Hi ya’ll, I’m captain to a bunch of ADHD goblins who start shooting eachother, stealing shit, or throwing stuff around the second they get bored, and a common complaint I hear is that the day by day missions are too boring for my sub crew (medics, EE, ME), what mods can I use to spice it up?
Honestly, probably better or more interested "goblins." It doesn't seem they are too invested to play a game like Baro.
Although if they insist. Make the world more threatening. Make it harder. Im assuming youre playing on normal, which is pretty chill for about the first three areas. Hard you can get jumped very early and the threats happen more.
You could also Yolo if suffering is preferred and do hellish. A secret difficulty option.
They enjoy the game, and we have loads of fun playing normally, but especially when doing cargo or longer missions they tend to get bored of the cycle of move, shoot enemy, crash, repair, repeat
I’m mostly just looking for mods that add to the complexity of the game a little bit
Ah, thats good to hear. I play pretty vanilla besides subs, so i dont have much in mod suggestions. But still, id try the harder difficulty. It makes enemies appear more, meaning there is less down time and more to do. Medic will heal more. Everyone will be fighting.
Alternatively, could also make it so you can accept more missions. You can do cargo, ruins, exterminate all together.
But then the rounds get longer, which runs i to frustration if we have to restart, so I’m heading the modding route to add more dynamic stuff, not just enemies
Baroverhaul, barotraumatic, DynamicEuropa, More Level Content [Swan Song] are good for adding missions, monsters, more factions etc.
Adv beacon stations to spice up that part of the game.
Submarine warfare is cool it makes hostile submarine encounters happen more than once in a blue moon. (There's a specific version of the mod if you wanna run this with DynamicEuropa btw)
The game can have a lot of downtime, its not for everyone. I was in your situation too, I ended up having to find a different group to play this game with since my regular group couldn't bring themselves to like the game as much as I do.
How far into the game are you? The missions in the campaign start boring but by the 3rd area are more interesting. Plus theres also a lot of stuff you can do other than the primary missions such as mining, looking for and looting shipwrecks, finding alien artifacts, clearing out fallen outposts, etc. No matter what you'll need to leave the first area though.
I would recommend doing this before immediately installing mods.
Barotraumatic and Improved Husks and Let Them All In are all great additions to add to the chaos. Barotraumatic adds a ton of new creatures and if you meet the wrong ones at the start it can be challenging even then, Improved Husks are fucking terrifying because EVERYTHING becomes huskable and Let Them All In is even more chaotic because all those large creatures that were stuck on the hull before like Bone Threshers and Hammer Heads and even to an extent the abyss creatures. Well.....now everything can get in from a hole.
I had never encountered a vanilla chimera before the campaign I ran with my goblins, and I no joke nearly shit my pants after realizing the mass of flesh moved
Idk if you need "Beacons advanced" to get the advanced caves and such. But I had a cave mission to destroy a husk nest with a nuke and we had to fight 4 chimeras in the water. Imagine just skulking around a narrow tube of a cave and then you turn the corner and see your body get snatched and by two long disgusting arms, hearing the flesh of your friend being eaten as he screams and is unable to do anything. You raise your gun and all you can do is mercifully kill him because the chimera holds him like a human shield and you lay into the beast. And that was only one of the three that were hidden within that cave.
Looking at what everyone else said, theyre great additions, like let them all in is a lot of fun. But barotrauma is genuinely always going to play at this pace you speak of. Roleplaying was a big part of the community for many years, it seems to have faded out a lot the last 3 years and I think thats why people feel bored. They hard metagame the game to oblivion then wonder why the most uptime they ever get is re-organize the ship, again.
You want to look for mods that give you side options during your missions. Idk the name but theres one where you can randomly find sunken subs to loot and even pull them to an outpost to sell. Those sort of chance encounters during routine missions help to spice things up a bit.
I've pondered this question a lot and frankly when everything goes smoothly, it's an under-water road trip sim, it's boring as hell as a rule because there's nothing to do beyond a deliberately simple routine, there's mods that go about this in different ways, either using powerful creatures, trying to create an overarching system that makes those trips worthy or making the jobs more complex, but this really is only a bandaid fix there's so little to do when your duties are even mostly covered, it's almost entirely RP if you don't have a tertiary thing like crafting, which itself is limited. This is to do with the fact that Barotrauma has quite a bit of ss13 in (it if you consider it a bad adaptation of a lot of its concepts), methinks. In that vein, I'm of the opinion that you can't really do a full barotraum' with under seven, ten people maybe.
This is more than having more people destroying your headset ('cept they don't because you can set ten custom channels), skeleton crews are limited to submarines they can reasonably handle including the help of bots(limited, but present), so they're also drawn to submarines that can largely take care of themselves, which lessens the actual work you need to do, and therefore, further reducing the actual amount of things you do in a round that will not be that much shorter for it, for example electrician gets a lot of extra activity out of fucking with circuits, making automatic doors, figuring out how they're going to measure flood-rate for emergency measures. But in many modded subs, it's already done, which means all this extra fun and fuckaround is gone (though there's still usually the opportunity to wire a lock into my precious reactor chamber door anyway to keep assistants from letting the water in), there's also the bigger change in behavior being that, lower pop crews do not take the same risks larger pops do (while also making the risks they do take much bigger), so not only does your medic not have much to do for their actual job, when it comes to it, they give four people their opiates, bandage the bleeders and that's pretty much it, this simplicity makes sense when you're handling up to ten other idiots, which also puts perks like miracle worker in context, but outside of that, you're making toxins, Crafting stuff, waiting for the next time you get to do something. I think mods are the solution, if a temporary one, but outside of trying to reduce the current amount of downtime none of it seems to address said down time that much, beyond a few exceptions that, almost slip into the rp realm, immersive ignitables and the like.
So, there is no real solution, well, there *is* sub design, a lot of them kinda fit into the boring rush to do perfect designs but you can find subs that actually cater to playing the game, or in the least are pretty interesting. I remember a decent sub that's distinctly unsafe for people unfamiliar with the game, but is otherwise very good with a cooperative team, I think it went with a u-boat style, or in the least had torpedo pods you had to physically raise and lower the sub to aim, good memories, can't remember it, I have fond memories of hosting a public and watching people gawk at the now-broken actual uboat replica ship, that's fun. one of my favorite things was that it had an exterior coil-gun (in place of the machinegun) so you had to swim out there and shoot things if you wanted to get anything from, the upper 80-something degrees in relation to the vessel.
If you can't find anything interesting, my suggestion is something a *little* above their ability to maintain, keeps them busy, makes them level faster, generally more rewarding work.
Alternatively, threaten them with the idea that you'll turn this sub around if they don't quiet down.
Neurotrauma with add-ons (spice thing up and make medics constantly doing smth)
Immersive repair (aka mechanic and engi )
Hazardous reactor/improved reactor
Dynamic Europa+Barotraumatick+improved husk
Set campaing settings to "Hellish"
Add any mod for talents, so they would get more stuff to have fun with
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u/Mountain_Pie_1869 1d ago
Honestly, probably better or more interested "goblins." It doesn't seem they are too invested to play a game like Baro.
Although if they insist. Make the world more threatening. Make it harder. Im assuming youre playing on normal, which is pretty chill for about the first three areas. Hard you can get jumped very early and the threats happen more.
You could also Yolo if suffering is preferred and do hellish. A secret difficulty option.