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: each hands you one of its own missions at the start, 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 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 each campaign in the seed begins with exactly one random mission open — 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.

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 HEV suit and long jump module. Everything else is filler: ammo caches, medkits and armour batteries.

Half-Life brings 13 weapons (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, barnacle grapple, pipe wrench and minigun. 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.

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. There are three. 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.

Locations — 173 in Half-Life alone, 353 with all four campaigns:

• reaching each part of a mission (Surface Tension has five, Office Complex one)
• completing each mission
• reaching each weapon where its campaign would first have given it to you, the crowbar included
• using each health charger and HEV charge panel, 143 in all

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 107 of the 143 and They Hunger has three in total.

Weapon checks are pinned to where the original campaign hands each weapon over: "First Shotgun" is the Office Complex shotgun, and no other shotgun in the game will send it. 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 it goes back to being Half-Life's: you find it in Forget About Freeman, where the campaign has always given it to you.

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.