Wanderers

[pango]

Idea: wilderness is quite empty, farms, small villages can be hard to find without fast travel, and unknown dungeons are very hard to find period.
Since it seems roads are a long way ahead (no pun intended), could there be alternatives?

Wanderers

NPCs/monsters walking around the land, minding their own businesses; Most of the time coming from, or heading to, some relevant place in the vicinity.

That could be seen as a smaller/achievable relative of Random Encounters idea

Details

Each time some terrain zone is instanciated, have a small percentage of chance to instanciate NPCs or monsters in that zone. The mix could be similar to random attacks mix, or only the weaker ones, I'm not sure.
They always start walking straight ahead in some direction, peacefully; and stop when they're too far from the player and despawned, as usual:

- animals: go in any direction, but try to avoid cities/farms/temples directions. They don't pay attention to the player (or even try to walk away from you once you're detected) unless you get too close in which case they become aggressive.

- humans (not sure if villagers can be added, maybe not in 1st version): either come from or ahead toward cities/farms/temples around, if there's any. Otherwise random direction. Don't attack unless you attack (there's already random attacks in game, wanderers are just minding other businesses).

- monsters: either come from or ahead toward dungeons, if there's any. Otherwise random direction, but try to avoid cities/farms/temples directions. Switch to aggressive if they detect you, so the only way to know where they're going is to not be detected. It should require patience and some luck, but not be impossible.

[Midknightprince]

I totally want this !

[Prester Lewin]

it would be good to have some genuinely helpful NPC encounters in the mix - merchants, healers, temple priests (who can bless you), for example.

I don't mean the merchants should be stocked like a full shop (unless anyone wants to create a caravan), just carry a few useful items and be able to buy a few items off you. They could even provide non-mages with a chance of getting an occasional enchanted item.

For the role-playing villains, there would always be the option to kill and loot them...

[pango]

it would be good to have some genuinely helpful NPC encounters in the mix - merchants, healers, temple priests (who can bless you), for example.

See the Random Encounters mod that I mentioned, that looks like what you describe.
The goal of wanderers would be to be achievable instead of forever delayed.

Not that I know how to do a mod like that, maybe 5% of what's required... but I had a look at terrain generation last evening

[Prester Lewin]

Yeah, that's the idea. Isn't it basically like the random encounters in Tedious Travel? I think that triggers encounters as soon as you enter a new map section. Perhaps that plus some of Jay_H's quest pack techniques could be combined to provide at least some of what we are talking about. Easy for me to say, of course...

[pango]

Well, technically it should be similar to random encounters (that happen with or without Tedious Travel), so that's some more code that I need to look at. What I may check later in Tedious Travel is how to compute directions.
Basically, I tried to only use mechanisms that I've seen used elsewhere or that look reasonably straightforward.
Hopefully that could be used as a solid ground for more complex ideas from other people.

[meritamas]

This would be useful and make the game more realistic. I love realistic.

[Kamer]

I made a suggestion in general about this but a bit different. I'd like wondering mobs in dungeons or where ever. It would work well with my WA quest pack but having wondering mobs from vanilla DFU would be fantastic.