What is the value of "Something Awaits You"? [d: Distribution]? [d: 100]? Something else? Presumably, its value is set when the quality is acquired, but is it constant or does it change over time? That is, does it start low and accumulate value the longer one stays out at zee or is it fixed when it’s acquired?
The game has one Always deck and one Sometimes deck. When does it draw from the Sometimes deck? Can a Sometimes draw be triggered by an event result? If so, how? Does the game engine draw one card at a time, or multiples? If the latter, how does it choose which to "play"?
Is it possible to define a special Sometimes deck for a particular area? I suppose that a bunch of sometimes cards with a particular quality as a requirement is functionally equivalent to having multiple sometimes decks, but conceptually it would be useful to be able to associate a deck with a subset of events. In any case, from a modding standpoint, it appears that one could assign events to a new deck ID but there’s no obvious way to inform the game engine about the new deck or assign the new deck to an area.
What does fractional ordering mean? When an event has an "Order:" attribute like "0.5323421", what does that number represent?
Is it possible to query and/or set values on the player character? What about "global" values like the current in-game date?
Thanks for any answers.
edited by slickriptide on 6/12/2017
The only thing I can help you with is the SAY stuff: basically, it ranges from 0 to 200. The value is set after a certain time at sea (see navigationsconstants.json), and every time it’s set, a new value is randomly given (so no increment). For more info: Something Awaits You - Official Sunless Sea Wiki
About the Sometimes deck, i’m probably wrong, but I don’t believe it’s used in Sunless Sea? I think it’s more like a vestige from the StoryNexus engine. But i’m resolutely unsure of that.
The closest thing I can think of would be the Restless nights and shifting stars events. I’d take a look at them if I were you.
Hope it’s helpful :)
The Sometimes deck is quite possibly just a bookkeeping mechanism to keep track of the random events. The specs for the deck do invariably specify a deck with a hand-size of zero and a draw of zero.
I think there must be something more to the SAY value than simply being [d:200]. A significant number of port encounters are coded in a way that suggests that they believe the cap on SAY is 100.
In fact - after an extensive (though not remotely exhaustive) examination of the events file, including several underwater ports, I can’t find any events that explicitly test for a SAY value greater than 100. The events that explicitly set the SAY value always roll [d:100] or less.
Given that the SAY >= 100 descriptions are all zubmarine descriptions, I suspect that SAY never actually exceeds 100 and the game cheats when displaying the “flavor” description of the SAY when submerged by adding 100 to SAY just for choosing the appropriate submerged description.
Outside of the level descriptions coded on the quality, the actual value of SAY appears to never exceed 100.
Correct. SAY itself only uses values up to 100 - even for underwater events - and the values above 100 are only so the logbook has alternate QLDs while underwater.
I’m not sure if underwater events that reroll SAY display the default QLDs as well, or if they’re coded to display the underwater QLDs too. There might even be random events that can trigger while zailing above or below, so perhaps the gazetteer has code like the logbook does. Probably something like Display = [SAY+Below*100].
edited by Optimatum on 6/13/2017
Is there any way to access values that are not explicit qualities? Current InGameDate, for instance, or captain’s name or AvatarImage?
Can anyone help me find the files to mod in the first place? I’ve dug through my files and can’t find anything that anyone’s talking about. Here’s my files:
On MS Windows, open file browser.
In the address bar type %APPDATA% and press ENTER.
This puts you in your personal application data space.
Go up one level, then down through LocalLow to Failbetter Games and down again into Sunless Sea.
The folders of JSON files are the game data.
You override them with your own versions by making a new folder under addons and duplicating the folders and files you want to modify.
In other words, if you wanted to mod one event, you’d make a folder in addons called my-mod, make folder under that called entities, and put an events.json in that entities folder with your modified event code in it. You only need to include your new or modified events. It would be bad form to drop the entire JSON file in there when you only changed one line of one event or quality or tile or whatever.
edited by slickriptide on 7/16/2017
Thanks! I tried it out and it wasn’t quite working, but a search for Failbetter itself yielded the result. I thought I had everything visible, but… it turns out I was looking in the wrong place. I really appreciate it!
I wanted to make something a bit more like Fallen London’s ship-based experience where you zailed with "sufficient" fuel and food. The terror mechanic is interesting enough for me to still have plenty of fun and challenge in the game. I really appreciate you reorienting me; I looked back over the other resources online and I just skipped over the part where it directs you to the LocalLow folder.
Next I neglected to make a proper tree (I was just putting a "constants" folder in instead of "my-mods" and then a subfolder "constants"). But, then But… I got everything in order and now the mod works perfectly; thanks again!
edited by Septimus on 7/16/2017
