Why is LL:E's intro so hard?

EDIT: As of 1.81 this issue is fixed! :D

Does this situation seem familiar to you?

As part of 1.9 I plan on revamping the old road tutorial mission to make it fairer, more forgiving, and teach the player about some of LL:E's mechanics.

But why is it so hard and unfair? Is Ancestress being mean on purpose again? Is she a cruel and unyielding mistress?

Not this time.

Currently, the old road is a nightmare. Let me explain why. (tl;dr this game's backend is a mess)

First, let me prime you on the way enemy spawning works in Darkest Dungeon. Each dungeon, at each difficulty, has a 'mash' file. A list of probabilities with a list of enemy combinations next to it.

When you walk across a combat tile, or enter a combat room, it'll roll a dice and choose one of the encounters in the mash list. Simple right?

Second, we have conditional mash files. These work a little differently to normal mashes: When you start combat, these have a chance to replace whatever you're fighting with a different encounter, so long as the conditions are met. Let's look at our classic conditional bosses:

When the torch is at 0, there is a 1% chance that Shambler replaces a hallway fight.
When you have a certain amount of items in your inventory, there is a 3% chance that Collector replaces a hallway fight.

Fairly simple, right?

Thirdly we have additional mash files. These work very similarly to conditional mash files and are pretty much exclusively used by roaming bosses like Thing From The Stars and Puppetmaster.

Alternatively we can force a dungeon layout to look a specific way with specific encounters by using a map file.

This is basically a pre-created custom dungeon that is shaped in a specific way with specific enemies in it. Many quests use it, the final dungeons use it, the town invasion uses it, the crypts tutorial mission uses it.

So the Old Road uses a map file too, right?
With conditional mash spawns?
That's why it's the same every time?

Hah. No. That would be easy.

At first I thought the issue was with conditional spawns replacing the expected spawns in the old road (You know how it's possible to encounter Shambler on the old road if you set your torch to 0? That.)

So I did this to fix it:

I set every conditional spawn in low difficulty weald missions to require that the first level be beaten before they can spawn (That's the '.plot_quest_requirement plot_tutorial_crypts' part). Should be a solve, right?

So what the hell are these three still doing here?!

The answer, it turns out, is that like many things in Darkest Dungeon the old road quest is hard-coded. Baked into the game, unable to be altered. Set in stone.

Does it use a map like everything else? Nope.
Does it use a conditional or map-named mash like everything else? Nope.

For some mad reason the old road - and this is the only place the game behaves like this - pulls from the top level of weald 1 mash file and reads downwards instead of rolling the dice. Why? Fuck knows. Maybe this is how the game originally worked and they never went back to change it?

This is why, in the base game, the weald 1 mash file has these entries:

A 0.01 weight chance to spawn a single guy? Well now it makes sense.

With this new knowledge I went back and looked at LL:E's weald 1 mash file, and wouldn't you know it--

What an annoying situation. Fortunately, an easily remedied one. With this knowledge I can now more tightly curate the game's opening sequence. I can finally stop the opening dungeon being an absolute pain in the ass.

I would like to apologise to everyone who has suffered the frustration of having their first two characters die in the janky opening sequence of LL:E, by formally saying:

... and running away.

Thank you for reading! Hope this has been informative!

Kindly,
Ancestress