Hello. I may or may not have spent an entire day doing something I thought would have been simple.
I have been playing this fantastic game/mod and a few thoughts popped into my head. “What if… I could change how many skill points you earn per level, modify the cap to devotion points, and add affixes to epic/legendary equipment?” So I looked to see if it was possible. It seemed so. And I only wanted to play by myself anyways…so may as well give it a go.
However, now I realize that changing a few numbers isn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be (or maybe checking a box or two in the case of the last idea).
So my question is: is modding a mod possible for the average person? Or have I delved into a never ending rabbit hole? I have managed to open the asset manager, modify some dbr files that I thought were the correct ones (though saving them and selecting my modified mod from the play screen yields nothing. It was just the base game. Not even the original mod), and somehow stumbled my way through a lot of errors preventing me from loading the dbr editor. I can’t tell if I am actually making progress - or if this is more of an illusion of progress - and I am not any closer to accomplishing what I sought out to do at the start.
My recommendation for anyone wishing to get into modding is to start small…read the guides, dissect other mods to see what they did and how. Don’t get discouraged when things don’t work, ask for help on this forum or on the GD Discord, and persevere!
you have to set up asset manager, change game/gameengine.dbr for the devotion cap and creatures/pc/playerlevels.dbr for the skill points and then build the mod again in AssetManager
Once you have figured that part out, anything else is analyzing other dbr files and figuring out what changes you need, e.g. for the affixes
I seem to have made some tangible progress (I think). Testing a fresh character I now have successfully edited the devotion cap and skill point/level. However now I ran into a different problem. Upon building the modified mod, the asset manager seems to have deemed all the mod’s files as ‘empty’ and deleted them. So now there are checkerboards everywhere and many UI elements are messed up.
Just keep the original mod’s .arc files, as long as you edit .dbr files only, they do not change.
Once you do want to change them, you need to create asset files for their soucre files (e.g. the .tga the .tex texture is being generated from), but that in turn requires you to have the .tga source and the mod might not come with it.
If you do not have the sources, you need to use ArchiveTool to buil;d the new .arcs (add the files for which you have no sources)
I am stuck at the Build > Build part. It seems that is necessary to save the changes I made to any dbr files. However that is also the point when asset manager thinks a bunch of other much-needed files are ‘unnecessary,’ and deletes them.
I appreciate the encouragement. My default level hovers around 0.
Perhaps you could answer a quick question I have. In my searches over the last few days, I have come across quite a few forum posts that provide helpful links to other resources, such as this one:
However, every link I tried in that list takes me to the home page of the forums. This wasn’t the only compendium of resources that did this either. I was wondering if there is an obscure setting I may need to change on my end to fix this.
I am a sliver away from getting this to work. I can edit the devotion cap/skills points per level - however doing so causes much of the inventory spaces to become unusable. They still show up - but items cannot be placed in them. I’ve noticed that the mod.arz file goes up by 1KB in size when changing the skill points per level/devotion cap. Aside from a few changed dbr files being added to the base mod - that is the only other change…
Thank you for your help so far regardless. I wouldn’t have been to make it nearly this far without it.
That sounds like there are some other values in the .dbr that you lost during your edit.
If the mid already contains the dbr, change that, not the vanilla one. You can always do that in a text editor to ensure that you know exactly which file you are editing.
not sure what you are doing here, but all files should be in the mod dir, none should be vanilla files (that may mean copying a vanilla file into the mod and then editing the version in the mod)
Editing the dbr files in Steam > steamapps > common > Grim Dawn > mods > ModName > database > records > creatures > pc > playerlevels.dbr (and the database > records > game > gameengine.dbr) didn’t clear up the inventory issue, so trying something different I instead edited the files in Steam > steamapps > common > Grim Dawn > database > records > creatures > pc > playerlevels.dbr (and same for gameengine.dbr)
You wouldn’t happen to know what the values for this 4 lines would need to be if I were not using Grim UI and the mod included an inventory expansion mod called ‘Stasher,’ would you?
I swear I am cursed or something. This doesn’t make sense.
So I reinstalled the mod (didn’t change anything), and everything is fine. I copy/paste the dbr files that I intend to change into a blank file. Then - I make the changes to the dbr files. Inventory is out of whack - but I did change the skill points per level / devotion cap. Now I paste the dbr files I just copied before making changes to them back into the mod - and now not only is the inventory messed up - but I am also back to the default skill points per level / devotion cap. I do not understand this.