Do higher-tier monsters spawn at world creation, or only through evolution?

Question

What it says on the tin. In Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, I know I can control the rate at which monsters evolve over time with a world-creation option; what I'm wondering is, if I set this to zero, would I simply never see hulking horrors or bileous zombies or skeletal juggernauts, etc.?

Answer 1

The majority of high-tier monsters will only come from evolution, but some high-tier monsters can spawn right away in special locations or during quests.

As of the current version, monster spawns in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead are all preset by the map locations and their corresponding JSON files, which can be found in /data/json/mapgen. You can also look up specific monsters and what they evolve into in /data/json/monsters - the "upgrades" field lets you know the upgrade half-life (i.e. the time at which around half of the monster population will have evolved into their next stage, which the evolution scaling factor is multipled by) and the possible evolution branches (the "into" field).

Because the "half-life" of each monster is multipled by the evolution scaling factor, in the current stable release, if you set the monster evolution scaling factor to 0.00 (Settings -> Options -> World Defaults -> Monster evolution scaling factor), it fully disables the monster evolution mechanic. Everything will spawn exactly as they are set in the mapgen files and will never evolve into higher-tier monsters through the evolution mechanic.

That being said, there is a very rare chance for high-tier monsters to naturally spawn outside of the evolution mechanic, i.e. in certain quests or special locations. For example, looking through the files:

• A special "boss monster" (GROUP_LAB_MUTANT_BOSS) can spawn in the lab location. This can potentially be a bestial mutant (mon_mutant_evolved), which normally evolves from an experimental mutant.
• Some high-tier zombies can spawn in FEMA labs (GROUP_LAB_FEMA), in particular the shocker brute (mon_zombie_brute_shocker), which normally evolves from a shocker zombie.
• The lab security group of monsters (GROUP_LAB_SECURITY) and the lab surface group (GROUP_LAB_SURFACE) can include shocker brutes (mon_zombie_brute_shocker).