[DEVBLOG#173] Vanilla Psycasts Expanded (Patreon)

Hello and welcome you lot! I have an announcement to make.

Lots and lots of you have been asking me about expanding Psycasting system for a while. I never wanted to do it, because Royalty DLC was never appealing enough to me to sink time and money into making a mod for it. This, however, has changed.

Not going to lie, I saw a few youtube lets play videos with RimWorld of Magic and I figured: Hey, great concept. Leveling up your wizard, unlocking new powers, improving the stats etc.

Obviously RimWorld of Magic leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to User Experience, UI and, well, it's not 'vanilla' in the slightest.

Since erdelf and I already worked on an ability framework (for RimEffect abilities), I figured we could use the same framework to enhance psycasts. Because, let's not lie to ourselves, the fact that AI doesn't use psycasts is just bad and lazy decision, no matter what you tell me.

So, with that in mind I began drafting a total overhaul of the Psycast system. We are keeping things like heat and psyfocus, eltex gear too (although craftable now), but we will be changing psylink, psycasts and everything around it.

This mod will be incompatible with any mods that add psycasts, but for a right reason. We are literally tossing the Royalty DLC psycast system out the window and replacing it with something 20x bigger.

PSYLINK NEUROFORMER CHANGES

In the DLC, players need to find a neuroformer, which when used advances the psycaster to the next level, unlocking a new psycast.

Psycasts can reach up to level 6. This is something we are totally overhauling. As such, Psylink levels are no longer capped at 6.

Psylink Neuroformer, as an item, remains, but it’s effect are now different. Instead of just outright granting a random psycast, Psylink neuroformer now simply adds 1 Level to the Psycaster level.

It’s important to note: In base DLC, maximum psycast level is 6. We are not using Royalty level up mechanic and instead we are plugging the Psylink Neuroformer to work with our system. This means that there is no maximum level the psycaster can reach.

You will read below that we now have a Psycaster Experience system which goes up as your pawn meditates. Psylink neuroformer simply adds the amount of experience needed to level up to the next level.

Example: Jimmy is a level 3 Psycaster. To level up to level 4, they need 173 Psycaster Experience. Jimmy however already has 50 Psycaster Experience. Jimmy uses Neuroformer. Jimmy gets +173 Experience, which immediately advances Jimmy to level 4 Psycaster, whilst also moving the already gained 50 experience onto the next level. Jimmy is now a level 4 Psycaster with 50/207 XP to get to level 5.

PSYTRAINER

Psytrainer is an item that teaches a specific psycast. It can be any psycast. We are keeping this mechanic, however with one single change:

If a psytrainer was to teach a psycast from the path that isn’t unlocked yet, it also unlocks this path.

ROYAL TITLES

In the DLC, pawn can also unlock new levels of psylink by gaining royal ranks. This is also the case here, although changed, since we’re using a custom level-up mechanic. Gaining royal titles now simply levels up your pawn the same way Psylink Neuroformer does.

ANIMA TREE MEDITATION

In base DLC, Pawns can meditate at an Anima tree to grow anima grass. Once 20 grass has a grown, a ritual can be performed, consuming the grass and granting one Psylink level to a pawn with the "Natural" Meditation focus type. This is also the case here, except again, we are using our custom level up mechanic, which means the ritual needs to be changed to actually just give 1 level up instead.

MEDITATION AND OTHER MECHANICS

Meditation, Heat etc remain unchanged. Pawns still meditate to gain psyfocus, pawns still gain psychic heat as they use psycasts, and that heat still dissipates overtime.

The only thing we need is to patch all forms of gaining psyfocus (meditation etc) to also give psycaster experience. More on that is explained in the Leveling Up section.

This means we will be leaving in all the mechanics regarding to psyfocus, meditation, heat etc, and we will be plugging our abilities to use them.

You can read more about how Psycast system works in the DLC by following this link:

https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Psycasts

You will probably quickly notice that Neural Heat and Neural Heat Recovery rate have special tables:

Since in our mod, the psycaster can even reach as high level as 30, this would very quickly scale out of proportion. As such, these tables are changed slightly:

Neural heat limit at level 1 psylink is 30. It then increases +5 with each level.

The Neural Heat Recovery base rate at level 1 is 0.5400 heat removed per second. With each additional level, it increases by 0.0500/s

MEDITATION FOCI

Base DLC has a decent number of different meditation foci.

Meditation Focus is a set of structures that enhances the rate of meditation. Player can build meditation spots around these items so that the Psycaster gains focus quicker.

We are not removing or changing any of the existing Meditation Foci.

What we are doing instead, is making the meditation foci unlockable in the Psycaster UI. Player will now be able to unlock Morbid meditation focus on his psycaster, allowing that psycaster to meditate to graves etc.

As such, each meditation focus is now represented with a small little icon.

Locked meditation foci are colored in code: (84,84,84)

Unlocked meditation foci are not colored in code: they are white.

NATURAL FOCUS

Unchanged from base DLC.

MORBID FOCUS

Unchanged from base DLC.

ARTISTIC FOCUS

Unchanged from base DLC.

MINIMALISTIC FOCUS

Unchanged from base DLC.

FLAME FOCUS

Unchanged from base DLC.

DIGNIFIED FOCUS

Unchanged from base DLC.

GROUP FOCUS

This focus is all about meditating as part of a group. If another pawn is meditating within radius, both pawns gain +6% Meditation Focus Strength.

If there is a third pawn meditating in radius, pawns with Group Focus gain +10% Meditation Focus Strength for each pawn other than themselves (which in case of 3 meditating pawns would make it +20%).

If there is a fourth pawn meditating in radius, pawns with Group Focus gain +15% Meditation focus strength for each pawn other than themselves (which in case of 4 meditating pawns would make it +45%).

If there is a fifth pawn meditating in radius, pawns with Group Focus gain +20% Meditation focus strength for each pawn other than themselves (which in case of 5 meditating pawns would make it +80%).

Radius is 5 tiles.

ARCHOTECHNOLOGY FOCUS

Archotechnology focus in a way is similar to Artistic focus, but instead of using art and beauty, it uses archotech artifacts and their value. It uses an increasing Meditation focus strength curve based on value of an archotech-tech level item or structure.

1$ value - 1% Meditation Focus Strength

5000$ value - 50% Meditation Focus Strength.

Furthermore, all other archotech items around the meditating pawn, in radius, grant +4% Meditation Focus Strength. This is capped at +40% Meditation Focus Strength.

SCIENCE FOCUS

Science Focus is about meditating around Research benches. It’s very simple: the pawn meditates to a research bench, and the Meditation Focus Strength scales with the Research Speed of that bench.

Meditation Focus Strength is 50% of the Research Speed of that workbench (after calculating all the additional research boosts, such as Multi Analyzer etc).

WEALTH FOCUS

Wealth focus is all about meditating to valuable objects. When making a meditation spot for Wealth meditation, it will calculate the total value of all the items around it in radius of 6. This number is then multiplied by 100. It will then compare this value with the total colony wealth. The percentage you receive is the Meditation Focus Strength.

This means that if the total colony wealth is 100.000, and around the Meditation Spot there is 10.000 worth of wealth, the pawn will receive a 100% Meditation Focus Strength.

As wealth changes all the time, these values should be checked quite regularly. Maybe every time a pawn begins meditation?

PSYCASTS BUTTON

A new tab is present in the Pawn Inspect panel. It’s ONLY PRESENT ON PAWNS WITH PSYCHIC LEVEL OF AT LEAST 1.

Clicking it opens up the Psycast tab in full.

PSYCASTS UI

This is the Psycasts UI in full. Below we will go through each of the separate elements.

This Psycasts tab disappears if the player clicks off of it, the same way Health tab, Research tab etc disappears when clicking off of them.

It should be made so it scales well with different resolutions.

STATS AND INFO PANEL

This panel on the left features the information about different stats the player can alter.

From top to bottom:

Pawn name - This section gives the full name of the player

Psycaster level label - This section shows what level the psycaster is.

XP bar - this section shows the progress to the next psycaster level. More about that in the Leveling Up section.

Available points to spend - this section shows how many talent points are left unspent.

Neural Heat limit - this section shows the maximum level of Neural heat the pawn can sustain.

Neural Heat recovery rate - This section tells the player how quickly neural heat dissipates on this pawn.

Psychic Sensitivity - This section tells the player what is the total psychic sensitivity of the pawn, and includes all items in calculations.

Psyfocus gain multiplier - This is a flat multiplier to the psyfocus gain and dictates the speed at which meditation regenerates psyfocus.

Stats above can be leveled up by pressing the ‘Upgrade’ button. This button is not present if there are no Available points to spend.

Focus type - Might be renamed to Meditation Foci later. This section shows graphics for each type of meditation focus. Normally, in the DLC, meditation focus is based on traits and backstories. In this mod, players can unlock different meditation foci by spending talent points. The little arrow buttons are not present if the focus is unlocked already, or if there are no Available points to spend.

PSYSETS CUSTOMIZATION

This piece of UI allows players to customize their psysets. Players can simply press the ‘Create new set’ button to create an empty set, and then drag and drop abilities from the Path cards on the right, onto the set.

Abilities can be removed from the psyset by dragging them off of it.

There should be a scroll bar since the UI is not too tall and won’t fit everything on the screen.

Below this UI is a search bar that highlights the abilities on the Path cards on the right.

If the player doesn’t assign a psyset, all abilities are just present as normal when selecting a pawn.

When a psyset is created, in reality two psysets are created: The one with player-selected abilities, and one with ALL abilities. This way the player can cycle between the limited, tailored psyset, and see all unlocked abilities, ingame, without pausing.

PSYCASTER PATH CARDS

This section shows all the available psycaster paths. At the top, players can pick a card, similar to the Research menu. We should make it so other modders can add their own tabs with their own paths.

Each path starts out with a black 50% opacity overlay on it. The overlay disappears when it’s unlocked. There are buttons in the middle of each path that allow players to spend Talent points to unlock them.

There are png graphics underneath each card, provided in a nice little folder.

When unlocked, as can be seen on the Skipmaster path, player gets to see the whole ability tree. This might also be changed (as we might want players to inspect ability trees before unlocking the paths), but generally all abilities are greyed out until unlocked.

Abilities are connected to each other with thin white lines to show prerequisites.

Abilities show detailed information upon hovering over them.

There should be a scroll bar there due to the sheer amount of abilities.

This UI should be made so it scales well depending on resolution. We should not add a horizontal scroll bar - if anything, when the screen is narrow, reduce the amount of cards in a row from five to four, and then three. Probably never less than three.

LEVELING UP

Base DLC without any mods has a few ways pawns can gain new psycasts:

• Acquire a Psylink neuroformer through questing
• Gain Royalty Titles by accepting Honor as a quest reward.
• Pawns can meditate at an Anima tree to grow anima grass. Once 20 grass has a grown, a ritual can be performed, consuming the grass and granting one Psylink level to a pawn with the "Natural" Meditation focus type

This is still the case here.

However, pawns can also gain new psycasts by meditating (as it advances the Psycaster Experience bar).

Question is: How does the player initially unlock the psycasting potential of their pawn so they can even start meditating in the first place?

The three methods mentioned above (Neuroformer, Royalty titles, Anima tree meditation) still work. However, player can also obtain the first level of psycasting through other means. For example, there will be new quests that will allow a pawn to meditate to explore their inner self. More on that will be explained in a separate Quests section.

In order to unlock new psycasts or improve psycasting-related stats, players need to distribute Talent Points. With each level up, player gets 1 Talent point.

In order to level up, the player needs to fill the entire Psycaster Experience bar. Psycaster Experience is gained through meditation (meditation is Royalty mechanic where pawns meditate to regenerate psyfocus), where 1 regenerated Psyfocus gives 1 Experience point.

It is important to remember: GoJuice, for example, also regenerates Psyfocus. It should be made so it ALSO gives Experience. No matter how the player regenerates Psyfocus, 1 regained psyfocus is always 1 experience.

According to RimWorld wiki, a pawn gains 50% psyfocus per day of meditation as a baseline - of course the amount is adjusted by meditation foci and the objects pawn meditates with.

As such, the following is the level up table.

The formula is:

If level is less than 20:  XP needed for previous level * 1.15

If level is between 20 and 30:  XP needed for previous level * 1.10

If level is more than 30:  XP needed for previous level * 1.05

As such, to level up from level 1 Psycaster to level 6 Psycaster, a pawn will need to spend almost exactly 17 days meditating.

Alright, but what can the player put Talent points into?

UPGRADING STATS

Player can select the ‘upgrade stats’ button to give a small percentage boost to following stats:

Neural Heat limit, Neural Heat recovery rate, Psychic Sensitivity, Psyfocus gain multiplier

This gives a permanent bonus that is reflected on all relevant info panels of that specific pawn.

Each time a player allocates a talent point to upgrading the stats of a psycaster, following stats get increased by the following amounts:

Neural Heat limit +20

Neural Heat recovery rate +0.2

Psychic Sensitivity +5%

Psyfocus gain multiplier +0.1

UNLOCKING FOCI

Player can unlock new Meditation focuses (sic!) by clicking the icons of already locked ones. They take immediate effect, and upon unlocking, for example Morbid focus, the pawn can immediately meditate to graves.

UNLOCKING PATHS

Player needs to spend a Talent point to unlock a new path. This does not grant any abilities by itself; it simply allows the pawn to distribute further points into actual abilities in that path.

Paths can also be unlocked through various quests, so sometimes it’s better to wait for the path to unlock before spending a talent point on it.

UNLOCKING PSYCASTS

Ultimately, the player can also unlock various psycasts in all unlocked paths, provided the prerequisites have been met.

PSYCHIC COMA CHANGES

Many of the psycasts send the pawn into a psychic coma. Generally, most of the ultimate psycasts (level 5) do that. Psycasts sending the pawn into a coma have it specifically mentioned in the psycast tables below.

What we want to do: Psychic coma scales with Psychic sensitivity of the pawn. If a psycast mentions that the pawn goes into a 12 hour psychic coma, that is baseline for 100% Psychic Sensitivity pawn.

A pawn with 200% Psychic sensitivity, however, will have this duration reduced from 12 hours to 6 hours.

A pawn with 0% Psychic sensitivity will have this duration extended from 12 hours to 24 hours.

ELTEX RESOURCE

A new resource becomes available in this mod - a resource used for creating Eltex gear, named, you guessed it - Eltex.

Eltex is a crystal-like substance known to enhance psychic abilities. Psycasters can use it to focus psychic energy, which often helps amateur psycasters with casting more powerful psycasts.

Eltex cannot be mined, it doesn’t appear naturally in nodes, and it cannot be deep drilled.

The main feature of Eltex is the fact that it’s essentially to Empire what oil is to America - Empire desires it, Empire demands it, and Empire will be very unhappy if you sell it to anyone who isn’t Empire.

ELTEX TRADING

When a player comes across Eltex, they have a choice to either use it to craft their own eltex gear, or to sell it.

Selling to the Royal Tribute Collector

Royal Tribute collectors will have to be patched to accept Eltex.

If you are not enemies with the Empire, Royal Tribute Collectors will visit your base approximately twice a year. They accept gold, eltex and prisoners in exchange for Honor. The pawn who initiates the trade receives the Honor.

Eltex's exchange rate (listed in the trade window) is 0.25 point of Honor per eltex, rounded up, and is not affected by Social skill. The amount of eltex required for each point of Honor is as follows:

4 Eltex - 1 Honor

7 Eltex - 2 Honor

12 Eltex  - 3 Honor

Selling to any other faction

If you want to sell Eltex to any other faction, you need to be aware that relations with the Empire will degrade. It won’t be an immediate change, but it can happen after some time has passed.

When player trades with any other faction and changes the value of Eltex to sell to anything other than 0, a message in the top left corner should appear:

Selling Eltex is against Imperial law. This may or may not affect your relations with the Empire in the future.

Then, between 7 and 14 days later, the game flips a coin. There is 50% chance nothing happens, and 50% chance the following yellow letter appears:

Letter label: Empire angered.

Letter description: Empire caught wind that you have been trading Eltex behind their back. They consider it to be against Imperial law, and your relations have degraded.

Goodwill with <EmpireFactionName> is now <Goodwill>. (Reduced by <AmountReduced>.

Goodwill is reduced by 1 for each Eltex sold.

OBTAINING ELTEX

As previously mentioned, Eltex doesn’t appear naturally and cannot be deep-drilled. Instead, Eltex always appears in the form of a meteor, which can appear both on the local map, as well as the World Map as a quest location, similar to Resource deposits.

Eltex ore, which is essentially a rock wall colored with Eltex color (176,212,208), when mined drops 3 Eltex.

Eltex Meteorite

A large meteorite has struck ground in the area. It has left behind a lump of eltex. Eltex can be used to create psyfocus-enhancing gear, or sold to the Empire to gain honor.

This event brings down a small meteorite on your local map. Meteorite has 5 tiles of eltex ore that needs to be mined to yield eltex. This event should be rare.

Eltex Meteor

A large meteorite has struck ground nearby. It has left behind a lump of eltex. Eltex can be used to create psyfocus-enhancing gear, or sold to the Empire to gain honor.

You can send a mining party to retrieve it, but chances are if you wait long enough, someone else will lay claim to it.

This is a world map location similar to Precious Minerals Found. When you arrive on the map, there is a 9 tile big eltex ore lump in the middle.

ELTEX ITEM

Eltex

Text.todo

Market value: $167

Eltex is used in crafting any items that increase Psychic Sensitivity, from masks and staffs to royal armor and swords.

REQUIRED PATCHES

Certain craftable apparel in Royalty DLC mentions using Eltex, but since Eltex has never been a resource, we will now need to patch the following recipes to include Eltex.

Prestige recon armor - Cost now includes 1 Eltex

Prestige recon helmet - Cost now includes 1 Eltex

Prestige marine armor - Cost now includes 1 Eltex

Prestige marine helmet - Cost now includes 1 Eltex

Prestige cataphract armor - Cost now includes 1 Eltex

Prestige cataphract helmet - Cost now includes 1 Eltex

CRAFTABLE ELTEX GEAR

Royalty DLC introduces a large number of Eltex gear that is sadly not craftable. This mod will change that.

A new Research project is available. It’s Spacer tech.

Label: Eltex clothing

Description: Tailor and craft complex eltex apparel, capable of improving psychic focus of your psycasters.

It should be positioned late in the technology tree and should require Complex clothing research.

As such, following items now have crafting recipes and can be crafted on tailoring bench. Please note they will need to be patched.

Eltex robe - 100 Any Textile, 4 Eltex, 20,000 ticks of work. Minimum skill required: 6 Crafting.

Eltex vest - 45 Any Textile, 3 Eltex, 12,000 ticks of work. Minimum skill required: 6 Crafting.

Eltex shirt - 65 Any Textile, 1 Eltex, 6,000 ticks of work. Minimum skill required: 6 Crafting.

Eltex staff - 35 Plasteel, 8 Eltex, 18,000 ticks of work. Minimum skill required: 6 Crafting.

Eltex helmet - 40 metallic materials, 10 plasteel, 3 Eltex, 8,000 ticks of work. Minimum skill required: 6 Crafting.

Eltex skullcap - 15 metallic materials, 8 Eltex, 2,000 ticks of work. Minimum skill required: 6 Crafting.

Alright. This is a long one, but it covers essentially all the changes you can expect. Now now, we are not trying to 'get rid of RimWorld of Magic'. RoM will work just fine with our mod. What I am trying to do is create a Psycasting system you can actually engage with, to give you a sense of accomplishment when you unlock another psycast on your level 30 psycaster, and when you find some cool combination of psycasts.

I'm sure you would like to see all the psycasts we are adding, right? Well, not in this devblog, since it's already way too long. So far, we have planned 20 paths, 10 psycasts in each, which means 200 psycasts will be available in the game.

Vanilla psycasts (neuroquake, word of joy etc) are spread across various paths.

I suspect we will be adding many new paths in the future too, and the whole thing will be made easy for other modders to add their own paths.

If you wanted to see where your money is going, here it is :P

Thanks a lot and let me know how you feel about the whole thing. Right now it's all just a draft and many of these things have the potential to be changed.