More Dred (item pack)

As awesome as Dredmor is, the expansion floors get kind of boring due to lack of content. Early on looting the dungeon is interesting and exciting because there's a huge variety of equipment to find, but by the time you get to the bottom of the dungeon it's pretty much "ho hum, another Crownstar Addendum." So here's the start of my contribution to help rectify this problem. 20 items to start currently 81 items (mostly showing up in the second half of the dungeon), will be adding more as I get time. Put the zip in the mods folder (typically My Documents/Gaslamp Games/Dungeons of Dredmor/mods); if you have to unzip it, give it its own directory.

 

Just downloaded. There's some really good stuff there. Useful + Amusing = Win.

Nice spritework, too. Very impressed.

I appreciate that there's no consumables (other than a couple wands) as that means you're not creating inventory hassles, just livening up the late-game item drops. Well done.

Given the stated goal of expanding the variety of loot at the end of the dungeon, I'd encourage you to bump up the level of a few more of your new items that are currently level 8 to 10. In my experience, over half the items on any given floor have a level equal to that floor. So your level 8 to 10 items will show up mostly on floors 8 to 10 where the game already has lots of items, and very rarely spawn after that. If you bumped them up to level 11 or 12, they'd do a much better job of livening up the end game.

That said, if you had specific reasons for keeping them at the currently levels that might not be obvious at first glance, don't let me undermine your thought process. I was (and am) excited by the notion of well-designed items for the end game, and just a little let down when I realized that only 9 of the 20 items will actually spawn on the levels that need new items the most.

Regardless of whether or not you make such a change, I will definitely be giving this mod a run very soon.

 

There will be more coming, I just thought the mid-levels needed a little love too. Equipment choices shift towards heavy armor in a big way around floors 5-10, so if you're not into heavy armor the entire second half of the game gets pretty sparse for you.

 

I think calling this a "completed mod" may be a bit premature. v0.2 is now up with 20 additional items. Only a few items with level < 10, and no weapons this time around; I don't consider them as important since Chests of Evil and Krong powers give weapons a degree of variation that other items don't have, other mods seem to prefer adding weapons to armor, and I personally just don't find them as interesting for the most part.

Also tweaked a couple of the existing items--I realized that things like the +12 slashing damage on the claw gauntlet would apply to ranged attacks as well, so some of that type of thing got shoved off into weapon procs (with a little bit of base damage left in, because it looks cool on the stats tooltip and helps give an indication of what the item does.)

 

Oh, okay. I was kind of concerned about blindsiding people with new releases (admittedly I dunno if I'll have the time to keep updating at this pace) but if that's the norm then it's fine.

Thanks! The symbiont is my favorite too.

 

A lot of these items, I've found, are just stats and some (albeit cool) fluff. What really makes an item interesting are unique abilities, even if they're not very powerful. The ghoul mask, for instance, is (imo) the coolest item in this pack simply because of its double-edged unique ability that meshes perfectly with its flavor. 10/10, would dl again.

 

Sure, but not everything needs to have procs, especially when the lower floors have hardly anything there to begin with. Gotta make sure the basics covered too. As things get fleshed out there will definitely be more unique items added. Besides, people don't give "just stats" enough credit.

There's also the issue that at present there's really no way to concisely convey the exact effects of an item's abilities, especially if you're trying to avoid "breaking character" in the description. I do admit that I like the kind of more traditional roguelike feel you get from picking up a potentially dangerous item and finding out its effects through experimentation--if you think the ghoul mask is a double edged sword, baby, you ain't seen nothin yet.

 

Updated to v0.3 with an additional 30 items, most of which are exceedingly silly. I'm starting to feel bad for mages who try to stick to pure mage gear through the endgame; then again, if the devs aren't going to balance the better wizard trees then I suppose the next best thing is to make their characters look ridiculous.

Part of the delay is that I've started adding in a few weapons, which as established I'm not really as invested in. But it turned out in previous versions that the Stupidly Huge Sword wound up being the de facto "spam these things all over the bottom floors" weapon since there were literally no other common weapons at that depth, so I wanted to get a decent weapon collection going. You're still going to be seeing the same 8-10 weapons a lot by the end, though.

 

Here. I repacked it for you. It can work inside the zip like this.

Thanks for continuing the work!

*Edit* Download removed. No-longer needed.

 

Hey, thanks. I didn't even realize Dredmor read into zip files.

EDIT: Although I just realized that I left my debugging stuff in apparently? Uploaded a new version that fixes that and uses the shorter internal structure.

 

I just got your freeze wand with 4 charges. I tried it on two different enemy monsters, a wight and a gnome. It didn't seem to do anything either time. I tried it on the wight twice and the gnome once. I also after that experience looked at your code and the animation isn't triggering and the only thing that does appear to happen is if the monster is next to me or far away, it doesn't take it's chance to hit me. So it is losing at most it's one turn and that is all. It can move around and attack after I make my move.

 

I'd assumed that the monsters losing one attack was the point of the wand. Prevents one monster action to let you heal a bit more or wait out a cool down timer. It's not very powerful overall, but could be a life-saver in specific situations where you can't retreat. The one an only time I used one I was surrounded and one turn away from another axenado, and IIRC it fit the bill perfectly.

 

Whoops. The freeze wand has multiple paralysis effects which were cumulative in 1.10 when I first made it, so it would stun monsters for quite a while due to the paralysis turns piling up and even if they resisted one or two of the paralysis effects they'd still be stopped for a couple turns. Apparently that's no longer the case and now it's overriding the layered paralysis effects with the shortest duration one? I'll fiddle with it when I get home.

EDIT: Turned out to be simpler than that; there was a naming conflict between the Freeze Wand effect and part of one of the expansion spells, so it was applying the wrong effect altogether. Updated the Steam version, should now be working as intended and have a long, reliable stun effect.

 

Updated to v0.4, with 81 items. Someone pointed out in the Workshop that some of the leftover debugging spells were calling RotDG assets so that got fixed as well (should now be playable without RotDG.)

 

Is the Three Wolf Tunic yours? Because it made me lol.

 

Yeah, that's one of mine. Thank you--in my opinion it's one of the silliest things in the pack and it's good to hear that such silliness is not in vain.

 

Just so you know, the v0.4 of More Dred wont allow me to load saves that had the v0.3 of More Dred.

EDIT: I went into your mod and to get it to work I just changed the mod name back to More Dred from the change you made with More Dred (Item Pack). It's not a big deal for me as my characters aren't very deep in the dungeon and I have no problem starting over. I rarely let my characters die, just start new ones all of the time. Some people might complain loudly about breaking saves.