Make weapon drops less pointless!

Discussion in 'Starbound Modding' started by helioscentrifuge, Dec 6, 2013.

  1. helioscentrifuge

    helioscentrifuge Void-Bound Voyager

    You all may have noticed that dropped weapons are woefully underpowered.
    I have a fix, both for that and for other drops!

    Adjusting some values in your treasure pools (which can be found in \Steam\steamapps\common\Starbound\assets\treasure and edited in Notepad or equivalent) makes it a little more rewarding to fight the stronger mobs, as opposed to packing up and fleeing a planet every time you find an enemy base.

    The magic happens at this line in the code:

    "levelVariance" : [-1, 1],​

    Adjust the values inside the brackets to look like this:

    "levelVariance" : [-1, 7],​

    The values are tied to the level of the planet, NOT the level of the NPC! This is why killing powerful Glitch warriors and Floran stabmasters currently drops pathetically weak knives and hammers, as opposed to the uber-weapons that they were murdering you with.

    If you're feeling lazy, you can also edit the pools for cheap loot. For example, if you open up the file generalnpctreasure.treasurepools you can find a ton of listings for procedurally generated weapons, up to and including legendary weapons:

    As was mentioned in a prior thread, you can paste these values over the code for your hunting lists, grab a bow, and then farm until you get the gear you want.

    This also saves you the trouble of remaking a character! New drop lists load every time you restart Starbound from the launcher, so if you edit an item and your old copy turns into a Perfectly Generic Object (for example, editing your matter manipulator) you can use this method to respawn a brand new one!
     
    Last edited: Dec 7, 2013
  2. helioscentrifuge

    helioscentrifuge Void-Bound Voyager

    In clarification: You can set the levelVariance as high as you like. To test, I used an upper value of [-1, 80], and got a killer machine pistol that fired explosions. It's like a Borderlands-themed christmas party.
     
  3. lordn00ke

    lordn00ke Void-Bound Voyager

    So do I just change all the "levelVariance" : [-1, 1], in each of the files inside of the treasures folder?
     
  4. helioscentrifuge

    helioscentrifuge Void-Bound Voyager

    Well, not quite. After a bunch more testing I've found that some of the lists simply don't respond. Search instead for anything that's marked as randomgenerated.

    Also, I was wrong about the xxxx values. That's a percentage of appearance, not of drop. You can set it to any number you'd like, with 1.0 meaning it will almost always show up and 0.0001 meaning it's hyper rare. The game still has to roll for an item to drop, though, so as yet I haven't found a way to guarantee that any given item will always spawn.
     
  5. lordn00ke

    lordn00ke Void-Bound Voyager

    There are 6 basicmonstertreasure, I wonder why there's 6 of them. I assume what u mean by random generated u mean the ones that contain generated weapons, am I right? Do u know what the Pool rounds are for?
     
    Last edited: Dec 8, 2013
  6. epidemnic

    epidemnic Void-Bound Voyager

    After playing around with this code a bit, here's what I've come up with-slash-theorized. I apologize if any of this is too dumbed-down - this is my first time playing with code ever, and I want to make it easy for other newbs to pick up and start playing with, too. That said, i really have no idea what I'm doing except what I've gotten to work in-game, so if I've gotten something wrong here, please correct me.

    I'll use hunting.treasurepools because it's short and easy.

    The lines under "hunting", "pool", and "poolRounds" must add up to 100% or 1. When you kill a monster with a bow, Starbound makes a roll. In this case, 10% of the time, you'll get nothing. 90% of the time you'll get a drop. 70% of the time, that drop will be raw alien meat, and the other 30%, you'll get leather.

    The "1" above tells the game that as long as you're "hunting", the rest of the code applies 100% of the time. I'd imagine you can make hunting harder by messing with that number, but it'd be easier to change the values under poolRounds for this, which I'll get to in a sec.

    The values above tell the game how often you should be getting which drop, if you get a drop. 70% of the time you'll get alien meat; 30% of the time you'll get leather. If you change these values, make sure they still add up to 1.

    The values above tell the game how often you should get a drop at all when you're hunting. Here, 10% of the time you get nothing, and 90% of the time you get something. Again, if you change these, make sure they add up to 1. Getting rid of a line and instead putting "[1, 1]," *SHOULD* mean you'll get a drop every time you use the bow - but I've yet to test this.

    OP covered levelVariance and I'm not sure what allowDuplication does yet, so. :rofl:

    Hopefully this helps!
     
    helioscentrifuge likes this.
  7. furcate

    furcate Orbital Explorer

    On my mac this made me get stuck at the loading screen. So I don't know if it's the new patch or if it's just the mac version.

    EDIT: I found out what I did. I fiddled with some variables and they didn't add up to 1 so it just had a hard time with the files. Silly me.
     
    Last edited: Dec 10, 2013

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