Mutation Changes mod

Game Talk The Lab
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I like mutations, but one thing that bothered me about them was the fact that by the time you could actually make mutagens and serums, they were rendered pretty much useless. The amount of preparation required to get into a lab usually means that by the time you can actually break into one you have the problem of survival handled. Therefore any mutations you might undergo from that point onward only serves to make the game harder (things like faster metabolism, more thirst, disintegration, etc.) with the positive effects being rendered redundant because of the fact you have already fixed the problem of survival. Because of this, only the “safe” mutations are really considered worth it since they enhance your already good chances of survival without introducing any real penalties. In order to fix this, I have made a mod that changes mutations in multiple ways. Firstly, I made it so mutagens and serums are auto learned at level 5 cooking (or book learned at level 3 cooking from the correct book). This means that at mid to late game, crafting mutagens to gain their benefit becomes a thing.

Secondly, I tweaked some mutations and added some more since a lot of mutation stats are now JSONized. I added some new mutations to the chimera mutation line and just did some changes to a couple other mutations. Check it out and download below!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5zpxoppmorlqc1t/Mutation%20changes.rar?dl=0

Anyway, feel free to comment about the mod or suggest changes, improvements, and fixes that I can make!

6 Likes
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I added a bunch of new things and fixed pretty much all the issues. I even added a completely new mutation tree for tortoises for everyone who wants to live the dream of being your own mobile home! Check it out in the download link in the original post.

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Perhaps it is better to make a mod out of this. If people copy paste this into their current working game, the changes will get lost then they upgrade it. I however do not know if the system currently can deal with mods that add mutations.

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But I did make it a mod! All you have to do is download the file from the link and unpack it into the mods folder of your game and you can then create a world with the mod enabled, or did I not make it clear enough that this is indeed a mod and not some collections of files that you can use to essentially “hack” your game? As to whether or not the system can deal with a mod that adds mutations, it seems that according to the work I have done with this mod that it is possible.

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My bad.

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Hey Penguin

I love the idea for your mod, and I agree wholeheartedly about the mutation problems. They just have no place in the game other than for roleplay, and even that only makes sense if you start out as a mutant.
I also love the idea of roleplaying a ninja turtle :slight_smile:

As for the mod, I tested it for a bit and it has some problems. Armor seems to work fine, as well as books and mutagen, but the mutations and their categories are borked. I tried out Cattle first to see if you changed anything and I couldn’t get past threshold no matter how many serums I injected. Also tried tortoise, ursine, beast, raptor and troglobite. Ursine couldn’t get past threshold either, raptor did it in just 3 serums, beast took 17 to get to it and troglobite worked as I expected from vanilla, taking some 13 serums. Tortoise has a buttload of mutations, but other than generating a huge number for mutation category strength and me being unsure how to trigger snapping jaw, it seems to be working ok.

Basically what I think is the problem is that the categories for certain mutations that you changed got borked, especially the ones used by tortoise. Regardless of which serums I tried tortoise nearly always was the strongest category, and the other categories sometimes didn’t make sense either. For example, after consuming 50 ursine serums, I had insect, raptor and elfa categories at 300ish to 350ish, tortoise was 440 (highest of them all) and ursine a measly 208.
With no mods, ursine took a whopping 31 serums to break threshold, but the category level was the highest at 224, and tied with raptor. Oddly enough, after breaking threshold, lizard and raptor overtook ursine by over 100 points, at over 600 to ursine’s 500, which may be a signal that even vanilla mutation categories are borked somewhat. It probably isn’t right that Raptor needs 3-4 serums for threshold and bear needs over 30.

Anyways, I think I will like using this mod for a troglobite character, but I wouldn’t use it for a beast-like thing yet.

1 Like
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[quote=“Zombies-R-Us, post:6, topic:12362”]Hey Penguin

I love the idea for your mod, and I agree wholeheartedly about the mutation problems. They just have no place in the game other than for roleplay, and even that only makes sense if you start out as a mutant.
I also love the idea of roleplaying a ninja turtle :slight_smile:

As for the mod, I tested it for a bit and it has some problems. Armor seems to work fine, as well as books and mutagen, but the mutations and their categories are borked. I tried out Cattle first to see if you changed anything and I couldn’t get past threshold no matter how many serums I injected. Also tried tortoise, ursine, beast, raptor and troglobite. Ursine couldn’t get past threshold either, raptor did it in just 3 serums, beast took 17 to get to it and troglobite worked as I expected from vanilla, taking some 13 serums. Tortoise has a buttload of mutations, but other than generating a huge number for mutation category strength and me being unsure how to trigger snapping jaw, it seems to be working ok.

Basically what I think is the problem is that the categories for certain mutations that you changed got borked, especially the ones used by tortoise. Regardless of which serums I tried tortoise nearly always was the strongest category, and the other categories sometimes didn’t make sense either. For example, after consuming 50 ursine serums, I had insect, raptor and elfa categories at 300ish to 350ish, tortoise was 440 (highest of them all) and ursine a measly 208.
With no mods, ursine took a whopping 31 serums to break threshold, but the category level was the highest at 224, and tied with raptor. Oddly enough, after breaking threshold, lizard and raptor overtook ursine by over 100 points, at over 600 to ursine’s 500, which may be a signal that even vanilla mutation categories are borked somewhat. It probably isn’t right that Raptor needs 3-4 serums for threshold and bear needs over 30.

Anyways, I think I will like using this mod for a troglobite character, but I wouldn’t use it for a beast-like thing yet.[/quote]

The vanilla system for getting thresholds is a bit borked right now since it is contingent on things like how many mutations of a given category that you have. I haven’t bothered testing thresholding all the mutation paths but I figure that I could fix it by adding a lot (and I mean a lot) of redundant mutations like I did for the no ears mutation.

A big thing contributing to the borked mutation paths is that a lot of mutations are shared between mutation categories so, for example, getting the very strong mutation will increase your mutation category for every mutation that has very strong or any of it’s prerequisites on it’s list. This would be a rather easy fix - just add a bunch of different strength mutations for each category that has them - but that is impossible to do with mod files as I cannot remove mutations from a category without editing the game’s files. The best solution I have right now is to add a bunch of cosmetic mutations to each of the mutation categories in order to “strengthen” them, but that would lead to odd instances where using just plain old mutagens would have a disproportionately high chance of giving you something rather useless or even doing something like replacing your “no ears” mutation with the “no ears” mutation. Not the best situation, but it’s better than being unable to threshold in a given mutation path.

1 Like
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Dang, I don’t know nearly enough about modding this game to help you out with something that specific, but I will say this: looking at the files, some mutations that you wrote over, like Ursine Muzzle, Hooves, Bovine Snout, don’t have a defined category in your mod, whereas raptor, insect, troglobite ones do. That may be the reason for being unable to cross those incomplete tresholds.

Also I don’t quite follow why you’d want to add a bunch of redundant mutations - having several categories at a high level is perfectly fine, so long as you have enough distinct mutations in a certain category that would prevent you from, for example, injecting bear mutagen and getting less bear category strength than chimera or raptor.

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[quote=“Zombies-R-Us, post:8, topic:12362”]Dang, I don’t know nearly enough about modding this game to help you out with something that specific, but I will say this: looking at the files, some mutations that you wrote over, like Ursine Muzzle, Hooves, Bovine Snout, don’t have a defined category in your mod, whereas raptor, insect, troglobite ones do. That may be the reason for being unable to cross those incomplete tresholds.

Also I don’t quite follow why you’d want to add a bunch of redundant mutations - having several categories at a high level is perfectly fine, so long as you have enough distinct mutations in a certain category that would prevent you from, for example, injecting bear mutagen and getting less bear category strength than chimera or raptor.[/quote]

Those mutations don’t have a defined category in my mod because the game does not overwrite categories, it only adds them. This means that I only add categories to a mutation if it is different from the vanilla files. Otherwise the mutation gets put into the category twice.

The way thresholding in this game works is that the game checks your mutation category scores and if one mutation category is significantly higher than the others, it will give you the threshold mutation for that category. I don’t know the numbers behind it, but having more than one mutation category at a high, relatively even score pre-threshold will cause you not to gain a threshold mutation.

Gaining more mutation score in a category other than the one you thresholded in has to do with all the mutation tree overlaps in the vanilla game. The redundant mutations are there to ensure that you build up the mutation category that you want and that you keep it built up, as well as just adding some nice aesthetic flavour to the mutations.

To this end however, I have updated the mod to fix the thresholding weirdness. I tested each mutation path using a character that started with no traits and successfully gained the threshold for each mutation using the mod. Check out the updated mod in the original post!

1 Like
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[quote=“Peeved Penguin, post:9, topic:12362”]Those mutations don’t have a defined category in my mod because the game does not overwrite categories, it only adds them. This means that I only add categories to a mutation if it is different from the vanilla files. Otherwise the mutation gets put into the category twice.

The way thresholding in this game works is that the game checks your mutation category scores and if one mutation category is significantly higher than the others, it will give you the threshold mutation for that category. I don’t know the numbers behind it, but having more than one mutation category at a high, relatively even score pre-threshold will cause you not to gain a threshold mutation. Gaining more mutation score in another category than the one you thresholded in has to do with all the mutation tree overlaps in the vanilla game. The redundant mutations are there to ensure that you build up the mutation category that you want and that you keep it built up, as well as just adding some nice aesthetic flavour to the mutations.

To this end however, I have updated the mod to fix the thresholding weirdness. I tested each mutation path using a character that started with no traits and successfully gained the threshold for each mutation using the mod. Check out the updated mod in the original post![/quote]

Oh I see now. The system is super weird then, especially considering that Chimera has so many mutations that cross into other categories, making it often the strongest category, regardless of which beast serum you’ve taken. Even weirder is when I tried to debug mutate ursine muzzle I got 16 feline, 8 ursine and 8 tortoise category strength.

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Well, if the threshold only looks at the mutations you already have that is a bit silly imho. Just injecting a certain serum should already give you a point in that categories direction.

So the game doesn’t only look at the mutations but also the amount of serums you shot into your own bloodstream.

But that would involve some coding (including updating savegames etc).

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Enjoying this mod. Good work!

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I just added a new update to the mod with a slew of new mutations for plants and some new ones for chimera! You can finally live your dream of standing in one spot and never moving! Check out the OP for the updated mod.

1 Like
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After a short hiatus I’m back to updating this mod. This fresh new update features updating which mutations cancels which to a headache inducing degree! We also have some new mutations for beasts as well as a couple others for various different mutation paths as well as making armor mutations give more armor in general and making the mutagen recipes a bit less grindy. Get the updated mod in the OP!

1 Like
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I have cooking level 5 but I dont see the the recipes, Help?

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Never mind, Needed medic 1

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trying to install this mod from the cata dda updater crashes the updater, upon further investigation “hxxps://www.dropbox.com/s/mtjwfh0or5tqegb/Mutation%20changes.rar?dl=1” points to a 404 error.

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Looking at it myself it seems that the Cata Launcher is using a link for an older version of my mod (which no longer links to anything); it’s trying to use a link which no longer exists basically. I don’t have any input on the development of the launcher so I can’t really help you with that. You are going to have to install the mod manually until the launcher gets an updated link for my mod.

This problem seems to be occurring because when I update the mod I generate a completely new download link and remove the older one. This was never a problem for me before since my mod wasn’t a part of the launcher. I’ll try to see if there is a way for me to update the mod without changing the link in order to avoid this in the future.

1 Like
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I’ve updated the mod link in the launcher to the new one. This should now work in version 1.3.6 of the CDDA Game Launcher.

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There is currently no standard way for me to track external mods versions/releases and updates. This is being worked on slowly. A proposed solution is for mod author to use github as their source code repository and perform releases there. See https://github.com/pisskop/PKs_Rebalancing/issues/8 and https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/18754 for more information.