Undead Legacy Anti-Bullshit:

Undead Legacy is an incredibly awesome mod with an infamously sadistic grindiness. This game balancing overhaul improves Undead Legacy's brutally unfair progression systems for a smoother and much more fun experience. All features are modular, which means that you're able to remove individual tweaks below or adjust their settings very easily. It improves the following gameplay systems:


Leveling:

• By default, Undead Legacy requires almost 2x as much XP as vanilla per level. That's bullshit!
• We restore that to vanilla's XP progression, to reduce the extreme grindiness of the leveling process.
• This tweak also works perfectly and retroactively if you're installing this mod into an existing save/server, but just keep in mind that the "XP requirement per level" won't correct itself in-game until your character reaches the next level, since that's when the game re-calculates the leveling XP requirements.
  

Action Skills:

• By default, Undead Legacy has an action skill system which levels up based on your active skill usage, but it's so excruciatingly slow that you could be 80 hours into a save and primarily using handguns, and still only be at handgun skill "50 of 100 max". The action skills level up so slowly that you can barely even switch to another weapon type deep into a save, since you'll never catch up to a useful level with your new weapon against the hard zombies you'll be facing at endgame. To make matters even worse, it isn't even affected by the game's native "XP Multiplier" setting, so even if you want to play with faster game progression, you still won't get any more action skill XP in Undead Legacy and will still always have the excruciatingly slow 1x rates. That's bullshit!
• We therefore tweak their algorithm to boost the action skill XP to a much more reasonable 3x rate, which means that you can finally level up your skills within the timespan of a reasonable human lifetime, and can switch to new weapon types later in the game without feeling too terrible about it (it'll still hurt, which is intentional in UL, but it won't be as painful as vanilla rates).
• You can simply edit "buffs.xml" if you want another multiplier, and your choices are between 1x and 5x compared to Undead Legacy's normal action skill XP rates, but our setting of 3x is very well-tuned for smooth yet meaningful gameplay.
  

Research:

• By default, Undead Legacy tortures the player constantly, by having extremely high "Research Data" costs for all recipes and workstations, while only giving 50 "Research Data" per scrapped book/schematic, and only giving a laughable 2 "Research Data" per recycled "Old Book" (in the Recycling Station). In previous versions of Undead Legacy, it was possible to recycle electrical devices such as TVs to earn Research Data, but that has been removed, which means that scrapping your own skill books/schematics is now the primary way of gaining research. It means that the player's progression is constantly locked behind the need to destroy every crafting-book/schematic they loot, just to be able to make the workstations they need, thus never really progressing in the game and never really having a chance to learn the game's hundreds of recipes, and constantly feeling bad about scrapping recipes that you'd really prefer to learn. That's total, extreme bullshit.
• We re-balance the research system to give you a smoother path of progression, with a more meaningful choice between learning a recipe you'd really like to know, or sacrificing it for research. In vanilla Undead Legacy, you are forced to basically scrap everything even if you wanted to learn it. Now, you're able to learn the recipes that appeal to you, without falling behind too much on Research Data.
• This problem was fixed in two ways. First of all, scrapping any Book/Schematic now gives you 100 "Research Data", which basically means that they're twice as valuable, and means that you can usually afford to learn the ones that you really like instead of feeling extremely pressured to sacrifice them all. Some people may wish that it was even more, but this exact number is balanced so that we still preserve the need to go outdoors to find more loot to scrap for Research Data, to be able to progress in the game, which is the purpose of the research system in Undead Legacy. We've just reduced the sadistic torture "enough" to make Undead Legacy feel super fun to play.
• Secondly, the "Old Book" recycling system was re-balanced completely, by making them give 10 Research Data when recycled. The Old Books are required by tons of recipes and are therefore a very valuable ingredient, and it never made any sense whatsoever to recycle them before this change. Now you'll still have to make the hard choice between keeping the Old Books for your crafting, or sacrificing a few to get more Research Data, but you'll at least get a sane amount of data for your sacrifice if you recycle them. In other words, they can now help push you over the edge towards a research milestone, if you're willing to sacrifice a few of your valuable Old Books.
  

Old Books:

• By default, Undead Legacy randomly gives you 1x "Old Book" in various containers such as Bookshelves, Book Piles and Mailboxes. However, that loot slot is shared with all kinds of other items, which means that the chance of actually getting one is very low. Furthermore, you need an absolute ton of "Old Books" for crafting various recipes and workstation upgrades. You then end up having to waste a ton of your "Paper" and "Research Data" to craft your own "Old Books" (in the Tier 2 Research Station), which is very punishing since you constantly need that "Research Data" to create actual crafting recipes and to upgrade your stations, so you end up having to make huge sacrifices no matter what you do. And crafting the "Old Books" yourself isn't even an option for you in the early game. Getting them is a constant struggle and a huge amount of torture for players in the early game, while not being as much of a problem in the mid-game when you can craft your own books, albeit still being a huge waste of "Research Data" in an already extremely grindy game. That's bullshit in so many ways.
• We solve that bullshit in two ways. First of all, by making book containers able to randomly contain 1-3x "Old Book" instead of just one, to reduce the reliance on having to craft them (while making perfect lore sense, since only a madman would store one book per bookcase).
• Secondly, we also re-balance the crafting cost of making your own "Old Books", to a more reasonable crafting cost (while fully considering the other balance changes in this mod). To be specific, the "Paper" cost is reduced from 25 to 15 (since you constantly need your Paper for more important things, such as making ammo and various schematics), whereas the "Research Data" cost is increased from 5 to 10 (to remain balanced with the other changes to the easier Research Data acquisition). You should also keep an eye out when you visit traders, since even in vanilla Undead Legacy they can sometimes sell a stack of 1-50 "Old Books", although they're part of a huge pool of random shop items, so the chance of actually seeing them for sale at a trader is very low.
  

Land Claim Blocks:

• By default, Undead Legacy massively increases the cost of creating a Land Claim Block (a base claim). The vanilla game's crafting cost is just 5 "Small Stone" in the backpack, which means that anyone can craft them easily. Undead Legacy raises the cost to a massive "25x Concrete Mix, 50x Iron Plating" in a heavily upgraded "Artisan's Table (Tier 2)", which means that claiming your own base area becomes a major hassle. Since new players can't afford to make a claim block, their containers are therefore completely unprotected and anyone can go into their base and steal everything. That's bullshit!
• We instead change it to be craftable in the Carpenter's Table (the first crafting table that you make during the tutorial), and we set the cost to a reasonable "10 Wood, 10 Small Stones, 5 Scrap Iron". We still keep the 1 minute crafting timer, to keep the "serious" feeling of crafting a land claim block.
• You can of course adjust this cost if you want it to be difficult to claim a base. But since the game already limits the amount of active land claims a player can have, there's really no reason to restrict the crafting costs.
  

Item Upgrades:

• By default, Undead Legacy has an insanely annoying item upgrade system where you have up to 40% risk of failing your upgrades and losing all of the extremely expensive upgrade materials. Having RNG-based item destruction that's completely outside of the player's personal control/influence for VERY expensive upgrades is total bullshit and bad game design, and leads most players to ignore the upgrade system and just use loot instead.
• We remove that bullshit to make all item upgrades 100% successful all the time, because it's a bad system and doesn't belong in any games. If it had been more reasonable and you only lost a few of the materials, it may have been acceptable, but RANDOMLY losing ALL of your extremely expensive and rare materials when an upgrade fails, with zero ability to affect the chances as a player, is just awful game design.
  

Less Sadistic Engine Loot Re-Balancing:

• By default, Undead Legacy forces the player to learn every previous vehicle "Maintenance" research schematic before they're allowed to learn the next vehicle recipe, which is weirdly unrealistic game design, and also causes a huge problem: The random world generation barely places any motorcycles on the map, and even if you find any, they have such a low drop rate for engines that you usually have to take apart 30+ motorcycles just to find 1 engine. Those engines also existed as part of the extremely rare "engines" loot group, but only had a 6.7% chance of appearing when you found an engine. All of this is especially hellish if you're playing with other people and need multiple motorcycle engines. It also turns something that should be a fun "Woohoo, we finally found a repairable motorcycle!" into a feeling of sad hatred instead, where you think "Damn it, we'll have to destroy yet another ultra rare motorcycle and probably still not get an engine, and still won't be able to progress our vehicles". It also forces all players to selfishly destroy every motorcycle they find, which means that no other players have any chances of getting a motorcycle! All other engine types also had various problems, such as the Aviation Engine (end-game item for gyrocopters) being way too common at 26.7% chance in the "engines" loot group, while the engine that players need the most of, Compact Engines (needed for schematics, for minibikes, and for crafting all kinds of motor tools), were a rare drop from rare construction sites which meant that people were reluctant to even "waste them" to repair a freaking minibike, a freaking basic vehicle that everyone should be able to enjoy! Meanwhile, Car Engines and Truck Engines (the strongest engine in the game) were extremely easy to get on day 1 by just wrenching a ton of cars/trucks, since they had around "1 in 5" chance of dropping an engine, which meant that it was easy to get strong engines, but also meant that players had to move around like locusts destroying all vehicles in the whole city until an engine drops, turning the city into a sad and desolate hellscape of emptiness. It's all just terrible game design. It's just pure bullshit!
• We fix this bullshit in multiple ways: First of all, vehicles and machines now have a higher, much more realistic engine drop rate, so that you don't have to artificially destroy the whole city just for a freaking engine. But keep in mind that you should ONLY wrench the repairable/lootable vehicles, since the "totally dead" vehicles have NEVER been able to drop engines in Undead Legacy!
• Secondly, the more important part of our re-balancing, is that the car mechanic's "Pass-N-Gas" loot crates in the game world now have a massive 40% chance of containing a random engine, which, you know, makes SENSE since there would be freaking spare engines in freaking car repair shops! The random "engines" loot table has also been re-balanced, to shift it towards giving you realistic engines: You'll be getting lots of car engines (they're obviously the most common engine in the human world, so you'll have tons of those and can sell/throw them away), a decent amount of motorcycle engines and compact engines, and rarely Avation/Buggy/Truck engines (since those are more specialized engines which you only need late in the game, and you will have found them by then via this new system, and the Truck engines for your electrical generators can easily be gotten directly from wrenching trucks as usual).
• The existing chances for "random engines in certain loot containers" still exists too, so you will still very rarely find engines randomly within vehicle trunks (such as lootable cars), in Damaged Generator Banks (there's a 20% chance of a random engine in their loot container), and even within "Pass-N-Gas" loot crates (which still have their low, default chance of engine in addition to the new chance, so in very rare situations you'll now find 2 engines in some of those crates).
• Thanks to this new system, you should change your behavior in the world! Cars and Trucks can be wrenched for a great chance at getting engines, and they are abundant in the world and will re-spawn whenever a POI resets during questing, so feel free to wrench those if you want some parts from them. However, if you see repairable Bikes, Minibikes and Motorcycles, you should NEVER destroy them anymore! They are still super rare, and they aren't even guaranteed to contain engines. You should be REPAIRING the minibikes and motorcycles you find, or leaving them there for other players to enjoy! You'll be getting plenty of engines via looting "Pass-N-Gas" crates instead!
  

Slightly Increased Bikes/Minibikes/Motorcycles Spawns:

• By default, the "bike, minibike and motorcycles" vehicle spawn group is rarer than Unicorns in Undead Legacy. That's partially because people don't know where to look, but also because the spawn rates truly are too low. There's also a very high risk that any vehicle that spawns is totally damaged and cannot be repaired/used, which further contributes to them being rarer than Unicorns. Bikes are the most common, whereas minibikes are rare, and motorcycles are super rare. It's an awful feeling, just wasting hours and hours looking all over the map when trying to find a motorcycle. Especially since the engine availability issue (mentioned in a previous point above) leads most players to destroy all vehicles they see, like locusts, which means that Undead Legacy is very poorly optimized for multiplayer servers. It's sadistic and unfun. It's total bullshit.
• We fix this bullshit by slightly increasing the spawn chances of bikes, minibikes and motorcycles, while still ensuring that they're definitely rare, so that the players have to hunt a bit to progress on their journeys. It's important to preserve the "rarity" for realism purposes, since you can just take a look at the real world and you'll see tons of cars but barely any motorcycles, since they simply aren't a popular vehicle in reality. But since we've re-balanced the engine availability (see previous point above), you are no longer dependent on finding and wrenching apart motorcycles. If you see a motorcycle, you'll instead be happy in the knowledge that it can be repaired and that it should be left alone for use by actual players, rather than greedily being destroyed for resources. This factor also means that the spawn rate only needed a slight increase, since there will be a lot more repairable motorcycles left alone in the world, when players can relax and know that they don't have to destroy them all.
• Note: This tweak also works perfectly for existing savegames and servers (there's NO REASON to generate any new maps), but it ONLY takes effect for unvisited parts of the map where no player has been yet. The game generates "16x16 block chunks" in the world whenever a player is near the chunk, so you'll have to go to your map's never-visited chunks to see the extra spawns. However, the vehicle spawn increase really is small in this tweak, so you don't have to feel bad about not getting it for the already-visited parts of your current maps. All of the other tweaks, such as the engine loot re-balancing, will also take care of making your vehicle journey enjoyable on your existing maps, since there won't be much pressure for players to destroy repairable vehicles anymore.
• However, one of the main reasons why people are having trouble finding bikes, minibikes and motorcycles in Undead Legacy is actually because they don't know where to look, so I'll explain how the game's random vehicle spawns work: Inner city roads have a VERY LOW chance of randomly generated clutter / vehicles. Meanwhile, HIGHWAYS between cities and the OUTER roads at the EDGES OF CITIES have a VERY HIGH chance of randomly generated clutter. The game's programming theory is basically "people fled from the cities, and their vehicles broke down or ran out of gasoline on the long highways between cities". Therefore, the BEST place to look is at the roads at the OUTER EDGES of cities, and at the HIGHWAYS / ROADS between cities. Asphalt roads have a higher chance of vehicle spawns than dirt/gravel roads, but both road types can contain vehicles. Vehicles can also spawn randomly on the asphalt/gravel inside POIs, such as the driveways of POIs, or parking lots at big "parking lot" POIs, but the best chance to find minibikes and motorcycles is always at the roads outside cities! Furthermore, there is NO BIOME BONUS! The forest is as good as any other biome for finding motorcycles! Many people wrongly believe that deserts have a higher chance of motorcycles. That isn't true! It might just feel that way because you're seeing a clearer view of the road when there's just a desert without any trees. But there's nothing in the game's code that adds more motorcycles to any specific biomes. The best advice is to simply follow the large roads AWAY from the cities, and you'll find plenty of motorcycles, minibikes and bicycles! If you have a bicycle already, you simply have to go on a nice little trip with your friends and cycle along the large highways to find the motorcycles of your dreams!
  

Slightly Improved Vehicle Parts Availability:

• By default, you are completely enslaved to terrible RNG chances when getting certain vital vehicle repair and crafting components (Headlights, Ball Bearings and Lead Batteries). You can't craft those manually, and therefore have to get them via loot or wrenching. Getting them is very "easy". You "simply" have to waste your life wrenching every freaking vehicle you see, until the cities look like ghost towns and the RNG finally blesses you with some drops. That's terrible game design, and makes zero sense since you can clearly see with your own eyes that a good portion of the vehicles you are wrenching are in good shape. It just turns the game into a constant grind where you have to neurotically destroy every vehicle you find, which breaks the immersion and is extremely tedious and requires no player skill at all. Furthermore, after you've had a bunch of players on the server who have destroyed every vehicle they can see, there's nothing but rare POI respawns left for the new players that may join later. That's total bullshit.
• We fix this in two ways. First of all, the wrenching drop rates of those three materials have been slightly increased by roughly "+10-15%" (percentage points), which means that you'll find a bit more in the world, but still won't be inundated with them. It's simply improving the balance of the game, while still keeping the entire vehicle progression system intact, since you STILL need to research all of the expensive vehicle repair manuals (up to and including the vehicle you wanted), and still have to research and manually craft all of the wheels for your desired vehicle (since wheels are incredibly difficult to find in the world), all of which still costs a LOT of Research Data, and you'll need to craft or gather a lot of generic materials (such as metal plates), and you'll finally also need Gasoline to drive your vehicle (which you can't really find until you're comfortable mining for oil in the desert). In other words, there are still tons of systems that prevent too-early vehicle progression.
• Secondly, we're improving the vehicle availability issue by adding a very small "4%" chance that any "Pass-N-Gas" loot crate will contain a random, bonus vehicle part (meaning things such as a Bicycle Frame or Handlebars, etc). The chance is low enough that you'll barely find any parts, and the parts you'll find are always scaled based on your current "Loot Stage", and they require a very, very high "Loot Stage" to progress to the next "tier" of vehicle parts. All of this means that most players will only see Bicycle parts, while the high-level, end-game players who visit the best biomes with the biggest "Loot Stage" bonuses (such as the Wasteland), can sometimes find random parts for better vehicles. It's tuned to require such a high player level that players will be done with their own entire vehicle progression long before they ever see any good vehicle parts in these crates. The goal is simply to ensure that long-running servers have a steady supply of a few extra vehicle parts, so that high-level players are able to give parts to new players that join later when a server has already been fully scavenged and when most cities are empty. You won't notice these extra parts during your own progression. It's simply intended to help out your server community's health in the long term. Note that if you're playing offline, or if you're still progressing without any help on a server, then the bonus items will barely appear and won't matter at all since their quality is very low while you're still progressing in the game.
  

Perk Points:

• By default, Undead Legacy gives you only 1 perk point per level (just like vanilla), which is insanely grindy and makes the game feel like you're progressing through syrup. It's slower than pretty much all other games on the planet. You'll be grinding to level yourself up, only to be rewarded with totally insignificant progression every time. Often you'll even have to waste 2 or 3 whole freaking levels just on getting 1 attribute perk, which is absolutely rotten game design and means that you're often making zero progress when leveling up. And it also makes your choices extremely punishing since you'll never have enough points to make any fun or meaningful impact with the game's huge amount of combat and utility perks, unless you grind forever, and by that stage you will already be bored with the game's repetitive grinding and won't even enjoy your points anymore. That's bullshit.
• We set that to 2 per level, mainly because that's a very balanced number which makes the game move along faster while still having to make very meaningful choices about how to invest your points. It also means that you won't need any other mods just for setting the perk points.
• If you don't like this particular number of perk points, you can simply edit "progression.xml" in this mod to set the perk points per level to another number. However, I would only recommend 1 or 2, but never more than that (the reasons for that are explained in the perk point article below).
• Note: If you're installing this mod into an existing save, check the article below about how to "catch up" with your missing perk points!
  

General Information:

That's it. Everything is carefully balanced, and programmed in a way that makes this mod future-proof against all future Undead Legacy recipes and game updates, since it's extremely unlikely that the game authors will ever do any radical changes to the game's data structure. So this mod should continue working with all future game versions, for as long as the game exists.

It's also programmed very cleanly, so that these tweaks will cleanly apply themselves to all existing saves (both for single player and dedicated servers), and will cleanly vanish and revert to Undead Legacy's vanilla rates if you uninstall this mod again!

It's always safe to upgrade to newer versions of this mod with your existing saves.

You can edit every XML file, and they're all commented in detail so that you can easily customize every tweak, or remove any tweaks you don't want (which could be useful if you're a masochist who wants to restore some of the worst pain). Everything is also fully modular, which means that you can easily pick and choose which exact tweaks you want to install (see the section about modularity below).

The name of all included mod folders start with the letter "Z", to ensure that they load after Undead Legacy and overwrite the settings of that mod.

Special information about ammo rarity in Undead Legacy: Some people complain that you can barely find any ammo in Undead Legacy, and that you're usually only getting around 7-12 bullets per stack. That is only true at low levels, and is by design so that you'll have to use more melee weapons and bows at low levels. A sneak attack headshot with a bow is usually lethal against most zombies, and is a great way to progress in the early game. When you're higher level and have a higher "Loot Stage", you'll find a lot more ammunition (since the amount scales based on loot stage). If you also learn the Lucky Looter "find more ammo" book, you'll be absolutely swimming in ammunition, usually finding 25-100 bullets per stack. This gets even better when you have the Lucky Looter "zombies drop more loot" book as well, which ensures that zombies drop loot very frequently. You can also always craft your own ammunition. Therefore, there won't be any adjustments to ammo in this mod. That's already very well balanced in Undead Legacy, which does a great job of ensuring that advanced ammo and powerful ranged weapons is a mid-/end-game progression.

Important notice: I won't take any requests for changes to anything else, since I think that everything else in Undead Legacy is perfect. If you want to modify any of these values or anything else, just download the mod and edit the XML files yourself. I've made sure that the XML files are clean and easy to understand, so that everyone can adjust them to their personal tastes! However, please respect the copyright and hard work that went into this project, by not re-uploading any personal changes publicly.



Articles / FAQs:

• How to easily catch up on missing points if you're installing this mod into an existing save. (Highly Recommended!)
• How to repair vehicles that you find in the world.
  

Installation:

• This mod works on both servers and single player!
• It can be safely added or removed at any time during your existing saves!
• Simply put all module folders in the game's or server's "Mods" folder, where you'll also see the Undead Legacy folders.
• If you're installing this on a server, you only need it on the server itself. The players who connect to the server don't need this mod, since the settings will automatically apply to all players via the server.
• Special Note: Undead Legacy itself has a bug/quirk where changing the game's "Loot Abundance" setting causes you to find stacks of multiple identical books/schematics. It's totally unrelated to this mod. This is just a reminder that you should always play with "Loot Abundance" set to 100% when playing Undead Legacy. Any other values will introduce issues, such as duplicate items (as mentioned) if you go higher than 100%, or certain items vanishing from loot tables entirely due to rounding errors (if you go lower than 100%). For your own sanity's sake, always play Undead Legacy at 100% "Loot Abundance".
  

How to use the Modular Tweaks system:

• All tweaks are self-contained within individual "sub-modules" (folders), to make it easy for you to choose exactly which tweaks you want.
• You can pick and choose the exact modules that you want. For example, if you only want the improved Action Skill XP, you could just install the "Z_UndeadLegacy_AntiBullshit_003_ActionSkills" folder and ignore all of the other modules.
• If you like the general package, but if there are certain tweaks you don't want, then you can instead simply keep all modules as usual, but delete a few module folders that you don't want. For example, if you actually want everything except the Action Skill XP improvement, you could simply delete the "Z_UndeadLegacy_AntiBullshit_003_ActionSkills" folder but keep everything else.
• All modules are independent, and they don't "require" each other. However, the tweaks are all balanced to work together as a "complete package", so removing any tweaks or only using specific tweaks is entirely up to your own discretion.
  

Copyright Notice and Disclaimer:

• This mod isn't affiliated with Undead Legacy! It's an incredible overhaul, and everyone should be very grateful to Subquake for creating it, even though it does feature some infamously ridiculous grind which these tweaks aim to solve. Don't pester Subquake about making any of these tweaks official! That's why this tweak exists, so that we can have these tweaks without interfering with his personal settings and preferences!
• We use absolutely zero code from Undead Legacy. Everything in this mod is original content, and uses the game's official modding system to change values and algorithms in the game engine.
• The code here is open-source, but NOT public domain! Don't copy anything without explicit permission from me. Reverse engineering these algorithms, doing deep testing and ensuring that everything works perfectly took a lot of time and energy. You are welcome to make private tweaks to this mod for use on your own servers or sharing among your friends, but you aren't allowed to release them online without explicit permission.
• This mod's official home is here at Nexus Mods. Re-uploads to other websites is not acceptable, since that would confuse users and make it harder to find the latest version.