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
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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. ~