will dramatically slow the pace you gain gamestage at...However that does also starve you of perk points; So it's give and take, and as you already guessed, will slow the pace you get better loot as well.

[DthBlayde]

If you're not above cheesing the system, you can periodically kill your character. This will reset the "Days Survived" variable in the GS formula, knock it back down a few pegs; but even then the minimum it'll ever go is double your level.

[USSMessier45]

Originally posted by DthBlayde:

If you're not above cheesing the system, you can periodically kill your character. This will reset the "Days Survived" variable in the GS formula, knock it back down a few pegs; but even then the minimum it'll ever go is double your level.

Ugh I completely forgot about that, thank you! I installed the mod that gives you 3 skill points per level I think instead of 1 so I'll try setting exp to 25 or 50% and maybe off myself every once and a while lol

[Mardoin69]

You can also change how often you have a blood moon. So, setting this to more time between blood moons kind of slows gamestage in a round about way.......it will take longer to start getting the real bad asp zeds at least.