Wasteland Theme

[The_Silent]

I'm creating a survival map set in a irradiated wasteland. But I'm torn between desert wasteland or nuclear-winter wasteland. What do you guys prefer setting wise?

 

[Gyrosphinx]

Cold desert nuclear-winter wasteland? Like the Gobi desert, only irradiated?

 

[MiniMage]

I personally find a Nuclear Winter to have far more potential. Not only would it be a struggle to remain warm, it would be a struggle to find food. Still watersources that have yet to freeze would be a deathtrap. To stay warm, the survivor would have to kill other beasts and use their hides to remain warm. Finding a decent water source would be difficult. Staying on the move would basically be essential to the survival of the survivor, at least until a shelter has been set up. But even then, firewood would have to be gathered, dried and then burned to remain warm. The fire would also ward off predators, as the wildlife would be struggling equally hard. However, trees would be commonplace. So building weapons wouldn't be difficult.

In the desert, your main priority is to remain hydrated. You'd roll around in mud to lessen the pain of the suns rays. You'd move very little. Hide in the shade of a tree, dig yourself down to the cooler sand and rely on traps. Moving very little to conserve energy. If a makeshift shelter is made, it's designed to shield from the suns rays. The second reason would be to elevate the makeshift bed to avoid snakes, spiders and scorpions. But building shelters would be difficult, particularly in the desert. The most logical resources would be animal bones and use that in combination with rocks. It would not be pretty, but it would work. This explains the survivability of a normal desert. If you combine it with radiation, there can't be pools of irradiated water. Or if it can be, then it's still just a struggle with nature with a higher difficulty.

In the winter scenario. Rivers of frozen sludge could serve to mutate the wildlife and roaming humans. Not to mention the fact that a winter landscape can be far more detailed scenery. A desert landscape is varying degrees of flatness and small hills, with the occasional cactus, maybe skeletons here and there. There's not really much you can do with that scenery.

Then there's also the sheer variation possibilities of a winter landscape. In the desert, there's scorpions, snakes, lions, elephants and gazelles. That's about it. There's a little more that I can't think of right now, but the sheer blandness of the desert landscape would just be boring, in my opinion.

But for a winter landscape, you can have Wolves, Bears, Moose, Snakes, Rats, Squirrels, Deers, Badgers, Beavers, Foxes.. numerous birds.. the list goes on. There's also various fishes that you could think about, which could produce some interesting mutations. Now, if you sprinkle these other guys with some nuclear mojo, you have a massive variety of mutants to worry about. For added variety, you could have humans and their mutant counterpart. Then you could've made mutant hybrids, because why not?

Also, apologies for my little rant. Long story short, I prefer the Nuclear Winter option.