Half-Life (Sven Co-op)

What is this game?

Half-Life's campaign, as rebuilt for co-op play inside Sven Co-op. Sven Co-op ships the whole 1998 campaign, Black Mesa Inbound through Nihilanth, recombined into 35 larger maps across 18 missions, played co-operatively. It ships three more the same way: Opposing Force, Blue Shift and They Hunger, all reachable from the same campaign portal, and any of them can be part of a seed.

A note on multiplayer

Sven Co-op is a multiplayer game, and its versions of these campaigns are built to be played co-operatively. Some of what they ask of you is there on purpose to keep it that way.

This randomizer is made for co-op lobbies. We do not endorse using it, or any convenience it adds, to work around Sven Co-op's multiplayer design or to treat these campaigns as free single-player games. Play it with other people. If you want Half-Life on its own, buy Half-Life.

Where is the options page?

The player options page lets you configure your game.

Which campaigns can be in a seed?

Sven Co-op ships four single-player conversions and the campaign portal fronts all of them, so a YAML picks any combination of Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift and They Hunger. Half-Life alone is the default.

Enable several and they run in parallel rather than in sequence: the seed opens one mission from any of them, the rest open through items, each has its own "how many missions open my finale" setting, and the seed is won only when every campaign's finale is done. Their weapons go into one pool, so Opposing Force's displacer and They Hunger's tommy gun turn up in Black Mesa and the Tau cannon turns up in theirs.

What is Suspension?

An arcade map Sven Co-op ships alongside the campaigns, and an optional extra in a seed: suspension: true. It is one map rather than a campaign; a class-based squad retaking a suspension bridge in eight sections, against waves that scale with how many players are in the lobby.

Three things become checks. Each of the eight sections, per difficulty. Clearing a run, credited to whichever class you spent most of it as. And the medal at the end, scored on the team's total deaths: platinum for a flawless run down to n00b, with suspension_required_award deciding how far up the ladder goes. Medals always roll down, so a platinum run sends every lesser medal too and nobody has to die on purpose.

Difficulty is the lobby's shared ticket pool: 50 on easy down to a single ticket on insane: and Progressive Suspension Difficulty items open the tiers in order, so a fresh seed can only vote easy. Seven of the eight classes are items. The eighth, the Juggernaut, is not: the map opens it once a run has been cleared with each of the other seven, exactly as it does outside a randomiser.

Suspension's goal is a run cleared with every one of the eight classes at your capped difficulty: so the Juggernaut is the last of them, and the cap is what the goal is measured at. suspension_goal_requires_award adds the medal to that: off, the deaths do not matter; on, each of those clears has to earn suspension_required_award as well. Reaching it does not win the seed on its own: every campaign in the YAML still has to be finished too.

suspension_classanity turns each section into a check per class, which is lobby-scale: eight players on eight different classes clear eight classes' worth in one run, where a solo player would need eight runs.

Section 4 is a tank, and only the Grenadier, the Pointman and the Engineer can get anything that hurts it: the bridge's explosives crates equip those three and nobody else. So every check from the tank onward, along with the clears and the medals, is in logic behind holding one of those three classes. The sections before it are open to any class, the detonation pack in section 3 included: that one is a map item anybody can pick up and carry.

There is no hub console for it. Type !warp suspension.

What does randomization do to this game?

The Sven Co-op campaign portal becomes a hub. Every mission is sealed until its unlock item arrives from the multiworld, and the seed begins with exactly one random mission open, from any campaign in it: so no two runs start in the same place.

Every weapon except the one you start with is also an item. Weapons lying in the levels can still be walked over (that is what sends the check), but Gordon will not pick one up until the multiworld has granted it, and the campaign's own per-map loadouts are stripped to match. A shotgun found in Office Complex is worth nothing until somebody, somewhere, sends you the Shotgun.

That starting weapon is the crowbar unless random_starting_weapon is on, in which case it is any melee weapon your campaigns could hand out: Opposing Force's pipe wrench or combat knife, They Hunger's spanner. It replaces the crowbar outright, so a wrench start means the crowbars in the levels are refused like everything else: until the Crowbar item arrives, because it is in the pool like any other weapon the seed did not start you with.

A campaign's final mission is not unlocked by an item at all. Nihilanth opens once you have completed a configurable number of other Half-Life missions, and every other campaign's finale works the same way off its own count.

Mission 0, Black Mesa Inbound, has no console in the campaign portal: !warp 0 in Sven Co-op chat is the only way to travel there. It can be dropped from the seed with include_black_mesa_inbound: false.

What items and locations get shuffled?

Items: a mission unlock for every mission in the seed (17 for Half-Life, 9 for Opposing Force, 5 for Blue Shift, 2 for They Hunger), the weapons of every campaign you enabled, and optionally the armour, the long jump module, the flashlight and Melee Throw. Everything else is filler: ammo caches, medkits and armour batteries.

Half-Life brings 14 weapons (the crowbar, Glock, .357, MP5, shotgun, crossbow, RPG, Tau cannon, gluon gun, hivehand, satchel charges, tripmines, snarks, hand grenades). Opposing Force adds eight more: the desert eagle, SAW, sniper rifle, displacer, spore launcher, shock roach, barnacle grapple and pipe wrench. The shock roach lies nowhere: shock troopers carry it and drop it when killed, and that drop is refused until the item arrives. The item never puts a roach in your hands: Sven Co-op's roach has to be dropped before you can draw anything else, so it only lets you pick one up. They Hunger adds nine of its own, from the Colt 1911 and tommy gun to the tesla gun. Blue Shift adds none: in Sven Co-op it uses Half-Life's, down to the crowbar. Half-Life's weapons are in every seed with a campaign in it, even one without Half-Life, so a Blue Shift run can still find a crossbow or a Tau cannon.

They Hunger's are the one set that cannot travel. They are custom entities its own maps register rather than weapons the game ships, so they exist only while you are playing They Hunger: receive one elsewhere and it is handed to you the moment you arrive in an episode.

trap_percentage turns some of that filler into traps, each picked by its own *_trap_weight (0 leaves one out). There are seven. Like DeathLink, they are the whole lobby's problem rather than one player's, and all of them are nuisances rather than punishments: none can cost you a run:

• Scientist Trap: four scientists, one of each variant, appear around every player and start following them about.
• Headcrab Trap: four headcrabs each, same idea, considerably less friendly.
• Butterfingers Trap: everyone drops the weapon they are holding. The suit reissues it after thirty seconds if you cannot find it again; with butterfingers_reissue: false only once you have nothing else to fight with.
• Bot Swarm Trap: six crowbar-wielding bots appear around the lobby, run about crouch-jumping over things, and swing at whatever they bump into, players included. Bots wear player models found on the server: the stock ones, plus any custom ones in svencoop_addon or svencoop_downloads. Each map uses up to eight of them. A player who lacks one of those models has to download it, so a server with custom models but downloads turned off should remove them. A custom model missing the player animations the bots use is skipped. The host can keep bots to the stock models with !custombots 0 in game or /toggle_custom_bots in the client; it is remembered between sessions.
• Bunny Hop Trap: everyone jumps every time they land, for fifteen seconds.
• Sticky Key Trap: everyone is pushed along one movement direction (forward, back, or a strafe) for fifteen seconds. You are told which.
• Reload Trap: the weapon in everyone's hands reloads from empty. The clip goes back into the reserve first, so no ammo is lost.

Optional items, each behind its own option:

• Armour (shuffle_hev_suit): the HEV Suit (Half-Life, They Hunger), the PCV (Opposing Force) and the Security Armor (Blue Shift), each only when its campaign is in the seed. Each switches armour on for its own campaign's maps.
• Long Jump Module (shuffle_longjump).
• Flashlight (shuffle_flashlight): the flashlight key does nothing until it arrives.
• Melee Throw (melee_throw): secondary fire throws the crowbar, which hits four times as hard as a swing and comes back after ten seconds.
• Progressive Air Acceleration (progressive_air_acceleration): air control (sv_airaccelerate, shared by the lobby) starts at air_acceleration_minimum and each item raises it a step, the last reaching air_acceleration_maximum. 15 items for the defaults of 10 and 100.

Locations: 189 in Half-Life alone, 383 with all four campaigns:

• reaching each part of a mission (Surface Tension has five, Office Complex one)
• completing each mission
• finding each weapon for the first time in each campaign, the crowbar included
• using each health charger and HEV charge panel, and stepping into each Xen healing pool
• with include_microwave, exploding the food in the Anomalous Materials break room microwave (keep pressing its button)

Sven Co-op splits Half-Life's campaign into 35 maps across 18 missions, so progress through a mission is itself the check. Every wall-mounted charger is a check too, whether or not it still has juice in it: pressing use is enough. Set chargesanity: false if you want a shorter run without them; that hits Half-Life hardest, since it holds 120 of the 162 and They Hunger has two in total.

Weapon checks are the first copy of that weapon you find anywhere in its campaign: "First Shotgun" is sent by any shotgun on a Half-Life map, and "Opposing Force: First Shotgun" by any on an Opposing Force map. Nothing on the hub or on Suspension counts, nor does a weapon the game hands you, nor one Butterfingers or a throw put on the floor. You do not have to be allowed to keep the gun for the check to count.

Which items can be in another player's world?

Any of them.

What does another world's item look like in Half-Life?

There is no world model for it. Collecting a location prints the check to chat, and the item goes wherever the multiworld sends it.

When the player receives an item, what happens?

Weapons and mission unlocks apply silently: the next time you spawn, or immediately if you are already alive, your loadout is rebuilt to match what you own. Filler is applied on the spot: health, armour, or a top-up of ammo for whatever you are currently carrying.

The HEV suit is the exception worth knowing about. You always wear it, because in GoldSrc the suit is what draws the weapon HUD and without it you cannot change weapons at all. What the item grants is armour: until it arrives your armour is held at zero, and batteries, wall chargers and armour filler all do nothing.

The long jump module is switched on and off directly, so a module lying in a level is scenery until the item reaches you. Leave it out of the shuffle and the item is locked to its vanilla check at the end of Lambda Core: walking over the module there sends it to you, and you keep it into Xen however you get there.

What is the goal?

Kill Nihilanth. Its mission only opens once you have completed enough of the others, so the run is a tour of Black Mesa rather than a beeline.

With several campaigns enabled it is every one of their finales, each behind its own count. With Suspension enabled it is those plus one more: the bridge cleared with each class in suspension_goal_classes, all eight by default, at the hardest tier your YAML allows, and earning suspension_required_award too if suspension_goal_requires_award is on.

What happens when somebody dies?

With DeathLink on, a death is the whole lobby's: everyone gibs and one DeathLink goes out to the multiworld. lobby_death_link separates those two halves, since one player's mistake ending the round for seven others is not always what a lobby wants:

• on: the default, and what DeathLink has always done here.
• non_arcade: the lobby gibs in the campaigns but never on Suspension, where a run is long and deaths are already the medal's business.
• off: nobody else dies for your death, and the DeathLink still goes out.

A DeathLink arriving from another world always takes the lobby, whatever this is set to: being killed by it is what receiving one means. And with DeathLink itself off, none of it happens: there is nothing for a wipe to be the point of. death_link_amnesty is separate again, and forgives a number of deaths before one is reported at all.