Custom Survival and Badge Progress

[Frost]

Please! Please! Please! Make it so custom survival mode games can be used to get the badges/progress them.

My Experience
I was personally on a 257 day run on stalker difficulty before the update. I plan to restart and try to hit that 500 day mark (I am waiting for the major updates of Tales to be complete before I hop back in). However when I first made this run I started on a custom difficulty which was Interloper in all settings except I turned the guns on because this is what I wanted to experience. 30 days into this run I saw online that custom setting games do not progress badge progress, which completely killed my interest in a custom settings run to begin with. Why? because it took me 200 hours to reach 247 days on Stalker and I got 3 badges in total. I enjoy this game, I do not have time or interest in playing purely for the sake of the badges as there is no reason to play on interloper to simply drink coffee and catch rabbits. I can do these things on Interloper and still have the satisfaction of surviving on that difficulty (Not to mention after 240+ days, playing stalker is easy for me now, playing on the lowest difficulty would not be mentally stimulating).

The are reasons as to why it should be disabled as listed below however I have also explained why each of these are more damaging to the experience than add to it:

• If someone is of the mind to cheat, cheese or exploit their way to getting the badges limiting them to ONLY the default difficulties is not going to stop them. You can import a save and use cheat engine to instantly give yourself these badges. Someone who wants to "cheat" badges is not going to spend countless hours on custom mode farming badges.
  
• Someone who purely wants to do testing on custom mode may not want badges to progress. Simple fix, add an option in the custom settings that disables badge progression.
  
• Someone might go on the lowest difficulty to get all the badges and then use them to survive on a higher difficulty. This is quite frankly ridiculous as for one this is a single player game with single player progression, stats and achievements if that is how someone wants to play they spent their money on the game, your choices/opinion "should" not matter when it comes to adding more options to the game, it is not being forced on you. (Not to mention by playing for so long grinding badges on the lower difficulties they will learn to play the harder ones just via playing and the badges do not give such an advantage that an inexperienced player can boot up interloper and survive for 500 days).

TLDR: Please add the option to turn on/off the badge progression in custom difficulty. I should not be punished in my experience of the game simply because I want to set a single option for interloper from off to on. Especially not after already playing 247 days of stalker.

[Frost]

Originally posted by smmcresident:

I agree with you that there are many aspects of the game that would be nice to have the option of changing available in the base game. However, it's unlikely to happen given the number of things different people want and this is something that has been requested for a very long time. There's a mod that allows feat/badge progression in custom games available and I'd encourage you to take advantage of that. There are also several QOL mods that make the game much more enjoyable as well without breaking the basic game mechanics. You know stuff like being able to place 2 objects closer than 2 meters apart.

I did not know there was a modding scene for TLD, the idea of not having to space out all of my flares, painkillers etc in my base would be fantastic! Is there much support for the current version?

[Frost]

Originally posted by smmcresident:

A good chunk of mods are up to date with the current version of TLD. Some really nice mods didn't make it. Just Google TLD mods and there should be at least a few that will get you where you want to be. I'd highly recommend "Place Anywhere" which makes organizing your gear so much easier and eliminates the insanely sensitive collision system. You will need melonloader to run mods, but it's pretty straight forward to get everything working. Most of the mod websites have instructions if you are not familiar with melonloader from other games.

Shame we probably wont see the feature added, but at least there is alternatives. Thanks for the info!