[Mod] Nydiamar

Just checking in to see how’s the work on the mod going?

Update 8: Relaunch

4+ New Locations / 16 New Environments

New Location — A Dream

You take a short nap and dream about a somewhat familiar place.

New Location — Devotion

Devotion is the central location from where you can access each of the six unique Devotion Dungeons.

New Location — Devotion Dungeons

All Devotion Shrines are hidden inside these dungeons, and each one offers you a new challenge to overcome.

Adventurous Cavern

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure through a dialog with over 3500 words.

Sacred Halls

Cold Ruins

Run through spikes!

Illusionary Dungeon

Find the actual shrines.

Overrun Fields

Clear the area and face the final encounter.

Scorched Grounds

Survive all waves — but with a twist! Each wave will spawn after a certain time, even if the previous wave still exists. If a wave is cleared, a torch will light up.

New Location — Siegmar’s Landing / Faction Centre

For whatever reason, all Faction Merchants are gathered here.

New Location — Siegmar’s Challenge / Faction Arena (Rogue-Like Dungeon)

A new Rogue-Like Dungeon that is split up into three different parts. Fight through small arenas against many random encounters until you eventually arrive at the final arena to battle one - or maybe two - boss(es). Each part increases in difficulty and the path leading to its end is at least a bit randomized. For an extra challenge, you may also take on the Time Challenge by completing each part in a timely manner.

Part I

Part II

Part III

New Location — Sanctuary (Rogue-Like Dungeon)

The entrance to this new Rogue-Like Dungeon is hidden away near the Entrance to the Catacombs. Vanishing Keys are scattered around the dungeon and required to unlock tiered reward areas. And if you feel like it, you may as well curse yourself.

Swampy Graves

Thick Forest

Fields

Sanctuary

Reworked Existing Location — Nehada Desert & Ancient Ruins

Visually fully reworked the whole area.

Comparison to Previous Version

New Mechanics

  • Main Quest
    • This quest acts as a guide and tutorial. Reading the quest description might yield you useful information.
  • 6 Divined Devotion Spheres
    • Hidden somewhere inside the world. Find and pop them to unlock each Devotion Dungeon.
  • 8 Attribute & Skill Shrines
    • These can be found scattered around the world. Cleansing them gets you a Tome that can be exchanged for Attribute & Skill Points.
  • Faction Tokens & Tickets
    • The Faction Tickets are used as an entrance fee for the Faction Arena. Faction Tokens are used to level up each faction and are rewarded upon completion of the Faction Arena or through level-up rewards.
  • Material Merchants
    • These sell every material available in the game. Chances are you can’t actually get all possible materials through my mod, since some monsters or bosses might be missing. The merchants offer a very expensive way to still acquire them.
  • Bounties (Reworked)
    • Added 5 new bounty objectives. Doing the objective, for example smashing urns, you now get so called Bounty Tokens. These are tokens you hold inside your inventory. Should you get enough of them, the bounty completes itself. No more pop-ups.
  • Nydar Mode
    • I have added a simple buff to make the mod easier. You are not supposed to use it — and because of this, you need to enable it through the console.

Read more about these mechanics here!

New Quests

  • Hawton Mine — Stolen Supplies
  • Strange Well — Investigation: Strange Well
  • Tomb — An Once Forgotten Legend

Reworked Quest Rewards

New Items

  • Loot-Spheres
    • You can pop these to get their contents. There are many different variations, and while you mostly get them as a reward, you might as well drop them occasionally from chests.
  • Experience Scrolls
    • Increases the experience you gain for a short duration.
  • Stash Scrolls
    • Spawns a stash right at you. Don’t get crushed.
  • Divine Crystals
    • Grants you a powerful buff for some time. These are a possible reward in Sanctuary.

A New Soundtrack (10+ titles)

Changes to Existing Environments

  • Completely Reworked Nehada Desert & Ancient Ruins
  • Prelude — Refined ground textures
  • Edge of Eternity — Reworked the atmosphere, more diverse weather
  • Cruesle Canyon — Reworked the cliff, which is now accessible
  • Flooded Mountain Woods — Lowered the cliffs for a better view
  • Strange Well — Refined ground textures
  • Transition Part I — Removed the fog, refined ground textures

Changes to Existing Content

  • Completely reworked all dialog with coloring and a better structure
  • Completely reworked all level-up rewards
  • Balanced encounters — Lowered overall difficulty in the starting areas; Limited the level enemies can go up to on each difficulty; Higher level offset in late-game areas and challenge dungeons
    • Hawton Mine — Added additional spawns to the boss fight
    • Strange Well — Final fight has slightly more spawns
    • Tomb — New scripted encounter before final fight
    • Odul Aela’s Dungeon — Reworked some encounters, now slightly more difficult
    • Ashes — You can now encounter Salazar (required for a recipe); Increased difficulty of the optional additional encounters for the final fight
  • Reworked the unique armor I’m Attractive, as well as added a long duration version — You can now actually build an army
  • Changed up the boring Necklace Quest a bit
  • Fixes — Opened doors still blocking the path (Hawton Mine & Odul Aela’s Dungeon); Ashes final fight not working after dying once and reentering; Enya’s Vision teleporters not working correctly; Odul Aela’s Dungeon rewards given even if the player died; No more duplicated blueprints

And countless other minor changes . . .


I want to sincerely apologize for the silence. Besides being burned out, I also had other things to deal with first. Fortunately, I had quite some surge of motivation, so I got back on it. Again, I’m really sorry for whoever anticipated an update of the mod.

A full play-through on Normal should now take 7 to 10 hours. I think I might have overtuned the difficulty of some parts, so feedback about this would be appreciated.

I’m also considering porting all my environments over to the main campaign. They would act as new Rogue-Like Dungeons that you can find randomly in the world. Rewards will be tuned down to match the rest of the game. Currently counting them I come up to potentially 15 new dungeons — so ~2 per act, but I would probably scatter them more around the starting acts than the later ones. This would be a completely new mod that expands the main game.

That’s all. Enjoy playing.


Follow the instructions from the Main Thread!

3 Likes

Patch 1

New Location — Underground Fortress (Extension)

This is a really small hub where you can find several merchants that sell each available Legendary Item (High-Level) in the game. The area has an entrance fee of 750 000 Iron Bits and 5 Skeleton Keys — and the average price for each item scales to roughly 300 000 Iron Bits. You need to be level 85 to access it.

Unfortunately I realised that adding all Epic Items would take way too long and probably require me to add more than 10 new merchants (to overall 18). So I will leave them out. This also means that a Level 100 Play-Through doesn’t make much sense anymore if you can’t buy proper equipment, therefore I might scrap my plans for it.

Difficulty Merits

You get Difficulty Merits as a reward upon completion of this mod. You could now level a character through Normal and Elite, take the merit(s), then switch over to the main campaign and continue playing on Ultimate the way you normally would do.

You can get a merit only once per play-through. Normal gets you one to skip Normal; Elite gets you one to skip Normal and Elite. The merit does not work for Nydiamar.

Here's a short guide about how to move your modded character to the main campaign
  1. Go to “Documents\My Games\Grim Dawn\save”.
  2. Copy your character from the “user”-directory to the “main”-directory. Make sure you don’t already have a same-named character in “main” / Don’t overwrite anything.
  3. Download this useful tool.
  4. Now open the tool, navigate to the “Char Editor” tab, select your character (the one in “main”) through the drop-down menu and remove the “In Mod” flag. Afterwards save your character.
  5. Your character will now appear in the character select list (Main Campaign) in-game — load into Normal and use the Difficulty Merit to unlock the difficulties.

Do not use the Difficulty Merit while being in Nydiamar — it won’t work and will be wasted!

Keep in mind that you will end up with more Attribute and Skill Points than intended. Nydiamar gets you (in case you complete everything) the same amount of points as the main campaign (doing every quest). You might end up with 8 Attribute and 11 Skill Points more than you should.

You will also lose all Nydiamar specific items, and therefore won’t be able to play this mod again with the same character.

Other Changes

  • Fixed the repeated/bugged encounters in Part III of the Faction Arena — This is really hard to reproduce, so I can’t be sure - it still might happen occasionally
  • Fixed the Treasure Trove not taking 1 Dynamite from the player
  • Rebalanced the Juggernaut Curse in Sanctuary — It now drastically increases your survivability but reduces your Total Speed and Damage
  • The Level 45 Head-Start now awards you 10 Devotion Points for a better start

Patch can be played with characters created in Update 8.

Follow the instructions from the Main Thread!

Excellent mod, love the environment atmosphere.

I find it difficult at times with pathfinding and I’m not sure if it’s a design choice but the lack of stars (or other marker) for the quest objectives (particularly when they’re not far away) is frustrating.

Thanks for your hard work.

I agree! Gonna release a small patch tomorrow that will add them (Quest & Entrance Makers). I tried adding them once a long time ago but did not get them to work. Somehow figured it out now.

1 Like

Patch 2

Quest & Entrance Markers

Entrances are now marked on your map (where it makes sense). Some quests now have Quest Markers — not all objectives are marked, only the ones that might be hard to find. Unfortunately you still need to get quite close to them to appear.

I might add Point of Interests with an unique marker in the future that marks locations like the crater in Snowy Landscape or the hidden pathway in the Tomb.

That’s all.


Patch can be played with characters created in Update 8.

Follow the instructions from the Main Thread!

Patch 3

Monster Totems

Most areas now spawn the newly added Monster Totems.

Other Changes

  • Added a lot more Quest & Entrance Markers, as well as some Point of Interests
  • Added the new Legendaries to the merchant inventories
  • Rewrote some dialog

This will be the final update for a while — I think the mod is now in a really good spot to be enjoyed. I hope some more people give it a try, tho.


Patch can be played with characters created in Update 8.

Follow the instructions from the Main Thread!

1 Like

I’m enjoying Nydiamar very much! I’m finding a lot of the puzzles quite challenging, as many of them have no indication of how to actually solve them from what I encountered- Elements took me far, far too long and eventually I just resorted to potion spamming my way through (I assume I just had to avoid stuff? but hitboxes were almost impossible to read), and I’m currently stuck in the Tomb (got the fake ashes and can’t find the real ones).

Faction dungeon is super cool, and the music is great. I’m finding it an odd combination of relaxing and engaging, which are two words I would not use describing Grim Dawn!

Just wanted to let you know that people ARE finding your work, and enjoying it greatly!

Great to hear that you are enjoying it!

I think even when following the correct “path” you could not make it without taking any damage, so using your constitution or a few potions is required. When eventually doing the Devotion Dungeon with the Elements theme, just run straight to the clear ground-tiles, use your constitution to heal up, then continue.

There’s a hidden pathway behind the large memorial. I added a Point of Interest in Patch 3 which marks it on your map. To open it up you need to interact with one of the torches (the one that’s not lit) on the side. You might need to rotate the camera to spot it. But completing the quest with the wrong ashes might yield you even better rewards, depending on what you want — Loot or Experience.

By the way, if the mod gets too difficult or frustrating, you could always enable the Nydar Mode. I actually needed it myself when testing Ultimate.

So many great mods that i overlook some sometimes.I don’t have much time.I do at the moment though.I broke a rib on Wednesday but mostly recovering btw it hurts like hell for anyone that wants to know :grin:

So when you say to make a new save file for every new version of the mod do you mean we’d need a new character for every update to the mod we install?

No, all recently released patches do not require a new character. I just wanted to make sure that people won’t use a character created from before Update 8. These won’t work, since the update changed nearly everything.

Besides that, all future updates also won’t require new characters as well.

1 Like

Anyone know if there is a way to play both this mod and dawn of masteries together?

You can only play one mod at a time, and the char should generally be exclusive to that one mod too (in this case definitely)

Thank you for your reply! I was confused.

Just to get back to this a second.

I plan to port my environments over to the main campaign, as in 15+ new Rogue-Like dungeons you can randomly encounter. When doing this, I will try to clean up the source a bit, so only the necessary files are changed. Basically I will only change the campaign map, nothing else — to keep the experience “vanilla”.

This might make it possible to merge the mod with others, as long as a source and the permission from the author is given. But right now, there’s unfortunately no way.

That sounds awesome

I have been looking up and down the bridge, but I can’t find the chest the key opens in “Return the Lost Necklace”. Any hints?

Hello, your mod is awesome. I am a Chinese player, but I have encountered the problem that the text cannot be displayed while playing your mod. Can you provide me with a text for me to add? I will thank you very much!

The chest was stolen by a thief, there’s a note that indicates that. You will find the chest later on, near a large bridge, before getting to the Old Graveyard. Should have a Quest Marker on it!

Hello!

Did you try changing the game language to English inside the settings? You should be able to switch back and forth easily. Besides that, I have no idea how to fix this. Do you have the same problem with other mods?

The text is included in the source (download in the OP), but we are talking dozens of text, conversation and quest files. If you meant doing a translation by it, then this would take an insane amount of work. All text might be well over 15000 words, which would be over 33 pages of pure text to translate.