MOD REQUEST: Reduce all wands to 1 charge

Bugrat

Is there a mod to reduce all wands found in the game to 1 charge?

This is with an eye towards BG1 and importing items to Siege of Dragonspear. After completing SoD for the first time, I was struck with the feeling that the sheer number of wand charges that you're able to carry into the expansion from the vanilla campaign is kind of ridiculous. I feel like this made combat in SoD less interesting.

At the start of SoD, I think I had something like:
Wand of Fire: 80+ charges
Wand of Lightning: 60+ charges
Wand of Paralyzation: 50+ charges
And so on...

And this was having skipped all extra BGEE Dorn/Rassaad/Neera content which probably reward the player with yet more wands. While wands provide a lot of utility, they kind of invalidate having very many damage spells memorized in your mage's spellbook, which just makes things less interesting and too easy in my opinion.

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Bugrat

I didn't do any recharging -- I wasn't even aware you could do that until I researched this topic a little bit. Is that where you sell/buyback wands at shops?

It may just be my tendencies to hoard consumables/wands at fault here

Bugrat

If I were to do change all wands in the game to have 1 charge myself using NearInfinity (as an absolute beginner) could I just Find references to say the Wand of Fire in .CRE, .ARE, and .STO and change the charges to 1? Are there any other references I would need to search?

MachoGrande

It would be easy to use shadowkeeper/eekeeper to change item charges in your inventory, no mod needed. You would have to do it for each new game but it only takes a few seconds.

Bugrat

True. EEKeeper would be the simplest way, but I kind of want to see if I can make a simple mod for it so I don't have to monkey around in EEKeeper whenever I loot a wand.

MachoGrande

All you need to do is edit the wands' .itm file and put the new file in the override folder.

Bugrat

Does the .ITM edit affect all wands in the game? Since there's some wands with 10 charges and some with 5 charges and whatnot spread out as loot in the world. (Again, I am a total noob to NearInfinity)

MachoGrande

Actually, I don't know and I don't have the game installed right now to check. Just edit one of the wands you want changed to 1 charge and start the game to test it, and if you see multiple entries for a particualr wands edit those too.

jmerry

The .itm file affects the base item; it has an entry for the maximum number of charges allowed. That's what controls how many charges you get if you sell a wand to a shop (that doesn't already have wands in stock) and buy it back. Setting this to 1 would shut off wand recharging in nearly all cases.

The exception comes if a shop has wands already stocked; a wand sold to that store recharges to the same as the wands already in stock. In game, this mostly applies to Sorcerous Sundries, which sells ten each of most wand types.

If you want to weaken the wands you find by reducing their charge counts, then you have to go into the .cre/.are/.sto files. Note that some creatures use the wands they carry; lowering their charge counts may weaken them in combat.

Bugrat

Just in case anyone else is interested in this sort of tweak I found out that the Made in Heaven mod by AngelGryph does exactly what I was looking for. You can set the cap on charges to whatever you want with it. This tweak and others are part of the MiH Item Pack mod.

https://www.gibberlings3.net/forums/topic/29992-my-new-made-in-heaven-mods/