[A12d][ModPack] The ModVarietyPack

[Kardek]

Hi, just wanted to reach out and see if any there was any luck with progress on shield compatibility and combat realism (CR).

I've nearly overcome my apathy to take CR out to put some of the great shield mods in till its resolved but I'm hoping I dont have to

EDIT - Just wanted to say thank you for this amazing pack. Lot of great mods and really appreciate the effort bringing it altogether in a great experience!

[simon-82]

Hi, just wanted to reach out and see if any there was any luck with progress on shield compatibility and combat realism (CR).
I've nearly overcome my apathy to take CR out to put some of the great shield mods in till its resolved but I'm hoping I dont have to
EDIT - Just wanted to say thank you for this amazing pack. Lot of great mods and really appreciate the effort bringing it altogether in a great experience!

Well, I talked to Skully about his shields. He was very kind and made a patch for CR. With the modified .dll file the shield theoretically blocks the CR bullets.
While testing the new shields, we uncovered the real problem.
The main problem is that these bullets travel much (much!) faster than the vanilla bullets. Simply put, the game can't calculate things fast enough to make the shield absorb all the bullets. This results in some bullets passing through the shield, some not.
Good news is that noimageavailable is working on a new release of CR which will have reduced bullet-speeds.
If all the bullets are slowed down, the shields will be able to register every hit and be usable again.

When I try to add the mending mod or high-caliber mod to this, the research tab is blank, and I can't research anything. Please fix, thank you

I can't support you, if you add other mods to the pack yourself.
If you want to add / remove mods, you have to fix the resulting bugs yourself, sorry.

Has anyone run into a bug where a wounded and subsequently treated character refuses to work and their current action changes to "Standing"?
I've only had it happen in this mod pack, so I'm curious if it's a known bug.

Didn't have this bug for a long time. I thought it was fixed. Can you upload a logfile (and maybe savegame) with the error?



New release v.1.25 is ready

Also, the modpack has a website / blog now
Visit http://simon-82.github.io/ModVarietyPack
and find everything related to the modpack! (plus some (more or less interesting) blog posts by me )

I also posted the changelog there in this blog post

Also updated the first post of this thread with all the links to the website.
Everything from the old wiki is there now, downloads, installation instructions, everything in one place

[jldkrocks]

Started with a new install and a new game but im getting this bug when accessing the completed research and it stops me from using it ever again unless i reload the save. I keep accidently hitting it...

[Fluffy (l2032)]

-ugh-
@jldkrocks: see here; https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=17548.0

[Cherna]

New release v.1.25 is ready

Good job, thanks! Can we play with old saves after update?

[Astasia]

Having said that, I was wondering if the MAIs themselves made sense to keep and I think going with these little bots is better for the overall experience. They are easy to handle, have their own bed /recharge station and don't clutter up the colonist lists.

I feel like you are thinking of MAIs as a utility, something you build to do a job but don't really care about. To me they are full colonists, expensive to build, but with some advantages over other colonists. I don't think the utility bots are even remotely similar, and while the new ones are really cool, I don't understand at all why you'd want to remove MAIs.

[jldkrocks]

-ugh-
@jldkrocks: see here; https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=17548.0

Thanks that worked

[simon-82]

Good job, thanks! Can we play with old saves after update?

Unfortunately not, too much has changed. I suggest you finish up your colony on the oold version and start fresh with the new one.

I feel like you are thinking of MAIs as a utility, something you build to do a job but don't really care about. To me they are full colonists, expensive to build, but with some advantages over other colonists. I don't think the utility bots are even remotely similar, and while the new ones are really cool, I don't understand at all why you'd want to remove MAIs.

It was a hard decision to make, don't get me wrong. And while I do like the MAIs, there were some issues with them that I found during my playthroughs. For one, the nanite repair thing was causing job errors when colonists tried filling it.
I also had somebody report an issue on github to me about unlocking skills for MAIs. It would sometimes unlock an ability, sometimes not, sometimes all of them at once.
The next thing was a problem with the MAIs using colonists beds instead of their own recharge station.
While it is not a great problem in itself, it illustrates the main problem I have with the MAIs - the MAIs are basically treated as humans by the game (with a different texture and no needs). So for example a colonist went to sleep in a MAI recharge station (because it is technically a bed), the MAIs show up in the colonist bar or they show up in recipes related to human corpses (like biomatter from MAIs).
Most of this is minor stuff that I could have (or had already) fixed, true. Again, it was not an easy decision to make and maybe I will add them back.
Ultimately, I was looking at what the MAIs would do for my colony and what the utility bots could do, if there were more types of them. They are bots. They should serve and take the workload off my colonist to let them do useful stuff. The ones in the pack now are what I found most important. They do the dumb labour (hauling, cleaning, cooking, mining, ...) and let my skilled colonists do work that needs skill (research, construct, ...). 

[Astasia]

I guess I was lucky to not experience any of those issues while using them. I can see how some of that wonkyness might negatively impact the game for other people. I've just gone ahead and added them back on my own, so it's no big deal.

While I'm here, a couple suggestions. The Quantum Storage stuff is really cool, but completely outclassed by Deep Storage in almost every way, it holds vastly fewer items per tile, at a higher resource cost, and a large power cost. I only tend to set up a small area of them late game to deal with chunk collection, and maybe another area for garbage equipment drops, but only when I'm at stupid high power levels. Maybe that is their intended role in the pack, with Deep Storage intended to be used everywhere else, but I just wish it was feasible to use the quantum storage elsewhere. On my end I've tried reducing the power cost to 1/10 for all the pieces, just to see if that makes them remotely viable, but I don't know if that is enough. I believe there is a stack per tile cap, so I didn't want to try boosting that.

Also, there's a ton of good weapon crafting options in the pack, but very little for armor. In fact I noticed that was the same for pretty much all the "main" packs right now, I don't really understand why. I've thrown in Brunayla's armor crafting with some tweaking, but that's just base game armor. I would love to be able to craft the Rimsenal armors.

[captainradish]

Is there any way to add a large shield/blast door? I enjoy building arctic bases and like having a big shield door like on Hoth. I remember there being one in existence, but I'm not sure it has ever been updated. It acted like a togglable wall.

Edit: OK, I guess it wasn't as hard to find as I thought. Beantek blast door: https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=12243.0

[jldkrocks]

Would I be able to add combat realism defence, mending and high caliber without any problem?

[Fluffy (l2032)]

try it, if it doesn't work, you try adding em one by one. But for high calibre if it doesn't have a combat realism patch or something it won't work.

[Britnoth]

Having said that, I was wondering if the MAIs themselves made sense to keep and I think going with these little bots is better for the overall experience. They are easy to handle, have their own bed /recharge station and don't clutter up the colonist lists.

I feel like you are thinking of MAIs as a utility, something you build to do a job but don't really care about. To me they are full colonists, expensive to build, but with some advantages over other colonists. I don't think the utility bots are even remotely similar, and while the new ones are really cool, I don't understand at all why you'd want to remove MAIs.

Removing them is an excellent step. The issue is they are FAR from expensive.

500 steel, 350 silver and some chips for a new colonist? Entirely circumvents the existing prisoner recruiting method making high social wardens useless. They also do not go berzerk, making the entire colonist mood mechanic redundant. As he said, they are also a bit glitchy.

Having them require using an AI core would at least increase their cost to a more reasonable level. That is the self imposed restriction I used. And I still felt dirty. 

I would love to be able to craft the Rimsenal armors.

Are those the marksman/reflex armour sets? Those things are pretty broken in their own right, and fairly cheap in price to buy.

Same shooting bonus as full bionic eyes for 1500 silver, and some armour on top? Yes please.

Also fun to have trigger happy guys down to 29% aim time when using helms with aim time decrease on them.. and that is with infusion mod disabled...

Armour types may only appear lacking because MVP has such a multitude of redundant weapons with almost identical stats to many others... which I mentioned to Simon yesterday. You can probably reduce the number of weapons by 50-75% and lose no choice of weapon to use whatsoever.

Edit: Adding a tiny fix after being requested. o/

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[NemesisN]

any news on those shields with Combat Realism ?

[Astasia]

Removing them is an excellent step. The issue is they are FAR from expensive.

500 steel, 350 silver and some chips for a new colonist? Entirely circumvents the existing prisoner recruiting method making high social wardens useless. They also do not go berzerk, making the entire colonist mood mechanic redundant. As he said, they are also a bit glitchy.

Having them require using an AI core would at least increase their cost to a more reasonable level. That is the self imposed restriction I used. And I still felt dirty. 

The good ones do require an AI core to activate. AI core is like 5-10k silver or a rare event, you can buy slaves from several merchant ship types for ~1-2k silver each. I don't see the issue. Mood mechanic is "redundant" as soon as you install a joywire on all your colonists, which is again only like 1.5k silver each, far cheaper than an AI core.

Are those the marksman/reflex armour sets? Those things are pretty broken in their own right, and fairly cheap in price to buy.

Same shooting bonus as full bionic eyes for 1500 silver, and some armour on top? Yes please.

Also fun to have trigger happy guys down to 29% aim time when using helms with aim time decrease on them.. and that is with infusion mod disabled...

Armour types may only appear lacking because MVP has such a multitude of redundant weapons with almost identical stats to many others... which I mentioned to Simon yesterday. You can probably reduce the number of weapons by 50-75% and lose no choice of weapon to use whatsoever.

Yes, those are 2 of the Rimsenal armor types. I think they are decently balanced, they all have fairly large negatives to counter their boosts. The 20-30% armor on the marksmen set for example is essentially useless in this pack because of combat realism, so that's a glass cannon set. The heavier armors have large penalties to offense and/or mobility. You can maybe buy an awful one for 1.5k silver, a master or legendary is like 20-30k silver. You get to a point where you are selling as much as you can to every trade ship that comes along, getting 5-10k silver each, and it still takes a while to get enough to buy one or two pieces of armor, then you are also waiting for a ship to come around that has the piece you need in a decent quality. I'd rather spend like 500 plasteel, some hyperweave, and a bunch of electronics and craft the armor parts I want. Maybe that means creating a new "armor plating" part that works like the weapon parts, so you can get enough raw resources into the crafting recipe to balance it. 50 plasteel bars and 50 hyperweave creates 10 armor plates, 100 armor plates and 50 electronic chips makes one rimsenal body armor, something like that.

I don't think there's a lack of armor types in the pack, though I am curious why most of apparello is disabled. The issue is you can't craft any of it. Like the only armor crafting options in the pack are vests, light combat armor and steam armor. Light combat armor is basically useless, steam armor is very difficult to use because of the -max temp penalty. I tend to spend most of my time running around in just clothes, getting limbs shot off or dying in one hit because they offer zero protection against combat realism bullets, gearing up in armor is a very difficult and luck dependent effort.