[WIP] "Lord of The Rims" Medivial Fantasy Magic Mod

[Kyos]

Hello and apologies for the atrocious pun. (Lord of the Realms was a great game)

"A trio (or more if you have the EdB prepare-carefully mod) of space travellers makes a unscheduled landing on a seemingly normal medieval tech level world. But as the horrible green mutants, giant fire spewing reptilians and strange artifacts that defies even glittertech make it abundantly clear, what you took for granted as the immutable laws of physics, no longer apply here."

"God help you."

Lord of the Rims

I didn't know GIMP had a pixellate filter.

This is my project, the stated purpose of which is to create a medieval tech full conversion of Rimworld. Then paint some fantasy elements on top of that, code permitting. Assistance in various aspects are welcome. Suggestions will be considered. Progress will be slow.

Aspects which I will rant about below with hotlinks for ease of reference:

• Armanents arms and armour. Mundane and fantastic
• Magic: The arcane, mechanics, what can and can not be done, minions and artifacts. etc.
• Monsters foes, friends, factions, beasts: Dragons, orcs, goblins, giants.
• Factions: Knightly orders, wizard towers, vikings (norbals?) peasant hamlets.
• This list is subject to the whim and whimsy of its author.

Finished Items in no particular order:

• Compressed steel is out, ore now comes in chunks. (Ores now have lite fantasy flavor to them)
• Electricity is out, your energy is now a wood/char/coal economy.
• Animals now produce animal-fat when butchered. This is important as food supplement or leatherworking.
• Armor crafting added.
• Armor craft now has stuff tags.
• Stuff tags now actually do something for armor.
• Metals now have defensive stuff-values.
• Added bones! Comes in four varieties. Because Rimworld is not very modder friendly.

[/list]

What a Medieval Mod Needs:

• Non-electric everything

As of A13: Tynan has added several new features. Such as refueling campfires and fuelable workbenches, which will solve so many problems for me. Thank you Tynan.

[Kyos]

Rimworld already offers a wide variety of medivial and even some neolithic armanents: So I thought I would elaborate on items which could bear some consideration:

Slings

A sling is one of the most simple weapons ever made, short of the Mk1 Rock. And even it has two varieties, a short sling for some direct fire close range and accurate shots. And a long sling, for long ranged indirect saturation fire. The sling was long considered the most effective counter to archers as a slinger could not operate in a packed formation, and usually out-ranged the contemporary archers of the time. - The main drawbacks is that its *really* hard to get good at slings and most slinger companies were recruited from areas with a long tradition of the darn things. - This is neither here nor there for the abstracted simulation that is Rimworld, but basicly, a solid weapon, made from plant fibers and leather. I imagine I'll have a prototype banged out in the next week, barring complete mod compilation failure.

Crossbows, is another one. Hunting, Light, Heavy, Siege... Repeating.

Eventually given enough research, players will be able to fashion crude gunpowder weapons.

Armor:
Here Rimworld actually has a point, since medivial, and I dare hope, modern armor systems were effective because they were layered. There was the brigandine, (or vapntrey� in nordic countries), which was just padded thick cloth that absorbed the piercing impacts of arrows and other projectiles. But was next to useless to the cutting force of a sword or a axe. Which is what the maille, or less derpily called, chainmail, was for. Which on its own, did not offer much protection against arrows, but combined, a warrior had very solid all around protection. Whereas a knight in shining armor would be next to impervious to damage... Unless he opened his visor at the wrong time and ate a faceful of crossbow bolts. - To that effect, I am making a line of helmets which hopefully will cover more than just the eyes.

So turns out that head slots are very picky affairs.

Finished items in green, coded but in need of art assets in yellow.

- Light Crossbow
- heavy Crossbow
- Repeating Crossbow
- Siege Crossbow
- Sling (short)
- Sling (long)
- Buckler
- Shield
- Kite Shield
- Tower Shield
- Cap
- Coif
- Pot Helmet
- Half Helmet
- Full Helmet
- Cuirass
- Hauberk
- Full

[Kyos]

Magic is one of my favorite topics, because its basicly a free license to go all out nonsensical, - within reason. While understandably, having a whole colony that can lob fireballs at whim might be incredibly broken (and hilarious). I, as the code illiterate I am, would not even know where to start. So what can be done within the system constraints of rimworld regarding magical chicanery?

... Well crafting. Mostly.

Nono, don't get up and leave. I am serious. And we can make this work. Or rather, I'll make it work since this is my mod thread (I kid, I can't code for ****). Lets just break it down a bit.

For the sake of this discussion, I am proposing that magic and magic related tasks is a fine balance between Research (book smarts magic) and Art (natural talent) and if I had any idea *how* I would give skilled researchers a range and precision bonus to casting and skilled artists a power and radius bonus to theirs. But I don't so whoop-whoop-whoop-wee. - The benefit of this abstracted idea is that I don't have to code in a entirely new Skill Type but can build ontop of the existing one.

In pretty much most fantasy settings, its relatively rare of wizards to channel the arcane with their bare hands. There's always some kind of focus involved. Wether it be a ironwood staff crackling with power, a ancient tome of spells, some kind of gem, or even a wooden stick with frilly unicorn hairs in its centre. So working from that logical fallacy: I have the terraria approach to magic.

Wands, Books, Staves, Etc: Which use Research and Art instead of Shooting and Melee. (Again, not a clue how to do this, but I am just rattling off concepts I've been coming up with for the past few weeks) with various effects, be it freezing, fire or shooting ligthtning. To more mundane things, (which I can't think up a good example of yet, bear with me and he looks PO'd)

Looking at great mods like MAI and MD2 Droids, we can derive the concept of craftable-minions. Thats two topics right there, Golemcraft and Necromancy.

Looking at the deluge of drug mods from the latest update we can derive Alchemy and Potioncraft. Because what is a fantasy game without the utterly generic Potion of Cure Booboos. (And flaming oil grenades)

Golemcraft: Golemcrafters Bench: for example, a skilled crafter can create the body using mundane materials, wood, stone blocks, even meat, (clay is traditional, but I'd have to mod that material in), the finished golem Form can have quality levels, for simplicitys sake, lets say it does. - The next step is activating the golem. For which you need a researcher/artist (see rant further up) with high skill to know the right words to put in the Golem's head. And barring complications, you have a obedient, but ultimately boring minion which will work until it crumbles from abuse.

The Necromancers workbench (Which is part surgery theatre and part taxidermy workshop) is quite a bit simpler, in that the creations don't need a second activation phase, and only requires one resource. Corpses! 

The state of the corpse does not matter to the necromancer. But will affect the end results. - A fresh body will create a strong and durable minion suitable for the many rigors a budding necrolyte faces in his career. Like mobs of pitchfork wielding peasants. While a several year old carcass (or bones at this point) Will make a weaker skeletal pawn, fragile but harder to harm with piercing weapons. - For immersion effect: I would like the corpse, to maybe have a disease like effect? Rot? That slowly atrophies it, until its a shambling slow paced zombie that reeks to high heaven, until its flesh rots away completely, leaving a dessicated skeletal minion. Which while not as slow as the rigor mortis ridden zombie, is very brittle and fragile. And only useful in combat roles out of melee range. Or tending fields. The rot can only be treated temporarely (using off shelf corpse preservatives) but not completely.

with additional research, the necromancer can start crafting superior minions, such as ghouls, death knights, and most notable, a frankensteinian creation using a dozen corpses, mixed and matched for best efficiency, this creature, closer to a flesh golem than a undead minion, will not have the rot issues of its kin, and superior stats across the board. It will however be very suspectible to flames and avoids them if possible.

Additionally: If I were to say the necromancer can craft neurotrainers from corpses, you'd just look at me as if I'd gone full potato. However, if I phrased it thusly. -using his extensive knowledge of the spirit world, the necromancer binds the spirit of a skilled but deceased master of its craft into the skull of a recently deceased. The skull thus augmented can be activated by staring deeply into its eyesockets, whereupon the spirit will impart as much knowledge as it can into the willing recipient. Pawns with a passion for the craft thus imparted will benefit the most. The skull, thusly spent disintegrates, releasing the spirit which fades back into the aether from which it was drawn. - see? Complete nonsense, but it sounds legit. The wonders of contextual narrative.

The Alchemy worktop is simple enough, a system of convoluted beakers and mortars n pestles for processing reagents and distilling them into liquids with the desired effects, be it life-saving medicines or explosives.

Not to say thats all there is to it. For example: One can code in a drink that renders the imbider immune to pain for several hours. Making him, if not a melee powerhouse, then certainly difficult for a raider band to take down. - A potion that improves manipulation dramatically for a while, and all affected tasks with it. A brew that boosts blood filtration to absurdity, and thus the Pawns ability to regenerate (at least I think thats what blood filtration does, correct me if I am wrong.) Fantasy settings can play hard and loose with the rules and make up analogues to even modern cybernetics without feeling out of place. (And this goes both ways with *some* "sci-fi".)

Enchantery Table Or infusion circle, or Thaumic Lathe.. Its a workstation for turning mundane objects into majik objects (TRADEMARK). The process itself would be easy, but initially you'd only be able to make simple items, such as magic daggers or enchanted rings. To make an item, you will need to craft something too enchant. The better quality item, the more it will benefit from the enchantment process. - Researching the Enchantment tech tree will unlock more recipees and more complex enchantments on this particular bench. (Instead of unlocking more effing benches... ) Enchanting takes reagent materials, which I haven't come up with yet. In addition to a strong Art skill. Because Magic (TRADEMARK). They will mostly be mundane crap, like extra damage or swiftness or accuracy.

Actually thinking about it: Why not let items re-roll its quality modifier? Or maybe jump-off from its initial modifier. So that its recommended using mastercrafted gear for your enchantments, otherwise you might end up with... Lets put it like this, you don't want enchanted items below 'Normal'. - instead of improving on the weapon, it actually becomes worse. - Items enchanted thusly are known as 'cursed' items. - Raiders will have a number of these if only because they tend to be thrown out with most other trash.

Enchanted items will not degrade if left outside and are fire proof.

[Kyos]

What is a man, a miserable pile of secrets! What is an orc? Big green and ugly!

Below are Factional ideas: Some are already out there, like orcs (And who cares if they are gun wielding space barbarian orks, some of us enjoy the challenge!) and some are not. Like Kobolds, why are you racist against kobolds, bru? What did kobolds ever do to you. Besides poisoning your iron, stealing your babies, raiding your villages and being the go-to comedy relief of Bioware games.

Now, Kobolds would be a standalone faction, minor pirates really, not siege users, but hit and run raiders. Weak and cowardly they will try to steal away items of value, with a primary focus on edibles or crafted goods. While shanking you in the legs on the way in and out. - Easily cowed by a skilled warden, they'd be little more than skilled miners and haulers, which goes a long way to explain their tendency to steal from other factions than making things themselves.

Giants would have a high point cost induvidually. Mostly because they'd be robust mofos to bring down with conventional tactics. Much like mechanoid centipedes. But meleecentric. Unless its a rock throwing giant. - Unsure how to make a giant pawn, but it might be doable? Most giants are armed with neolithic equipment and gear. If they bother at all. And tend to herd muffalo herds for sustenance. If you manage to recruit a giant to your cause, you'll have a very hungry, very unskilled and very STRONG oaf on your hands. Congratulations.

Undead: Occasionally a necromancer looses track of his mindless minions and the poor things wander off and try to perform the last order they were given. Usually murdering some poor sods. This can be a problem because being undead, they are not likely to break and rout. Fortunately, being dead, they are not very robust either.

CyberDemons because this is not very serious fantasy.
Replacing the mechanoids wholesale with CyberDemons, because why not. They appear from suddenly appearing demongates (resprited derelicts) which will jostle out a stream of unwarrantedly agressive hostile cyberneticly enhanced demonspawn. The demonic cybernetics can be harvested from either dead or living demons, but they themselves can not be recruited, unless you are extremely persuasive. Demonic cybernetics have some... drawbacks in human hosts. As you can imagine. (Infernal Firmware!)

[Kyos]

What factions would be suitable for a Medivial Fantasy world like... like.. sorry trying to make a pun on SkyRim and RimWorld, but its just not happening, lets just get on with some concepts:

The Norbal Viking Program is a amazing mod, if a little crazy to deal with without high powered weapons, and a great example of how much fun medeival centric combat can be. So naturally it'd go great with this mod, I think. - Something to consider in the future if I ever get this albatross off of the ground.

The Knights (Who may or may not say Ni)
What it says on the tin (hue) A randomly named order of knights, who may or may not be initially hostile to player faction. Usually consisting of lordlings and their squires with a assortment of men-at-arms for support. When agressive will attack with mounted (see mount concept appendix "Stupid Idea") armored knights and armored footmen, with the odd auxiliary bowmen. Can siege. Maybe using miniature catapult things (Just make a spoon shaped "mortar" on a frame. I believe someone is already hard at work with a faction similar to this. So props to them. Hope to see it finished.

Wizards of the Insert School Here:
Fantasy mod. There are wizards. - Not whole armies of wizards, the actual mages are high-point cost wonders (or several weaker apprentices) supported by armed thugs and goons. High chance of more unique items and wares. Like ancient elven M60s. - This would be your primary source of powerful magic artifacts. Though I would not be shy to let the player craft them himself, given enough research and investment.

Necromancer Guild: Same as the wizards, but with a dark bend, minions are mostly undead.



Dwarves
Mandatory stubby beardlings. - heavy armor, heavy axes, dabbles in crude gunpowder siege tools. Occasionally accompanied by gnomes or hill giants. If friendly: Will trade in their masterwork weapons and tools. (remember to ask Miscellanious author about making trade faction specific somehow)

The Fae:
Not a real faction as such, just replaces the role of traders. Will carry items ranging from mundanity, to spectacular, but more often than not, hideously cursed.

Adventuring Guilds: Elite faction with a high induvidual point cost, if hostile will send small but effective parties of heavily equipped 'adventurers'. Adventurers quality will depend mostly on colony wealth. Will most definately have rare and powerful artifacts that will be of use to your colony. (Occasionally carries strange but magic junk as well, bronze bones, rings of detect ennui, non-eucledian wheels.)

[Kyos]

Yannowhat? I have never liked the current resource model. Compressed steel ruins make sense (to a point, I would rename it as scrap metal, so we can make scrap swords and scrap walls! and refine it into steel proper (which would not be flammable, I do not understand the reasoning behind it. Its a weak material made a liability)

To get back to my point... I would like... Ore... Chunks. Bear with me, but I distracted him with some salmon.

The miner mines a ore-vein, which results occasionally in a chunk of ore, these can only be processed in the smelter. With me so far? So its basicly slag but yannow, decent ore payout. Lets say 75 steel per ore chunk.

No, not steel. wrought iron. Wrought iron is basicly what the Eiffel tower is made out of. So yannow, its not bad. Its just not as good as high carbon steel.  In fact, iron is a amazing material, with so many degrees of hardness and uses, I can't even name them all. Much less make a mod depicting it all in any detail. So we'll rub the abstraction brush on here. - Smelting ore makes wrought iron. Or regular iron for you plebs. Smelting iron with coal or charcoal, makes cast iron... Or iron with 4% or more coal in it. So we already have a conversion from from Wrought cast iron to Cast wrought iron, (in case you want to, I dunno, make cooking equipment and other implements, like anvils) Neither are good for military grade iron, or steel. Know why bronze swords were so short? Bronze is kinda soft. Harder than wrought iron, though. Or so I'm told. ... By wikipedia. (No, the reason was because bronze is HEAVY)

Dubious sources aside. To make steel, you have two ways of going about it. You can take the wrought iron cast iron, and smelt it into a iron bloom, then hammer the impurities out of it. This is of course intensively extremely labour intensive and only produces small quantities of steel. The other method involves taking the carbon rich cast iron, and smelting it again with a lot of oxygen in order to burn away the excess carbon, this requires a advanced and hot smelter however. If anyone suggests lava-powered smelters I will punch you in the face. I am all for fantasy normally, but only dwarves know the secrets of Magma smelting as far as my suspension of belief is concerned.

So there, you can either convert wrought into steel using coal and lots of labor, or convert cast iron into steel using lots of energy. edit: Long story short: Cast, Wrought and Steel can be turned into eachother with a lot of effort and work. Also I don't know jack about metallurgy and boy howdy does it show.

A cast iron wall would be impossibly durable.
Okay, so all the editing rendered the post unreadable - I'll do a quick summary here without the rambling for clarity.

Ore > Ore chunks > ore smelter > cast iron > wrought iron > steel

Addendum - This part is more or less completed now.
Even added a charcoaling process. - Now Boreal forests will not be enough.
- Charcoal added
- Charcoal process added
- ore to cast iron reaction added
- cast iron to wrought recipe added
- wrought iron to steel recipe added
- alternate cast-iron-straight-to-steel recipe added, requires flux stones. (In vanilla rimworld, these would be marble or limestone)

[Kyos]

Flora

.. plants...

Initially a colony has access to a wide spectrum of crops, - primarily of the foody variety, - some take longer than others, but has higher yields, or other benefits in the long-term. For a medeival mod, I felt we should use some more era-centric crops which hasn't been put in the main game yet

Grains: - Three kinds of grain, the fragile but bountiful wheat, the hardy but flavourless rye, and the sweet and beer-friendly barley. Each has their own usage and you have to balance their ratios if you want a successful colony. And some beer on the side. - Additionally there are turnips, pumpkins, lettuce, gourds and other staple crops. - The biggest benefit of grain however, is that it lasts practically forever. So a colony can do well with just stockpiling grain and using it up one meal at a time.

More esotericly: I was thinking of adding more arcane plants, - such as mandrake and various herbs with mystical connotations: no word if these will have specific planters, or if I will just wrangle someone to make a .dll for me

- Should probably update on this: Following flora has been added.
- Four kinds of grain.
- Cabbage
- Pumpkin
- Turnip
- Carrot

[Kyos]

Medivial medicine was rather crude, at best. The only antiseptic available was vinegar and the only painkiller was blunt force trauma. - Still, not to say it wasn't quite developed in certain aspects. Medieval people were not dumb. For one, they never put flouride waste in their own water and charged people for it.

Prosthethics: There really should be like, hook hands, or wooden hands. But that said. - It being medivial fantasy means that we have a bit more... leeway? Like say, a Iron Gut prosthethic, a belly made of enchanted corrosive resistant metal that dramatically improves metabolism/eating. Or eyes. - Ranging from Glass Eyes that do nothing but fill that horrible empty eyesocket. To decidedly organic eyes harvested from horrific beasts or demons. Glass eyes enchanted with simple majiks(TRADEMARK)Quiet you. Enchanted pearls purchased off of traders and so on and so on and so on. One benefit of this is that since magic is involved, the prosthethic organ can operate outside of its expectations. - A Heart of Darkness for example might save a colonists life and improve his blood pumpin' overall. But also gives him the psychopath trait. Not sure if thats even code-able, but thats why I post my concepts here. - To make people think outside the box. Or the ribcage in this case.

[Kyos]

Instead of ditching electricity entirely: We could rename it/resprite it to something more thematic: Like, I dunno. Mana, or Thaums. Lazy possibly, but why throw out the baby with the bathwater when there's still plenty of good eatin' on it.

That said: My analogies need work. And a ethics comission board.

Right, picking up where I left-off, Being a medivial society, the primary source of energy would be simply, fire. - So, basicly a wood based fuel economy. I was thinking some gradual increments in advancements as the colony progresses. From cooking fires, to cast-iron cauldron (see metallurgy post) and so forth. - Thaumic energies would primarily be used for the more arcane crafting processes. Such as the production of minions or gear. - ( I am not entirely sure how to begin to describe that using the arcane ley-lines of the planet to cook your muffalo meat and potatoes is not a very good idea (but it is a option!))

Initial concepts for producing thaums to power your arcane machinery: (Benches mostly)

Lowest Tier: Dream Catchers, (inverted solar panels)
Mid Tier: Thanatropic Differential Array (Graveyard energy, cheap and renevable)
Higher Tier: Leyline nexus (geothermal analogue)

[Kyos]

Just occurred to me (and this should really been a no-brainer), before you can make a medieval fantasy, you need a medieval world. I know, shocking. If you just pile on fantasy, you end up with meaningless dross and spectacular set-pieces, barely tied together with the loosest of narrative strings.

That said: I think most of the work can be done via the research tree.
By which I mean, locking away the electric stuff and introducing wood-fueled analogues. Wood is going to be very important in this mod.

[Kyos]

Just a heads up, I can't C#. Period. With XMLs everything is vaguelly defined in language that makes sense to me. So with sufficent trial and error I can sort of work things out in backwards order. With C# I don't have that. I have page up and page down of untranslatable gibberish. If I alter a line in XML, a item either stops spawning or acts weird. If I alter a line in a C# assembly, the thing won't even compile.

What this translates into is that I'm going to have to cut out a lot of planned features with a blunt machete. No there's no getting around this short of outsourcing the task. Most if not all assemblies are fragile snowflake codes that exists solely to serve the mod they're packed with. Unlike a lot of my work to date, I can't just take a assembly and repurpose it to suit my needs.

Not without special tools anyway...

Hold that thought.

- Okay, that was a mistake, blood everywhere, the fire won't go out and the ritual started. I need to find a young priest, a old priest and a Judas Priest before things escalate.
- I don't even know where the blood is coming from! Its just gushing from the rafters!

[Kyos]

The art of FoodSmithing

This one is pretty straightforward fortunately enough. I can just use the existing meal system, - I could also make some new items that our founding fathers fled the mainland to avoid. Like Porridges, bread, stews.

I could create some faux variety by making several different looking food items and just setting the graphic tag to simple-meals as "random"

[Kyos]

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