I like to create small mods for my own use. Recently, I added an “Agile” mutation that adds -10 encumbrance to all body parts (using “encumbrance_always”). In doing so, I discovered two problems:
The encumbrance displays in the character menu (’@’) and armor sort menu (’+’) seem to ignore mutation encumbrance.
Encumbrance can be negative. It should probably have a floor of zero.
It behaved exactly as you’d expect. It gave small bonuses to melee attack speed, movement cost, and so forth. The effects were listed correctly in the character sheet, but not the actual encumbrance value.
That’s actually very interesting. Maybe it shouldn’t have a floor. Being able to go negative without breaking anything definitely opens up more options to modders imo.
Maybe it should work a bit like “wet_protection”, where instead of “ignored”, “neutral”, and “good” there would instead be something like “add” (as “encumbrance_always”), “add_covered” (as “encumbrance_covered”), and “cancel” (reduces encumbrance but won’t drop it below zero).