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Risky Unarmed

Shoving and stomping now carries a risk of being counterattacked. Highly customizable.

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Ever wonder why zombies become helpless when they're knocked over? Or why you never get bitten when you're shoving away a horde and putting your limbs right in front of their gnashing faces? Or maybe you just feel too powerful curb stomping dozens of zombies and walking away without a scratch on the first day?

The idea behind this mod is to simulate the risk of fighting zombies without any range advantage. In short, it introduces a small chance for any one shove or stomp to backfire and result in a wound on the attacker with the same consequences of a normal zombie attack.

This change discourages fighting when unprepared, especially at the very beginning of the game. Any last-resort improvised weapon becomes safer than going unarmed. In this time it might be better to flee and break line of sight than to kill a threat with your bare hands. When you do get a weapon, it becomes very important to keep zombies outside the weapon's minimum range so your melee attacks aren't automatically swapped into shoves. Crowd control with low-knockback weapons should be more difficult. The practice of preserving weapon durability by using unarmed is now risky.

By default it's safe to shove zombies who are unalerted, facing away from the player, or who have already counterattacked a player within the last couple seconds. The player also has a separate shorter grace period after being counterattacked. Wearing armor on your limbs can reduce or eliminate the danger from this mod. The strength and fitness skills affect the chance of being injured, as do the thick and thin skinned traits.

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Almost every part of the mod is customizable in sandbox options so you can use as much or as little of it as you want. For example, you could configure the mod to:

- Simulate the roughness of unarmed combat without actually being "attacked" by zombies by disabling all wounds except non-infectious scratches on the hands and feet, ignoring defense and not causing holes in clothing. With this setup you might get blisters or abrasions on those parts but it shouldn't ever be directly lethal.

- Enable shove safety when holding two-handed weapons, allowing you to safely push zombies away using brooms, planks, or other long weapons. You could even hold something like a pillow to protect yourself from being bitten if you set shove safety to recognize "any item"

- Set shoving to only affect the forearms, and stomping to only affect the feet; that way the counterattacks from this mod can be absorbed by more easily accessible clothes. Assuming you aren't using mods that add armor for the hands and shins.

- Set the cooldown very high to (in effect) prevent a zombie from counterattacking you more than once. In case you want the risk to still be significant but don't like the chance of being ripped to shreds because you won an unarmed fight.

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I personally play with low-pop vaulting runners and transmission off. If you play with high pop, shamblers, or transmission on, this mod might make less sense or feel excessively punishing. It was just bothering me that my character could 1v1 a rabid monster the size of a full grown human while bare-handed and at little to no personal risk.

Note: I have not tested this in multiplayer or with most other mods. I don't see a reason why it wouldn't work, but let me know if it doesn't and I'll mention incompatibilities here.

Workshop ID: 3434796669
Mod ID: RiskyUnarmed