Hello CDDA community, I’ve got a question, mainly to devs if anyone knows if there are plans to add tail holes and other modifications to clothes and non-futuristic power armors? I deduced how to make my own mod and was starting to create recipes and so on for such modified gear (only tails for now) but I heard you are already working on it, is that true? I also seen in game the “debug tail” body part and on git hub someone trying to do something with mutant body parts using the new WIP body part system. I’m asking bcs I don’t want to convert so many in-game items and spend tens of hours writing the mod just for it to get obsolete in the next update or something.
Also I’m not sure if I chosen the category of the topic correctly, hopefully.
We’re working on moving mutant bits like that to the limb system properly. That will have to involve some pretty drastic changes to how armor works, but how that will look is still up in the air, so no promises.
I’m glad that all those mutated bits will not just be some imaginary things easily shoved into an XL clothing and forgotten, tho hopefully you will make mutating a bit more beneficial then (in terms of defenses not stats, the best scales provide only 4 cut resistance which even some clothes have more).
However, how long do you think it will take to implement those, are they a major goal when going from F to G version or it’s a project for future like H, J…, or something. Also, will this change include clothing and armor modifications or for now just the body parts?
I’m guessing here, but in addition to the body part work, there’s also work on weak points (gaps in armor, etc.), so I’d expect some work to happen in the relatively near term, although I’d expect mutation specific clothing to be where people other than the core team would pitch in once the mechanisms are in place.
Briefly, add more detailed info to mutations outlining what is conflicting, what the impact is, and how it can be mitigated, then we can have a tailoring action to apply that mitigation to articles of clothing.
There’s a potentially problematic part I don’t have a solution for, which is when mitigations are appropriate to apply to different articles of clothing.
On the balance side, only some mutations are reasonable to have these mitigations for, and the mitigations are going to have tradeoffs such as lowered coverage and durability.
Then there’s the primary issue, which is that in the last 8 years, no one has as much as attempted to implement this system.
My suspicion is that the people willing to implement said system as I’ve outlined it aren’t interested in doing it, and the people that really want a system for this are put off by the balance goals. Everyone I’ve talked to that said they want to work on this has argued that all mutation penalties and clothing conflicts are solvable, and usually they also argue that it would be trivial to do. When people realize that they aren’t going to be able to completely nullify all mutation drawbacks, they drop it.
I don’t know how to code so my plan for the mod for the beginning with the already existing mechanics was to simply make ALLOW_THICK_TAIL and ALLOW_SOFT_TAIL flags, replace the ALLOW_TAIL flags on the mutations and gear and then make new recipes for gear that just have a hole with reduced cover and weight for balance and gear that would also include protection for the tail but those protected ones would be restricted only for the thick tails flag since it wouldn’t make sense to put chainmail on a fluffy tail but it would make sense for a club or a raptor tail. I was also thinking of making armored tails do extra bash damage (or perhaps a new heavier and weaponized gear type?) but with penalty to chance of using it as a weapon but I don’t think there’s any clothes currently that could use as an example. But that’s just the tails, there’s so many other mutated body parts that would need different solutions. If I knew how to do that thro tailoring kit it would probably cut on the number of recipes to be made.
Your method is probably most balanced, tho I must agree that when ppl ask for this, they want to mostly nullify the drawbacks a mutation has (currently, other than the stat boosts, being a mutant is really, a big drawback as mid to late game where the thresholds are aquired they prevent lots of good armor options that could save someone from a robot/turret bullet or from being shocked/irradiated as currently there’s nothing to protect a mutant from those bcs of gear restrictions). I could probably make a separate rant as I always want to be/start as a lizard as it’s the closest to a dragon but that’s off-topic. But you are right that some mutations just seem impossible to work with armor like soldier helmet and antlers or gloves with webbed hands (tho I guess mittens are a thing but they are so bad).
The modification part is in the future of “somebody working on it”, as Kevin mentioned. I’d like the mutant limbs to be a Thing by the end of this cycle, but I’m the mostly-JSON guy doing the easy bits and not the guy having to mess with armor code (and accomodate my pestering). We’ll see.
Unrelated to clothing, however, since you Venera will be taking care of coding mutated parts into actual, hitable and interactable things, could I ask for digitigrade legs and paws?, I mean, we have tentacles, hooves and even omnicellular slimes so mutating in such a way doesn’t seem far from “reality”.