Player Death Update

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."