Magiclysm: A Total Fantasy Overhaul

Game Talk The Lab
422

Okay, good to know.

Now I have a question more related to contributing to your mod. I suspect that I am not especially far into your mod but when looking at your planned stuff list I noticed “new dangerous monsters that can drop alchemical components.” As of right now I don’t know of any ‘alchemical components’ but I’ve thought of what would probably be a fitting monster idea.
What kinds of things exactly would I want to add for the drops and where would I find the correct id files for something along the idea of ‘an animist’s mistake?’

423

Ideally when “alchemical components” get added, at least one recipe they get used in is also added; which means if you don’t have a clear idea of what to do with those, just leave them out in that monster. Adding a monster by itself is perfectly fine, especially if it seems like there’s design space to expand the harvest list later for someone who might be interested in adding alchemical components for potions and spell components. As for the files, data/mods/Magiclysm has all the mod files, and it should be fairly easy to see which folders new additions should be added to. if you need specific information about more json-oriented stuff i suggest reading https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/wiki/Guide-to-adding-new-content-to-CDDA-for-first-time-contributors
and hopping onto the development discord and asking me in the #mod-development channel. sounds like you have an interesting idea that might go really well with a map special!

424

I’ll go check that all out.

425

I have a question about attunements.
…how do you acquire them?
Thanks in advance for the answer.

e: oh, and another one. Magic Circles which you can find in magic academies and abandoned bookstores. Do they currently have any use or they are just an ornament for now? And the same question about standing alembics.

426

attunements are not yet aquireable. i still have a ton of work to do to finish them out, but eventually there will be a little mini quest. i’ll make sure to make an announcement when they’re ready.

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427

Trying the Magiclysm mod for the first time.

Getting pretty far in (general skills getting into the 6-8 range), and aside from tooling around in a vehicle with an orichalcum frame, I’m not really benefiting at all from magic. The one set of spells i’ve found are necromantic animism, and… summoning a zombie or two at the cost of a health bar and a full minute cast (at a high failure rate) is deeply underwhelming when I’m approaching the point where I can kill a few dozen Zeds in a row bare handed without substantially dipping into my endurance pool.

On the flip side, I just ran into the ‘forge of wonders’ where I was able to buy a pile of magic rings that dramatically increased my stats across the board, as well as other major benefits - at the cost of a few of my huge stock of spare firearms I was never going to use. These rings are crazy powerful, so unless there’s some horrible drawback to equipping them that I’m about to discover the hard way, they were wildly under priced for the huge upgrade they represent, which is equivalent to an extensive CBM or Mutation array.

Haven’t encountered many magiclysm enemies either - other than a handful of demon spiderlings, and the plastic golems classically guarding wizard towers, that’s really it after 30+ game days. Also haven’t seen much in the way of anything that I can craft, outside of a few magic crafting trinkets who’s purpose I don’t understand. I can keep studying spells of course to raise my spellcraft, but I literally have never had an effective use for a single spell to date. :confused:

PS - Orichalcum framed armored vehicles seem quite common.

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428

i’d love to hear your opinions on what the rings should cost if you think they are under priced.

429

Sure! Lets see, right now all rings are priced at ~140 regardless of what they do, so that’s obviously just placeholder.

The rings I saw all had very high bonuses (+3 and higher, nothing below), for primary stats those values should start at +1 and go up, not sure how high, but a +3 to a stat is already quite strong, and +4/5 is crazy powerful, esp on strength or dex.

So you’d probably want to look at a minimum price of ~300 for a +1 ring, and go up at maybe a 1.15 exponent from there, and the availability of higher level rings should not be guaranteed (don’t know how NPC vendor stock management is usually handled in CDDA).

The problem is, the actual barter values for a lot of gear in game aren’t balanced very well to start with. Some rather arbitrary pieces of equipment sell for hundreds, while most random slightly useful things are worth 1-5.

Now If you really wanted to make this marketplace tie into Magiclysm strongly, you’d probably want this guy to trade only for magical creature organs, mana crystals, spell books, scrolls and such.

Otherwise he’ll just kind of act as a dumping ground for piles of unused mundane gear and weapons - don’t know if you can tweak the barter trade system to only respect a certain subset of items though. If you could do that, you could much more effectively create your own economy of value within your mod without having to worry about the arbitrary and whacky pricing of other gear in the game.

430

Regarding magiclysm creature spawn rates - do the MC creatures have evolutions like the zombies do? Because it seems like I’m seeing them less as time rolls on, and I wonder if they can survive against the higher tier zombies that are now fairly commonly spawning in my game?

Of course, I have been spending the bulk of my playtime in cities, where I presume that magiclysm creatures don’t often spawn or get overrun by zeds quickly when they do.

Places I’d expect to see Magiclysm creatures in populated areas would include:

  • Basements (where untrained civilians were getting up to practicing hedge magic, also a good place for some minor item/book spawns)
  • Sewers/subway tracks (because of course magical creatures escape into the sewers)
  • Churches/Cathedrals (drawn by all that holy ‘magic’)
  • Near Magical towers (not solely the internal guardian golems, but creatures who escaped after the cataclysm)
  • Antiquities Shops (drawn by old magic in the knicknacks there)

Can’t really speak as to what creatures might want to spawn in these locations, as I don’t think I’ve seen most of the beastiary yet. Just a few types of golems, demon spiders, and the occasional rare owlbear.

431

most don’t - i’d like significantly more creatures in magiclysm but that might require more/other contributors than me for any kind of movement on that front. when you said “exponent”, are you talking that the +1 ring would be 300, and the +2 ring would be 705, and a +3 ring would be ~2000?

i’m not sure if i can jump into the npc trade system because there are actually quite a few things broken there at this time and it’s not my area of expertise anyway, but maybe in the future after i’ve done attunements and all these current side projects i have going on.

432

Yep. Those rings are super powerful as they jump up. My current run functionally ended when I found the forge because there’s really not much left in the game that I can’t easily demolish after that large an upgrade. Not sure what the +6 protection ring is actually doing, but I don’t think I’ve been hurt since I picked it up! Honestly, given that players can pretty easily just gather massive piles of useless junk and turn it in for barter value, I think you’ll find it pretty difficult to balance things using the general barter system.

The other thing that would be cool if the barter won’t work is if anything past the most basic magic toys required quest completions, like ‘go hunt an owlbear and bring me its pelt and I’ll give you this ring.’ sort of stuff. A +4 or higher ring should probably require the killing of some monstrosity like a dragon or demon spider queen or what have you, while the lower level ones should require the equivalent of kelvar hulk at a minimum.

That would also make it a lot harder for players to just pick and choose the best stuff from a long list of goodies for massive piles of useless junk the way you currently can at the forge.

433

What’s your spell level? They get more powerful and easier to cast the higher the level is.

434

I would love that stuff, but i personally don’t like writing quest npcs, so we only get what other contributors add.

435

Level 6 spellcraft, and spell levels are around ~5 for the few I’ve played with? The time to level them further is already becoming prohibitive given the minimal gains I’ve seen for leveling them so far.

For a minute of spellcasting time and self injury I’d need to summon something a LOT more powerful/numerous than basic zombies or skeletons to even remotely compare to the kind of slaughter I can lay down by just punching enemies or laying about with a fire axe that entire time - especially when you consider that basic Z’s are incapable of hurting most of the medium or higher level enemies. I don’t know if any number of basic zombies can realistically harm a single soldier zombie, never mind a kevlar z or anything actually dangerous. At best they’d act as weak meat shields.

So part of the problem is that the necro spells offer close to zero utility, even if they had 100% cast chance, in 1 second, at no cost (forget an 80% fail rate, after 60 seconds and self injury). I really haven’t experimented to figure out why my fail rates are so high, because the idea of summoning a single basic zombie just isn’t worth the effort.

I’d say the biggest problem with the summoning spells starts with their cast time. You don’t have a full minute to cast a spell in virtually any conceivable instance of real threat in CDDA. That’s 60 turns standing there doing nothing, which is suicide in any remotely hazardous condition, so the spell could automatically instantly kill everything on screen and it would STILL be next to useless (much like a mini-nuke, now that I think about it. :smiley: ).

Spell balance must keep in mind the fact that a mid-level survivor can pretty easily put down 40-60 damage per second in melee, plus disabling effects like knockdown/stun, and a min/maxed endgame survivor potentially a lot more than that with strength bonuses, extra attacks and the like, so even minor spells that buff the survivor will be very effective - but spells that replace melee or gunfire have to be far more powerful to compete for that time. So in 60 seconds I can either summon one basic zombie, or do ~3000 points of melee damage… :thinking:

Then there is the light spell, which also appears to be a creative way to commit suicide at night. Nothing like a wisp to follow you around and constantly illuminate you for several minutes, that you can’t get rid of. Being able to target an ENEMY with a light spell that would illuminate them for the next couple minutes on the other hand, would be fantastic. Night Vision or Telepathy style spells would of course be very useful.

The only other book I have is a paladin book I got, which I assume I’d be incredibly bad at using because I chose animist - I haven’t even been able to learn a spell from that one yet after a few tries.

436

BTW, this is not intended as a harsh criticism of Magiclysm by any means. Work in progress and all. These are pretty common sorts of balance issues I see in lots of games, including large scale professional projects. :wink:

437

I thought the prices were unbalanced because Korg was still adding itens/content frequently to the mod, so it was not his priority at the moment, and he wanted to balance them all after it’s a lot more complete (easier to see the big picture).
I do agree that the rings are too cheap, and that the better ones should be rarer to spawn on the forge of wonders, maybe they should have a better spawn rate at late-game dungeons/locations or being quest rewards, etc, etc, etc, but as Korg said those things are not easy to implement, so unfortunately we need to wait and the impression i get is that Korg already knows about all those problems and he have a vision of how to make the mod even better/more complete.
Unfortunately it’s so much work and it will be such a slow process, that currently, magiclysm is in this weird position where somethings are really polished and other are really unbalanced/unfinished.
If you see the amount of projects that Korg is working right now it becomes easier to understand why some things are like they are, i personally think that magiclysm is progressing wayyyy faster than what i originally thought it would be (thanks to some contributors), but unfortunately there aren’t so many people helping so progress is slower than what we would want and all we can do is wait.

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438

Time-gate is pretty high on crafting the Serum, Major QoL suggestion is reducing the time to grind Mana dust or include a batch time savings, It literally takes RL hours to craft a handful of the serum with the crafting chain.

The Serums aren’t worth it, the negative chances seem to be worse than any other line, had to purify everything… Massive waste of time. With robust Genetics, I got 1 positive and 10 negative on the 6 serums. Wish I hadn’t bothered.

439

Loving the updates to this mod. I saw a few replies regarding the ‘Forge of Wonders’, which I came across recently. It was like being a kid in a candy store only with magic stuff!

I noticed a few things which might not be directly related to the mod. I could sell back items at significantly more than the original sell price. I see there is a restriction on wearing only one type of ring. E.g ring with +3, however, there isn’t a restriction wearing it with similar rings, of say +4. Is this intentional?

440

my intent is to eventually make it so you can only wear one enchanted ring on each hand. enjoy the OP-ness while it lasts.

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441

All right guys and gals, we have finally gotten to the point where i’m comfortable enough with the amount of attunements to release them in a WIP state! they are WIP so if you get an attunement that doesn’t give you spells that’s somewhat expected for the time being.