[Crafting] More Grilled Cheese

Discussion in 'Mod Releases' started by lockeslylcrit, Mar 2, 2012.

  1. lockeslylcrit

    lockeslylcrit Member

    So I've decided to try my hand at modding DoD, and this is the result of about an hour of tinkering and reverse engineering. Naturally, this is my first mod, so I welcome any and all feedback. This isn't really a serious mod, just something I whipped up to get my feet wet with the xml files.
    Also, I'm not an artist, so please ignore the really bad art for the burgers.

    More Grilled Cheese

    This mod adds new recipes to make Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, as well as three new food items. It didn't make sense to me that you could only make GCS from a specific cheese, so I added in the rest of the cheeses as well, with the exception of Grated Cheese. This balances out as there are far more cheeses than Sliced Bread (and, in fact, Sliced Bread is a pretty uncommon food from my experience).

    The new items are:

    Hamburger
    Requires 2 Ground Meat and 1 Sliced Bread
    Heals 25 life
    NOT Vegan-friendly

    Cheeseburger
    Requires 1 Grated Cheese, 2 Ground Meat, and 1 Sliced Bread
    Heals 30 life
    NOT Vegan-friendly

    Tofuburger
    Requires 1 Tofu and 1 Sliced Bread
    Heals 20 life
    Vegan-friendly.

    'Cheese' Bits
    Requires 1 Mud Wen (makes 3 'Cheese' Bits)
    Restores 1 mana
    Vegan-friendly

    McDiggle
    Cannot be crafted
    Heals 25 life
    NOT Vegan-friendly

    Green Cheese
    Cannot be crafted
    Heals 7 life
    Adds a short-duration damage buff
    NOT Vegan-friendly


    Update log:

    1.2 - Added new items

    1.1 - Lowered the amount of health restored of all items to be more in line with the 1.0.10 balance change to Cheesy Omelette.

    1.0 - Release
     

    Attached Files:

  2. Kazeto

    Kazeto Member

    Simple stuff, but the idea is neat.

    I hope you'll make more mods in the future to come.
     
  3. Lorrelian

    Lorrelian Member

    The tofu burger is nice for vegans. I may load this up on my next vegan run just for that.
     
  4. lockeslylcrit

    lockeslylcrit Member

    Thanks. I plan on making new skills next, though all the good ideas have already been taken. :)

    Killer Vegan is one of my favorite skills to take, but being restricted to just fruit, danishes, tofu, and bread kinda stings. I wanted something to rectify that without being overpowered.
     
  5. Kazeto

    Kazeto Member

    So? For as long as your idea differs from we have there, even if it's similar, go at it. It's always better to have a few similar skills to choose from, as that way we can use the one we like the most. And that way you'll have something to compare your work to, which is good for a beginner.

    I think you did a fine job at it. I'm not sure because Killer Vegan is a class I seldom choose (my play-style tends to be pretty suicidal, so I can't limit the amount of food I can eat thoughtlessly), but it's good to see them get something usable for combat purposes.
     
  6. Ruigi

    Ruigi Will Mod for Digglebucks

    I've been wanting to make a mod like this but I never got around to it.

    very nice work. you should add more food items.
     
  7. blob

    blob Member

    Nice. I like the tofu burger idea too !
    They might be a bit too powerful though ? Im saying this as they seem easier to make than the regular grilled cheese sandwich
    which requires one particular type of cheese with the slice of bread. ( grated cheese and ground meat you get by tons, tofu too if you re vegan. )

    On another note, do you want some art ? I can try to draw juicy burgers if you want.
     
  8. r_b_bergstrom

    r_b_bergstrom Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Something like this has been on my "to do" list for a while, as well. Thank you for saving me the trouble.

    As to balance concerns:

    Having so many grilled cheese recipes is definitely a decrease to the difficulty level of the game, but it's a small one. I don't think it will disrupt balance. You're still primarily limited by the amount of bread, this simply removes the inventory headaches. You'll still get roughly the same number of grilled cheeses per game. The only power boost is that you get the grilled cheese a little sooner in some cases, and you don't have to walk around with an inventory slot filled all the time. Buying bread from vending machines is a better investment now, but you still don't see that many of them.

    The hamburger recipes actually strike me as underpowered. If a bread + any cheese will give me 40hp, why would I ever want to settle for 35hp? It's not like cheeses are difficult to come buy if you don't care which variety you're getting. I'd make the hamburger 40 hp, and the cheeseburger 45 hp.

    Tofuburger seems fine to me at 30hp, given how much tofu you can get with Killer Vegan and some RNG luck. The point of Vegan is that you're supposed to be lacking many of the best food items, after all. So I'd keep it as is.

    That said, though, you are really increasing the number of high-value food items that spawn on the dungeon floor, which is probably a much larger impact on character survival rates than the new recipes. You might consider adding special="1" or craftoutput="1" to those new items so they don't spawn assembled. They'd still show up in vending machines from time to time, but that's not nearly as big a change to play balance as doubling the number of high-end floor food spawns.
     
  9. lockeslylcrit

    lockeslylcrit Member

    Thank you for your input.
    I find that the burgers spawning as loot is not that big of a deal since you'll often see Dire Sandwiches spawning on DL1.
    As for the Hamburger, it's simply there as an option if you get tired of making the same thing, as well as being able to find it as loot. I'm mostly looking for variety, not min-maxing or such.

    Compare the Cheeseburger or Grilled Cheese Sandwich (which heals for 40) with the Cheesy Omelette (which heals for 56). You also can find Diggle Eggs in higher quantity than Sliced Bread. As noted before, Sliced Bread is fairly uncommon, so you have your choice of either making Grilled Cheese Sandwiches or Cheeseburgers, which heal exactly the same amount both.

    And I'd love it if someone made art for the burgers.


    EDIT: That said, I'm thinking about lowering the health gained and adding an additional hit point buff for eating the burgers. Thoughts?
     
  10. Kazeto

    Kazeto Member

    I think it's better to leave it as normal food for now - it's a viable alternative the way it is, and it's better if you simply make a bigger "burger" that would give you a buff later, sort of like Syzygy from Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster (which is, if I recall correctly, the most potent alcohol item in the game).
     
  11. Essence

    Essence Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Wouldn't it be easiest to make the Grilled Cheese recipe work on shredded cheese instead of having a different one for every kind of cheese? IIRC, David said he was going to do that like 3 patches ago and it just got lost in the shuffle.
     
  12. blob

    blob Member

    Oh so its planned to make the grilled cheese easier to make ?
    I know its currently limitated to bread, i was just pointing out that the grilled chesse sandwich was becoming meaningless because it was harder to get. If the change Essence mentions happens, then its fine.
    Cant really compare food to cheesy omelette IMO, its an OP recipe that destroys all others.

    Hey, I ll try to do some art this weekend.
     
  13. r_b_bergstrom

    r_b_bergstrom Will Mod for Digglebucks

    You're welcome. I hope I'm more helpful than annoying.

    My concern was that now you're effectively seeing 4 times as many Dire Sandwich -caliber foods. When the game spawns a food on the floor, it does so from a big table of possible items, each with equal weight (possibly adjusted by floor level and star quality). The majority of such spawns are a small meat, fruit or cheese in the neighborhood of 5 to 15 healing, many of them not worth the turn it takes to eat them during a fight. The sandwiches are fairly uncommon, probably not much better than 1 in 25 even in the deeper dungeons. With this mod, though, a rather larger percentage of floor food will do 30+ healing, won't it?

    *Does some quick math* There's about 25 foods that floor spawn in the main game, so a dire sandwich should be spawning about 4% of the time. With your mod, a sandwich-level item should spawn about 15% of all food drops. Certainly not the end of the world, but probably worth a bit of thought. Have you played very deep with this mod yet? I'd be curious to hear what the impact is by the later floors.

    If that's the goal, then it's a success, I'd say. It should nicely broaden one's options.

    There's the catch, though, isn't it? Once you release something to the world, you lose all control of how they'll use it. :rolleyes: As long as that doesn't bother you, you're golden.
     
    blob likes this.
  14. Essence

    Essence Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Cheesy Omlettes make your concerns seem fairly invalid to me, r_b. When I can turn every single Diggle Egg into a 56-health food with basically no effort, the existence of more "second-tier" Sandwich-type foods is mostly irrelevant.
     
    blob likes this.
  15. blob

    blob Member

    ( Both points seem valid to me ! )
     
  16. Lorrelian

    Lorrelian Member

    Personally, I think the game could use more mid range health items, somewhere between the 10-15 of most cheeses and the 40+ of the really good food items. Dire Sandwich is the one exception I can think of, these add more. ^_^

    r_b might be right about floor spawning, but I'd want to put it to a test in some way. If I can think of an effective way to do that, I'll run it, but in the mean time, I wouldn't sweat it too much. If there's not a general hue and cry raised over these three recipes, I'd say keep working on new content.
     
  17. The ol' "there are a couple super-powerful things, and I abuse them constantly, [logical leap] ...therefore nothing else has to even think about trying to be balanced!" argument. No one can accuse you of not being consistent! :p
     
  18. Essence

    Essence Will Mod for Digglebucks

    :(

    That's not what I've ever said.

    :(

    The correct version is "there are a couple of [core] things that are obviously better than the rest of the [core] things, <logical leap>...so obviously [non-core] things on par with those couple of [core] things are totally kosher!"
     
  19. r_b_bergstrom

    r_b_bergstrom Will Mod for Digglebucks

    My current No Time To Grind Going Rogue character would disagree with you. On my most recent zoo fight I used up all my sandwiches, all my omlettes, drained my cube of fisk, and then threw all my lockpicks into the cube so I could still heal up between waves. Not sure how I'm going to survive the next zoo. Good food can be pretty rare in NTTG GR. Or maybe the RNG just hates me.

    It's not like I said three extra sandwich types was bah-roken, just that it deserved some caution and contemplation.

    EDIT: Yep, an hour of play later, and my NTTG character was indeed dead to the next zoo I encountered.
     
  20. blob

    blob Member

    Yeah but NTTG is yet another problem too.It has an inherent balance issue due to the fact that you get the same XP but half as items in general. So yeah, it makes it harder to get good equipement and as much food as in the regular game.
    I ve never run out of omelettes in the normal game.