A wandering updater appears! Works with B8166 (lazy b8212 update in comments)

[Malkeus]

I’m at a loss for the 2 related to mon_bandit_glock. That monster is 3 entries into the file and looks ok. This is an error you see at load up? My only idea is to make sure you are loading in the same order as I did above, whether you used all the mods or not.
The duplicate professions issue is still there because the game’s not giving me enough information to fix it easily, so it’ll be trying to figure out how to search the files somehow. I’m not about to try picking my way down the list, assuming it’s not an issue of a duplicate profession id with a different name. Too much data. If you should happen to spot duplicate entries in the professions list, please let me know.

I took care of the epower problem, that’ll be in the next update.

And I’m afraid the last one is on you, theres only 72 slots available for overmap specials. Those are the places you see on the (M)ap, and contain maps of the terrain you slaughter your way across. You’ll have to give up 1 or more of the building adding mods. The demo one takes about 15 slots iirc, national guard camp is a hog too. Lots of choices, you’ll have to experiment til you find something that generates cities to your liking.

I’m currently obfuscating a bunch of recipes in Duro’s Doings, to clean up the crafting menu a bit and get rid of blatantly overpowered stuff til I can get too it. You can still get the 3d printer and build all the cool toys, but it’s gonna be a scavenger hunt. Honestly, Advanced Gear does it better, so I’m just wasting time on that side of things. I’m also adding two way radio as a requirement for the airdrops, which I’ll be poking at soon.

I’m having fun dodging bandits. I thought I had secured my little corner of the city, until I woke up to my npc’s getting murdered. Another narrow escape out the window, lol, I need to nerf their aim just a bit, it’s insane how accurate they are.

[QueenestoftheCassies]

Actually now that you mention it I do believe that I saw two Bionic Surgeons, one with first aid skill of 8 the other with 3. Re mod load order that’s probably it, I think my load order is slightly different.

And yeah I hadn’t realized what Duro’s Doings was doing, so to speak, till I noticed the flare recipes. And then I was like “this is literally a method by which to acquire unlimited items” because you can craft a crate of flares, thus allowing you an endless chain of craziness. And the Zero Point suit was like… wtf is even the point of playing after getting that.

EDIT: Also I am noticing what appears to be disappearing items. Plastic bottles, bags, and the like seem to just vanish after I finish consuming something, rather than going into my inventory or dropping on the ground. I haven’t enabled any auto-dropping options so I know it’s not that. Also, it seems like I can craft wild vegetables from literally nothing? And I can also craft them from flashlights. Which is kind of odd, and might be due to a mod I have that you don’t.

[Entity]

duplicate entries in professions array is coming from Cataclysm++, narrowed it down to c_scenarios.json, removed these lines and no longer get that debug message.

c_scenarios.json

{
“copy-from”: “mutant”,
“type”: “scenario”,
“extend”: { “professions”: [ “faulty_bionic”, “cykotic” ] },
“ident”: “mutant”
},
{
“copy-from”: “bad_day”,
“type”: “scenario”,
“extend”: { “professions”: [ “faulty_bionic”, “cykotic” ] },
“ident”: “bad_day”
},
{
“copy-from”: “missed”,
“type”: “scenario”,
“extend”: { “allowed_locs”: [ “s_electronics_s”, “s_clothes_s” ] },
“ident”: “missed”
},
{
“copy-from”: “missed”,
“type”: “scenario”,
“ident”: “missed”,
“traits”: [ “MARTIAL_ARTS_SURV” ]
},
{
“copy-from”: “fire”,
“type”: “scenario”,
“extend”: { “allowed_locs”: [ “s_electronics_s”, “s_clothes_s” ] },
“ident”: “fire”
},
{
“copy-from”: “infected”,
“type”: “scenario”,
“extend”: { “allowed_locs”: [ “s_electronics_s”, “s_clothes_s” ] },
“ident”: “infected”
},
{
“copy-from”: “ambushed”,
“type”: “scenario”,
“ident”: “ambushed”,
“traits”: [ “MARTIAL_ARTS_SURV” ]
},
{
“copy-from”: “wilderness”,
“type”: “scenario”,
“extend”: {
“allowed_locs”: [ “surv_camp_l” ],
“professions”: [ “pri-sur” ]
},
“ident”: “wilderness”
},

[Malkeus]

I’ll take a look at the surgeon thing. It looks like Entity has something on that problem :). I know what you mean about DD’s, but I see a lot of potential there. That flare crate will be debug only at some point lol, it’s bad enough you can convert so many things into chemicals and make flares that way. I welcome ideas to make it all make sense somehow. I’m either going to nerf the hell out of things, or make the recipes tie in to PK’s and Arcana monsters, so you have to go out and slaughter the masses. Advanced gear has the nanotech angle covered in endgame, maybe this could be the cheap unreliable knock off version lol. Duro’s Doings as it is now is broken. One should build shrines around it and make sacrifices to it’s glory…because you’ll have the time, you’re invincible. Expect the safety suits to change.

I haven’t seen anything like what you’re mentioning with the bags and bottles and I pay attention especially early game. I keep all that stuff for arrows and gimmicking the freezing water nonsense.
The wild vegetables recipe comes from Duro’s again. I think it’s meant to represent going foraging, if you’ll notice, you’re trading a lot of time for that vegetable. And less time and some flashlight charges in the other recipe. I’ve cut the time down quite a bit, I want to see how it feels compared to actually foraging in the woods. I’ll change it or take it out based on my experiences and the forums feedback.

[Malkeus]

@Entity
Thank you so much! I had given up on tracking that stuff down. It’s specifically the lines entries with faulty_bionic and cykotic causing the error. I didn’t even know where to start, I missed my opportunity to add things in in a sane and logical fashion. I also tracked down @QueenestoftheCassies bionic surgeon. That was just a coincidentally named profession, I renamed it to Tech Surgeon to reflect it’s description and eliminate confusion.

Ok, I’ve got a new version uploaded, it includes all the fixes mentioned above. The only error message I’m getting on world load right now is the lua debug whine and the usual overmap specials complaint. (I’m playing with load orders to see what happens to worldgen). Also included are some very preliminary changes to Duro’s Doings to make the super op things more difficult to obtain. There were a bunch of things I meant to write down as I was changing them…but I forgot.

• ATTENTION:
  I’ve changed folder names to make it easier for me to update and cleaned up a few files. Unzip into a fresh install for best results.
  ATTENTION

• Too keep my version of Salvaged Robots active in your world, YOU WILL NEED to change the Salvaged Robots entry in your worlds mods.json file to

“Salvaged_Robots_M”,

This was done to make updating cataclysm much easier for all involved, the launcher will handle everything. Mine makes me manually delete the previous_version directory first for some reason, but works fine after that…

• Working with B8099
  Download here or use the link in OP.

[TheJanissaire]

I got a fixedTM version of a_mutated_arsenal that load in(by Alexandreiah) i got no idea if i can share it, also somebody dropped a fixed version of Mutation change [in that thread Mutation Changes mod ] and i am curious if you are interested in adding those to the pack since muta like huge make you reallllly weak to gun like the m4a1 and H&K 416A5 and really everything else, gaining the ability to actualy wear stuff like power armor is a savior.Also maybe the bioco mod to craft your own prosthetic cbm thing, to give some meaning to the giant fort you just captured from bandit also do you think “hairs” and it’s patche properly work now?Because mine don’t and all npc are bald and foolish when using msx++deadpeoples
edit: btw the modpack a saviour, i had vehicule problem, and numerous crash due to the cata++ and pk patch not actually working

[Malkeus]

I’m glad you’re enjoying the pack. I’ll take a look mutation changes, I liked the sound of that. I’m not sure what a mutated arsenal entails, but I’m intrigued.

As far as bioco, it’s already in the pack inside Poracomp’s Compilation. I have to admit I haven’t touched any part of bioco yet, but I’ve seen it in the wish list and terrain editor.
I don’t know what ‘hairs’ is, sorry.

edit: it’s pora’s not pixels…

[TheJanissaire]

Hairs+(you also need the mutant npc mod and npc trait mod for them to show up) is a mod that is required for npc to actually have different hairstyle and such, it is part of msxdeadpeoples a giant tileset (https://github.com/SomeDeadGuy/Cata-MSX-DeadPeopleTileset)
edit: it is not part, but it’s required if you don’t want all npc to be bald and foolish.
edit2 mutated arsenal just make edit to allow a bunch of late game item that normally can’t be used by HUGE user and other kind of mutant, it also add special recipe that can be only found on book for late game power armor that is supposed to be used by stuff like chimera.

[Malkeus]

Lol, and just when I thought my mod folder couldn’t get any bigger. I’ll be check that out for sure, I hope the tileset is cool.
I’m interested in something like mutated arsenal, big guys deserve some kinda compensation for not being able to drive. I should be able to ride on a platform made of stow boards and steer by digging a hand into the ground on one side or the other. I’m HUGE!

[Kadian]

Mh, yes, very nice. Don’t ask me how, but I stumbled upon this topic just now, even though I’m active for a few weeks now.
In any case, I can already see several mods I’m actively using in my game and some others I wasn’t able to use due to conflicts.

Before I start praising you like the sun though, one question: How high is the number of the overmap specials with all your mods? I can already see that several mods in your pack have overmap specials, and I’m using quite a few other mods which also add overmap specials, so I’m kinda interested in seeing how much space there is left If I’m using your modpack.

[Shard]

Advanced gear has the nanotech angle covered in endgame, maybe this could be the cheap unreliable knock off version lol.

Actually, Advanced Gear literally started off as the zero-point stuff from Duros Doings cut out and modified a bit. I disliked how it was either instant godmode or impossible to acquire, and wanted something you could pick up endgame and have to put some time and effort into.

The wild vegetables recipe comes from Duro’s again. I think it’s meant to represent going foraging, if you’ll notice, you’re trading a lot of time for that vegetable. And less time and some flashlight charges in the other recipe. I’ve cut the time down quite a bit, I want to see how it feels compared to actually foraging in the woods. I’ll change it or take it out based on my experiences and the forums feedback.

Unfortunately, it appears recipes that don’t consume any items don’t give any results, unless something has changed since my last test, so it is better to modify it to use a flashlight -1 as a tool then consume batteries, and remove the non-flashlight one or make it use a stick or something easily found.

[Malkeus]

@Kadian
This is my most recent worlds mods.json: https://pastebin.com/hHkcgh0W .
That setup gives me 91/72 overmap specials. I resolve this by shuffling the load order around a bit. As long as Monstergroup mod is last, with ascension above it (and all it’s submods) everything seems kosher. It seems to have an affect, I get a bit of variety in my world gen. It could all be my imagination though lol.
I don’t understand why theres a hard coded limit of such an arbitrary number, but that’s how it goes.

@Shard
LMAO! That explains why I was finding so many congruent points, with Advanced Gear coming out far in the lead in every category. I guess that leaves alchemy and airdrops to do some work on. And I’m not a fan of the ‘convert everything into X so you can convert X to everything’ mechanic the chemicals thing has. Airdrops will be getting all my focus then.
I’ll look into that thing with the wild vegetables, I think i’ll probably just scrap it. If you are hiding out in your basement, you shouldn’t be able to spend an hour shining your flashlight at your feet and get vegetables. We can actually forage in the woods now, I don’t think that was fully implemented when the mod was first made.

[Kadian]

The hardcoded limit is linked with the mapsize and its chunks, as far as I understood. Something about there being 72 maptiles of a specific size in 1 ‘big map’ or somesuch, and every single maptile of those 72 can have 1 special. This is done so that bigger specials don’t overlap too much, and of course, for realisms sake, you wouldn’t see a prison, 1-2 big malls, a mansion, a lab, a school, a hospital and so on extremely close together like it would happen if the limit was higher or those maptiles were smaller.

One easy way to fix the issue is to go into the overmap_special jsons of the mods you changed and change the occurences of the specials. For example, the Spider pit from PK’s mod has Occurences 2, 8, which means that it HAS TO show up at least twice in one of those big map-thingies, and can occur up to 8 times. There is no issue to lower this to 0, 8, just means that there doesn’t >need< to be a spiderpit. It’s not really an issue anyways, since in later stages you can travel enough with deathmobiles and such that you will eventually find the stuff with a minimal occurence of 0.
Another thing that’s not necessary is the pond from PK for example, that one has an occurrence of 2,15 ; there is no reason to force 2 ponds to spawn, and there is definitely no reason to have up to 15.

By default, I recommend lowering most of the specials to a minimum of zero. Only important special places should be forced to spawn. That way you can get rid of the error, and you will have a more random world overall, because it doesn’t want to force over 72 specials, making specials with minimal occurence of 0 near impossible to find.

[Malkeus]

I’ll put that on the list, esp for PK’s. Thanks for the explanation, I’ve never known where to start with that issue, or even if it was solvable in json. Is there anything that absolutely HAS to spawn or your games gonna suck? I guess keeping the refugee center and ranch on the same overmap tile would be nice lol…but other than that?
P.S. If you’ve got these files already edited and lying around, I’d gladly put them to work for you

[Kadian]

I already edited the specials myself by now. So…yeah!

Now, lets see…I’d keep the following as forced:
Refugee Center
Ranch
Laboratory (At least 1)
Bee Hive (1 forced)
Anthill (1 forced)
Triffid Specials
Fungal Specials
hell spire (PK)
sky anomaly (PK)
Curious Structure (Arcana)
Strange Grove (Arcana)
Floating Temple (Arcana)
Island Temple (Arcana)
Survivor Holdout (Cata++)
Bio Weapon Lab (Cata++)
Unknown Lab (Cata++)
Makeshift Command Centre (Cata++)

Basically, forcing at least those will make sure that most enemies and so on will be able to definitely spawn in your world. The Hell Castle is, by default, not forced, so it should probably stay that way, after all, you will be able to find it eventually by driving through the country.
Otherwise, some of those are also necessary for ‘questlines’ and similar stuff, so you would want to keep them forced for the player to be able to do without driving for several days. Of course, you have to consider that basic stuff like Schools, prisons, Mansions and so on should spawn semi-regularly, so you might want to make them at least partially forced too. Otherwise, if you do it right, you can make sure to stay under the 72 limit ; and every ‘spot’ you don’t force will be, more or less, completely random.

Oh, just to be sure you don’t make any mistakes:

    "occurrences" : [x, y], 

that’s the line usually looks. the first number, in this case the X, is the >Minimum< amount of said special. This is the number that is forcing the game to generate a special. The second number, the Y, on the other hand seems to be the maximum amount of a certain special that can spawn. So, if the numbers are [1, 7] that means this specific special is forced to spawn at least once, but could spawn up to 7 times in total. This is important for ‘simple’ specials, like ponds, mansions and so on - those should have a higher maximum amount, so they could potentially spawn more often than not. Stuff like the hell castle on the other hand should keep low numbers, to make it reasonably rare. You don’t want to have one in every town after all.
In general, places with high-end loot or with a lot of loot should be more rare than places with less loot or only very simple loot.

This can also be indirectly be used to control the amount of survivors, if you have a fitting mod. For example, there is a merchant mod out there, made by “Undereastern” which adds several overmap specials, mostly small survivor encampments or lone traders in small bunkers. You could, in theory, use those specials to make survivors a little bit more common, if you raise both numbers. Or you could keep them at 0-1, in that case the player would have to search around in order to find small enclaves of other survivors. Both could be interesting scenarios.

[TheJanissaire]

I am curious do your vampire still need hel pwith a tileset?somedeadpeoples, who is behind msx++deadpeople is making a lot of tileset for mod, think might be even doing some for dort life

[Malkeus]

@TheJanissaire I don’t know anything about the vampire mod, I haven’t tried poking at it beyond making it run. If there are problems with it, let me know and I’ll see what can be done. I’m currently running with the msx++deadpeople tileset along with hairs+, I really like it.

@Kadian I’ve done a pass through Pk rebalance and lowered a lot of occurences and removed the requirement for enough to get rid of my error at world load, at least 19. I’ll look at other’s at another time.

All right then, it’s update time! I had a bit more focus this time around, only 2 major changes to report and I do believe this is this first time there weren’t a slew of changes I forgot to mention

• Duro’s Doings has been removed, and replaced with a stripped down version I’m calling Airdrops and Alchemy. It’s currently just Duro’s Doings without any of the zero point stuff or a 3d printer. Shard did an amazing job revamping that aspect of the mod with Advanced Gear, and these remnants from Duro’s are just getting in the way.
  ATTENTION Just install as normal, be sure to delete M_Duros_Doings from your mod folder. There’s no need to edit save files, I left the mods Ident alone for now.
• I removed the requirement for several overmap_specials, as per Kadian’s post above. I only worked on PK_Rebalance, let me know how your worlds feel.

The upshot is, this is the first version of this pack that I can load a world, completely error free! Yay! Thanks so much everyone, I couldn’t have figured out how to fix these persistant error’s without your help, especially Kadian on the overmap specials and Entity’s assist with the professions. Link is in the Op. Works with B8101

Have !!FUN!!.

edit: If you previously had Duro’s Doings installed, you will get several error messages on startup, about missing items and invalid recipes. Skip through and your world should load ok. I’m not sure how the devs handle updates that remove recipes/items without causing error spam…any clues?

[Shard]

Note for the overmap specials: Only ones that need to be minimum 1 or higher are those that are start locations or quest locations, anything else should be set to minimum of 0. This prevents crashing due to inability to find quest locations, improper spawns due to lacking the spawn location, and maximizes the number of random selections.

[Malkeus]

Currently working with B8118

It’s good to have clarity on what the minimum is, I’ll be going through the mods again with this in mind. Thank you, Shard.
I’ve found another mod that I’ve got running unmodified with the modpack, MST_Extra, by chaosvolt. It’s an extension of mainlined Survival Tools, written by the originator of Arcana.

I hope everyone’s enjoying the modpack, if you find something broken or a recipe is messed up somehow (too cheap, too expensive, impossible, etc) then let me know here. I’m going to redo overmap_specials with Shard’s information in mind, and revamp the monstergroup mod based on other things I’ve learned. I’ll be giving it a unique Ident and fixing it’s dependencies. That’s my current todo list before I plan to release a new version, I want to get the spawning issues ironed out and maybe poke at Airdrops and Alchemy (Opinions requested: Should I call it “Duro’s Airdrops and Alchemy”?)

Have at that text wall, share your thoughts. Anyone give lessons on paragraph construction?

[Carrnage]

The blazemod variant in the Ascension Compability pack appears to have the Blob section broken, no blob feed (which is the ammo for most of the blob items in the pack) or growing frame (which is the starting point in the blob vehicle tree)