The many faces of a life after death.

Player Death Alternative allows you to keep playing in the event you finally succumb to death. The mode respawns you at a settlement and creates a zombie with all your gear in the spot where you died. Now this mode has received some love to make it better (and more stable).

Player Appearance

One of the things I really wanted to do was have the player take on the appearance of the settler they were replacing (if there was one to replace). Unfortunately the Papyrus functions to get HeadParts are all not available without F4SE (Fallout 4 Script Extender, which won't work on XB1). What I've decided to do instead is at least try to randomize the player appearance as much as I could. This also works when the player spawns in a random location due to having no settlers left to replace.

While there are no function to get HeadParts there is a function to change them. Gotta love the consistency from Bethesda on that one, huh? The ChangeHeadPart function in particular allows you to change parts of the head by passing in a HeadPart object representing the part you want to change. HeadParts are available for eyes (color), hair, and beard (for males) so I've included all of them. When you re-spawn a random eye/hair/beard is assigned to your character.

Unfortunately this does not include hair/skin color or other facial parts like nose/ears/eyebrows/etc. I have yet to figure out how to change these parts via scripting. It'd be nice to at least choose a random preset and then randomize the facial parts mentioned earlier, but I'm not sure if that is possible via scripting either.

Random Equipment

Another change to Player Death Alternative is when the player is re-spawned they now are assigned the following:

1) random blunt melee weapon (eg. board, cane, pool cue)
2) random under-armor clothing (eg. fatigues, road leathers, tattered rags)
3) stimpak, sweet roll, dirty water, and a single lockpick

This helps further randomize the character and in the case of the aid items add a bit of survivability. In the future I may consider adding a gun with limited rounds and possibly armor based on level.

Spawn Location

New spawn location at Covenant that doesn't automatically aggro the entire community.

Re-spawns with Player Death Alternative enabled will first check for existing non-unique settlers to replace and spawn you in there place. If not settlers are available, then a random settlement is chosen regardless of whether the player has ever visited it before.

The exact location of that spawn point used to be right on top of the workshop. It is now the linked ref of the map marker associated with the location of the workshop. I believe this to be the fast travel marker which is meant as a spawn point and tends to be outside the center. It gives you the options to assess the situation and decide to go in or turn around and head a different direction before getting knee deep in combat.

Bug Fixes

Recent updates also included bug fixes related to Player Death Alternative. The biggest being a script error related to an off-by-one error randomly accessing an array. The script error was infrequent as most random values fell within the range, but when it occurred it caused the re-spawn to never complete and black screen to get stuck. I've ran into this and know others have as well and I'm hoping these help resolve the issue and make the re-spawn work more reliably. 

Future Thoughts

Outside of continuing to improve the random appearance and equipment assigned there are other ideas I'm flirting with. One involves creating a random quest for the newly spawned player to give them a purpose. This idea was actually spurred when I watched YouTube video where the player created a fake mission for himself with a custom map marker: "The apocalypse just started and I need to find my daughter at the library."

Raider zombie taking out a former teammate while the sole survivor looks on.

There's no denying the popularity of The Walking Dead series. One of the features of that series that fans of this mod have been asking for is an option to have all NPCs start off infected instead of needing to be hit by a zombie first. With the latest update to Zombie Walkers, this is now an option.

NPC Resurrection options

The NPC Resurrection option has been a part of the Zombie Walkers holotape since almost the beginning of the mod. It used to be a simple feature toggle but has now been expanded as follow:

• DISABLED: turn the feature off.

• IF INFECTED: works like the old ENABLED option in that NPCs can resurrected from the dead as a zombie but only if they were previously hit by a zombie before dying.

• ALWAYS: this is the new feature that enabled all NPCs to resurrected as a zombie when they die regardless of whether they were previously hit by a zombie.

Note that the ALWAYS option will apply when the mod first processes each NPC. If using this on an existing save, there may be several NPCs already marked that won't have this affect applied to them. If those NPCs are hit by a zombie, they will still have the condition applied to them as normal. This does not apply to new games.

Expanding eligible races

In the past NPC Resurrection applied only to actors with the Human race. It has now been expanded to include the Ghoul race as well (not to be confused with Feral Ghoul obviously). This was done in part because Spawn Replacements lumps those two races together as one logical unit already. Also, why not? Ghouls are being used as the 'Zombie' that replaces the actor anyway and are identical to humans outside their skin in game terms. This makes it easy to transfer items over and provide more zombies in the game.

Future thought

Players have the concept of infection and resurrection (Player Alternative Death). NPCs only have the concept of resurrection. I am considering applying the infection state to NPCs such that if they are hit by a zombie they will slowly die and visibly show that to the player. This will handle cases where NPCs survive an attack.

You can imagine a scenario like a settlement attack where there are no settler deaths but a settler or two may have been infected. The player would need to keep an eye on their settlers to avoid their settler turning later on and spreading the infection from within the settlement. Maybe the settler could move a little slower and show the infection through skin color (if possible) or a periodic emotion/sound?