The desert region mod recently got the axe in DDA with no real reason as to why.
...that would explain why it keeps glitching out, and why it takes several attempts to generate a playable character. DDA doesn't WANT me to play it.
Because I don't need to pour more kerosene on DDA's flaming mess, I actually understand why they would axe it.
1) It apparently wasn't the most popular of mods.
2) DDA is more buggy on the Desert region due to DDA's temperature system being balanced on New England weather.
3) Thus leading to more bug reports that don't make sense until the player says "Oh, I was using the Desert Region mod"
4) Thus either leaving the decision of fixing the game based upon a minor mod, or axeing the mod.
5) And the death keel is that apparently the mod's author disappeared (its been on version 0.2 for several years). Nobody exists who cares to update it.
The specific technical issues, that seems to have actually been fixed to some degree, are that Desert region mod works by changing all the fields into desert and increasing the ambient temperature (I think). There used to be bugs in that the game required field regions to spawn things (like the Helicopter crash, for example). That has been fixed, since I saw Helicopter crashed in the desert now. My guess is that after all that work, it was decided to just cut the buggy mess.
I however thought it was an interesting concept, the idea that the game could exist in different biomes. Maybe there could be a Tropical mod, an Arctic mod, or even Country/region mods so that Japanese Pagodas or European Castles could appear. But it's
difficult.