Vandi

Vandi

Creatures wear more stars in a biome whose boss you keep killing, and that boss comes back harder the next time you summon it. All of it follows your own kills, not the server's.

The design is on the site, where players were asked about it before any of this existed: Stars worth earning, and bosses that remember you. Testing below says what has been checked and what has not.

Vandi is Old Norse for trouble.

The problem

Once a biome's boss is dead, that biome is mostly walking. Its creatures cannot hurt you any more, and the starred ones actually worth meeting, for the drops or for taming, are rare enough that finding one is a chore rather than an event. The usual answer is a difficulty setting, which raises the whole world for everybody at once and lands hardest on the player who has not got there yet.

The idea came from CRVD in the Discord: let the biomes you have beaten be the ones that get harder.

What it does

• Killing a boss raises the chance of starred creatures in that boss's own biome. The Elder

changes the Black Forest, Moder changes the Mountains. A biome whose boss you have never beaten stays exactly as it was.

• Every repeat kill of that boss adds more: five percentage points a kill, stopping at twenty

five extra. The points go on top of whatever the game already rolls where the creature spawns. That is ten in an ordinary stretch of a default world, so there a biome whose boss you have killed five times spawns starred creatures about a third of the time. The game rolls higher in parts of the world far from the centre and lower on a world set to fewer stars, and the same twenty five go on top of that. Creatures still cap at two stars: only the odds move, never the ceiling.

• Each repeat kill also makes that boss one star harder the next time you summon it, capped

at two.

• The compendium has a Vandi page that shows all of it for you: each boss by biome with your

kill count, what every kill adds to the star chance and to the boss, and the road still ahead. With Malmr installed it also says which of its metals wait for which kill.

• All of it is yours. A player who joined last week walks into an ordinary Black Forest while

the veteran standing beside them does not.

Starred creatures drop more and a harder boss drops more, so the mod pays for the trouble it makes. It is a reason to go back to a biome rather than a reason to avoid one.

Metal that drops half again

Kill a biome's boss three times and the metal of that biome drops half as much again for you, x1.5. A stack is rounded up, so a stack of one becomes two and nothing ever drops fewer than the game made. The third kill is the one that was summoned at two stars, the hardest fight the defaults give, and this is what it pays. DoubleAtKills is that number, and 0 turns the whole thing off. The setting names still say Double because saved config files are keyed on them.

• It follows the metal, not the place. Copper is the Elder's wherever it drops, so a

Mistlands copper deposit pays extra for a player with three Elder kills, and the Queen adds nothing to it. Iron scrap, the muddy scrap piles and a fuling's black metal scrap count as the metal of their biome. Bars and anything crafted never rise.

• The metals are worked out, not listed. A metal is anything the furnace or the blast

furnace takes in, placed in a biome by the same index Yoke uses. A mod that adds an ore to a furnace gets it for free. vandi metal in the console lists every one it found and what it would do for you right now, and vandi metal CopperOre answers for a single prefab.

• The Queen pays for the brains. The Mistlands' copper and iron already belong to the Elder

and Bonemass, so what is hers is the giant brains' Softtissue, which the Eitr refinery turns into Eitr. Three Queen kills raise it. Eikthyr gives nothing, since the Meadows have no metal. DoubleBosses is the list of bosses that can do it.

• Bloodgold is included. It is the prefab GoldOre, which the blast furnace turns into

Gold. The Deep North has no boss of its own in BossBiomes yet, so Fader owns it, and three Fader kills raise it, just as they raise Ashlands flametal. Once the Deep North's own boss is wired in, bloodgold follows that boss instead. NeverDouble is empty now.

• It is the blow that counts. The drop is raised when the rock breaks or the creature

dies, never when you pick it up, and it goes to the player who dealt that blow. A friend who mines while you stand by collects an ordinary stack even if you pick it up. In a group, the player who breaks the chunk gets it.

• Malmr is the same. A vein Malmr breaks is broken with a copy of the blow that filled the

bar, so the whole deposit is raised for the player whose swing filled it, even if a friend put most of the bar in. Malmr needed no change for this.

• A client that does not own the rock is still covered. The machine that owns the rock or

the corpse makes the drop, reads the attacker's kills out of the world's global keys, and raises it there. That machine has to run Vandi, which it does anyway, since everyone needs it.

• If the game cannot say who struck, nothing is raised. The attacker is read off the blow. It is

missing when the player is not loaded on the owner's machine, or the blow was struck by something that is not a player, such as a tamed creature. Vandi does not guess the nearest player in that case, since that would hand one player's reward to another.

• A creature's metal is raised in its drop list. The game does not create a creature's

drops the way it creates a deposit's, so a fuling's scrap is raised by scaling the count. It is done where the game makes the list, when the creature dies, because most creatures leave a