[A15] Ancestral Spirits - ALPHA

[MinutesToWeekend]

There is the save game.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cqp3t0ts5dlsk3e/RimWorld_savegame_with_ancestors_bug_wishmaster.zip?dl=0

But I guess this happens even on a fresh savegame with only hospitality + ancestors + patch, just like I tried before your update...

I'll take a look, thanks.

No, it has to be a bug, I wasn't exaggerating just wasn't being precise. My magic value is something like -2,453,233,444. I've seen it happen twice now, once when I try and move a shrine and once when I uninstalled and reinstalled your mod with a shrine in place.

That's pretty strange. That appears to be above INT_MAX and...uh, shouldn't be possible? Can you send me the save?

Bug Reports:

1) Male animals can become pregnant from the "bestowing a child upon ____" event. My six-year-old male cat named Cairo is now pregnant O.o

2) Wild animals will hunt spirits when hungry. I spent ~5 minutes watching a wild timber wolf bite a spirit repeatedly. The spirit, not counting as a colonist, didn't receive help from the turrets nearby. The 9999 HP helped with its health, though. It never went before 99995 health as it would regenerate faster than the wolf could hit it.

1) Obviously the magic of the Ancestors is just that powerful!

...I'll add in a check for that.

2) Hmm, yeah, that's problematic. I'm not gonna fix that now, though; that'll be addressed when I roll around to targeting. You can probably use Wishmaster's supplementary patch if you like, though I haven't tested it myself with that case.

Incidentally in the newest version Ancestors should be literally immune to all damage, instead of just having super high armor and regenerating health.

[Seinne]

I edited the save file before  I read you wanted it. If it happens again I'll send you a copy somehow.

[Darkmark8910]

Bug Reports:

1) Male animals can become pregnant from the "bestowing a child upon ____" event. My six-year-old male cat named Cairo is now pregnant O.o

1) Obviously the magic of the Ancestors is just that powerful!

...I'll add in a check for that.

Time to make all the yaoi fangirls squirm by only letting the boys get the goodies ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[Darkmark8910]

Update: Cairo the Manly Man Cat gave birth. He has three daughters now....

[Wishmaster]

Another pregancy problem: Ancestors made my cobra pregnant.... but the cobra breed with eggs !

[Wishmaster]

Also when I tried to petition Bless Crops, my colonist seem stuck on the shrine (I don't very long to be honest). So I draft and undraft and it says I just spent 9 magic (instead of 1 !), which is as much as brazier I have.

[MinutesToWeekend]

Another pregancy problem: Ancestors made my cobra pregnant.... but the cobra breed with eggs !

...I didn't think of that possibility. I'll see if I can make them be, uh, pregnant with eggs? Lay eggs? Or maybe just exclude egg-layers.

Also when I tried to petition Bless Crops, my colonist seem stuck on the shrine (I don't very long to be honest). So I draft and undraft and it says I just spent 9 magic (instead of 1 !), which is as much as brazier I have.

That's definitely intentional, though it may be badly explained. There should be a tutorial message on it. Basically, you can spend more or less magic, depending on how badly you want the ritual. Base chance is 80%, .5 is 60%, and 1.5 is full. How much magic you spend is equal to the number of lit braziers.

So, for things like crop blessings, you might want to devote half magic, since on average you'll come out ahead just repeatedly trying it. However for smiting enemies, which you really want to work, you might want to devote the full 1.5 since you need lightning and you need it now.

As far as it immediately firing, uh, that's a bug. And the petitions have variable length. I'll put up a progress bar and handle cancellations more gracefully.

[Wishmaster]

So that means I would need roundup (1*1.5) = 2 braziers to be 100% sure to get my crop blessing ?
I didn't know that chance thing. But what's you want to control how much you spend ? and isn't most of my magic wasted when I spend 9 points for crops blessing?

[Canute]

I think too, there need to be a control about the prayer.
I though the braziers are just how much max. magic i can use, i just notice now, i can switch them off.
At last there need a better description about the shrine and prayers.

[Mekhet]

First off, the mod is really entertaining and i think it´s great that you are so passionate to constantly work on fixing those bugs (laughed my ass off when the hungry panther died from starvation trying to kill an ancestor) and making process day by day. Many thanks for that. It´s really fun to use and i´m using it alot, mostly the call rain prayer to extinguish burning loot from torched raids. One thing about the mod concerns me though: in my opinion magic is too easy to get. in my current playthrough i basically put the shrine into a 10x10 room with marble walls and wooden flooring -> done. Never touched the room again, ancestors are satisfied and i get to use the massively strong prayer bonuses (remove toxic rain -> no problem) without any further investment. I would suggest making magic generation a work bill (that maybe generates joy?) and while we are at it i would suggest (you know what comes now, dont you) adding a sacrificial table to..well.. sacrifice...stuff..like maybe..wool? 

that aside i also had problems with EPOE on the new playthrough -> some bills couldnt be finished, the crafting process stopped at 0 or -10. Repeatedly restarting the same bill resulted in sometimes finishing a product. sounds weird to connect the issue to your mod, but i didnt change my mods besides adding AS (though theres the possibility that some got updated by steam).

PS: First post in any game forum ever i really like it here

[MinutesToWeekend]

So that means I would need roundup (1*1.5) = 2 braziers to be 100% sure to get my crop blessing ?
I didn't know that chance thing. But what's you want to control how much you spend ? and isn't most of my magic wasted when I spend 9 points for crops blessing?

I think too, there need to be a control about the prayer.
I though the braziers are just how much max. magic i can use, i just notice now, i can switch them off.
At last there need a better description about the shrine and prayers.

You control the amount of magic spent on each petition by lighting/dousing the attached braziers. You can have as many attached braziers as you want, but only the number of *lit* braziers is count when determining magic. I'm not sure it's explained well enough; I made mention in the tutorial but either it's unclear, or it didn't fire, or more likely nobody ever reads tutorials. I may add in an upper bound check to make sure somebody doesn't accidentally burn 9 magic when they meant to burn 1 though.

The intent of the whole system is to kind of replicate the whole "setting up for a ritual" feeling - you want to pray for good fortune so you go in and light the incense before you pray, kind of thing. Dunno how successful it is at that.

[...]
One thing about the mod concerns me though: in my opinion magic is too easy to get. in my current playthrough i basically put the shrine into a 10x10 room with marble walls and wooden flooring -> done. Never touched the room again, ancestors are satisfied and i get to use the massively strong prayer bonuses (remove toxic rain -> no problem) without any further investment. I would suggest making magic generation a work bill (that maybe generates joy?) and while we are at it i would suggest (you know what comes now, dont you) adding a sacrificial table to..well.. sacrifice...stuff..like maybe..wool? 

that aside i also had problems with EPOE on the new playthrough -> some bills couldnt be finished, the crafting process stopped at 0 or -10. Repeatedly restarting the same bill resulted in sometimes finishing a product. sounds weird to connect the issue to your mod, but i didnt change my mods besides adding AS (though theres the possibility that some got updated by steam).

PS: First post in any game forum ever i really like it here

Hi! Welcome to the forums. Glad to hear you're liking the mod.

As far as magic being too easy to get/too powerful, that's a balancing thing which I haven't really addressed yet because I'm not even in the "Features are roughly complete" stage. I was toying around with adding a sacrifice-based system, but am thinking more on it.

As far as EPOE and conflicts go, that's very strange! I've been playing my own game with EPOE enabled, as well as my mod, and haven't had any issues I've noticed. Can you upload the save file and the output log? You can find the saves in "C:\Users\[Your User]\AppData\LocalLow\Ludeon Studios\RimWorld\Saves" and the output.log in "[Your Rimworld Install Location]\RimWorld\RimWorldWin_Data\output_log.txt" - and if you're running a set of mods that isn't just EPOE/Ancestors, it would be really helpful to also have the ModsConfig file, found in "C:\Users\[Your User]\AppData\LocalLow\Ludeon Studios\RimWorld\Config"

Just a heads up - I'm not going to be working on this probably until after a couple weeks into December, so you won't see any updates in the short term.

[Canute]

You control the amount of magic spent on each petition by lighting/dousing the attached braziers. You can have as many attached braziers as you want, but only the number of *lit* braziers is count when determining magic. I'm not sure it's explained well enough; I made mention in the tutorial but either it's unclear, or it didn't fire, or more likely nobody ever reads tutorials. I may add in an upper bound check to make sure somebody doesn't accidentally burn 9 magic when they meant to burn 1 though.

Put a similar text at the description of the shrine.
Yes you are right, i never read/used the tutorial.

And another suggestion, after the prayer is finished (successful or not) the gods should turn off all braziers.

[Tammabanana]

...sacrifice...

I think a lot of ancestor-revering societies don't "sacrifice" to the ancestors so much as they offer them gifts - favorite foods left at the shrine, flowers left on a grave.

IMO, the ancestor mechanics could benefit from loving bribery.

[4rfv2wsx]

Just wanted to echo the above bug reports. I've been hit with both the shrine 'disappearing' on save load and the -2 billion magic. I'll try to give as much detail as I can, but I didn't debug it too deeply.

Shrine Bug
The shrine bug was completely unavoidable in my play through. It happened at every single load. Unfortunately, I was playing Permadeath so playing with save/load techniques wasn't in the cards. The shrine did not physically disappear, only the room stopped 'seeing' it and would revert to 'Room' and not 'Shrine Room'. This would make matters worse if an Ancestral Visit was active at the moment of saving. The "Shrine has been destroyed!' alert would sound and they would be pissed about it.

One way to sort-of counter it was to enable 'pause on load' in the options (should be default in my opinion... :-P) and hop into dev-mode. Destroy the bugged shrine then god-mode a new one in its place. If no ancestors are currently spawned, it seemed to work well (though tedious). If they are around they didn't always seem to despawn if I replaced it this way. I think it might have reset the visit timer because hovering over "Ancestral Visit" event would read out "They should have left by now!" or something to this effect. But they would almost always leave unhappy. :-(

Negative Magic
The colossal neg-magic bug only hit me once. I have not been able to repeat it and I'm not 100% sure when it happened/triggered. I just noticed it at some point when checking the shrine so I edited the value in my save back to the defaulted 6 and never saw it again. It was pretty early in the game, first or second season if I remember correctly. Almost looked like some sort of overflow error, but I'm not familiar with even what language Rimworld is built on. Sorry I don't have any more then that, but I wanted to at least add a second report that it has happened.

Mod List
I am playing with a decent amount of mods, EPOE and Hospitality among them. I also had to two patches mentioned up-thread. If a full mod list and save file can be of any use, I'll be happy to post them.



Anyways, it's sadly become unplayable. The shrine bug has made it almost impossible to quit the playing if I want to maintain any amount of magic. It's just constant punishment in the form of mood debuffs and blights. So, I've stripped my save of everything pertaining to this mod so I can continue without it. That said, it is a really neat concept. I was looking forward to replacing Tech with Mysticism in my Tribal/Medieval colony. I will definitely give it another shot once you get a chance to work out the bugs. (^_^) b

[faltonico]

...sacrifice...

I think a lot of ancestor-revering societies don't "sacrifice" to the ancestors so much as they offer them gifts

Mayans LOVED "to gift" the blood and hearts of humans to their ancestors