[Mod] Beware the Dark [bewarethedark]

[Ben]

Beware the Dark mod

In Other Well-Known Voxel Games™, darkness is dangerous because it spawns monsters. In MineTest (specifically, minetest_game), darkness just makes it more likely for you to walk into a tree.

This mod changes that in a very direct fashion: you are damaged by darkness, the darker the damager. Managing light and dark becomes a first-class game mechanic, and "surviving your first night" just got real. So craft those torches!

Current behavior

If you stand in a node with light level 7 or less, you slowly lose your sanity, represented by a "sanity meter" (a line of eyes). The darker it is, the more sanity you lose per second, and when it runs out, you get direct damage instead.

Stand in bright light to replenish sanity. Sunlight is best, but standing directly on a torch should help, too.

Future plans

None at the moment.

Version: 0.4.0
License: Code LGPL 2, Textures CC-BY-SA
Repository: GitHub

Download:

• Version 0.4.0 (.zip)

+ Older Versions

• Version 0.3.6 (.zip)
• Version 0.3.5 (.zip)
• Version 0.3.4 (.zip)
• Version 0.3.3 (.zip)
• Version 0.3.2 (.zip)
• Version 0.3.1 (.zip)
• Version 0.3.0 (.zip)
• Version 0.2.1 (.zip)
• Version 0.2.0 (.zip)
• Version 0.1.1 (.zip)
• Version 0.1.0 (.zip)

Dependencies:

• hudbars by Wuzzy (optional)
• hud by BlockMen (optional)

[Ben]

Yes, I know everyone™ adds mobs via mods, but the standard minetest_game has none, seemingly on purpose. That got me thinking of ways to add danger without actually adding mobs ;-) (My thirsty mod also follows that thought somewhat.)

I haven't found any other mod that does this, but then I'm horrible at searching. If anyone knows any existing mod that does this, please let me know!

[ExeterDad]

Heh heh! Clever idea. I'm gonna steal my daughters pretty night light.

[Evergreen]

This is a really neat idea! It really does add something to minetest_game.

EDIT:
I just found a semi major bug. If you leave the game while it is night and rejoin, you will start taking damage until minetest can catch up and load the world around you.

[Ben]

I just found a semi major bug. If you leave the game while it is night and rejoin, you will start taking damage until minetest can catch up and load the world around you.

Yep, that can happen since minetest reports non-existing nodes (named "ignore") as having light level 0. I've added a quick bugfix that deals with "ignore" nodes.

[Evergreen]

I just found a semi major bug. If you leave the game while it is night and rejoin, you will start taking damage until minetest can catch up and load the world around you.

Yep, that can happen since minetest reports non-existing nodes (named "ignore") as having light level 0. I've added a quick bugfix that deals with "ignore" nodes.

That seems to work. Thanks!

[Esteban]

I was waiting for a mod like this to appear! This kind of mod is very useful for making maps based on horror games, such as amnesia, where darkness hurts you. Thanks for making this and many other great mods! Another great feature would be that the players vision got blurry when standing in darkness for too long.( like an image overlay on the screen)

[TG-MyinaWD]

Nice mod :) I will might just use this in my Dark Minetest Subgame.

Here the menu overview if wanted a peek.


Note: I am going change the header some. so not final.

[Krock]

And I thought fear from the darkness only damages the spirit... I seem to be wrong in this case.
It's quite hard to not get damaged at night when starting at sunset. The difficulty is to place enough light sources to stay above that light level of 7.

You made a challenging mod there, nice work!

[Ben]

Nice mod :) I will might just use this in my Dark Minetest Subgame.

Thanks! Ooh, a "Dark Minetest"? I'm intrigued :-D

You made a challenging mod there, nice work!

Thanks also ;-) It's not really tweaked yet, and is probably best paired with some health regeneration mod, but then again, some people like a challenge! So even though I'm going to add some kind of resource that will need to run out before you take damage, I'm definitely keeping a "hardcore mode" which damages you instantly, like it is now.

Hm, for fairness, I'd probably need to add some kind of "it's too dark where you are" indicator – again disableable for the truly hardcore :-P

[deezl]

I believe 3d-armor provides healing with a good set of armor, perhaps used in conjunction with something like that will allow you to eventually be a full night walker?

[Ben]

At the moment, you'd need a lot of health regeneration to fully counter the damage from light level 0: 4 health per second at the moment. That's probably game breaking :-P

That does give me another idea, though: if I add per-player "darkness factors", you could have special armor (or amulets, or something) that reduce the damage from darkness, allowing you to move freely where others can't ;-)

Thanks for the idea!

[Ben]

Version 0.2.0 released

First the simple stuff: instead of direct damage, you now gradually "lose sanity". It effectively works like hunger (or thirst!) now. Go to the light to "fill up your sanity".

For now, this change is mandatory (though I do know how much fun the direct-damage version is!), and for now, it is possible to refill with something less than sunlight. One possible variation I'm seriously considering is to allow sanity to replenish only in sunlight¹. This would mean you'd have to "come up to the surface" every once in a while!

¹ Or any light level 15. I think there are mods which add such "super light", they would work too, unless I make a special effort to thwart this, which seems like too much work :-P

[Ben]

Version 0.2.1 released

Nothing major, though I have "milded down" the damage for darkness a bit. The most important change is an internal refactoring of the sanity storage code, which I now plan to use elsewhere as well.

[FreeLikeGNU]

The premise reminds me of Amnesia: Dark Descent:

Daniel's sanity must be managed. Being in darkness too long, witnessing unsettling events, or staring at monsters will reduce Daniel's sanity, causing visual and auditory hallucinations and drawing the attention of monsters. Light sources help restore sanity, and if none are available Daniel may use tinderboxes to ignite candles in wall sconces and candelabra, or deploy an oil-burning lantern found near the beginning of the game. However, the number of tinderboxes and the amount of oil available are both limited, and standing in a light source also makes the player more noticeable to monsters. The player must balance the amount of time Daniel spends in light and shadow. Sanity is fully restored once Daniel completes an objective or progresses the game's story. It may also be restored by staying in the shadows until Daniel passes out, but this leaves him extremely vulnerable to any nearby monsters.

It would be cool to have a minetest adaptation of this theme.

[benrob0329]

Does it support the better HUD mod?

[Ben]

The premise reminds me of Amnesia: Dark Descent…

Yes, that's partly where I got the idea of calling it "sanity" from. But Amnesia wasn't the original impulse for this mod – it was really that Minecraft's important "survive your first night" thing simply made no sense in Minetest / Minetest Game, which (at the time of writing, version 0.4.12) has no mods, and therefor no "hard" reason to even care about lights.

For a better Amnesia homage, the Beware the Dark mod would need to shift from "light management" to "sanity management" – i.e. have mobs or debuffs also drain sanity, have it be restorable by potions etc. And this actually sounds like a good idea. I'll set up an API where any other mod can add or drain sanity, and influence the sanity draining (think "radiant helmet that protects against darkness" :-P ). That should help.

Does it support the better HUD mod?

No, not yet, but it will. I'm going to basically steal the code from my other mod, Thirsty, which supports the builtin HUD, Better HUD, and the HUD bars mod. The toughest problem with Better HUD was creating and documenting the example configuration files, since all indicators need to be positioned by hand, but I'll steal those from Thirsty as well :-P

[benrob0329]

Perhaps instead of potions, sleep, light, swimming, and drinking and/or splashing cold water on your face could help bring you back to reality.

And maybe the dirt/stone/sand monsters are really the aliens (that created mese) playing tricks on you, like a dream.....

[Ben]

Version 0.3.0 released

Now with support for Better HUD and Hudbars!

Well, not so much "and" as "or", what with them being mutually exclusive. But you get the idea.

[Ben]

Version 0.3.1 released

Bugfix: sanity was not reset on death.

[Ferk]

This idea is really good! It reminds me more of "Don't Starve" than Amnesia.

In Don't Starve, the less sanity you have, the more strange visions do you see in the dark, when you have no sanity at all the shadow creatures become real and start attacking you until you die.

Sleeping regains a percentage of your sanity. Also picking flowers, eating sweets or being close to friendly mobs will restore some sanity. And some equipment (making a crown of flowers, for example) will give you some sanity per minute. You don't really gain sanity by just being in the light, though.

You can check this wikipage, might give some inspiration or ideas.

What would be really cool is to have some random, spooky and/or crazy sound effects when the sanity is low. Maybe deep breathing and so.

[Don]

This is a really cool mod. I like it. Great work.

[Ben]

A lot of people are focussing on the "sanity" part of the mod – don't get me wrong, this is a good thing; a lot of interesting ideas and a lot of interest. But I have to say that it's not the purpose of this mod.

The purpose of this mod is to add a light management mechanic. To make "surviving your first night" different than "surviving your first day". To this end, I need something bad to happen to you in darkness, and to give players a better chance, and add some tactics, something should build up (or down) before the bad thing happens.

I could have just as well called this new resource "eyesight". If you don't listen to your mother, and don't turn on the lights, your eyesight will worsen. Until you start getting headaches, which then kill you a few minutes later :-P

So, thanks for your ideas. As I said above, I'm going to add an API which allows other mods to influence sanity, but other than that, I'd personally really like to stick to the light management idea for this mod. If you need more hooks, though, let me know ;-)

[Don]

I have thirsty mod installed with this. The sanity bar is hidden by the thirsty bar. I tried it with better hud and it made the thirsty bar hidden by sanity bar.

Edit - If you set your x offset to -262 then it works. I have armor, thirst and hunger and they all work fine.

[FreeLikeGNU]

A lot of people are focussing on the "sanity" part of the mod – don't get me wrong, this is a good thing; a lot of interesting ideas and a lot of interest. But I have to say that it's not the purpose of this mod.

but...

Current behavior
If you stand in a node with light level 7 or less, you slowly lose your sanity, represented by a "sanity meter" (a line of eyes). The darker it is, the more sanity you lose per second, and when it runs out, you get direct damage instead.

???

[Ben]

I have thirsty mod installed with this. The sanity bar is hidden by the thirsty bar. I tried it with better hud and it made the thirsty bar hidden by sanity bar.

Edit - If you set your x offset to -262 then it works. I have armor, thirst and hunger and they all work fine.

Yeah, that's a problem with HUDs, especially the builtin one. Wuzzy's Hud Bars mod automatically rearranges bars, if you want to try that. Better HUD does need a correct hud.conf to arrange the bars. I've supplied examples with Thirsty and Beware the Dark, both with and without hunger, but you're on your own if you want to combine them, sorry.

If anyone has a good solution for this, I'd be happy to hear it.

[Ben]

"It's not about sanity"

but...

"Darkness kills"

???

Ok, ok, I edited my parts in the quote of your post, sorry ;-)

All I meant was: many ideas seemed to focus on the "sanity" part. Like different effects of sanity loss, and ways to restore sanity, via flowers, or potions, or what not ("seemed", I say: looking back, I think most people just described what the system reminded them of, so my "complaint" may not even be real...)

Instead, I wanted to emphasize that this mod is about the darkness. I had noticed that the current Minetest Game (not other games!) has no mobs by default. I understand this is on purpose, because mobs are "broken" or "unreliable" in some way. So I've been looking for alternative dangers for a survival minetest game without mobs. Specifically, since mobs are what makes darkness dangerous in Minecraft, I built something that would make darkness dangerous without mobs for Minetest.

So though there might be a lot of neat ideas for sanity outside of darkness (e.g. looking at mobs makes you go insane), this mod is not the place for that. That's all I'm trying to say :-P

Sorry about the confusion ;-)

[Ben]

Version 0.3.2 released

One quick bugfix: dead players got their sanity reset, but continued to lose it until they hit the "respawn" button.

(Also: a new version of the persistent_player_attributes mixin with read caching. This is part of my mixin experiment, though, and not generally relevant).

[FaceDeer]

I've been pondering ways to set up a nice post-apocalyptic world where the only safety is underground, with an intensely hostile surface world. That "sunburn" angle you're considering for future development seems like an ideal way to help accomplish that, perhaps simulating a world in which the ozone layer's completely gone. Haven't seen discussion of the idea in this thread yet though, what sorts of things did you have in mind for it?

[Ben]

Well, it's simply an inversion of the current "get hurt by darkness" theme. Players in sunlight (light level 15, maybe 14) would lose some kind of buffer attribute (like "sanity" for darkness), and when that runs out, slowly take damage. Not sure how that would be balanced with restoring sanity; "sunburn" is also not high on the priority list :-P

What you might consider is going from "sunlight is lethal" to "the surface is lethal", meaning you'd get hurt just the same during the night. If you're a coder: test for minetest.get_node_light at time 0.5. If that returns 15, it's in the open →damage!