tehAon’s Mindless Zombies – Feral Zombie AI

Three additions, all server-side; still verified booting on a V3.0.1 dedicated server with
`EACEnabled=true`, so clients still install nothing.
- **They shift with the clock.** Speed and rage now key off the phase — day / night / blood moon.
Vanilla already hands zombies run speed in the dark and walk speed by day; Mindless leans into that
with a per-phase scale (default `0.45` / `0.70` / `1.0`), so daylight is a losable shamble and a
blood moon is a surge. Rage distance widens the same way (`12` / `25` / `40` m). No new per-tick
hook — the existing speed and rage patches just read the phase at call time. **Beeline is unchanged
in every phase:** `pathCostScale` stays 0 around the clock; only the tempo moves.
- **Enrage on damage.** Shoot a zombie and it gets a 5 s burst of speed and bite (`buffMindlessEnrage`,
a new appended buff). `EnrageSpread` wakes the ones next to it too — one hop, not a horde-wide
chain. The buff is applied from the DLL so it obeys the preset (off on `lite`); the definition rides
along in the auto-pushed `buffs.xml`.
- **Noise has teeth.** Gunfire heat on the AI director's activity map is scaled (`NoiseHeatScale`,
default `2×` on standard), so a firefight summons a screamer in about half the shots. Done
server-side in `AIDirector.NotifyActivity` — **not** by editing `sounds.xml`, which is client-loaded
and would have broken the install-nothing promise. Only `Sound` events are scaled; campfires and
forges are left alone.
- **Not built, because it was already done:** an anti-door-funnel feature. At `pathCostScale=0` the A*
engine flattens every custom connection to a uniform cost, so doors already have no advantage over
walls. Verified in the pathfinder, documented, skipped.
- Preset defaults extended; new settings `DaySpeedScale` / `NightSpeedScale` / `BloodMoonSpeedScale`,
`RageDistanceDay/Night/BloodMoon`, `EnrageEnabled`, `EnrageSpread`, `NoiseHeatScale`. The old single
`SpeedScale` and `RageDistance` still work and set all three phases at …

- **Wall commitment.** Once a zombie starts tearing through toward you (the "rage" / destroy-area
behaviour), it now stays on the wall instead of letting the destroy-area timer lapse and bouncing
back to route-finding — hit the same wall, re-decide, start over. That flip-flop is what made a
horde look like it was hesitating at your base, and every bounce was a wasted pathfinder request.
The commitment is held only while the zombie is genuinely breaching and is released the instant it
can reach you, so it never stands in melee range chewing a block instead of hitting you.
- Distance-based release (not path-based) on purpose: a Mindless zombie has `pathCostScale=0` and so
always holds a straight-through path, which a path-emptiness test would never catch.
- Safe: only ever extends a destroy-area task the game already chose to keep running; never revives
one that exited for its own reasons (stun, a hopeless spot). Non-zombies untouched.
- New knobs `RageCommit` (on; lite = off), `RageCommitSeconds` (8 / nightmare 12),
`RageCommitReleaseDist` (3 / nightmare 2.5). New patch: postfix on `EAIDestroyArea.Continue`.
- Pairs with **SteadyFrame**: more of the horde sits in the cheap block-breaking state at once, which
SteadyFrame's cost-weighted cap counts cheap and can therefore let you run more of.

- **Fences no longer un-dumb the horde.** A player added horizontal industrial-fence blocks to a
defensive wall and the zombies "regained their brains" — routing around it instead of smashing
through. Root cause: `pathCostScale=0` only zeroes a block's cost when that cost rides the pathfinder's
*scaled* channel (`PathType > 0`, `Path="solid"`). A thin off-centre model shape — fence, railing, pole
— loads as a *scan* block (`PathType = -1`) whose blocking and detour the game carries in an **unscaled**
channel (`BlockerFlags`, baked edge costs, `Block.GetPathOffset`) that the mod's one lever can't reach,
so the wall got a real cost gradient back. Fix: at load, promote every destructible, movement-blocking
scan block to solid (`PathType 1`) so its cost zeroes like the wall around it and the beeline holds
through it. New patch: postfix on `BlocksFromXml.InitBlock`. New knob `FlattenPathCutouts` (on; global
to the shared AI path grid, so all AI stop threading fences — the point of the mod; runs once at load,
never per tick). A boot self-test confirms no destructible scan blocks are left un-flattened.
- **A player standing beside a zombie is no longer ignored.** Reported: zombies ran past a digging player
to keep smashing/chasing. The mod never touched target *selection*, and 0.3.0's wall-commitment made it
worse by gluing a breaching zombie to the wall past the player. Fix — a point-blank **melee lock**: when
a live player is within reach **and** in line of sight, the zombie retargets to them and drops out of
the block-smashing state so ordinary approach/melee takes over. The line-of-sight gate keeps it
caveman-simple and matches intent exactly — a player behind the wall it is breaching, or down a hole out
of sight, fails the raycast, so the zombie keeps smashing (or keeps following the noise into the hole).
No strategic routing is added. New knob `MeleeLock` (on); it reuses `RageCommitReleaseDist` as its reach,
so there is one number for "close enough to hit you". W…

- **Fences no longer un-dumb the horde.** A player added horizontal industrial-fence blocks to a
defensive wall and the zombies "regained their brains" — routing around it instead of smashing
through. Root cause: `pathCostScale=0` only zeroes a block's cost when that cost rides the pathfinder's
*scaled* channel (`PathType > 0`, `Path="solid"`). A thin off-centre model shape — fence, railing, pole
— loads as a *scan* block (`PathType = -1`) whose blocking and detour the game carries in an **unscaled**
channel (`BlockerFlags`, baked edge costs, `Block.GetPathOffset`) that the mod's one lever can't reach,
so the wall got a real cost gradient back. Fix: at load, promote every destructible, movement-blocking
scan block to solid (`PathType 1`) so its cost zeroes like the wall around it and the beeline holds
through it. New patch: postfix on `BlocksFromXml.InitBlock`. New knob `FlattenPathCutouts` (on; global
to the shared AI path grid, so all AI stop threading fences — the point of the mod; runs once at load,
never per tick). A boot self-test confirms no destructible scan blocks are left un-flattened.
- **A player standing beside a zombie is no longer ignored.** Reported: zombies ran past a digging player
to keep smashing/chasing. The mod never touched target *selection*, and 0.3.0's wall-commitment made it
worse by gluing a breaching zombie to the wall past the player. Fix — a point-blank **melee lock**: when
a live player is within reach **and** in line of sight, the zombie retargets to them and drops out of
the block-smashing state so ordinary approach/melee takes over. The line-of-sight gate keeps it
caveman-simple and matches intent exactly — a player behind the wall it is breaching, or down a hole out
of sight, fails the raycast, so the zombie keeps smashing (or keeps following the noise into the hole).
No strategic routing is added. New knob `MeleeLock` (on); it reuses `RageCommitReleaseDist` as its reach,
so there is one number for "close enough to hit you". W…

- **Your settings survive updates.** Editing `Config/mindless.xml` never lasted — every update
overwrites it. Put what you want changed in `Config/mindless.local.xml` beside it instead; it
overrides the shipped values and nothing writes over it, because that file is in no release. A
`<setting>` merges onto the shipped one with the same name, or is added if absent. The overrides are
logged at startup.