Everyone's Infected

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?