Advisory - spell selection issues for arcane kits in large mod installs
jmerry
Member Posts: 3,829
When too many kits are installed, arcane casters suffer unintended restrictions on spell selection. Kits #64 to #127 have abjurer restrictions, kits #128 to #191 have conjurer restrictions, and kits #192 to #255 have both abjurer and conjurer restrictions. Spells from those specialties' banned schools cannot be learned during character creation for all arcane caster kits, level-ups for sorcerer kits, or the process of dual-classing to mage for fighter, cleric, and thief kits.
This does not affect the ability to cast or learn from arcane scrolls; those use the kit's "unusable" flags instead.
Q: What? Why is this happening?
A: Specialist mages are coded differently from all other kits. Eight bits of the kit ID number are reserved for them, and simply having one of those bits nonzero is enough to impose its banned schools on the character. With kit IDs assigned sequentially, it doesn't take that many added kits to run into conflict.
Q: Which games does this affect?
A: All IE games that support kits.
Q: What can I do to reduce or eliminate the impact, if I'm installing lots of kits?
A: There is no full solution at this time. However, this is a far more serious issue for sorcerer kits than anyone else, as mages and bards can learn spells normally from scrolls in gameplay. Make sure to install any sorcerer kits first, so that they aren't affected. BGEE/BG2EE have 41 kits before any mods (as of 2.6), leaving the first 22 kits you install completely unaffected by this issue.
See also this thread at Gibberlings 3.
This does not affect the ability to cast or learn from arcane scrolls; those use the kit's "unusable" flags instead.
Q: What? Why is this happening?
A: Specialist mages are coded differently from all other kits. Eight bits of the kit ID number are reserved for them, and simply having one of those bits nonzero is enough to impose its banned schools on the character. With kit IDs assigned sequentially, it doesn't take that many added kits to run into conflict.
Q: Which games does this affect?
A: All IE games that support kits.
Q: What can I do to reduce or eliminate the impact, if I'm installing lots of kits?
A: There is no full solution at this time. However, this is a far more serious issue for sorcerer kits than anyone else, as mages and bards can learn spells normally from scrolls in gameplay. Make sure to install any sorcerer kits first, so that they aren't affected. BGEE/BG2EE have 41 kits before any mods (as of 2.6), leaving the first 22 kits you install completely unaffected by this issue.
See also this thread at Gibberlings 3.
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