Infestations

Commentary

Infestations are a fun idea and help break up the monotony of going to work. That being said, I think the vanilla infestation behavior has flaws and, ultimately, harms the game's balance and design.

As a rundown:

• Infestations increase the max inside power count to a fixed value (same on any moon)
  • 30 for hoarding bug infestations
  • 20 for nutcracker infestations
  • For context, Titan's normal power level is 18. Experimentation is 4.
• During an infestation, 2 additional enemies will spawn every 2 hours.
  • This stacks with eclipses, meaning Offense/Dine/Embrion spawn 6 enemies every 2 hours.
• Enemy spawn chances are equalized
  • The "infestation enemy" is given a spawn weight of 100, and all other enemies are given a spawn weight of 1.
  • Normally this means the infestation enemy dominates spawns, but...
  • Once the infestation enemy reaches spawn cap, all other enemies begin spawning with equal weight
    • The ghost girl becomes just as common as bunker spiders on Experimentation
    • The Jester becomes just as common as thumpers on March
    • etc...

As you can probably imagine, every moon in the game devolves into chaos pretty much immediately during infestations.

My goal with reworking the enemy infestations was to maintain the same ideas but execute them in a way that is much more complementary to the game's usual limits:

• Infestations have no effect on power level cap
• The infestation enemy does not add/subtract from power level for the day
• Spawn waves happen as they normally would (as if there was no infestation event)
• As long as the infestation enemy hasn't reached its spawn cap, a separate additional spawn wave will occur, which attempts to spawn 2 infestation enemies

You'll still find giant swarms of the infestation's enemy type roaming the map, but you shouldn't be getting 20+ enemies on Assurance or nigh-guaranteed Jesters on March anymore.

As a little bonus feature, I've added butler and "masked" infestations, with new infestation types planned a little later down the line. For now, I think butler infestations will be quite nostalgic on Dine.