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Author Topic: Better Plants and Cooking  (Read 8554 times)

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Offline banjo2E

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Better Plants and Cooking
« on: December 09, 2010, 11:28:59 pm »
Well, I played the game to the end, and I liked it, but I thought the recipes could be a bit better. Some of the possible outcomes were pointless or counterintuitive, others woefully underpowered compared to more readily available things, and, most glaringly, two of the recipes required red bulbs, of which there were literally like three in the ENTIRE game; they never dropped from anything, anywhere, at any time, except one or two song bulbs.

So, I decided to change this. I altered several recipes to make them more interesting and/or make more sense based on their parents (ice creams are semi-useful now, and always tasty) and also changed the pull plants to, when they'd drop mushrooms, drop red bulbs instead. Additionally, I felt that bones dropping from them made no sense (not to mention that bones are pretty much useless except for a few extremely secret and wholly counterintutive recipes, and also sticking bones in rotten meat makes it edible somehow) so I replaced the regular bulbs with regular mushrooms, and replaced the bones with regular bulbs.

Everything's largely the same, but I tried to balance out my alterations based on complexity of the recipes and rarity of the ingredients. Some ingredients will have minor effects if consumed raw; most of these effects allude to the properties of the recipes they are involved in. Recipies that had purely cosmetic effects, or required rare ingredients for poor payoffs, such as ice cream and rainbow soup, now have highly powerful effects with fairly significant drawbacks; for example, ice creams are all delicious and have semi-potent powers, but slow you down for a while after consumption, and rainbow soup grants the largest speed boost in the game at the cost of becoming even more stoned than in vanilla Aquaria.

You'll have to try the recipes in-game to see for yourself if you like this mod; I haven't changed any of the crafting methods, just the effects that some items have when consumed.

Since this mod's intended to affect the core game, this goes in your root /aquaria/ folder, not /_mods/. Make backups of the files indicated in the readme before you extract anything, just in case you want to go back to the vanilla recipes and plants.

Since attachments aren't working for no reason, have a Rapidshare link.

EDIT (Aug 04 2012): Well, the Rapidshare thing died, and I've been away from Aquaria for quite some time, so I had to reconstruct this from scratch. I haven't tested it yet, so the recipes may or may not be completely broken.

Have a Dropbox link.
« Last Edit: August 04, 2012, 09:39:22 am by banjo2E »

Offline Alphasoldier

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Re: Better Plants and Cooking
« Reply #1 on: December 11, 2010, 12:09:56 pm »
This seems more than interesting, I read through it and though I'll most likely not use it, you did put some wicked changes in there.
Though I must say that some things are slightly overpowered.

Also, don't use crappy Rapidshare, use dropbox
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Offline Aristobulus

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Re: Better Plants and Cooking
« Reply #2 on: December 16, 2010, 11:18:52 am »
This is actually pretty interesting, and well thought out. You make some good points - a lot of the recipes just confused me as to why they even were in the game, and there's just a lot of items that aren't worth using.

It would be interesting to try another runthrough with your recipes and see how that affects the game. Have you done that yourself, yet, to test it out for balance? Because Alpha mentions that some might be overpowered.

Offline banjo2E

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Re: Better Plants and Cooking
« Reply #3 on: August 04, 2012, 09:43:15 am »


Yeah, I just came back to Aquaria (still one of my favorite games ever, by the way) only to realize that this mod wasn't on my system anymore. So I had to rebuild it from scratch.

I think I didn't mess anything up in the process, but I pretty much had to relearn everything about modding this game and I haven't done any playtesting at all. So if you're interested in this, there's a very low but not entirely nonexistent chance that your game will break in incredibly amusing ways. You've been warned.