S4 - Standalone Seeker Slayer Survivor mod! (Beta/Feedback thread)

[Noqn]

Some time back @Elric Galad made the suggestion of a mod to enable a standalone playthorugh of the Seeker Slayer Survivor DLC:

On 7/30/2021 at 5:38 PM, Elric Galad said:

The best thing with Arena content from BG serie was arguably that it enabled creating a party specifically for them.

A CRPG being around 100h of play, being able to experience a party for much shorter runs was great.

 

Slayer Seaker Survivor does not allow it. It is well integrated to the base game (as well as an arena game could be) but it is still the least good of the 3 DLC for me. Prolonging a run with another series of mere battles isn’t that fun.

It is a pity because the huge diversity of builds allowed by PoE2 would probably make it great.

 

So what about making a mod that would allow such an experience ?

 

I've (sporadically) worked on implementing this concept, and the mod is now at the point where it's a fully playable - big thanks to everyone in the modding subforum thread! I thought to post it here since this new gamemode may be of general interest.

 

Features

• New Game starts with entering the Temple of Toamowhai, and you'll be blocked from exiting the island. All quests flags will be set appropriately.
• You'll begin at Lv 16 with 100'000 gold and a Superb copy of every weapon and armor kind.
• You'll be free to access the inn and hire a full party of adventurers before taking on any challenges (just speak to Humaire once first).
• Challenges will provide extra gold (50k) and experience. These rewards are repeatable, but your party will reach Lv19 in the later parts of the campaign even if you only do the mandatory challenges.
• Vendors will sell unique loot and large quantities of all consumables and misc items:
  • Caretta will sell all (non-SSS) Unique Armor and Weapons.
  • Winge will sell all Grimoires, Scrolls, Trinkets and Unique Accessories. (Note that Winge is available after the first challenge.)
  • Neale will sell all Potions, Ingredients and Upgrade materials.
  • Cook Corrin will sell all Drugs and Prepared Meals.
  • (TODO: Pets, Soulbound Armor & Weapons, Bombs & Traps)
• Artefact-hunting challenges will be unlocked simultaneously with the ones you get from exploring Kazuwari.
• You can load any preexisting non-S4 playthrough while the mod is enabled, and experience vanilla behavior! (The changes to rewards and vendors only take effect if a specific flag has been set upon character creation.)
  To start a new non-S4 game, you only have to temporarily disable the mod (and reboot the game). Then reenable it after character creation, or whenever you go back to your S4 playthroughs.

 

Looking for feedback!

All feedback is much appreciated, in particular regarding starting gold and rewards which are currently somewhat abitrary

If there are any items missing from Vendors that you think should be available (besides the ones listed TODO above), I'd be happy to hear!
Feedback on Levels/Experience reward are also welcome, here are some more details on what's currently implemented:

Spoiler

6 hours ago, Noqn said:

:: Lv 16 ::

• Agony of the Elements
• Trial of the Naga

:: Lv 17 ::

• Memories of a Mad Man
• Bloodletting 

:: Lv 18 ::

• (Exploring Kazuwari)
• Any 3 S/S/S Challenges

:: Lv 19 ::

• Contest of the S/S/S
• Battle Royale
• (In-Between)
• 

All challenges will grant 6000 XP and 50k cash to party. Trial of the Naga & Bloodletting will also always grant the xp needed to get to Lv17 & 18 respectively.

3x 6000xp will be enough to get from Lv18 to 19. The player can also repeat any challenges to get to lv20.

 

Download -> S4 - Standalone Seeker Slayer Survivor.zip

Installation

Download the .zip file and extract the content to your override folder.

.../Pillars of Eternity II Deadfire/PillarsOfEternityII_Data/override

Note that if you install and enable the mod while the game is still running, the vanilla intro scene will still be used. In that case, restart the game once and the mod will thereafter property override the intro scene.
(Likewise, if you want to uninstall/disable the mod, the game must be relaunched after the mod has been unstalled/disabled for the intro scene to revert.)

Edited July 23, 2022 by Noqn

[Boeroer]

Wow - very cool!

[Elric Galad]

That is really great to see it happen, congratulations !

I apologize that I won't be able to play right now. Got the usual IRL Stuff to do, new BPM version I've just started to work on, my first Tyranny run in progress that I've delayed for years...

But lacking time was basically the reason why I wished so much for this very mod to exist

[Noqn]

Me calculating when Elric will be at his most busiest and releasing the mod at that exact date:

Edited July 23, 2022 by Noqn

[Elric Galad]

What's the next step then ?

Are you waiting for a few feddbacks before putting it on Nexus ?

Do you need a hand to advertise it on some other forums ? Maybe later ?

[Noqn]

Thanks, there's a few things I'd like to do first:

1. Decide what to do with Soulbounds with special requirements.
2. Add pets, bombs & traps to stores.
3. Tweak gold rewards based on feedback/my own playtesting.

Also I won't have access to my Deadfire installation during August, so I'd like to relese it afterwards in case a hotfix is needed

Edit: soulbind stuff turned out to be painless. I've added all non-SSS soulbounds (except Modwyr) to stores, requirements like sailing Lord Darryn's Voulge into a storm will now be auto-completed. Will post patch after testing.

Edited July 26, 2022 by Noqn

[thelee]

wowowow this is great work. 

 

...where do i install the mod on macOS? i'm not near my gaming PC for a while and only have my laptop

 

edit: this is as close as I can see so far in terms of equivalent paths:

Edited July 27, 2022 by thelee

[Noqn]

I didn't know mac had different paths

https://www.gog.com/forum/pillars_of_eternity_series/poe2_mod_installation_for_macos_fyi

It seems you have to create the "override" folder inside the "Contents" folder, then drop the mod folder there.

 

Edited July 27, 2022 by Noqn

[thelee]

i'm still trying to carve out some time to more properly put it through its paces, but a few quick thoughts

• blunderbuss doesn't appear to be in the initial set of superb gear? i double and triple checked but i don't think i saw one
• what about turning down the initial gold and the per-match gold rewards? to make purchasing stuff a bit more strategic decision
• what do you think about splitting up the accessories between different merchants? there's just so many, it feels like it takes a while to find items to buy through the long list and if they were subdivided somehow that'd help.
  • simlar thing with weapons - maybe split 1h and 2h weapons betwen different merchants to make it easier to find through them? though i had less problem here because it feels like there are a lot fewer weapons to go through
• what about a few non-unique items? i was trying to find gloves of accuracy, for example. i ended up settling for the unique gloves of the dungeon warden, but that wouldn't suffice if i wanted more than one character with them. same thing with other non-unique accessories.

[Noqn]

Thanks for the feedback!

7 hours ago, thelee said:

blunderbuss doesn't appear to be in the initial set of superb gear? i double and triple checked but i don't think i saw one

Fixed! Note that the changes to vendor inventories/starting gear (probably) won't take effect during the ongoing s4 playthrough.

Download -> s4.tar.gz

7 hours ago, thelee said:

what about turning down the initial gold and the per-match gold rewards? to make purchasing stuff a bit more strategic decision

Sounds good, I reduced the starting gold to 50k & per-match gold to 20k. You can experiment with the values if you want, look inside the globalscripts folder:

• starting gold -> line 22 in s4_post_character_creation.globalscriptbundle
• challenge gold -> line 37 in s4_challenge_rewards.globalscriptbundle

7 hours ago, thelee said:

what do you think about splitting up the accessories between different merchants? there's just so many, it feels like it takes a while to find items to buy through the long list and if they were subdivided somehow that'd help.

Yeah, the vendor inventories are really bloated. Splitting each category of items between vendors would make the item lists more condensed (when filtering on a specific category at least), but I'm afraid it would also make it harder to know exactly which vendor to go to for which item.

____

Edit: thinking about it some more, I do like this idea. Domenga could get all rings and capes or something, as long as those categories are collected in one place the player will know where to go.
____

There's also the option of using Engari. He's not unlocked as a vendor until after 4 encounters, which I felt was a bit much and decided not to give him anything. But maybe he could be used after all?

7 hours ago, thelee said:

what about a few non-unique items? i was trying to find gloves of accuracy, for example. i ended up settling for the unique gloves of the dungeon warden, but that wouldn't suffice if i wanted more than one character with them. same thing with other non-unique accessories.

Agh, missed those. I added 1 copy of each to Winge in the latest version above. They aren't stackable so adding more than one of each would bloat the inventories even further. I'll probably make them regenerate in the vendors inventories in the future, so that you can buy several of them (although one at a time) while keeping the bloat down.

Edited August 1, 2022 by Noqn

[thelee]

heya any update on a version with pets and such?

 

edit: @Noqn, also it might be useful to also provide superior small shield, medium shield, large shield at start of S4

Edited September 6, 2022 by thelee

[Noqn]

Hi, just a few days after I got back home and could access my desktop I got hit by corona, so I've been out of commission for the last week or so

I think the pets (& soulbounds) stuff were included in the download in my last post, but I forgot to mention it (pets are sold by Domenga). I'd update the main post but annoyingly it seems I can't edit it anymore.

Anyhow, new download with superior shields added -> S4 -Standalone Seeker Slayer Survivor.zip

Next I'll split up the accessories across vendors and set the non-unique accessories to regenerate.

What do you think about the campaign as a whole as it is currently?

[thelee]

12 minutes ago, Noqn said:

What do you think about the campaign as a whole as it is currently?

lol i'm using S4 as an opportunity to try out higher-level turn-based mode and i honestly have only just managed to get past the second fight (naga one); quite a steep learning curve for TB-mode coming from dedicated RTwP play. so not much comment yet.

Edited September 6, 2022 by thelee

[Elric Galad]

22 hours ago, thelee said:

lol i'm using S4 as an opportunity to try out higher-level turn-based mode and i honestly have only just managed to get past the second fight (naga one); quite a steep learning curve for TB-mode coming from dedicated RTwP play. so not much comment yet.

Yeah and you're technically among the GOAT of this game. 

Please tell me you're at least playing Solo.

[thelee]

1 hour ago, Elric Galad said:

Yeah and you're technically among the GOAT of this game. 

Please tell me you're at least playing Solo.

hey man, action economy considerations really different in TB mode! you can get wrecked pretty badly when naga outnumber you like 2x and focus fire and they are all guaranteed a turn each round

[thelee]

On 9/6/2022 at 9:12 AM, Noqn said:

What do you think about the campaign as a whole as it is currently?

So now that I've gotten the hang of TB mode

• i think you hit a good spot with the cash rewards
• same thing with exp
• i was wondering how you were going to deal with the treasure hunting part, glad to see they all get unlocked

some thoughts:

• remove high-level scrolls and bombs from vendors? seems a bit trivializing that it's easy to buy 5 scrolls of maelstrom, at least make people craft for it c'mon!
  • edit: similar thing with foods. edit 2: well, maybe not foods, since the nice ones are expensive enough that they may be more of a tradeoff to buy and rest spam
• similarly, it feels like mats should be split up, like one person gets jewels, one person gets creature parts, one person gets the other stuff. makes it hard scrolling through least unstable coil guy's inventory. edit: eh, maybe not, upon further play it's nice that i don't have to run around while trying to remember what mats i needed for an upgrade.

Edited September 10, 2022 by thelee

[Noqn]

5 hours ago, thelee said:

So now that I've gotten the hang of TB mode

• i think you hit a good spot with the cash rewards
• same thing with exp
• i was wondering how you were going to deal with the treasure hunting part, glad to see they all get unlocked

Good to hear, good to hear. I'm especially happy how the artefact hunt skip turned out

5 hours ago, thelee said:

• remove high-level scrolls and bombs from vendors? seems a bit trivializing that it's easy to buy 5 scrolls of maelstrom, at least make people craft for it c'mon!

If scrolls are going to be available through crafting (which is probably unavoidable since we need to provide all ingredients for upgrading equipment), I reason that we might as well put them in shops for the sake of convenience.

Should I remove the BoW & FS bombs? I don't think they are craftable by default?

Quote

edit: similar thing with foods. edit 2: well, maybe not foods, since the nice ones are expensive enough that they may be more of a tradeoff to buy and rest spam

Hmm, Food would be easier to gate due to having unique ingredients. But I too think it's a fair tradeoff atm. Also, the player would have access to all foods in a vanilla playthrough after all.

Quote

• similarly, it feels like mats should be split up, like one person gets jewels, one person gets creature parts, one person gets the other stuff. makes it hard scrolling through least unstable coil guy's inventory. edit: eh, maybe not, upon further play it's nice that i don't have to run around while trying to remember what mats i needed for an upgrade.

This is absolutely worth considering, finding the right ingredient is too painful atm.

Edited September 10, 2022 by Noqn

[Noqn]

2 minutes ago, Noqn said:

If scrolls are going to be available through crafting (which is probably unavoidable since we need to provide all ingredients for upgrading equipment)

Got me thinking...

Another proposal: Make duplicate receipts for all Item Upgrades which will only display on a S4 playthrough. The difference from vanilla recipes is that these won't require any ingredients (but have prices adjusted). This way we could remove ingredients from shops entirely. I imagine this would be of great convenience to players.

Vanilla:

S4:

S4 (with vanilla hidden):

Thoughts?

Edited September 10, 2022 by Noqn

[thelee]

i think overall that would be an extremely useful change. with the slight niggle that the only thing is that i feel like it'd still be useful to have mats or something for crafting consumables. you're getting some mats after some fights anyway. (and even for enchanting, getting an adra ban off the fire titan fight saved me some cash from having to buy it) but i can't deny it'd be heck of a lot more convenient to just worry about cash only

 

12 hours ago, Noqn said:

Should I remove the BoW & FS bombs? I don't think they are craftable by default?

i think it's fine to have "out of chronological order" stuff. makes this mod really like a battle sandbox (esp fun to have some of the items to buy that normally are only available like a few minutes before the end of the game)

[Elric Galad]

On 9/10/2022 at 12:10 PM, Noqn said:

Got me thinking...

Another proposal: Make duplicate receipts for all Item Upgrades which will only display on a S4 playthrough. The difference from vanilla recipes is that these won't require any ingredients (but have prices adjusted). This way we could remove ingredients from shops entirely. I imagine this would be of great convenience to players.

Vanilla:

S4:

S4 (with vanilla hidden):

Thoughts?

Worth considering.

Worth considering as a standalone mod too.

Basically, if it isn't too much work, go for it.

[Noqn]

On 9/11/2022 at 12:27 AM, thelee said:

i think overall that would be an extremely useful change. with the slight niggle that the only thing is that i feel like it'd still be useful to have mats or something for crafting consumables. you're getting some mats after some fights anyway. (and even for enchanting, getting an adra ban off the fire titan fight saved me some cash from having to buy it) but i can't deny it'd be heck of a lot more convenient to just worry about cash only

True, we can keep ingredients in Neale's shop, the player can just ignore them if they aren't needed.

On 9/11/2022 at 12:27 AM, thelee said:

i think it's fine to have "out of chronological order" stuff. makes this mod really like a battle sandbox (esp fun to have some of the items to buy that normally are only available like a few minutes before the end of the game)

8 hours ago, Elric Galad said:

Worth considering.

Worth considering as a standalone mod too.

Basically, if it isn't too much work, go for it.

Probably going to make it as an optional package(s).

If the vanilla recipes (with ingredients) aren't hidden, the enchantment menus will get bloated and a bit confusing. Still convenient, but ugly enough that I don't want it as default.
However if the vanilla recipes are hidden, I'd have to make edits to all those objects that for compatability reasons I'd prefer not to have in the main package.

So I think the best option is two optional downloads, with vanilla recipes either visible or hidden.
Feel free to try out one of the two options (doesn't cover the quality enchantments yet though) -> S4 - Recipes (Vanilla Hidden).zip  S4 - Recipes (Vanilla Not Hidden).zip

[Elric Galad]

Okay, so I'm proud to announce that I've finally installed the mod and started a new game (but nothing more, need more time to actually play  )

Tested the Hidden Recipes component. IMHO you should include it in the mod by default. Installation instruction should remain as simple as possible (at least once you're confident enough that it is stable).

[thelee]

is there any issue with me swapping out my existing S4 mod with the modified recipes (hidden or not) if i already have a game going on?

[Noqn]

On 9/12/2022 at 11:57 PM, Elric Galad said:

Tested the Hidden Recipes component. IMHO you should include it in the mod by default. Installation instruction should remain as simple as possible (at least once you're confident enough that it is stable).

I'll take it into consideration, but I'm still a bit hesitant. The mod is atm pretty clean when it comes to edits on vanilla objects. Recipes are outside the SSS sphere that I'd considered fair game, so I'm not keen on making blanket edits on them in the main file. It could introduce awkward compatability issues down the line, in case someone makes a mod that messes with recipes.

Would it be better to have a single optional package for clarity? The non-hidden version is probably not necessary tbh.

 

36 minutes ago, thelee said:

is there any issue with me swapping out my existing S4 mod with the modified recipes (hidden or not) if i already have a game going on?

The two "S4 - Recipes" files I uploaded are optional mods that go alongside the main download, you can safely enable (or disable) either of them at any time. The S4 recipes will only show up on a S4 playthrough, while vanilla recipes will only be hidden on a S4 playthrough (if you picked that option).

edit: my reading comprehension is not the best, did I misunderstand your question?

Edited September 15, 2022 by Noqn

[thelee]

7 minutes ago, Noqn said:

edit: my reading comprehension is not the best, did I misunderstand your question?

no you got it, thanks