By blujai831
#212176 Having the drops imply the Pokemon die is somewhat morbid and guilt-inducing, particularly since they are completely harmless. On a related note, I've noticed that currently, the mod's gameplay largely obsoletes the vanilla health system and disincentivizes vanilla gameplay. Sure, you can die of hunger if you aren't playing on peaceful, and you still have to watch out for heights and lava, but the lack of vanillla combat makes the vanilla health system uninteresting; sure, you can turn on vanilla mobs, but that kind of breaks immersion, at least it does for me; and sure, some vanilla resources are useful for certain purposes in the mod, but it never feels like quite enough to make it entirely worth a trip to the mines, or setting up and maintaining a farm.

Also, it's really hard to train your Pokemon in the early game, because it's rare for wild Pokemon to spawn at level 5 or below, and trainers are extremely rare. It's also quite difficult to make money.

To avoid the XY problem, I'll come out and say I guess the feature I'm really requesting is a solution to these gameplay complaints; any solution will do, I'm sure. So the following three items aren't exactly the features I'm requesting per se; they're just my own ideas on how the gameplay adjustments I'm asking for could be implemented.

1) Wild Pokemon could pose a threat to the player, like in Legends: Arceus. Say, for instance, if the player's Pokemon have all fainted, and the difficulty setting isn't peaceful, then whenever wild Pokemon try to become aggressive, instead of their aggression being cancelled because the player can't battle, it instead gets turned into hostile mob AI. Contact damage, as with zombies, would be plenty good enough as far as implementation is concerned, but ranged attacks with animations would be very cool, even if it's just colored particle streams, and even if it's just the same attack for every Pokemon except the Pokemon's primary type determines the color of the particle stream, and maybe the level and special attack stat determine how many hearts of damage are dealt. Anyway, the point is, making wild Pokemon dangerous would kill two birds with one stone: it would alleviate some of the morbidity and guilt around the wild Pokemon's implied death upon defeat, and it would make the vanilla health system and survival gameplay relevant again. Additionally, it would lend purpose to the config option that allows the player to personally attack Pokemon (which existed, if memory serves, though it might not) and restore purpose to crafting weapons and armor.

2) Sell prices could be assigned for certain vanilla items. Particularly vanilla items that require a great deal of vanilla gameplay to produce in bulk: foodstuffs, rare minerals, enchanted books, effect potions, etc. This would reincentivize vanilla gameplay by creating a pipeline from vanilla gameplay to Pixelmon-related benefits; a player could, for instance, spelunk caves for coal and iron, craft iron tools, spelunk farther and/or strip-mine, and obtain diamonds and/or emeralds, all to sell them to Pokemart shopkeepers for hefty amounts of money with which to buy TMs and high-tier battle items, or just to stock up on mass amounts of lower-tier fundamentals like potions and Pokeballs. As this is already possible by editing the external JSON, I already have this functionality in my single-player game and am enjoying it.

3) If the default spawn rate for trainers were drastically increased, it wouldn't be so difficult to make money. It would also be easier to train your Pokemon in early game, as I've found trainers seem to be more willing to spawn at low levels. Since this, too, is already possible by editing the external JSON, I already have this functionality in my single-player game and am enjoying it. I increased the spawner weight of all NPCs by a factor of 20. They still spawn less than wild Pokemon do. That's how rare they were to begin with. Alternatively or in addition, it would be nice if it were more possible to find wild Pokemon at or below level 5.

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By SKyTheThunder
#212178 Vanilla combat with wild Pokémon has come up around the release of PL:A, but it's not an easy feature to implement. Adding a rudimentary system may be easy enough, but making it actually engaging and balancing it well is a challenge.
It's a slim line to walk between "barely an inconvenience" and "too punishing". How is damage determined exactly? How does it scale? Are max level attack-focused Pokémon still threatening if they barely do more damage than a random lvl 50 to avoid one-shotting players? From how far away can Pokémon target players? Is there any warning before being attacked randomly? Can they apply effects like burning, wither, etc? If so at what chances and for how long? Can the player fight back or do they keep their massive HP pools? How would it interact with players currently locked in battle?
It's a whole additional layer of combat to debug and balance. Plus it would have to be an opt-in feature because most players expect to be safe among Pokémon, like in any of the main line games. If it does happen, it would take some time before it can be added. I don't expect it anytime soon.

I personally like the idea of selling higher tier Vanilly items. However, you have to again consider the balancing. In the 9.0.x Beta we currently have the opposite problem that it's too easy to find loot to sell, making money pretty easy to come by. It would have to be items that can't be mass-produced easily, but also give enough money to make the effort feel worth it...
By blujai831
#212180
SKyTheThunder wrote:*snip*


I see. The balance concerns with hostile wild Pokemon are understandable. I agree that it would be best to keep it opt-in.

It may help with balance to think about what's the least acceptable damage for a hostile mob to do to a player, and what's the most, and scale damage within that range. Maybe capping the scale at Lv 50 as you seem to suggest; as long as the damage is still at the absolute upper limit of what's reasonable, I think Pokemon above Lv 50 would still be plenty threatening despite the lack of challenge growth beyond that point.

Alternatively, it may be worth considering that players who approach Pokemon above Lv 50 head-on with a fainted team are asking to get one-shotted, and map Lv 50 to the upper limit of what's reasonable but not cap it there.

As for loot, that's another thing: at least with the Gameshark sidemod enabled, I agree that it's actually far too easy to find loot to sell. That's why personally I play with it off, which is probably why, ironically, I find that it's too hard. (I actually forgot it was on by default in the recommended modpack.)

I can't give my thoughts on the 9.0.X beta; I can't play it due to errors that come up. If I recall, and was reading the logs right, it looked like the mod would fail to register any Pokemon -- though I don't remember what reason was given -- and then crash on world join because data for all the Pokemon is missing. It may have something to do with offline mode; I get online with an incompletely implemented mobile hotspot that doesn't bridge the network, and I have to use a SOCKS5 proxy because I'm too dumb to understand how to properly bridge the network myself, and Minecraft client doesn't support routing through a proxy, so I'm permanently stuck in offline mode, and often run into problems no one else does, such as this, or BoP deadlocking in preinit.
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By SKyTheThunder
#212182 I didn't mean to suggest a damage cap at lvl 50. It was just meant to illustrate that damage scaling may have to be limited, at least in the higher ranges and/or if you want to map stat differences between Pokémon. It's all hypothetical at this point though.

Offline mode shouldn't cause errors like that or prevent you from playing at all. If you can hop on our Discord server I'm sure we'll be able to help you figure out what went wrong for you.
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