[MOD] Test Your Mettle!
argent77
Member Posts: 3,474
Test Your Mettle!
A mod for BG2:EE and EET (Enhanced Edition Trilogy) that provides you with a unique dungeon crawling experience.
Download: GitHub (35 MB)
Overview
This mod provides you with a whole new adventure where you can explore new areas, meet exotic races, uncover a devious plot, or simply enjoy battle with an endless stream of monsters.
The adventure starts in the Planar Sphere in Athkatla's Slum District, where you may encounter new victims of Lavok's planar travels. The result of the encounter will enable you to access a dungeon that has been tailor-made for the intrepid adventurer.
Note: This mod requires BG2:EE or EET, patched to version 2.0 or higher.
Components
1. Test Your Mettle! (requires BG2:EE or EET, patched to 2.0 or higher)
This is the main component. It installs many new areas, creatures, items, spells and everything else needed for a unique dungeon crawling experience. Moreover, this component restores the spell "Spacewarp", which is based on cut content from BG2. It can be acquired as a mage or priest spell in the course of the adventure.
2. Reduce experience for killing monsters (requires the main component)
As the monsters you may encounter in the dungeon are numerous, you will quickly gain a lot of experience that could make your party too powerful to enjoy the rest of the game. This component allows you to reduce XP from killing monsters by different amounts, or remove XP altogether. Unique monsters or creatures encountered outside the dungeon are not affected.
3. Make "Spacewarp" available to stores (independent component, requires BG2:EE or EET, patched to 2.0 or higher)
This component adds the mage spell "Spacewarp" to a small number of stores for sale. In "Shadows of Amn" it can be purchased from Ribald's special store in the Adventurer Mart, that becomes available in chapter 6. In "Throne of Bhaal" it is available from Lazarus Librarus' Arcana Archives in Saradush or Amkethran as well as from Karthis al-Hezzar, who can be found in the wilderness between Saradush and the Forest of Mir.
Screenshots:
The adventure:
The new spell:
Comments
I've been through quite a few rooms but I can't seem to "progress" the quest and just doing those rooms got boring a while ago.
I got multiple coin bags, goodies, magic items and clues to drop and also a note detailing Modron culture which supposedly improves communications with the Modrons. Yet, none of the Modrons I talked to had any additional dialogue options (including the director) and there seems to be nothing else I can interact with.
The scholarly notes are primarily there for lore reasons, but can also help you to communicate with the monodrones if your intelligence is too low (but don't expect too much from a creature that talks in binary code).
If your version is from around this time then expect a good number of improvements regarding combat, a couple of bugfixes and a few new items or item improvements. The director will have (slightly) more to say after progressing the plot.
What do you think can be done to keep combat interesting enough even after a while?
Did you make it into the areas with boss battles already?
I did install the mod around the time of that post, yes. I guess re-installing a later version shouldn't cause any trouble since the mod is the last one installed anyway, so I'll do that.
My main issue with the mod so far is that I just couldn't tell if I am progressing at all. Except for that one room with the dead scholar, all rooms seemed more or less random generated (which, of course is the whole point of the mod, even lore wise. I get that.) Still, there is no feeling of progress and no indication as to how many more rooms it would take to advance the quest. The enemies so far were not overly difficult and difficulty did not appear to advance either.
One thing that might help elevate that feeling of just going through multiple iterations of the same random encounter would be dialogue or very short scripted actions. Just a few one liners before combat or a malfunctioning construct from time to time might help quite a bit. The encounters in the Watcher's Keep maze might also offer some inspiration.
Of course, a wider variety of enemies might also help.
Apart from that, the mod looks great so far. Implementation is top notch, as always, and the Modrons are presented in a very interesting and entertaining way.
If I understand you correctly, I'll just have to keep going through rooms until I hit more boss encounters and the quest will progress from there? If that's the case I'll do that and hit you with some more feedback when I'm done.
another crazy idea is to create evolving constructs:
if you kill 10 constructs with magical damage all constructs develop magic resistance, if you kill them with slashing, they gain slashing res etc...
The recycling system (for the bogus items) has been improved as well. But for this change to take effect you will most likely have to start the adventure anew, since it requires the foyer map to be reset. (Or use NI to remove the map manually from your saved game.)
Yes, more or less. If you know the maze layout from PST you will probably guess where potential boss rooms may be located.
I think the preferred way to install mods on macOS is using a mod manager: https://github.com/subtledoctor/OS-X-Weidu-Launcher/releases/latest
Or alternatively you could download the macOS binary from here: http://www.weidu.org/~thebigg/
Unpack the "weidu" binary from the zip file into the game's root folder and rename it to "setup-A7-TestYourMettle". You might also have to make it executable before it will start (e.g. via console command "chmod +x setup-A7-TestYourMettle", but there may also be other ways on Mac).
Failure("Unable to find CHITIN.KEY: run me in an Infinity Engine game directory")
but I have been able to run other mods in this folder?
just for the enemies in the mod
it is multiplicative with EET xp reduction as far as i could tell (50% option in the mod and 50% from EET gave me IIRC 1/4 xp value)
I've been told another method to make mod installers work on macOS by creating a script file that is executed in place of the original binary. Create a text file "setup-A7-TestYourMettle.command" with the following content and make it executable:
command_path=${0%/*} cd "$command_path" chmod +x setup-A7-TestYourMettle ./setup-A7-TestYourMettle@BallpointMan It's as bob_veng said. XP reduction applies only to the creatures found in the maze. It is cumulative with other mods that may tweak creature XP globally, provided they were/are installed after the main component of this mod.
I think i somehow damage my CHITIN.key... is that possible?
Edit: Btw, did you download and unpack "A7-TestYourMettle-0.1-beta.zip" from the download link or one of the source code files that are listed as well?
Download: Test Your Mettle! v0.2-beta
I've made many adjustment and added several improvement in the past weeks. The mod should be close to a stable release now. I'd be happy if you could put this mod version to a test. You don't have to start a new game and can install it as long as you haven't entered the Planar Sphere in the Slums yet.It is fully compatible with BG2:EE patch 2.5 and contains the following changes compared to v0.1:
Screenshots:
The mod provides you also with a trading system where you exchange collectibles, that you can find in the dungeon, into useful items or money. The rewards can be quite powerful, depending on how many items you're willing to collect.
You gain experience from killing monsters, maybe too much depending on how much time you're spending in there. That's why the mod provides a second component that reduces XP reward.