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Hello guys and gals and welcome to a 192nd development blog. This time we will return to the Vanilla Psycasts Expanded - we are just wrapping up the 1st beta, with thousands of feedback messages received. We combed through all the reports and feedback, fixed all the bugs and rebalanced the abilities as per suggestions.

This means we are currently sitting on a formidable 140 unique psycasts that work, and are balanced well. That's like... 5x as much as Royalty had to offer. And we're not even done yet.

We are slowly approaching a second beta, which will toss another 40 abilities into the blender, allowing testers to submit feedback and bug reports for them.

I prepared cool infographics for those 4 new paths, and I'm sure you guys would like to read through them.

The paths that we will be adding now are:

NECROPATH

Masters of the dark arts, necropaths live to defy death itself. They can cast fear into the hearts of their enemies, emit a paralytic pulse to knock attackers down, rot away the flesh of living bodies and ultimately summon the dead - either through wicked enthrallment or sacred resurrection.

ARCHON

The path of kings, archons often occupy the highest seats in their local governments. Being able to easily bond with others, manipulate their enemies either through friendship or pain, with powerful archons strengthening themselves by draining the psyessence of other psycasters.

WILDSPEAKER

A secret path of the tribal communities, wildspeaking is the art of living in harmony with the forest and nature, and being able to summon the aid of the forest when needed. Tribal wildspeakers are known to control packs of territorial animals, be protected from all damage by an impenetrable shield, and they can also seem to make brambles and trees sprout out of the ground on a whim.

NIGHTSTALKER

Silent assassins who strike from the shadows, nightstalkers move under the cover of darkness, gaining power from the absence of light. They are capable of skipping to wherever  darkness prevails and executing multiple, near-simultaneous strikes to their target’s heart.

Let me know what you guys think! I'm really excited about seeing what the community does with all these cool options!

Comments

C.W. Elliotte

Can the, "regrow limbs" psycast be used to get more natural fingers for the "resurrect" psycast?

Anonymous

This expansion is MIND BLOWING. :O

Anonymous

Is it confirmed if this save game compatible? If I start a game without any psycasters or related mods can i just plug this one into the current campaign?

Anonymous

Would it be possible to get a VE Team curated modpack? With all the VE mods + the compatible mods that the VE Team recommends?

Anonymous

I think were all excited to see the enthrall psycast, but it says the creature targets the casters enemies. Im assuming that simply means enemies of the colony, but if the caster goes berserk, on a murderous rage, etc, do the enthralled also target friendlies? i think that would be cool

oskarpotocki

Everyone in VE team plays with different mods, there is no such thing as curated mod pack :) I’m going to try and assemble something but I’m not sure when I will have the time.

Anonymous

So I see all these abilities to steal power and stuff from enemy psycasters, but will this mod add psycasters to enemy factions? I haven't encountered a raid with an enemy psycaster yet.

oskarpotocki

Yes, that's the plan. It's not a thing in vanilla so don't expect to see enemy psycasters. That's the reason we are moving the entire psycasting code to use our Ability framework - vanilla game doesn't allow NPCs to use targetted abilities. Our framework does.

Anonymous

Ok that’s nice! Another thing is I already have some psycast mods in my play through, and some of the abilities are identical to what you guys are adding. What will happen to my main psycaster who already has all of those modded abilities? Can those mods coexist with pyscasts expanded or will I have to remove them and pray everything still works? Just curious, and I’m super excited for this mod!

oskarpotocki

Honestly unsure. I have a feeling there will be issues. We remove the psycast code from the game so those abilities might call null reference exceptions and glitch out the pawn. I recommend before you enable our new mod when it’s out, go into dev mode and delete the Psylink hediff from the pawn.

Anonymous

Ok, just the modded psycasts or all the vanilla ones too?

oskarpotocki

Just modded. The way we plan to make the compatibility work is it will translate the current psylink of your psycaster into the levels on a new psycasting system, but I'm unsure how it will look at modded psycasts. Either way, other psycasts mods will no longer be compatible with our mod. Like, you can't use any other psycasts mods.

Anonymous

Similar to how there are unique Psycast paths for Royalty and Tribal, will VE factions have an affinity towards certain paths e.i Vikings more likely to have Warlord / Staticlord, Ancients to have Archotechnist/Technomancer etc?

oskarpotocki

Only Empire and Tribal factions will have psycasters. We don't want them to be common. Lore-wise, they are extremely rare and important. Our goal isn't to make every raid have psycasters, it's more to have one raid every few years with a powerful caster that can bombard your base from afar, etc.

Anonymous

I actually like and prefer that, however I feel ecnountering pyscasters will be even more rarer than anticipated if you're running with several modded factions - atleast for raids. Like the scenario you laid out about having one powerful caster every few years sounds good, but if you've got like 4 other non-caster factions that are hostile towards you and happen to take up potential raid events it could be longer if the rng rolls that way (unless instead of only being available in normal raids there's also a special psycaster event that can guarantee a psycaster raid). It may also be underwhelming if you only find one every few years when you can have an entire colony of psycasters. It might result in them being easily dispatched . Will have to wait and see when it's fully released though, it's just my speculation and understanding

Anonymous

A shadow clone inspired psycast would be sick as hell. Creating multiple clones but balance it by having each one stack -5% consciousness of each clone per clone created. If the caster is downed then they all disappear.

Anonymous

Quick question about the frequency of psycast raids, will this be available in mod settings to be adjusted in case of wanting to see more / less of them in raids?

Anonymous

There is a mod that allows AI to use psycast by default. Will it clash with this mod when it gets released?

oskarpotocki

It outright won’t work. It will be incompatible, but for the right reason too: this mod comes with that feature by default.

Anonymous

Wow! Necropath looks really cool!