[Darkness Falls] Just a curious thing

[Similar]

Something I have going on in my current install of DF (B19, on 1.3).

Pine Forest always has game stage 0, no zombies in any POIs, no wandering hordes. There's only biome spawns (which do often still involve direwolves on night 1). Fetch quests have no zombies (not sure about clears. Haven't tried), but scout quests do, so the DF quest line works.
Not playing with blood moons, so I don't know if they spawn zombies. I would guess so.

In all other biomes game stage goes up like normal and there are zombies in POIs, wandering hordes and everything. So going from Pine Forest to somewhere else is suddenly a massive difficulty spike, which is kind of fun. And then I can go back to Pine Forest and relax.

It feels way too deliberate to be something I screwed up, so I imagine it's a bug, probably to do with difficulty settings, but I actually rather like it.
It's nice to have this huge difference between biomes. Of course, it does make Pine Forest extremely easy, but that's not usually where you find the best loot anyway and because there are so few zombies in Pine, I have to go to the other biomes to get enough XP to get anywhere (in my last game I turned Joel's tower into a sniper nest in the wasteland. Which left very little of his compound standing).

[Sr Humungus]

Didnt tried it yet (the new version of DF, if it is, dont know) but if you change bedroll square safe zone too big on xml files, zeds stop spawning, all buildings will be empty.

[Similar]

Originally posted by Sr Humungus:

Didnt tried it yet (the new version of DF, if it is, dont know) but if you change bedroll square safe zone too big on xml files, zeds stop spawning, all buildings will be empty.

heh. Interesting. Something like that was actually my first thought when I realized the POIs were empty, but then I went to the desert and discovered there were zombies in POIs there (and that everything else was working as usual there too).
I would guess it'd also block biome zombie spawns (maybe animals too?).