State of the 'Rim - April 2021

Hey everyone,

I wanted to update you on my progress over the last month.

Work has been insanely busy, as always, but I was really productive over the past few weeks, so I’m in a good place. This is my Spring Break, so I’ve taken the opportunity to rest and work on some of the backlog that’s accrued over the past few months.

Here’s what I’ve done:

1. I updated Blade & Blunt. This is the second major update to my combat mod. 1.3 brought some much-needed changes to combat regeneration and to blocking that helped boost sword-and-board players up to the level that other builds were performing at.
2. I updated Manbeast and fixed all of the bugs that I’m aware of. Most of these bugs were related to curing lycanthropy. I also made some improvements to Animal Senses and Howl of the Hunt.
3. I made smaller updates to Aetherius and Mundus, mostly fixing typos and shuffling a few bonuses around on stones.
4. I’ve updated all of my mods (yes, every single one) on the Xbox. This was a long time coming. Adamant especially was much further behind than it should have been. Sorry about that.

Besides the Blade & Blunt update, most of my work this week was “maintenance” type work--nothing exciting from a user perspective, just tweaked numbers and squashed bugs. But there was one exception. I decided to start working in earnest on Adamant 5. I want to talk about why.

I mentioned in my previous post that I sometimes switch from working on one mod to another when I feel stuck. Even though I’ve made tons of measurable and exciting progress on Mysticism 2, the update is just… a long way off from being finished. I’ve been dedicating almost all of my modding efforts exclusively to Mysticism since before Thanksgiving break, but the simple fact is that I need about a month of full time work to complete the update--and there’s no way in hell I’m going to get that time until the summer.

If I had been way more productive over Christmas, I might have been able to finish over Spring Break, but as y’all know I had to take a break around January or so. This is basically the aftershock of that decision.

Mysticism 2 is still a high priority for me, but for my own sanity I want to spend the rest of the school year working on projects that actually feel like I could finish them. That’s why I’ve pivoted to Adamant 5.

Adamant 5 is going to be the biggest update to Adamant since 3.0, and it’s going to come with an extremely thorough rebalance of the mod. I also really hope that Adamant will stay in the 5.x series… well, basically forever. I know I’ve said this before w/ Adamant 3, but I want Adamant 5 to be the last major update to the mod. That’s not to say that nothing will ever change, but I want to keep the changes as small as possible going forward.

For now, I am pretty sure I’ll be able to share at least a beta of Adamant 5 by… around the end of the month? There’s a lot of work left to go, but I was able to knock out quite a bit over the break. I expect the next month of work to be relatively relaxed before a final push in May/June to finish the year. Obviously, these things can be unpredictable. As always, I’ll keep you updated, whether it’s here or in my discord.