Increase difficulty mid campaign

[Adanar]

Started a new campaign with friends and we only realised after about 2 days of playing that I hadn't upped the campaign difficulty, is there any way to change it mid way through without losing everything we've done so far?

[kingmagma111]

It should automatically scale as the game continues. If it doesn’t scale fast enough for your playstyle preference, I don’t think there’s anything you can do.

[Adanar]

Originally posted by kingmagma111:

It should automatically scale as the game continues. If it doesn’t scale fast enough for your playstyle preference, I don’t think there’s anything you can do.

I know that it scales higher as you go, but in the initial making of the game you can set a difficulty level which works as kind of a base line, this is the setting I forgot to change and its now locked at medium rather than hard.

[Rhapsody]

There are some difficulty-related commands listed on https://barotraumagame.com/wiki/Console_Commands but no idea how they'd work in campaign. Probably best to not mess with those.

You could also enable commands to teleport to the end of the campaign, go through it and start a new "cycle" which makes the game harder, unless that was changed in the release update.

[Zothen]

I would assume the set difficulty is written to the save file. So decompress it, search for it and edit it.

[Greb]

It used to visually change it, at least I swear it did. We set the campaign to start at 5% difficulty and after hitting the hydrothermal wastes it still displays 5% difficulty when we return to the lobby, but the game is definitely getting harder over time. Many many big groups of enemies, including swarms with like 2-3 Giant Spinelings in them, Mudraptor squads with two Veterans in them etc, massive swarms of Crawlers, duo Molochs, lots of Watchers...but I haven't seen a Thalamus yet.

I dunno, it feels like the game has increased in difficulty, even if it claims it hasn't. Although someone once told me that difficulty only changes how quickly and how bored the "director" becomes before sending more stuff your way, and enemy spawns + numbers are tied to depth, so I dunno, maybe I am still stuck playing at 5% difficulty in regards to the director but the biome / region I'm at is influencing all of these big monsters and huge groups to appear, I dunno.

The thing is, I also read somewhere that difficulty value alters what stuff you find in Outpost merchant inventory, and we're seeing plenty of good stuff at this point, many skill books, husk eggs, nukes, talent locked equipment, all of that stuff. Even if it shows 5% still, it feels like we're definitely beyond 50% which I think is the trigger for fully opening up merchant inventory stock...but again, don't quote me on that either lol, it could be vastly outdated info at this point.

I just definitely remember playing a campaign or two back in the day and you'd steadily watch the difficulty bar go from like 2% up to 60%+ and such...it'd grow over time with you.

I was also certain that the first round is always "piss-easy go easy on the newguy" tier, but without touching any campaign difficulty settings on my initial few campaign attempts I was encountering multiple 3-4 sized groups of Mudraptors...could have sworn you'd normally only find 1 Mudraptor at once that early, 2 if you're unlucky. So I dunno, lol.

Maybe the devs tinkered with stuff as part of the 1.0 release.

[Rhapsody]

Originally posted by Greb:

It used to visually change it, at least I swear it did. We set the campaign to start at 5% difficulty and after hitting the hydrothermal wastes it still displays 5% difficulty when we return to the lobby, but the game is definitely getting harder over time.

It does get more difficult, the actual difficulty of the passage/node is displayed on the map.

[Greb]

I'll keep an eye out on the info node next time I play, then!