Piper, is that you? I guess she wasn't protected by the wall after all.

Is being the sole survivor of vault 111 not enough? Ever dreamt of being the sole survivor of the entire commonwealth? If so, then the Zombie Walkers 2.3.3 update is for you.

New Spawn Replacement Options

People have asked for the ability to replace all NPCs with zombies almost from the beginning of this mod. Now you can (almost) as I have added a couple more replacement options to the Zombie Walkers holotape:

- Humans/Ghouls
- Turrets

Note that the Humans/Ghouls option affects all Humans and Ghouls in the game regardless of faction. It also includes children with special handling to ensure that the children are only ever disabled by never issued a "kill" to avoid violating Bethesda terms and conditions (other actors are issued a kill when the zombie that replaced them is killed).

Also note that the existing options for Gunners and Raiders are overwritten if the general Humans/Ghouls option is enabled. As a result, I have decided to hide the Gunners and Raiders options when you enable Humans/Ghouls since that one takes precedence.

Spawn Replacement General Settings

Back when I overhauled spawn replacements with a new replacement approach, I described some base criteria that I used to prevent unwanted replacements. These protections kept things like companions like Strong (super mutant) and other friendlies like brahmin from being replaced.

I have added a new sub-menu under Spawn Replacements called General Settings that now allows you to override this behavior if you want to. By default the settings match what they always have and will avoid friendly replacement.

- Replace Essential
- Replace Nearby Visible
- Replace Non-Hostile
- Replace Protected
- Replace Teammate
- Replace Unique

Note that some NPCs may classify for several of the categories above and ALL all checked before replacement. This means if you really want to replace everything you'll need to Enable all of these overrides.

A special note on "Nearby Visible": this was added to avoid actors disappearing in your view (for immersion). The best example of this is the Museum of Freedom. When you enter through the load screen, the raider on the balcony will likely not be replaced even if you enable raider replacements. If it doesn't bother you seeing a raider disappear before your eyes and zombies spawn out of thin air, then you can safely enable this override even without the others and continue to play as you have while ensuring all replacements happen.

Humans/Ghouls replaced by Zombie Ghouls

The residents of Diamond City look a little different these days.

I have decided to replace humans and ghouls in a way that is consistent with how NPC Resurrection works. Instead of spawning a standard Feral Ghoul, I spawn a Zombie Ghoul instead and transfer and equip items over. Note that this does not apply to the child versions of those races and those will be replaced by standard ferals.

I felt this would make trips to places like Diamond City more interesting in that you'll see zombie guards, zombies in suits, etc. Also, there are already plenty of standard ferals in the game anyway. I considered making this configurable and may depending on what feedback I get.

When choosing the replacement options for humans/ghouls you still have the ability to replace them with 1 -3 zombies. The first replacement will be the Zombie Ghoul with item transfer and then any remaining zombies will be standard Feral Ghouls spawned next to them (which is why you can see a feral ghoul in the screenshot above).

Issue with Enable State Parents

I noticed some errors in the log file and saw an occasional non-replaced actor (usually children) during testing. I'm still researching this but wanted to describe it here for awareness.

cannot disable an object with an enable state parent

From what I can tell so far, this appears to result from me trying to disable the actor as part of replacement. The call to disable is what throws the above error and apparently is the result of this actor having a special link to an "enable state parent".

"Note that references with an Enable Parent cannot be enabled or disabled independently of their parent, even through script. Their disable/enable state is always determined by their enable parent." (source: Reference#Enable_Parent)

This is more problematic in that I have yet to find out a way through scripting to determine whether an actor has one of these enable state parents or how to get them if they do. Googling other modder comments on the topic in various forums makes it sound like there is no way and that these relationships are setup in the world view user interface which makes me sad.

As a result, some replacements may error out and not work. I didn't notice this error until working on adding the replace humans/ghouls option and mostly around Diamond City where I was testing. If you have all replacement options and the overrides in general settings enabled and see an occasional child or something still running around that is why.

Future: Zombie Ghoul Animation

The fact that Zombie Ghouls still walk like boxers with their fists up bothers me and you'll see it even more if you enable the new options. Also their punching is troublesome, but especially the lunging power attack they usually make first as it is not in line with the lumbering Romero-style I am going for with this mod. Needless to say this has been on my list for awhile and is increasing in priority.

Future: Zombie Animals?

If you've been following this mod, you've likely heard other asking for zombified creatures. I'm still not ruling this out in a future update. Many of the creatures already in the game have feral/ghoul versions of the actor already so it wouldn't require texture work for those (which I'm not good at). I could make a configuration option allowing you to decide what to replace animals/creatures with (eg. Feral Ghouls or Zombie Animals/Creatures). There are a couple challenges though:

1) Zombie creature behavior would need to be defined and different people may have different answers to these questions: 

Do they require headshots? walk/limp? form groups? infect on hit? etc.

2) Some creatures only exist only in DLC 

I'd like to avoid making Zombie Walkers depend on any DLC but I'm also hesitant to spawn another plugin mod from a maintenance perspective. Depending on the answers above, one of the other may need to happen as not all the changes needed may be possible with scripting alone.