[MOD] (Alpha 8) The Metal Age 0.0.3 , core game overhaul mod. (16/01/2015)

[Ironvos]

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Important, when using my mod, make sure to start off with a newly created world and colony, it is not save compatible as it changes a lot of things in the game.
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Some update info here.

Released a patch on 16/01/2015 for 0.0.3 that will make it compatible with the EdB scenarios mod.
However i can not guarantee it being compatible with 0.0.3 colonies you made before applying this patch.
If you have built any regular batteries or ship buildings there might be some issues, so use at own risk if you want to keep your past colonies playable.

Released 0.0.3 on 15/01/2015, this is basically 0.0.2 + the 0.0.2 hotfix all in one.

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Hello.

I would like to share the mod i have been working on for a while now for my YT channel.
It's a mod that replaces the core mod as it includes everything from the core game, be it somewhat modified, and a bunch of new things as well. Additionally the game also uses an extensive tech tree which you can see here (It's also included in the mod file).

Everything in the mod is either coded or created by me, or it's from the vanilla game.
I do however want to remind people that i am not a coder, nor am i an artist, so don't expect the best professional stuff here

-The first important change i suppose is that there are now some different mineable resources:
Iron, copper, silver, gold, titanium, coal, salt.
Steel and plasteel now need to be crafted.

-Some other new crafted items:
Superconductor, powerfilament, powercells, electromagnets, paved tiles, pickled food, salted meat, grilled food, first aid kits, ...
Almost all vanilla weapons, armors and prosthetics.

Some other important changes:
-Powerconduits now use a bit of power themselves. 10w for an iron conduit and 5w for a copper conduit. The supercondutor conduits don't use any power at all and are thus similar to the vanilla conduits.
This will make it so that you kind of have to think a bit more carefully about how you plan your powernet.

-Not all plants can be grown everywhere.
Cotton can only be planted in soil.
Xerigium and devilstrand can only be grown indoors (hydroponics or plant basin).
Plant basins and hydroponic basins don't require power themselves. So power outages won't kill your plants.
However the lamps need a lot of power, and so will your heaters or coolers, so your plants aren't completely safe yet.

-Normal standing lamps now have a small radius around them where plants can grow, this is to make it so the plant basin is usable.

-Buildings on average will use more power than in the vanilla game.
While the lowtech ones use around 400w, the hightech ones will use 1000 to 2000w.
This will mean that you might want to get some better powergenerators later on.

-You get a bit of choice in what resources you want to build something from.
I kind of expanded the 'stuff' system to accomodate to building power and production buildings.
There are basically two catergories: Lowend (Copper, Iron, Steel) and Highend (Steel, Titanium, Plasteel)
Most buildings will fall into one of those categories, some in both.
While this allows you some freedom in your building material, you will still need other materials either way since most buildings also have some fixed resource requirements.

-Steel needs to be crafted in the arc furnace (formely known and the electric slag furnace and now 4 times larger and very power hungry). You need iron and coal to do so.
To build this furnace however you will need Steel. So it's up to you on how you get your first steel.
You can find ruins made from steel walls, you can go open a casket and deconstruct it, you can go trade for it, or you can just wait until it falls from the sky.

-Electromagnets are a new MidTech resource created at the machining table.
They are made from iron and copper and used is many electrical buildings

-Powercells are a new High Tech resource made at the machining table or the power armor table. They are made from powerfilament and titanium.
Powerfilament is something you have to craft at the molecular infuser, it requires devilstrand.

-Nutrient paste dispenser is now a more high tech building. It is still as efficient as it was, and now the paste is considered a simple meal, so no bad mood penalty anymore.

-A lot of more smaller tweaks like trade balance, and things i probably already forgot about :p

-The new buildings, i hope i didn't forget any.

Preserving table: Preserve food with salt, edible but not very tasty.
Grill: Grill food, little better than preserved food, but rots faster.
First aid station: Make first aid kits from cloth, 0.3 medical potency.
Armorsmith: Make basic armors and helmets.
Gunsmith: Make 'ancient' firearms, the bacic ones require iron, more modern ones need steel.
Grenade assembly table: Make grenades and molotovs from iron.
Medicine cabinet: Similar to the equipment rack, but this stores medicine and body parts.
Prosthetics table: Make basic prosthetic arms and legs.
Laboratory: An advanced research bench. Because high tech research takes a long time, one way to speed it up is to have multiple researchers. The normal researchbench however is quite big, but the laboratory is small so easy to set up a room with multiple.
Bionics table: Make bionic limbs, eyes and some nasty melee bionics.
Mechanoid table: Allows you to craft the weapons mechs use, expensive to make but they sure pack a punch.
Power armor table: Craft power armor and helmet.
Molecular infuser: Used to craft advanced materials like superconductors, plasteel and powerfilament.
Plant basin: Similar to the hydroponics basin, but 2x2 and no fertility bonus.
Powercell battery: More efficient than a regular battery, looks nicer and doesn't explode in the rain.
Saltwater battery: A makeshift powersupply that get's it's power from a saltwater solution. Only provides 200w but it will get you started.
Advanced solar panel: More efficient than the regular solar panel in that it's only 3x3 while the normal one is 4x4. It does output the same amount of power though, but is only about half as big.
Chargelance turret: A high powered long range turret that is basically a mounted charge lance, a weapon you can build at the mechanoid table. You don't need a weapon to build the turret though, you just build it from scratch.
Fusion reactor: Some sort of ancient ineffective tokamak design. While it's not exactly glitterworld quality, it's certainly a more advanced generator than whatever else you had built so far. Needs to be built indoors, it doesn't take kindly to the rain and lightning.



And finally here's a link to the mod itself:
v0.0.3 (This is basically 0.0.2 with the hotfix, just uploaded it into one package to make sure people use the right version.)
EdB scenarios compatibility patch for 0.0.3

v0.0.2
v0.0.2 hotfix (just copy the contents into the required folder for the mod 0.0.2 and overwrite. )

To install it, extract the file into the mods folder for rimworld.
When in game, go to the mods menu, enable the mod and disable 'core'.
Make sure you don't exit the mod menu without having either one selected, otherwise your game isn't going to run properly.
If this does happen for some reason, end the game and go to the User/<your name>/AppData/LocalLow/Ludeon Studios/Rimworld/Config/ModsConfig.xml  file and edit the file so that under active mods it lists <li>Core</li>
This will enable the Core vanilla game mod again and will allow you to start up the game properly again.

If you have any thoughts, ideas or if you find any bugs or imbalances, let me know and i'll check it out.
I will attempt to fix as much as possible, however as i said i'm not a professional and most of my work goes into youtube.
So apart from hotfixes i will probably stick to just one release per alpha build.

Hope you enjoy the mod

[xeonxifiaction]

I will defiantly have to try this out! It seems like a very interesting mod.   

[Ugo]

This looks great!
I will try it as soon as i can.
Are there any compatibility issues with other mods?

[Ironvos]

This looks great!
I will try it as soon as i can.
Are there any compatibility issues with other mods?

There are most likely some issues with compatibility yes.
The whole tech tree is new, so a mod that makes use of the vanilla tech tree won't work, unless they provide their own research project.
And that research won't be integrated into the tech tree.

Buildings and items from other mods also won't be using the new resources i introduced, although that's not exactly a compatibility issue, and more a matter of keeping the mods consistent. For example anything the game thinks of as 'Steel' in actually 'Iron' in my mod, steel is a new resource.

To be honest i have not tested a whole lot of mods with it yet, and there are a lot of them around in all sorts of forms and shapes, it's difficult to know.
But i'd say try it out and let me know when mods throw up errors, that way i can make a list of certain incompatible mods.
If the game get's too many errors you will probably just get a black screen, just go into the ModConfig file i mentioned and return it back to core to fix the game.

[Arira]

Looks really cool but its seems that research system need to be improve
There's alot of modifications(in use by me) that uses research and it brake the game with your mod D:

P.s i just didn't want to modify all mods to play this one

[Oragepoilu]

I'll try, pal. I don't have a lot of time from the next two days but expects another anwser (in the worst case) after.

If I'll find something I found weird, I'll tell you.

Edit : i find the "salt" part a bit ... useless ?
I only had one spot of salt, it take ages to mine it (2500hp) and provide almost nothing to help with.
by the time you can get some salt you will be already making wind turbine or whatever (no need for battery) and it take too much time to mine to use it on food anyway.

[MuffaloBoy]

Looks cool. I'll give a try!

[Sokengo]

The Crematorium is way too fucking big, 6x4, this is intentional or is a bug?

[Ugo]

I am impressed. This mod adds a lot to the game.
I am a big fan of Minami's mods, and yours has the potential to be as good as his.
Great job! Looking forward to future versions of your mod.

[millenium]

interesting so far about an hour into the game and the major thing im wishing for is bulk canning for food preservation. making 5 or so pickled foods at a time would really help with winter food preservation. also its taking longer than i thought it would to get basic power and refrigeration. probably just have the wrong colony composition for it but its taking awhile.

also trading early on is an issue blocking the console is alright with me but letting me build the beacon would be useful since i have halpos miscellaneous mod with roaming traders.

ill update with another post when i get my colony developed a little more.

[Ironvos]

I'll try, pal. I don't have a lot of time from the next two days but expects another anwser (in the worst case) after.

If I'll find something I found weird, I'll tell you.

Edit : i find the "salt" part a bit ... useless ?
I only had one spot of salt, it take ages to mine it (2500hp) and provide almost nothing to help with.
by the time you can get some salt you will be already making wind turbine or whatever (no need for battery) and it take too much time to mine to use it on food anyway.

Well, it's pretty much your own choice which way you want to go. You can forget about salt for the most part and try to beeline for power. But the windturbine does need either steel or titanium to build, so if you don't have either then you can forget about an early turbine. Either way you will need the battery to power a machining table to make electromagnets as well.
Much of the early stuff is pure survival things, you won't need it later on, but depending on your starting situation they could come in handy.
Still i'm not saying it's perfect or balanced, i will evaluate all things and improve or cut out the bad and keep the good.
Also salt is 1500hp, and should be pretty abundant.

The Crematorium is way too fucking big, 6x4, this is intentional or is a bug?

Yes that's intentional, i wanted to make space important. Lot's of early things will take a lot of space. Later on you can get more compacted stuff , like advanced solarpanels, batteries that can be outside, fusion power, hydroponics, .. that will free some space for all the advanced workbenches and all new colonists.

I am impressed. This mod adds a lot to the game.
I am a big fan of Minami's mods, and yours has the potential to be as good as his.
Great job! Looking forward to future versions of your mod.

I played a lot with minami's mod, and it certainly showed me what was possible, and i'll be playing it again when it's updated.
My approach is somewhat different though since i stick to adding simple content by editing xml files, minami adds both content and features, something i can't do.
Still there's a lot of work to do on mine, i have a lot of crazy ideas but not all of them would work, gotta find out what i got right first to continue.

interesting so far about an hour into the game and the major thing im wishing for is bulk canning for food preservation. making 5 or so pickled foods at a time would really help with winter food preservation. also its taking longer than i thought it would to get basic power and refrigeration. probably just have the wrong colony composition for it but its taking awhile.

also trading early on is an issue blocking the console is alright with me but letting me build the beacon would be useful since i have halpos miscellaneous mod with roaming traders.

ill update with another post when i get my colony developed a little more.

Yea, food preservation was something i had difficulty with for balancing, i didn't want it to make too hard, but neither can it be too easy. Maybe it's a bit too slow now.

Having basic power be somewhat difficult to get at first was really the intention. The addition of the salt water battery allowed me to push back all the other power generators. Still it's not that hard to get if you really want to get it first. But by doing so you'll be neglecting other parts of the technology, like defense, trading and medical stuff. So it's very much a situation where i wanted people to have a choice on where to go for first, and possibly make bad decisions

Trading needed to be somewhat harder to get, because it's very powerful as it can supply you with pretty much anything early on.
Still it's only 4 research away, and i kept the beacon with the comms console because, well it made sense.

[millenium]

i had a thought this morning for a cooler type area. a food cellar or basement something simple to research and takes awhile to build but would lower the temperature in that one square by a couple degrees.

kind of like the heated floors mod but cools rather than heats. not sure how the coding would work but its low tech and in line with the overall theme of this mod.

[Igabod]

i had a thought this morning for a cooler type area. a food cellar or basement something simple to research and takes awhile to build but would lower the temperature in that one square by a couple degrees.

kind of like the heated floors mod but cools rather than heats. not sure how the coding would work but its low tech and in line with the overall theme of this mod.

I attempted to do that and it didn't work. My problem was that there is no existing way to set a temperature at which the object stops cooling without having the temperature controls that exist on the cooler object. But the heated floors don't heat just 1 square up. They heat the entire room, they are just like the campfire, they push heat into the room until a set temperature and then stop pushing heat until the temperature goes below that threshold. If I were a better C# programmer I might attempt to add in a minimum temp setting in which case the cooling floors would be possible. But without that setting you quickly drop the temps of the room to -200f.

[Oragepoilu]

After a check i only had one spot of salt (with 1500 hp my bad for this :p) so i restarted a new map, because only having the possibility of 400w for early game kill the thing a bit too much x)

Anyway incase of, is there a way to change the drop of salt ? each square give only 25 salt, and even if it's only for myself i could edit and change it if i know where the data is stored (didn't found it yet )

[popster99]

i'm gonna try this out with cerbernetic storm and edb's mods i'll say if i get errors