MaceThunderbrand

Mace Thunderbrand

Charge the vanilla maces with lightning. A Thunderbrand mace crackles with electricity, hits with extra lightning damage, calls a bolt down from the sky with its overhead smash, flies when thrown, comes back when called, and lets you leap into the air and land in a strike of lightning.

Nothing is bundled with the mod: every spark, bolt, light and texture is made by the mod at runtime, and the impact effects are the game's own.

Getting a Thunderbrand

Forge one from the plain weapon plus 3 Thunder Stones (Haldor sells them) and 1 Eikthyr trophy. The plain weapon is used up. Each Thunderbrand is forged at the same station and level as the weapon it comes from.

Every mace, club and sledge in the game gets a Thunderbrand version: the Club, Bronze Mace, Iron Mace, Frostner, Porcupine, Stagbreaker, Iron Sledge, Demolisher and any others this version of the game has. Weapons that already deal lightning damage are left alone. The BepInEx log lists what was made.

A Thunderbrand keeps everything the plain weapon had and adds lightning damage equal to half of its normal damage (the same ratio per upgrade level). The ratio and the recipe are in the config.

Maces added by other mods can be cloned too: turn on Cloning → CloneModdedItems, or name them in Maces → ExtraMaces.

What it does

While you hold a Thunderbrand

• The head glows with a web of electric cracks and throws arcs of lightning and a flickering blue light. The handle is left alone.
• Swings leave a trail of sparks and crackling bolts, and burst into lightning where they connect. Enemies hit with lightning crackle with electricity for a few seconds.
• Your gear takes on the electric look: a few thin, soft cracks spread across your armor, cape, shield and skin (kept faint, so the gear's own colors still show), arcs crawling over your body and sparks flying off it. Lightning cracks out around you when you draw. How bright, how faint and how fine the cracks are is set per kind under Armor, Capes, Shields and Skin.
• Secondary attack (middle mouse) on the one-handed maces is the overhead smash and calls a bolt of lightning down where it lands, with the game's own lightning sounds, a shove and lightning damage to enemies in the radius. It takes priority over other mods' special attacks on that button (NorseDemigods' Crush, Ice Shards and the like). Turn that off with Secondary → PriorityOverOtherMods.
• The two-handed maces (the sledges) have two attacks that match each other: the main attack (left mouse) is the plain sledge's own, and the secondary attack (middle mouse) is the Flametal Sledgehammer's, with the same lightning strike where it lands. A sledge whose main attack is only the ground slam (such as the vanilla Nord Sledge, when another mod has moved the slam to the secondary) is given the Flametal Sledgehammer's main attack too, so both buttons swing properly. Secondary → TwoHandedSecondaryFrom and TwoHandedMainAttack change where the attacks come from.
• Blocking with a shield shocks close attackers a little.

Throw and recall: F

Press F and the mace leaves your hand and flies out, tumbling and trailing sparks and hitting enemies on its way. Where it first strikes an enemy or the ground, lightning comes down with the mace's own ground effect. Press F again to call it back. It flies home, hitting enemies again, and your hand closes on the handle. A mace stuck in the ground comes back by itself after 15 seconds. The real item never leaves your inventory, so nothing is lost if you never catch it. Costs a little stamina; throw and recall can be given separate keys.

Leap: jump

Jump with a Thunderbrand in hand and you bound about 23 feet into the air, trailing arcs of lightning and sparks. Where you come down, lightning strikes with the same effect as the thrown mace and the secondary smash, including its damage to enemies around you. The height of the leap itself costs no fall damage.

The strike

Radius 4 m by default. It deals the mace's lightning damage (less toward the edge), shoves enemies back, and leaves the ground crackling for a few seconds.

Shields

All round shields (the round shield, bucklers, the banded shield and so on) are brought to one size, three quarters of the way from the Silver shield's to the Banded shield's, always, whatever you hold. A shield carried on your back sits clear of your cape. If you want vanilla shield sizes, switch off Shields → ResizeRoundShields.

If you also run SwordFirebrand, it makes the same shield changes, so this mod leaves them to it (Shields → LeaveToSwordFirebrand) and the shields aren't resized twice.

Multiplayer

Everyone on the server needs the mod, and the same major and minor version. The maces are new items the game has to know about, so install it on the server too.

Everything you do is shown to the other players near you: your thrown mace, strikes, sparks, leap trail and shocked enemies. Damage is dealt on your machine and shared by the game as usual. Two settings under Multiplayer let you stop sending your effects or stop showing other people's.

Configuration

The config file is BepInEx/config/brett.macethunderbrand.cfg, created the first time the game starts with the mod. It is also editable live with a config manager (F1). The settings people change most: