Mods got me playing this game again. Felt like sharing my experience.

I beaten this game so many times and played since release, I got tired of it a few years back (whenever plague territories came out). The only "modding" I ever did was use the community editor to make custom survivors. Pass couple of days, I tried out mods and it has me hooked enough to play full games again. I been playing with 3 (so far).

1. Red Death version 3(?). Makes all the freaks be the blood plague versions despite difficulty settings. I don't feel like playing lethal anymore but want to fight blood ferals. It let me do this.

2. Follower health bar. I always played with followers, even in lethal. But you always had to be mindful of the bad A.I. getting them killed. This mod puts their health, stamina, and infection state on the screen so you always know if you really need to save them or you can let them defend for themselves. Before, you would have to go to the survivor screen, find the one following you, click them and few their health and if they have plague or not.... all while in combat. And you couldn't even see how much infection they had!!!

3. Follower enlist. This made the game feel more rewarding as a campaign. The flow of the game was

A. Survive and get the basics of a base

B. Stabilize your economy
C. Grow your numbers.

D. Expand
E. Get good items

But in the base game (especially nightmare and lethal), There's no last stage in the game where you feel powerful to take on everything with no sweat. You can still easily die (3 blood feral pack or XL double jug horde spawning on you while you already fighting something, or headshots from NPCs doesn't care what state of the game you are in 😂 ). This mod allows you to enlist more followers. It made the campaign more rewarding without messing up the difficulty much at the start because you are still restrained by injuries, plague, and fatigue. So you still have to keep people at base resting to recover. In the early stages, I only really used it on day 1 when we were all full health and fighting an early plague heart. Once I was able to grow my numbers and economy, I could afford to take more people out... that started kinda late mid game. But once late game hit, I was able to afford to bring 5 people with me (to ride in 6 passenger trucks) and steamroll stuff that was challenging before. Like a reward for surviving so long and powering up my enclave.

Just sharing my experience