Vampire Mutation Branch Mod 0.01a

Game Talk The Lab
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This is my first mod. I created for only one reason - practice. There’s some stuff I’d like to do, but I don’t have the skill to do. So I’ve been doing as much simple stuff as I could, simply in an effort to break things on my personal copy until I knew how stuff worked. In that process, I’ve been tinkering and adding to the game.

This is the only thing I think people might have an interest in. I’m not suggesting its good, or something for mainline, or anything. I’m just saying I’ve created it, and you can take a look and play around with it on your local copy, change it, tinker with it - whatever. I’m just putting it out there.

Its a vampire mutation branch. My original inspiration for it was that I noticed that if you took a little bit of rat, and some medical and beast, you kinda ended up like a vampire, and I did that in a playthrough or two…and I thought … you know, I bet some scientist/survivor/player would probably think of that, too. That ended up not being anywhere near the recipe, for balance/rp reasons, but it was kinda how I got the idea.

Think of it as being in the ‘vein’ of elfa. It offers some serious powers, but a lot of drawbacks. I honestly did try to balance it. I played around with it using the debug for a few hours, and I think it definately feels different, style-wise, then the other mutations. I’m still not going to claim its good or balanced… but what you end up with are a lot of psychological drawbacks. You also gain the sunlight-disadvantages of the trogs, the hunger disadvantage of the chimeras, and the sleepiness of cats.

In return, you have a very, very long mutation path that…I think feels like a vampire. Chimera, alpha and raptor are probably still more powerful, for the min-maxers, but I think its interesting. Its definitely powerful if you see it through, though can take awhile and be random in the short run, like most mutation paths.

Please let me know if you see any bugs, or have ideas for better balance, coding or implementation. Please be kind in the criticisms.

Here’s the link.

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Hi! I’m also new to modding cata and have been working on a tiny mod of my own (which I was thinking about posting here and probably will do soon). It’s fun to see how other people do things, and this mod looks like good fun. I always thought a Vampire character would be cool - especially if there was perhaps a way to consume blood stains on the floor or something like that? From what I gather you haven’t created any new mutations as such, but have just created a ‘vampire’ branch of mutations. Correct me if I am wrong, I did read through the mutations that are in your vampire category and most of them seemed familiar. I hope you keep working on this as it seems like a sound idea. I created a character and cheated some vampiric mutagen and had a lot of fun with it =)

1 Like
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Yeah, right now its not possible with .json modding to create new types of mutations - you can only reorganize the old ones. So what I did was essentially find a niche where you could reorganize the old ones in a creative way.

You do eventually get a variety of mutations to allow you to eat humans/etc. However, these are along the line of the standard cannibal/sapiovore/etc. mutations. The player is a ‘vampire’ in the same sense that an ‘Elfa’ is an Elf … they are kinda replicating through mutation and Mad Science, and its not exactly the same thing. But its the closest you can get.

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That’s really cool, I will play with it some more tomorrow when I have more energy. It’s kinda strange that vampires aren’t in the game already given how pretty much everything else is.

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Combination of too-fantasy and code issues: if I could grab the species of a critter in the melee code, we’d have had in-combat biting for nutrition already.

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I am also only mediocrily experienced with cdda coding, but adding mutations that do new stuff can be comparatively easy, afaik. Just have a look at other mutations in their respective .cpp file and let yourself be inspired!

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Yay! Someone’s using my mutation category json stuff.

You don’t actually need to include the mutations that you aren’t using in the mod, same with items, and the mutation categories.

Adding mutations is relatively easy, getting them into the mainline is a little harder.

find where you want to check for the mutation trait

and add
if(u.has_trait(“INSERT_MUTATION_NAME”){
code here;
}

here if you are inexperienced in coding you would look at a mutation trait that does something similar-like Slime hands, or Venomous and add it in the same place that code activates.

To look for similar code:
For a bite attack that adds hp you would look to the Sheegoth(that auto regenerates), or if you are looking for nutrition you would be looking in where GOURMAND or the mutations that modify the character’s eating habits.

8

Bite attacks are in melee.cpp. Shoggoth’s auto-regen is simply auto-regen, not regen on attack.
Though the vampire bite attacks should probably grant nutrition rather than hp.

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I’m going to have to go over this when I get a chance (hopefully within a few days, next couple of days are kinda busy for me) - and see if I can make sense of it. I think you are saying in the first part that there’s some fat I can trim by taking out the unused mutations and putting just the ones I need in and renaming the file (would I need override = yes or anything like that?) … which is good to know, as I want to do it right.

I think, if I’m reading correct, the other bit if instructions on how to go through the code and add a new trait itself … which is great advice, I’ll take a look. The whole point of this stuff, for me, is so I can learn.

[quote=“Frostwood, post:7, topic:9419”]Yay! Someone’s using my mutation category json stuff.

You don’t actually need to include the mutations that you aren’t using in the mod, same with items, and the mutation categories.

Adding mutations is relatively easy, getting them into the mainline is a little harder.

find where you want to check for the mutation trait

and add
if(u.has_trait(“INSERT_MUTATION_NAME”){
code here;
}

here if you are inexperienced in coding you would look at a mutation trait that does something similar-like Slime hands, or Venomous and add it in the same place that code activates.

To look for similar code:
For a bite attack that adds hp you would look to the Sheegoth(that auto regenerates), or if you are looking for nutrition you would be looking in where GOURMAND or the mutations that modify the character’s eating habits.[/quote]

I think the next step for me is, if I can polish this a bit, I’m going to go in an entirely different direction. I’d like to try and master enough of the building code to put in more buildings. I don’t --actually-- think the game needs new content, par se, so much as more depth to old content. If I can figure out the basic building code, I’d like to add in to the game a rare ‘plastic surgery center’. I’d then redo something like this mod from the ground up. I’d have as the story behind the center … that they were using a version of mutagen to provide people with beauty enhancement services to the ultra-rich… except instead of being pure medical mutagen, or even alpha, they were using essentially…the distilled essence of the Kardashians and the Desparate Housewives types of characters. So you enter, and there are these ‘Beautiful People’ monsters, who look all like gorgeous supermodels but attack you on site… and if you search around there’s very, very low quality/crap mutagen easy to take. And the idea is, it gives you the Gorgeous/beautiful line of traits, but also the albino line (pale pretty skin), and all the mental drawback traits, and essentially turned these rich people into psychotic, beautiful cannibals. Kinda like the real Kardashians! … and that would kinda have an extra building (albeit rare) where mutants could be a prominent enemy. I also like the idea of crap mutation lines that are nevertheless easy to get, or provide an easier rp-method into them, though I don’t know if I’d keep going in that direction past the above.

I dunno, I just think that, with creativity, there’s a lot of room to mod in little extras to the game, and to try and expand on existing things. I don’t really think the game needs a vampire line, for example … it was just something I thought was within my beginners capacity. I hope I can keep learning and stick with it. There’s a lot of mod potential to this game.

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Something like the Wamphyri from the Necroscope novels would probably fit much better with this game’s ethos than the usual sort of vampire. In that series “vampirism” is caused by a symbiotic organism that originates in a parallel world. It also grants limited metamorphism that gets used in lots of creative/disgusting ways that would be fun in a game.