Elite Creatures Reborn

Creatures spawn with mutations — named, visible traits that change how a fight goes. A Mad greydwarf comes at you twice as fast on half the health. A Bloated draugr takes twice the killing and then explodes in your face. A Devouring wolf eats the boars around it and grows on what it eats until it comes looking for you.

Rebuilt from scratch. This release covers mutations and stars; the rest returns over the next releases.

Mutations

Ten, one per creature by default, each with its own colour and its own name on the nameplate.

Mutation power fields

mutation power in the rule file sets how strong each mutation is, in named fields rather than positional numbers. A field marked (enhanced) is multiplied by large star power on a large star; a cost field never is. Any mutation can also be switched off entirely with mutations enabled, regardless of its chance curves.

• Mad - move/attack speed multipliers (enhanced); health multiplier, its cost
• Bloated - health multiplier (enhanced); delay seconds from death to the blast, which goes off at the corpse's resting place; damage (enhanced) and radius (enhanced) of the blast; blast effect/warning effect vanilla prefabs for the explosion and the pre-blast warning
• Cloaked - reveal distance metres to become visible (enhanced); fade time seconds to phase, 0 snaps; fade margin extra metres before fading back out, to stop strobing
• Splintering - damage multiplier per split; max generations cascade-depth cap, 0 = unlimited; max descendants live-descendant cap, 0 = unlimited
• Leeching - regen percent max health per second, never enhanced; regen cap hard HP/s ceiling on a single tick, so a huge-health creature cannot out-heal a fight; combat cooldown seconds since its last damage taken before regen resumes; lifesteal percent of damage dealt returned as health (enhanced)
• Warding - reflect percent of incoming damage returned (enhanced); knockback force on a melee attacker (enhanced)
• Plated - armour percent of incoming damage cut at full health, to 0 hurt (enhanced); max reduction hard ceiling on that percent, so enhancement cannot approach invulnerability; damage percent bonus at zero health, to 0 full (enhanced)
• Miasmic - cloud life seconds a dropped cloud lasts; cloud damage strength of the vanilla Poison a cloud or hit applies, not direct damage (enhanced); clouds per second while moving (enhanced); cloud radius metres; cloud effect/body effect vanilla prefabs for the trail cloud and the permanent worn poison look (cosmetic)
• Devouring - absorb health/absorb damage percent kept permanently from a victim (enhanced; an instant kill always lands the killing blow, so the full amount is kept); slow per 100 health, its cost; player threshold fraction of a player's max health a hit must pass before it hunts players for good; devour cooldown seconds after a meal before it can eat again
• Thieving - max items the most it will ever hold (enhanced), hard-capped at 8; never takes equipped gear or more than one item per landed hit, and gives back everything it holds when it is killed

Stars

Beyond vanilla's two, counted in fives on the nameplate: a small star is one, a large star is five. A mutation on a large star is stronger. Star chances and mutation chances are set per biome, so the Meadows stay the Meadows.

Configuration

Two files, both written and documented on first run, both hot-reloaded while you play:

• BepInEx/config/gglasgow.elitecreaturesreborn.cfg — the settings: star chances, mutation chances and mutation strength per biome, colours, nameplate distance, and an off switch for everything.
• BepInEx/config/creature_rules.yml — the rule file, for anything too structured for a flat settings file, including a mutations enabled switch that turns any mutation off everywhere.

A server binds connected players to its own rules. Display preferences — colours, tint strength, nameplate distance, whether trait names show at all — stay with each player and are never locked.

Console commands

Install

With a mod manager, install it. By hand, drop EliteCreaturesReborn.dll into BepInEx/plugins. Requires BepInEx. On a server, install it on the server and on every client.

Multiplayer

Creature state travels in the world data the game already shares, so every player sees the same creature with the same traits. Install it on the dedicated server as well as the clients.

Files

• plugins/EliteCreaturesReborn.dll — the mod, a single merged assembly
• config/gglasgow.elitecreaturesreborn.cfg — settings
• config/creature_rules.yml — creature rules

Building

.NET SDK 8, with Valheim installed:

dotnet build EliteCreaturesReborn/EliteCreaturesReborn.csproj -c Release

Override -p:GamePath=..., -p:BepInExCore=... or -p:ModLibsPath=... if your layout differs. The build merges the shared libraries into one DLL and writes it to dist/.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0). You are free to use, study, share and modify it, and anything you distribute that is built from it must carry the same freedoms and be released under the same licence, with source. See the LICENSE file for the full terms.