[Mod] Nydiamar

Super news. Thanks!

So here’s what I was working on.


Next update will bring a new arena called Escalation. As the name suggests, the spawns of enemies escalates further and further the longer you go, with no upper limit — you might reach a point where the amount of enemies is no longer bearable (due to your weak character or more likely the performance) and you might consider leaving the arena for good. Every minute or so several spheres respawn in each corner — popping them all grants you a reward that gets better the more often you do this procedure. You can also choose the escalation difficulty and which enemies you will encounter beforehand.


The update also adds another whole new area. The main part is a large swamp where you might do some treasure hunting. Following the main path takes you directly to a new mini game, which requires you to use multiple towers to defend yourself — You are the core, hiding in your cozy ‘fortress’; You almost deal no damage and have your health reduced to only 1%, meaning that you can not fight for yourself; Enemies will hunt you down, you can not escape them; Surviving multiple waves gets you several rewards and eventually unlocks the exit.


Gonna take me a while to finish it up, but the ‘no fun’ parts are already done. Now onto balancing everything and adding the new Beutekugeln.

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Awesome mod.

Keeping this short but sweet.

Pros:

  • Amazing landscapes
  • Endless content
  • Some interesting short stories
  • Great difficulty curve
  • A lot of polish and work done to actually revisit this world, kind of like a side expansion to Grim Dawn

Cons:

  • There might be a story here, although I have no idea what’s going on.
  • A lot of complex mechanics at the very start of the game, kind of overwhelming.
  • A lot of fog
  • Not a particular fan of so many blank map zones
  • Strange flow of progression in terms of map/zone changes, not really sure how they relate to each other and changes drastically 1/4-1/2 way through.
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Awesome mod indeed!

One question, I noticed that switching from the main Nydiamar map to “Nydiamar main campaign” and back messes up all waypoints; I was able to fix the map by copying a backup over but it happens every time I switch between the two.

Is it “intended”? Any workarounds?

Thanks.

Thanks for the feedback!


I did not plan out anything at all (never expected to put out that many updates) and just wanted to create maps (mostly Rogue-Like Dungeons) with the available assets, so that’s why most things feel a bit disconnected. Also why there is no story besides some guidance — the maps came first, so I would need to shoehorn one into it. Might eventually add one in the future, but my writing skills are not impressive.

I will address both of these in the next update (I assume you meant the map overview with blank map zones)! Not all maps will get an overview, like the Nightmare, since there it does not make sense to have one, but others like the Strange Well.

Well, that’s true. I have two tricks I always use, the fog layer and the gloomy lighting throwing long shadows. Probably not to everyone’s liking, but I try to compromise!

Not intended at all! Probably a bug introduced by the latest patch.

Here’s a workaround:

  • Go to Documents\My Games\Grim Dawn\save\user
  • Go into your characters folder
  • Create a new folder, name it something like ‘__other maps’
  • Now move all ‘… .map’ folders of maps that you don’t want to play right now into the new folder
    • ‘levels_world001.map’ is NydiamarMainCampaign; ‘Maps_nydiamar.map’ is obviously Nydiamar
  • Do this procedure every time you want to switch campaigns

Hope that works for you!

Ah that makes sense, worked like a charm!

Thanks!

That’s a fair breakdown. Most of those “issues” were highly opinionated anyway, I can’t imagine it’s the same complaint for others and I don’t expect you to change anything at all. I think what you have here is a good thing, regardless, so keep it going and do what you do, it’s working.

EDIT: I should also add that you should’ve made a discord for this mod. Maybe it’s too late to do it now, but some things you’ve learned creating this might be useful to others also.

Alright, I give up on the Tower Defense mini game. The AI is just too frustrating.


I needed to cut all ranged units, since the AI does not care if a huge wall on a huge mountain is somehow in the way.

Pathing is completely random — Sometimes the AI prefers to stand still and stare at a wall instead of walking around it (even if not ranged), or it walks half the way towards me, and then for whatever reason decides to turn around, walk all the way back, to only once again stare at a wall.

Even without a wall in the way, the AI sometimes does not give any fucks at all.

I mean, look at these dudes, just standing there doing absolutely nothing. It's like they are brain-dead or something.

Towers randomly stop attacking despite having line of sight. Why the fuck would they suddenly stop? I can’t figure it out.


I know no one will care about this small rant at all, but seriously fuck this shit. AI is fine when it comes to the normal game, so I should not complain, but putting all this time into this only for it not working properly is really frustrating. Maybe I should not have used zombies?

I might leave it in since it is almost finished, but I won’t put any more time into it. Nonetheless, update is gonna be great, even without this small mini game.

The Final Update

Nydiamar now offers over 8 hours of content with 14+ Rogue-Like Dungeons, a different progression of the Devotion and Faction System, as well as plenty of new mechanics and items, such as capturing bosses and creatures or the large variety of Beutekugeln.

New Location — Escalation

An arena where spawns of enemies escalate further and further the longer you survive — until you no longer can handle them. 4 spheres appear in each corner after a short delay. Popping them all gets you a reward that gets better the more often you manage to do this.

You can change the type of enemies that appear to several others, including a random option that spawns a mix of everything.

There is also an Extreme Mode, which escalates the spawns even faster, but also increases the rewards you gain as well as decreases the respawn delay of the spheres, yielding you even more loot over time.

You can find the entrance to this area at Siegmar’s Landing. It does require a certain entrance fee, and you need to be at least Level 50 to gain access.


New Location — Duunart Swamp

A swampy area that is inhibited by trolls. The area has four bosses you can randomly encounter, as well as many hidden, or more precisely, buried chests, which can easily be missed.

Duunart Swamp (Fortress)

Disclaimer / Rant

This side area was supposed to be a Tower Defense mini game, but due to the various limitations of the AI (pathing, line of sight), the dungeon did not turn out too well. You could even say that it is completely broken. But besides the AI (and the proper balance), everything else is almost finished and playable, so I left it in. But I really could not have been bothered to polish it up, unfortunately. Give it a try and see for yourself, and just leave if it is not working.

Nonetheless, the description is below.

You are the core. You have drastically reduced health and damage. Use several different defenses to halt the enemy advancements towards you.

Besides defenses, you can also activate gates that close down if an enemy gets close enough, changing their path to a different and longer lane. A rune near the fortress entrance eliminates any enemies that got through your defenses — up to 10 are free, more eliminations require an investment. Everything requires a certain currency, which you get after each completed wave. The further you get, the better rewards you receive.

You can find the entrance to this area in Passage I. It does not require any entrance fee, but you need to be at least Level 50 to gain access.


New Location — Where the Time Goes . . .

Survive for 6 minutes. The spawns of enemies escalate further as the soundtrack builds up. That’s all.

You can find the entrance to this area in Passage II.


New Quest — A Flower

You eventually find a flower near the end of Nydiamar. Give it to someone (or something …) for a reward, which is different depending on who you choose — although we all know you will choose the dog.


New Quality of Life Feature

You can now pop Beutekugeln everywhere by destroying them.

The amount you destroy at once is the amount you will actually pop (e.g. a stack of 4 equals 4 pops). To pop an individual amount of spheres use the CTRL-Key to separate a stack, and then destroy the stack you want to pop.

Never pop them next to your stash — you will lose all spheres without gaining anything.

Was quite difficult to implement (well, for me at least). If you want to know why, read below:

When the player destroys a sphere, some function gets called that spawns a breakable loot container right on top of them, and then instantly breaks it to drop the loot.

This function also gets called when the player:

  • Receives a sphere as a reward directly or through dialog
  • Drops one from an enemy or chest
  • Combines two stacks inside their inventory
  • Uses the dialog option to pop the last available sphere (stacks somehow do not call the function)
  • Loads into the world for the first time
  • Puts one inside their stash

Now we only want the function to pop something when they actually destroy one by dropping it.

For the first three cases, we check if the amount of spheres the player previously had were reduced or not, since this would only be the case if they destroyed one by their own. The function that gets called can only count the current amount they have after destroying the sphere(s), so we need a count from before that point to compare to — which we get on loading into the world, on picking up a sphere (to update the count) and on leaving the stash area (since they could put some away).

For the dialog option, we count the spheres each time and ignore the dialog pop for the last sphere, so it pops through the new function instead (or else there would be two pops).

For the stash we need to disable the function while the player is next to it, which we do through a trigger that also enables the function again when the player leaves the stash area. There seems to be no way to differentiate between putting something into the stash and destroying something — this unfortunately means that if the player destroys one next to it, nothing happens.

For the loading into the world, we just add a short downtime of one second for the function.

Then we also got the problem with popping stacks of spheres instead of individual ones, since the function only gets called once. Solved by looping the pops for the difference of the previous and current amount of spheres the player has.

Lots of opportunities for it to not work, or worse, to be exploitable — which is why I had not done it previously.


Changes to Existing Content

  • Improvements to dialog and item descriptions
  • Improvements (visuals) to several locations — Noteworthy is Edge of Eternity, which is now much more detailed and cozy
  • Added A Nydiamar Note that has several short descriptions of mod features with some tips at the end
  • Added Beutekugel (Monster Infrequents) — Drops exactly what the name suggests; Almost all Monster Infrequents are included, works the same way as in the Crucible
  • Added two new chests
    • Nydiamar Chest — Most Rogue-Like Dungeons have a certain chance (50%) to spawn one (two in Sanctuary) near the end; Drops only Nydiamar specific items; Chance to drop an Attribute or Skill Point
    • Nather Chest (Monster Infrequents)
  • Added Defense Materials, which lets you instantly build a support tower
  • Added Map Overview to the following locations:
    • Strange Well
    • Depraved Ruins
    • Devotion
    • Sacred Halls
  • Changed the art of some Beutekugeln, as well as their pop effect
  • Reduced the drop rates of everything (by roughly 10 to 15%) — Progression is no fun if you get flooded with new items all the time, and there should now be a reason to do the more challenging content; You can easily undo this change on your own (Included in download)
  • Reduced the bonuses Nydar Mode grants the player — Focus lies on the increased Damage (now 35%), which makes the player clear faster but not necessary survive easier; While I personally only use it for testing, I felt like the mod is more fun with this buff being active, so I recommend using it until mid game, especially with not optimal builds
  • Added Aether Crystals (Creature) to some areas to offer an easier way to farm crystals for crafting
  • Added (more) Mummies to the Nehada Desert to add more variety
  • Mummies now reward Bounty Tokens (Undead)
  • Most Rogue-Like Dungeons are now marked as such through the name; Removed the lecterns in front of the Hawton Mine and Strange Well
  • Improved the script that removes duplicated Level Tokens
  • Fixed a logic mistake that locked the player out of the Hawton Mine and Sanctuary quests
  • Fixed an exploit with the Binding Stone spawning multiple creature packs
  • Fixed multiple exploits with the Summon(ed) Stash
  • And then some more fixes … (I did not fix the missing tags of merchants yet, unfortunately)

As the title of the update suggests, this is supposed to be the final major update for Nydiamar. There really must be some point where I call the mod done instead of constantly adding things and bloating it up. It is already a bit too convoluted as it is.

Should there be improvements to do (because you let me know of them), then I will come back and do more updates, so this mod is not abandoned. Bugs are still expected to get fixed, obviously.

If you have missed it, there is also Nydiamar Dungeons, an end-game mod based on Nydiamar. Check it out if you have not yet, maybe provide some feedback on it, since I plan to revisit it soon.

Enjoy. ~


Follow the instructions from the Opening Post!

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Patch 1

This patch is only for the version with Diablo 3 classes.

Changes

  • Added Diablo 3 Bosses to Siegmar’s Challenge (Faction Dungeon)

You can enable and disable them through a dialog option at the Lectern of Wisdom. Each boss you would normally encounter at the end of each part of Siegmar’s Challenge gets replaced. The final boss of the full dungeon will always be Diablo.

Slaying the Butcher in the second and Diablo in third part nets you many additional rewards. Should you reach the final arena where the fight against Diablo takes place, due to the high risk of just dying all used Faction Tickets get fully refunded.

All bosses are insanely hard (!) so that even a fully leveled and geared character will struggle — at least with non-Diablo 3 builds.

Enjoy. ~


All credits for the Diablo 3 Classes & Items, as well as the Diablo 3 Bosses, goes to Grimer (and Okami29, check the mod page for additional credits). I have only merged the mod with Nydiamar.


Download Patch 1 (Diablo 3 Classes)

Overwrite the existing files with the patched ones.

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Thank you for all the work you put into this mod. You have made this into pretty much a new game rather than just additional content like most Grim Dawn mods.

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Great i was waiting for it all the time thank you :slight_smile:

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Congratulations on finishing your mod. I hope you’re proud of your accomplishment,. :slightly_smiling_face:

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You say this in the OP:

“Feel free to message me directly on Discord to report bugs, suggest changes or discuss the mod:”

But I can’t see a link to your discord in either of the Nydiamar threads. Am I missing something?

I don’t have a Discord Server unfortunately, but people can message me directly if they want so, as some already did. I was trying to add a link a while ago that leads directly to my DMs, but that was slightly too complicated for me after searching for a minute, hence only my Discord name.

I’m also sometimes checking the mod discussion on the official Discord, and just saw that someone asked there about it!

I downloaded this from nexus.

There’s 3 files, where am I supposed to put the 3 of them? Do they all go into the mods folder? A readme would have been cool :wink:

File names:
_optional
Nydiamar
NydiamarMainCampaign

Nydiamar is the actual mod and goes into the mods folder.

NydiamarMainCampaign also goes into the mods folder and basically is the Grim Dawn campaign, but with Nydiamar items — so you can change back and forth (which currently does not work properly). This “mod” is optional, so you don’t need it.

_OPTIONAL includes Grim UI, which got instructions included, and a separate folder that lets you change the difficulty of Nydiamar (such as higher mob density), which can be ignored.

There should be a text file which title says something like “copy Nydiamar to the mods folder”, but a file named README with better instructions inside would have been indeed less confusing.

Yes a readme with all the steps and explanation for each file would be great.

Anyhow I’m playing the mod already and ignored the two other files for now.

Amazing work with the soundtrack, some of them are really good. The soundtrack was for sure one of the weakest parts of the vanilla even if Titan Quest their inspiration for the game had a very decent one. I had my doubts at first since the mod is more about exploration and less about mindlessly killing stuff, but I’m having a blast with it, it definitely feels like a different experience from vanilla.

Is there a walkthrough for the mod somewhere? I tried for a long time to find where to go after defeating the wardens and saw no other way other the secret passage with the shady woods key, did I miss any content using it? What was the normal path to go? A quest objective star at this point would have been very useful.

Later on I’m able to backtrack to the abandoned house since there’s a new slope we can use, was it here I had to come before?

The normal path is through the Abandoned House (walking up the fallen wall) — so the Shady Woods area is completely optional (I expected people to not defeat the wardens, and eventually to backtrack). The secret passage you used is for skipping a few minutes of the beginning, but nothing important is missed. Now if you walk through the Outpost, there’s a barricade which you need to get rid of to continue. The first area is the weakest and most confusing part of the mod, afterwards it should be more intuitive where to go.

The Main Quest was intended to guide the player a bit through “hints”. It has no story or anything, and is really only used as a guidance and short tutorial — so check it regularly to not get lost (read the quest description). Unfortunately, there is no full walkthrough, but I might do one now.

There are many parts where you can just do this, e.g. survive for 6 minutes or some sort of endless arena. The mod opens up a lot later on, just make sure to also try the optional areas.