State of the 'Rim - March 2021

Now that I’ve got the Patreon up and running, I wanted to take a moment to update you on what I’m up to.

As you probably know, I’m a new Middle School teacher, and this has been a difficult year for me. We’re in the middle of transitioning back to limited in-person teaching, so work is eating up a lot of my time. When I do have free time, I try to make sure I spent time with my wife and a few close friends. It's really easy for me to lock myself in a basement and mod until I burn out and hate myself, so I need to always actively think about how I’m spending my time.

In terms of modding, here’s where I am.

- Manbeast is my most recently released mod. It has a few small bugs, most of which I’ve managed to iron out by now, and will probably see a small maintenance update soon.

- Scion has a compatibility issue with Better Telekinesis that I need to look into. I worry that the problem might be with something in the DLL, which will mean I’m flying blind.

- Aetherius has a few small errors that basically amount to typos.

- Blade and Blunt, Mundus, and Arena don’t need anything as far as I’m aware.

- I’ve been pushing out small updates to Mysticism and Adamant whenever easily fixable bugs pop up. Some things, usually more balance-related than bug-related, are on the back burner because I hope to solve them in some large updates that are a little further off.

- Xbox is due a large round of updates. Basically all of my mods are one or two versions behind. Using Bethnet is extremely inconvenient, so I’m always a little slower with these bug fixing updates.

- I have one open project right now, Mysticism 2.0.

Mysticism 2.0 has technically been in development for almost as long as Mysticism has existed, and it’s been through many, many revisions. I released what I had of Mysticism 2 in August as Mysticism 1.1, which is the current live version (1.1.6 with hotfixes). The easiest way to explain Mysticism 2 at this point is to say that I’m rebuilding Mysticism from the ground up, based on the things I’ve learned over the past year and a half. My goals are still the same, so the mod will still feel the same. But a lot of individual details will change. The mod will almost certainly be smaller, and there are some spell archetypes that will be removed completely because I don’t like them. However, there will also be new spells and other new features, such as staves and scrolls.

Currently, I’ve finished my first pass on Alteration, Illusion, and Restoration. Destruction is about one or two work sessions away from being done with the first pass. When I’m done with that, I’ll either press on to Conjuration or circle back to Alteration, Illusion, and Restoration for a second pass. After the second pass for those three schools, they’ll be in a state of content lock where my goal is to only work on polish & bug fixes for them going forward. I do not expect Destruction to need a second pass--it will go straight to the polish & bug fixes stage. Conjuration is a bit of a wildcard for me. I expect it will go slowly, but ultimately not need a second pass.

One the five schools of magic are done, I have three remaining goals: staves, scrolls, and vendor changes. I don’t expect staves and scrolls to take a long time necessarily, but it is a big job. There’s a lot of problems with scrolls and staves that I hope to be able to fix. Vendors similarly won’t take long. It’s mostly about flavour (like having the mage who swears she won’t teach you how to kill with magic actually keep her word) and distributing scrolls more intelligently.

Once that’s done, it’ll be time for an early release, first on Patreon, and then on Discord, while I look for bugs and ways to polish the mod. I may or may not work on some patches before launch.

After Mysticism 2.0 is released, my next goal will be Adamant 5.0. I won’t go into my goals for Adamant 5 right now, but I have a lot of big plans for its continued improvement. I hope that Mysticism 2 and Adamant 5 will be the last major updates to either of those mods (certainly there will be updates for a variety of reasons, such as balance, polish, & bug fixes), but I definitely said that about Adamant 3… and Adamant 4… The difference with Adamant 5 is that I’ve been sitting on some of these changes for months (I started working on Adamant 5 in September) and I’ve had a lot of time to tweak, much like Mysticism 2. I also want to mention there's also a small chance I'll switch the order and work on Adamant first. Sometimes when I get stuck, switching to a new project allows me to be productive while still taking a kind of break. I'll let you know if that happens. 

After those updates are done, I want to make new mods. In no particular order, the next mechanics I want to cover are alchemy, food, enchanting, and artifacts.

Notice that I haven’t given any sort of timeline right now. I did offer a timeline before, and I had to break it due to an uptick in the amount of time work was demanding from me. I don’t expect to really start working on any of those four new mods until the summer if I’m being honest, but that’s the best I can give for any kind of schedule.

As always, I’m active in discord, so feel free to chat me up there. I tend to share progress reports and ask for feedback a lot when I’m working, so I’m sure I’ll be posting there in the coming weeks.