This is an odd request, but, I absolutely dislike them, and when I play roguelikes I feel incomplete if I don't search every room and kill every monster. Does such a mod exist? EDIT: Actually, cutting the amount of monsters to like 25% would be an alternative also.
Just one word, then. Impossible. I can elaborate if you want, but saying it simply, right now it's impossible to change anything related to monster zoos.
I strongly disapprove of this, as monster zoos encourage being prepared at all times, and actually I can't remember the last time I died to a monster zoo, they're manageable once you get the hang of them. nevertheless... here you go. Rename rooms.xml in your "game" folder inside the DoD package to roomsOld.xml, and then rename THIS file to rooms.xml. As much as I disapprove, it's not my business imposing my playstyle on others, and this is such a trivial change to do that not doing it is as good as imposing it on you, either choice would involve roughly equal amounts of work
The one thing you COULD do about monster zoos if you don't want to fight them: Pick burglary, get lockpicks. Always open doors from the sides of the door (not the middle). When you uncover a zoo you can immediately close the door on them! You don't have to pick burglary either but if you kick the doors it won't work.
Another thing you can do is pick a teleport skill like knightly leap. this will help you retreat to a position where you can hold them off.
quick question, would removing all monster zoo rooms from the xml make it so they never actually occur?
great minds think alike, haha. I had only skimmed over the posts so overlooked that you updated the xml for Urwy.
on a similar note is there a way I could make every room after a certain level a Monster Zoo? I love them ^^
Wohow ! The king of Masochism has arrived among us. ...Hope you also have a mod to turn every item put into the lutefisk cube into bolts of mass destruction.
I love Monster Zoos as well. Extremely challenging, lots of experience gained, and an artifact when you conquer it. XD Course I also use narrow passageways to funnel the monsters as well so making all the rooms on a floor a Monster Zoo would likely be a bit much. (Not to forget to mention the issue with not being able to have stairs be spawned.)
You can set additional rooms to have the zoo tag, but the game is hardcoded to only include one zoo per floor, so it'll only pick one of them. The times it gives a second zoo are a bug, and I don't think you can do anything to provoke it. However, there is some hope for you. The number of monsters spawned in the zoo is based on the size of the zoo. I'm guessing each floor space has a (high) chance to spawn a monster. So if you made a much larger zoo that took up most of the floor, on the rare occasions where it would spawn you'd get 500 or so monsters. There's already one zoo in the game that can spawn 200 monsters, but it's size is trouble enough during floor generation that I've only seen one report of anyone finding it (and that didn't happen till this week) despite keeping my eyes open for it the last several months. So a bigger one would spawn even more rarely. Larger rooms really have a hard time spawning, because the map is designed sequentially, and a room is only valid to spawn if it's dimensions (the smallest rectangle it fits entirely in) is smaller than the space available at the time it spawns. I've got a couple huge rooms in Interior Dredmorating, and they rarely spawn due to their size. The one that was about 35 x 42 was never spawning so it trimmed it down to 30 x 35 and now it spawns from time to time. Zoos would have the same issues. Such problems are of course compounded if you're playing on No Time To Grind. In my Interior Dredmorating mod, I have a couple bonus zoos that might fit what you're after. They're not officially zoos, so they can spawn in addition to the one "real" zoo of each floor, but they feel like a zoo with tons of monsters and an artifact somewhere inside. One is a multi-room complex packed with zombies that shows up sometimes on floor 2. On floor 10 there's a bonus zoo with one of every monster from the main game (but not Realm of the Diggle Gods) and on floor 15 there's "one with everything" a normal zoo-sized room that has every single monster except the skill-summonables and Dredmor himself. Many of my other non-zoo rooms in the later levels include hordes of monsters, so if you're looking for a good challenge, you might give ID a try.
I ve had two huge rooms with a lutefisk statue and some water ( added by the interior dredmorating as far as i know ) spawn in the same level on floor 7, are those the one you are talking about ? They had a lot of mushrooms in it.
Nope, there's a bigger one than that one. For comparison, the one you're talking about is only 25x20. Looking at the files, I see I was mistaken about the final size I trimmed the really big one down to. It's actually 39x28 now. It may not actually have more floor space than the one you found, though, because it's composed of narrow tunnels and hidden rooms. I'd have to count the ".'s" to be sure, and that just might drive me crazy. By the way, there's a few other rooms about the size of the one you've seen in ID, mostly lurking in the deeper parts of the dungeon. Monster Zoo! 1,086 monsters remaining! Maybe not. There will, however, be several new zoos in an upcoming version (probably not the next release since it's all about artwork, but certainly no later than the release after that). I've begun the concepting process on a series of zoos, one new unique zoo per floor of the dungeon. Including a cute little 3x3 zoo that may sometimes spawn on the first floor. I'll have to playtest that for balance, but I think it would be fun... assuming the zoo command works the way I imagine it does, and generates just 7 to 9 monsters for a room that size. If my assumptions are wrong and it instead packs 50 diggles into a 3x3 grid... that would be amusing.
My first thought on that would be "oh, a prat-house party". And promethean mages would probably all weep in joy when they get something like that.
