Features

Mushroom Mod was made with the understanding that many of Sven Coop's maps can become overwhelmingly unfair because there are not enough players in a server, or on other occasions quite boring because of repetitiveness and predictability, if not simply old and uninteresting. In many cases, despite having a decent amount of players, some mappers build their maps with silly amounts of monsters and give the players very little to fight them off with. Additionally, frags are essentially useless in Sven Coop from the beginning. Mushroom Mod solves all this by adding many effective and fun features that not only add to a player's arsenal for the sake of combat but also add fun ways to approach combat.

Sentries

Mushroom Mod has taken the idea of NeoTF's Multigun to provide the player with five different sentries which the player can purchase and deploy to fight off hordes of enemy monsters. There are five deployable sentries a player can choose from: the rocket launcher, the grenade launcher, the teslacoil, the snark launcher, and the standard sentry.

Laser-guided Smart Sentries

While deployable sentries can do a lot of damage, their recharge times and ranges can be very limited. To compensate, Mushroom Mod gives the player the option to use laser sentries instead, which take their inspiration from Team Fortress Classic, but with a twist. You can use the "Railgun" sentry for accuracy, or use brute force with the "Battleshark" laser sentry.

Monsters

In addition to an assortment of sentries, Mushroom Mod offers six fully fledged monsters when the player requires a companion of greater mobility and independence. Each monster has its own set of abilities. Some of them are based on where the enemy is, what kind of enemy it is, or how much health the enemy has.

Rocketsquid - A bullsquid that learned how to use an RPG Launcher.

Robohacker - A robogrunt that downloaded cheats; he will noclip through walls and open doors for you on occasion. He teleports to you when you're holding your ground against enemies on occasion. He also telefrags enemies and changes their health.

Voidshifter - A creature that changes form. He can become an alien grunt or an alien controller. He also converts some enemy aliens into allies. In controller form he will throw ranged enemies into the sky.

Necromancer - An alien slave who ran away and decided to become a voodoo abusing shaman. He throws an additional electrical bolt at the enemy which absorbs health from surrounding enemies. He can turn human enemies into zombies and has an assortment of voodoo vexes to combat the enemy with.

Headcrab Engineer - A headcrab with a Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering. He'll build his own sentries and place them around the map as he sees fit. He can toss explosive satchels and bouncing bomblets. He performs surprisingly well against large enemies.

Mad Scientist - A scientist turned madman after the Black Mesa incident. He used to bully Gordon Freeman at lunch. Now he makes mobile energy generators, zombie factories, and black holes. He's eager to test his new experimental weapons on his enemies: a poison grenade and an enhanced snark.

Dispensers

Dispensers were quite useful in Team Fortress Classic and NeoTF. Health dispensers were especially useful. Mushroom Mod provides three different dispensers that serve similar purposes on the field of combat. The health dispenser, the armor dispenser, and the energy drink machine, which is a combination of both, but with energy drink levels.

Vehicles

Mushroom Mod offers remote controlled vehicles that are useful when there are simply too many enemies to step out of cover. They are also quite useful in navigable levels where you can use a vehicle to take out a ton of enemies. There are currently two types of vehicles: drones and remote-controlled helicopters. Both have the same abilities, except that the latter comes with an automatic machine gun.

Gadgets

There are a few gadgets that solve a lot of problems players have in the conventional Sven Coop map. These were made keeping in mind the frustration some players feel when having to get around a ridiculous obstacle or having to walk all the way from the spawnpoint to where they died.

Teleporters - You can spawn your own teleporter and move it around throughout the map, thereby allowing you to skip the parts of the level you've already completed in case of respawning.

Walljump -The walljump in The Specialists was fun and useful in The Specialists, now it's fun and useful in Sven Coop. This is a typically cheap gadget that can save you some time having to get from A to B by simply jumping straight to B.

Hoverboards - You can spawn a hoverboard and glide through some of the more navigable and straightforward maps. However, Sven Coop maps have all kinds of physical configurations, so we included thrusters in case you need to fly over some obstacles or get past open spaces quickly.

Pickup

Mushroom Mod adds new items to the game which the player can use when they decide. Once a player picks up an item, they keep it until they use it or until they leave the server.

Timed Bomb - A bomb in the framework of the TFC Demoman's detonator, except more explosive.

Hacking Toolkit - A tool that allows you to force open locked doors.

Hornet Grenade - A grenade that fires hornets when exploded.

Mushroom - Gives you extra frags.

Timed Ghost - Gives you noclip for a short amount of time.

Black Hole Generator - Generates a miniature black hole in an open area. You might want to tell your friends to stand back.

Technical

Server administrators should take note of two components relating to serverside management. The first is the option to disable custom models. It is recommended that this be configured in the main configuration file. In other cases the map configuration would have superceded the main one, but models are precached first. The second is Mushroom Mod's built in precache control. Mushroom Mod has a lot of precaches. This is usually not a problem. In fact, statistically, less than 1 in 10 maps will be problematic. In some maps, Mushroom Mod will not be able to precache everything, so it only precaches the necessities. In such cases, Mushroom Mod will remain fully functional, but will work without special effects and some models. Unfortunately there is no easy way to change the precache limit in the Goldsource engine, but Mushroom Mod compensates by controlling precaches. At the expense of those expended precaches, precache control will save your server from crashing on such maps.