Your thoughts on mob mods/tougher mobs?

[xyzzy75]

I'm working on an HQM map and I want to add in a reason to be afraid of mobs. More fear than vanilla mobs can provide. No Mekanism, so no uber-geared vanilla mobs to ruin your day. However, I don't want to make ender pearls an impossible thing to get, which is something that most extra mob mods do by overwhelming the spawn table with custom mobs and drastically lowering the chances of enderman spawns. MFR isn't in my pack (yes, really), so Pokeballing an enderman isn't a quick fix early game option for future players of my pack. My pack will be an oceanblock or a skyblock (haven't decided which yet), so I need players to be able to build a vanilla style mob spawner and get a reasonable quantity of pearls. The starting area will be pretty big, though, so I want charcoal production for torches and night-time shelter to be an early priority. Basically, I'm trying to re-capture that "first night playing Minecraft" fear that we all had back in Alpha and I want it to persist for a little while as the player gains power.

I don't have much experience with mob mods or even know what the possibilities are. Can anyone point me to some mods that add (preferably configurable) toughness and/or better AI to vanilla mobs for 1.7.10?

 

[HeilMewTwo]

I don't have much experience with mob mods or even know what the possibilities are. Can anyone point me to some mods that add (preferably configurable) toughness and/or better AI to vanilla mobs for 1.7.10?

Zombie awareness is my all time favourite mod for this kind of thing

 

[darkeshrine]

Zombie awareness is pretty good for a better AI. Though it's more geared towards zombies, it does affect other mobs.

Special mobs is good for adding different types of vanilla mobs without reducing the typical drops(bones, rotten flesh, etc). Very few of the mobs are especially dangerous though.

There's also Infernal mobs, though I doubt you'd really be interested in it. It makes mobs... quite dangerous. Downside is that it seems to replace their normal drops, unless that's been changed between 1.6.4 and 1.7.10. Though, even with all mobs set to 100% Infernal, it's not all that challenging if you're careful. Fighting them head on isn't ideal.

 

[zbeeblebrox]

The downside of infernal mobs is that it's really hard to balance for. Luck of the draw can mean a player doesn't encounter one till they're geared up, while another player lands an infernal baby zombie on day one. I love the way it procedurally combines abilities, but I wish you had more control over it.

 

[Golrith]

Mekansim only makes the mobs insanely tough due to the base stats of all it's equipment being out of scale with vanilla and virtually all other mods. Just needs some balancing within configs to scale those weapon damage and armour values down a bit. If you also use zombie awareness, reduce the chance for armoured mobs to 1%. Stops you having an army of fully armoured zombies outside your front door.

 

[Skyqula]

I would personally realy like a mod that can keep track of passed minecraft days and increase mob difficulty the longer you play. Increasing the difficulty faster on higher difficulties. And I would like it if the world starts out as vanilla minecraft and that you gradually get different mobs, mobs with different weapons/armor and that they gradually gain different abilities.

I know there are mods out there can can do just about all of that as an either on or off. But if we culd get a mod that gradually introduces all of it, that could make for a very interesting experience I think.

 

[Wagon153]

I would personally realy like a mod that can keep track of passed minecraft days and increase mob difficulty the longer you play. Increasing the difficulty faster on higher difficulties. And I would like it if the world starts out as vanilla minecraft and that you gradually get different mobs, mobs with different weapons/armor and that they gradually gain different abilities.

I know there are mods out there can can do just about all of that as an either on or off. But if we culd get a mod that gradually introduces all of it, that could make for a very interesting experience I think.

Vanilla MC has a mechanic that makes mobs harder the longer you stay in an area.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

Leave mobs the same, and significantly reduce passive health regeneration.
Bonus if you can add negative potion effect if a player's health drops below a certain level, and a heavier punishment for dying.

Turning up the health/mob attack only works to limited degrees; otherwise you'll get chuck norris monsters and loads of needless clicking, or 1-hit deaths with no way to protect yourself.
I prefer the above because it makes the player is afraid of getting hurt- building into a fear of combat ect, as well as making potions a more significant part of the game.

 

[Wagon153]

Leave mobs the same, and significantly reduce passive health regeneration.
Bonus if you can add negative potion effect if a player's health drops below a certain level, and a heavier punishment for dying.

Turning up the health/mob attack only works to limited degrees; otherwise you'll get chuck norris monsters and loads of needless clicking, or 1-hit deaths with no way to protect yourself.
I prefer the above because it makes the player is afraid of getting hurt- building into a fear of combat ect, as well as making potions a more significant part of the game.

Blockmaster did this in his pack, Cables and Carts. It's the most evil way of forcing you to think before going outside at night.

 

[xyzzy75]

Leave mobs the same, and significantly reduce passive health regeneration.

That's a really interesting approach and I like it. Maybe some mild zombie awareness + reduced passive health regen.

 

[asb3pe]

Hate em. Playing a modpack right now that has something called "Primitive Mobs" and I just lost my base to some idiot creeper thing that was dropping TNT blocks (yeah, the actual blocks) very quickly inside my base before I could react. Then the TNT exploded and I shut my game down in disgust. There's just no need for that kind of rubbish IMO.

 

[Golrith]

Hate em. Playing a modpack right now that has something called "Primitive Mobs" and I just lost my base to some idiot creeper thing that was dropping TNT blocks (yeah, the actual blocks) very quickly inside my base before I could react. Then the TNT exploded and I shut my game down in disgust. There's just no need for that kind of rubbish IMO.

Boo Hiss.

Festive creepers are such fun. They will make a mess real quick (especially with zombie awareness - hey zombie horde, look at this nice hole I've made for you...), you got to keep an eye out for them, and deal with them quickly. I've missed the panic of encountering them during 1.5 and 1.6.

 

[xyzzy75]

Hate em. Playing a modpack right now that has something called "Primitive Mobs" and I just lost my base to some idiot creeper thing that was dropping TNT blocks (yeah, the actual blocks) very quickly inside my base before I could react. Then the TNT exploded and I shut my game down in disgust. There's just no need for that kind of rubbish IMO.

I don't like build destroying mobs. It's one thing to remove some torches and quite another to destroy someone's base. That's just not fun for most people.

 

[Golrith]

Depends, the pack should have a solution that you can build to tackle the problem. Back in 1.4.7 there was this great turret mod. A sniper turret programmed to just attack the festives kept a very large radius clear of them.
Hmm, note to self, need something like that in my pack, 2nd note to self, mod never survived beyond 1.4.7 - damn...

 

[Azzanine]

The downside of infernal mobs is that it's really hard to balance for. Luck of the draw can mean a player doesn't encounter one till they're geared up, while another player lands an infernal baby zombie on day one. I love the way it procedurally combines abilities, but I wish you had more control over it.

To elaborate on this; The mod can also trivialize the beginning survival phase, get a lucky easy to beat combo and you can end up kitted out pretty quick. Imagine getting a lucky diamond pick by last hitting a infernal mob suffocating in some quick sand, it'll be enchanted too.
Also the loot infernal mobs drop make spawners way too lucrative.

Of course you could tweak the loot drops.

 

[zbeeblebrox]

Speaking of debuffing the player as an alternative, I remember back in I think 1.2.5 the tale of kings or whatever mod - the one that auto-generates a guild hall at spawn when you start a new world - would start you off with only 3 hearts. You'd have to accomplish stuff in order to reach 10 hearts or more. It'd be nice to see a mod reimplement just that mechanic in some way. Ideally with configurable feats so you can customize how players earn new hearts.

 

[asb3pe]

There's better ways to do it. I just started InfiTech2 modpack and I already see birds flying around, and I got chased by two elephants which I thought might be friendly but most certainly were not. Now that's cool. I can deal with harder mobs like that because they're interesting. But creepers dropping TNT blocks at light speed, that's just somebody's idea of a cruel joke, that's all that is. PrimitiveMobs also has these pink slime things that live in deserts, they're really fast and can suffocate you or something... it's just bad. But if it's crocodiles and elephants, I'm perfectly okay with that, and I'm gonna know what I'm potentially dealing with. When I come across a cute little pink slime in a desert hopping towards me and making cute little noises, and the next thing I know is I'm dead... yeah. Okay. What's next, the killer rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? LOL

 

[Cptqrk]

Okay. What's next, the killer rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? LOL

What's next is turning off the game. I feel your pain here asb... I don't mind difficult, but zomgwtfbbwgetrekt mobs? no... just.. no.
Let me put it to you this way. If someone ran through your base dropping tnt and blew it up, that would be called greifing.. But if a mob does it it's fine? No...

 

[zbeeblebrox]

Didn't there used to be a creeper mod back in the day that spawned in different variants of the creeper, like lightning, water, stone, etc? They weren't any faster than normal creepers, and it was actually kind of fun to hunt them all down just to see what happens when they explode. There was one that inverted the ground - it didn't destroy anything, it just reversed every block in the immediate area. And another kind tried to suffocate you in a dome of glowstone, which was nondestructive and honestly more helpful than anything..

 

[xyzzy75]

I think you're thinking of elemental creepers.