[1.2] Sparkling Worlds - Glittertech on the Rim

[Canute]

Hi Albion,
could you please take a look into the doctor event ?
I send 2 pawn on it, one with medicin 0 and the other with 8, the message text took the one with skill 0.

[Albion]

The event technically doesn't check for the best medicine skill but for the best Medical Tend Quality. Did you check those?
If your medicine 8 doctor is missing an arm, fingers or an eye he might actually be worse than the medicine 0 guy.

[Canute]

He got a lost middle finger,
but the Skill 0 got 11% medical tend quality, the skill 8 got 54%.

Ok, i just got another Doctor event, lets try again with the same pawns.
Nope, same result.
Tryed other pawn combination, this time the more skilled pawn got used.
But i notice at first the 0 skill pawn, was at the first position at the caravan list. With the other combination the 0 skilled pawn was the at the second.

[Albion]

This is quite weird because I use a vanilla function to determine which pawn has the highest medical tend quality stat in a caravan. Can you do some testing with the pawn and their caravan positions? I can't look into it myself until after the weekend due to visiting relatives and wedding stuff.

[Canute]

I got 5 pawns, skill 10, skill 8, 3 with 0.
I don't found any relevanz with the caravan position.
With the skill 10 in the caravan he is allways taken.
But if is these special skill 0 in the caravan he is prefered before the skill 8 one.

So i think, basicly the event is working correct, and there is just a glitch with these pawn.

[Canute]

Some words about the mind altering device.
-At first a progress timer wouldn't be bad.
-And the time the pawn spend in the casket could a bit longer, 1 day isn't too short.
-Altering sickness should prevent a reuse of the casket.

Currently i think it is balanced, since it change the whole trait set and you never know what you get.
But it even can cause to imbalance when you play withs mod that add very powerful traits like Rim of Magic,Vampire,Werwolfes.

What do you think to add special mind sweep program's:
- Erase all traits, pretty fast process.
- Erase negativ traits, Very slow process since the mashine need to be careful.

Some additional catastrophal sideeffect's like eliminate relationship or lowering highest skill.

Maybe an additional Very expensive Research, that allow you to select 3 traits you want to program into the pawn.
Together with a new casket that need Adv. component's and Luciferium it shouldn't be that unbalanced at lategame.

[Albion]

Now that I'm a married man I'm back to modding. I'm currently doing a small side-project for ChickenPlucker but will be back to modding Sparkling Worlds on Friday. I also plan to finally release a german translation with the next patch.

Regarding your feedback Canute:
- There actually is a small progression bar on the device. It's that small yellow bar filling up right in the middle.
- You're right. I might increase the reprogramm timer to 0.5-1 day. 1/4 day is relatively short.
- The idea with altering sickness and the mood debuffs is that you can actually reuse the casket but bad things will happen if done to often in quick succession.

I usually balance Sparkling Worlds with just vanilla Rimworld in mind. Other mods like Rim of Magic or Madness will break said balance.

I don't plan to add additional features like erasing negative traits or being able to pick traits. There reasons are relatively simple:
- It would severly break the balance since you could create the "perfect" colonists. The MAD is designed to be somewhat chaotic and even locking features like this behind a long research makes them eventually available... Also even Glitterworld inhabitants have negative traits so I feel like that's okay.
- Actually more importantly: It would require quite a bit of extra code. Especially code I have never written before. For now I would rather focus on features that are more easily implementable.

Your suggestions for additional side effects are interesting. I wrote them down and might implement them in the future.

Progress update for the next update:
- ship crashes can be infested with hives instead of mechanoids
- replaced ship engines in the ship crash event with broken engines that drop less resources
- fixes to improve the trade fair event and resolve some issues
- infested ship chunks drop some resources when destroyed
- some other minor changes
- hunting lodge event is partially done. Still need to implement the code for the map generation and crush some bugs

[Canute]

I don't plan to add additional features like erasing negative traits or being able to pick traits. There reasons are relatively simple:
- It would severly break the balance since you could create the "perfect" colonists. The MAD is designed to be somewhat chaotic and even locking features like this behind a long research makes them eventually available... Also even Glitterworld inhabitants have negative traits so I feel like that's okay.

Yep, thats why i suggest to put that behind some real tough research. And maybe need Adv. component's.
So this is realy something for the endgame, when pawn's allready got full bionic's and good quality gauss/railguns. So it wouldn't realy matter if they got "perferct" traits.
Just keep it in mind if you got bored or when you don't got sleep because of the first baby ! :-)

[Albion]

Well the first baby is about 2 (planned) years away so there is still a lot of time...

I guess I'll eventually implement it but right now I got a rather long list of features I want to implement first. It's a continuesly growing list that will keep me busy for at least another 6 months I'm guessing.

[Albion]

An update on what's happening right now:
I'm hard at work to get the mod v1.0 ready. There were quite a few changes to the code and a lot of them affected by mod. It'll therefore take a few more days before I'm release ready.
At that point I'll upload a manual download with a test version of the mod.

The new features I was working on will also be integrated into the new version. B18 will however not get updated anymore.

On another note: I set up a support page. All money collected there will directly go into the mod and it's development. I got a job that covers my usual expenses but I would love to pay some artists to do more awesome textures and maybe create a short trailer.

[Umbreon117]

A short trailer? Well if my computer could record Rimworld with decent FPS then I could make a basic one in-game.

But alas, my potato doesn't do well with such things...

[Albion]

Thanks for the offer though Umbreon.

By the way: I updated my mod to be compatible with the current build for unstable 1.0!
Please remember that it's called "unstable" for a reason and any new build can potentially break my mod. I'll try to stay on top of it and fix any issues within 24-36 hours (or faster).
Plase provide feedback and report any bugs you encounter!
Dropbox link with current unstable 1.0 version

Change logs will be provided in a future post.

[Albion]

Hi Albion,
could you please take a look into the doctor event ?
I send 2 pawn on it, one with medicin 0 and the other with 8, the message text took the one with skill 0.

As it turns out there was a mistake in my code. I forgot to change the function that selects the pawn to give xp to. Therefore the best doctor was actually selected for the success calculation but the best diplomat was given the xp (and named in the letter). I changed it in my local version and will publish it with the next 1.0 version.
Work on the next release continues...
I already implemented a new mech serum called lazarus mech injector that stays inert in a pawn until it gets downed. Once that happens it'll quickly heal any wounds until the pawn can get up again. However this process will drain the mechanites, so don't get shoot to often 
Receiving a fatal injury will still kill the pawn though and the mechanites will be unable to help.

[Yoonic]

Hey man, sorry to bother you again but I have an idea about the reward system, more of a question actually.
Is it possible to create a unique item in Rimworld so that it can act as a unique reward or making a collection somehow, like the 7 balls(lel)?

[Albion]

Unique rewards are technically not really possible since they could be picked multiple times by the random reward generator.
You would need to create a custom c# class that handles unique rewards and keeps track if they have already been created or not.
In that case you'll also need custom events that can spawn these rewards. This is because they can't be selected for vanilla events since they are locked behind your custom class. With the use of harmony you could technically add them to vanilla rewards too but that is up to you (I never used Harmony so far).

Also something else to consider: You would have to keep track if these items get destroyed/sold or make them indestructable/untradeable.

So in conclusion: Yes it's possible but not super easy.