[mod] Rimworld 1.3: Nephila Hyperpregnancy Race Mod

[HiveBro]

They're a butchering style recipe at the Nephila Pool of colors, which can be built after you've researched the appropriate prerequisites (Advanced Fabrication and Vitals Monitor). Once you've got the pool of colors, choose to "prepare host" and you will create the item necessary to build a Cocooned One. Cocooned ones take a while to hatch, at which point they generate a "coalescing nephilim" egg, similar to the eggs that nephila maidens lay. Keep those eggs safe and they will eventually hatch into new Nephila maidens. It's essentially an alternate means of getting started with nephila stuff in-game.

[genericlogin]

I've been giving this a try, and found some problems and general oddities:

 

1. The Nephila are way, way too slow. Their base speed is bad enough, and the movement penalties for body parts just makes it worse. Even the maidens can't really function in a colony without normal pawns, because it takes them so long to get around.

 

2. They get hungry too fast. I understand the reason for their appetite, but I found that even a maiden gets trivial malnutrition just from a normal night's sleep. And of course that just makes them even slower.

 

3. Visiting caravans of Nephila can include the more advanced and slower types, which then die of starvation halfway across the map because they're too slow.

 

4. Nephila eggs can arrive in cargo pods. I don't know for sure if this is a bug, but I suspect so. Having 15 maidens suddenly join your colony is pretty disastrous.

 

5. A feature request: I was playing with Rimworld of Magic, which assigns classes using traits. You can turn off some of the classes, and I turn off all the fighter ones. When a pawn turns into a maiden, her random traits can include those disabled class traits. If possible, please add a check for disabled RWOM classes and don't assign those traits to new maidens.

[genericlogin]

I also discovered that a nephila can get nephila sickness from being bitten by a cherubim, which doesn't really make sense.

[HiveBro]

I don't entirely agree with all points, but I do appreciate the feedback. It helps me improve my mod.
1.) I have slowly increased speed for Nephilim pawns over time until getting to a point I felt was reasonable given the pawns' other strengths. Nephilim pawns aren't necessarily designed to be used as jack-of-all trades units. Often times you will have to supplement their weaknesses with base design and other non-Nephilim pawns. Some tips for helping with their speed and manipulation issues: 

   a.) Handmaidens and Matrons both have access to gear that increases speed and manipulation, which can go a long way to resolving their issues. For Handmaidens, this gear is pretty top end, but I'm working on a lower tier (less effective) armor set to increase their speed. 
   b.) Tight base design can help slower pawns work without significant productivity loss. Even Grand Matrons can make pretty solid artists, craftspeople, and researchers with the appropriate production line.

   c.) Nephila sickness increases speed and manipulation and Nephila are immune to the transformation it triggers at its end. While it does increase their food requirements even more, it can be worth it to deliberately infect Nephila with Nephila sickness to increase their abilities.

   d.) Nephila were designed more to work as a part of a base that has more than just Nephila in it. My general rule of thumb is to try to stick to two non-Nephilim pawns for every Nephilim pawn. Male pawns, in particular, can be worth recruiting because, like the Nephilim, they are immune to transformation from Nephila sickness and can get pretty nuts without much effort if you're careful to keep them infected. The Nephilim will provide newborn Cherubs for the male pawns to fight and receive buffs from and the male pawns will do the work that the Nephilim will struggle to do due to their inherent limitations.
 

I've used the above strategies to get pretty late game with a Nephilim colony. Things really come online once you start having Nephila Queen's Guard showing up in your base due to their inherent strengths and immunity to Nephila sickness.

 

2.) I agree with the hunger rate. I've noticed in my testing with 1.1 that Nephilim pawns seem to suffer from hunger at increased rates compared to what I saw in 1.0. Not sure why that is, but I will be experimenting with rebalancing that. Grand Matrons will always be needy, but Maidens/Handmaidens/Matrons are likely to be toned down some.

3.) I'm working on a lower tier movement speed buffing armor for Handmaidens (who should be the dominant pawnkinds in caravans). That should help with the hunger issues. Currently focused on an issue with titles and pawn generation, at the moment, but new armors for Handmaidens and Queen's Guard (who are currently perma-naked) are in the works once the core bugs are resolved.

 

4.) Huh. I thought I'd resolved that issue. It's not intended behavior. I'll fiddle some more with the Nephila eggs and see if I can stop their generation from cargo pods. 

5.) I'll look into it, but that check might prove pretty hard to code. If I can work out how to make it happen, I'll do it.

[Bookworm83]

One of my maidens was not promoted when her fecundity became severe enough and the status went away. Unfortunately I was not paying attention so I don't have a log of that point. I know it works though because the colony just before that I had a maiden become a handmaiden.

 

In non error issues my own comment is that the items in the pool need better explanations. For one thing all the cores have the handmaiden description. And for another it says that they can be used to make weapons and armor, but there's no indication of how exactly that works. I made a maiden core and it did nothing, then I made a handmaiden core and my pawn was able to eat it, but nothing happened.

 

In terms of actual additions to the mod I would like to see more buildings. Like some kind of nanite garden that produces food only the nephilia can eat, at least without consequences. That would help the hunger issue and be thematic. Also if they could spawn some kind of worker unit that would be nice.

[genericlogin]

Thanks for the clarification on how the sickness is supposed to work.

 

I just encountered a new bug. A nephila arrived in a transport pod crash, and there was an errror message in her info box:

 

 

I decided to let her die on the theory that it would do less harm than trying to save a bugged pawn. However, that turned out not to be the case. A few hours latter, one of my pawns started getting inheritance spam:

 

I checked some of the messages, and they were all saying that Hermione had inherited Alla's (the bugged crash victim) title. Alla hadn't actually died yet.

[genericlogin]

One other thing which confuses me, but may not be a bug. When my Nephila maiden transformed, she was made a Nephilim supplicant in the shattered empire faction, not the Nephila Garden faction. I haven't tried to do any quests to see if her title would change to one that the shattered empire actually has, but it strikes me as odd. I do have another pawn in the colony who is a supplicant in the garden faction, but she's a human. This is the first time I've used the new Royalty DLC, so I don't really know what to expect from it, but the impression I've gotten is that you normally choose to join a faction by doing a quest.

[HiveBro]

Currently working on a fix the transformation ending issue you mentioned, Bookworm. Essentially, the transformation doesn't trigger if the new form would fail to generate for one reason or another. My original implementation of the title system allows for occasional issues with pawn generation and, as a consequence, pawns don't always transform. The fix has proven a lot more involved than expected, though, and is taking a while to get right. Hopefully I'll have resolved that soon, but you can always reapply the appropriate hediff to your pawn to initiate the transformation again.

Hmm. I'll look into reworking some of the basic items. It makes sense to improve clarity for what they are and what they do. Additional buildings and furniture (mostly aesthetic to help improve theme) are a big priority for me, but I'm waiting until I resolve the bugs caused by title implementation to work on new content. 

That title inheritance issue is actually the same issue as the pawn transformation issue I just mentioned. Royalty is a really fun expansion, with lots of new elements to draw from in mod creation, but I'm still wrapping my head around some of its nuances. I apologize for the inconvenience some of these bugs can cause and appreciate folks helping me test the mod.

 

Edit: Oh! And, for that error displaying in pawn information, Genericlogin, that's a benign bug related to the way that gestation progress is written in npc pawns. No need to worry about killing the occasional npc pawn with the issue. It's not going to cause serious issues in your game.

[Bookworm83]

I also saw the issue where Nephilium titles are being attributed to the empire.

 

Also its not really a bug, but an aid trader came by with coalescing queen's guard for 14 silver each. So I bought a bunch of them. They seem to be born with standard traits and no restrictions on what they can do. I'm not sure if that's intentional since they seem to be focused on fighting.

[defcon9999999]

Got a couple of more question. My colonist keep put  coalescing cherubim in my fridge and i cant figure out where in the storage setting to turn off so they stop put in there and put it some were else so they can hatch. Also i got all the research done for the pool of scintillating colors but i cant find where to make it.

[HiveBro]

Coalescing Cherubim should be in the eggs section.

[RimmerInTheWorld]

what body texture are you using in the first screenshot? it looks great

[genericlogin]

I spotted a couple more oddities. Nephila sometimes vomit for no apparent reason--they're not sick, or anything. Also, they do get sick. Given the nature of their bodies, shouldn't they be immune to everything except fibrous/sensory mechanites?

[HiveBro]

Vomiting is intended (think morning sickness). Nephila getting sick is intended as well, though I agree its not very thematic. Nephila get sick for the same reason that they don't have custom bodies: given the limitations of the game, I decided that making certain concessions to balance would make the race play nicer with other mods and be a bit more balanced. The body texture is called "FemaleBB."

[genericlogin]

I discovered a bad interaction between the Royalty mechanics and nephila caravans when your pawns are in  the nephila faction. Whenever a nephila arrives on the map and then dies, her title can pass to a colonist. I saw a small (two person) colony die because the only person capable of growing food and cooking suddenly inherited a title that barred her from doing either of those things. This is particularly bad because I've seen a 100% death rate for nephila caravans arriving on the map. I play with the larger medium map size, and the farthest I've ever seen one get is three-quarters of the way across before dying of starvation.

 

Since nephila are supposed to be almost immobile and no more than a third of a colony, how about making caravans from their faction consist entirely of humans? It doesn't make sense for them to show up and die on your doorstep when they're incapable of reaching you in the first place...

[HiveBro]

I think I've resolved the inheritance issue. Testing the fix today. Hadn't considered using humans in their caravan. I'll try implementing that. Thank you for the idea. 

[genericlogin]

A couple more observations:

 

When a nephila uses a psychic power that the nephila faction allows her to use, there's still a warning tooltip that the empire might detect it and get mad. That actually makes perfect sense--there's two different psychic factions that don't like each other. I haven't been caught yet, but it's certainly a risk.

 

Nephila vomiting all the time explains why they get hungry so quickly. When a pawn vomits, their food need increases as the throw up the food they'd previously eaten. Honestly, I'm not a fan of the constant vomiting. When you have multiple nephila in a colony, it gets really disgusting really quickly.

[genericlogin]

How exactly does one get a "dormant cherub?" I've never seen one become dormant, and I haven't seen any indication of how to make it happen...

[Bookworm83]

Use the prepare cherubim as turret recipe in a pool. You need a medicine and a coalescing cherubim.

[HiveBro]

Part of my update for fixing the other issues is going to involve creating nephila-specific psy amps with a slightly different power list. I do like the idea of having to thread between upsetting the empire and the Nephila, but would rather it be through, say, quests, since unique powers opens up so many possibilities. 

Hmm. I wasn't aware of hunger increasing with vomiting. That does make things work. I'll turn it off for the next update. 

[genericlogin]

That's a good idea. As it is, a bunch of the psy powers are offensive which nephila shouldn't be able to use, but there's apparently a bug in the Royalty DLC that doesn't respect "incapable of violence" for psy powers.

[swvnday]

for some reason i've decided to do some retexturing

[genericlogin]

On 3/17/2020 at 6:54 PM, Bookworm83 said:

Use the prepare cherubim as turret recipe in a pool. You need a medicine and a coalescing cherubim.

 

Thanks! I was thrown off by the description text saying they were an "early game turret."

[HiveBro]

Ah, neat! I like the textures I made for my mod enough to want to keep them, but folks who want to tweak and fork their own versions are free to do so. New texture mods are always welcome.

[Henry_7]

I really liked this mod, especially the sprites. But already mentioned before the pawns are too slow for literal everything and they are incapable of violance already in their first stages. It would made sence in ther late/mid stage since they can't move at all but the first transformation should be able to do so. Also I think the the cherubium are somewhat.. useless? If you colony is only the nephilia Maiden than you are quite... well fucked.  So my Idea for a somewhat rebalance is that the First transformation, moves faster and can still hunt. Also that the Cherubium are like the minions of "Rimworld of magic" after they are hatched they are loayal to your faction, if they have at least one Maiden, and have the ability to carry around stuff. So you can let the Nephilim do the production and the small cherubium doing the leg work.