Crafting 'Progression' Mod concept

[Guest]

Hi all,

I've been toying with the idea of a mod and was wondering whether I could get some feedback on the concept and also bounce ideas around.

The concept

The progression in 7DTD applies  to almost all items and loosely follows the following:

• Primitive
  
• Iron
  
• Steel
  
• Gunpowder / Gas / Electric
  

However only one version exists for the forge, chem station and workbench and, from the style of them, they look very primitive.

The general concept is to have rare, lootable books which unlock additional tiers for end-game crafting stations, e.g. Advanced Forge, Masterworks Forge. These would offer additional benefits such as increased crafting slots, higher capacity, faster crafting rate etc and also be uniquely skinned. Ideally the final iteration (although possibly completely out of my skill set!) would be to have the final version be electric powered, as opposed to wood/coal powered.

The question(s)

Firstly, does anyone know if something like this has been done before?

I've got some experience of creating modlets for personal use and have toyed around with the XML quite a lot. As an example, to create a system where a new book unlocks a new type of forge with differing stats seems relatively straight forward but I really want to give the feeling of progression, which would mean creating different 3d assets for each of the tiers and also if possible, the use of electricity to power them.

From those with experience of Unity, does this project sound too advanced for a beginner? And, if so, would I be better off just using an existing asset and repurposing it? e.g. off the top of my head, the large computer banks you find in POIs.

I've not done any mods with electricity yet - how complex is this to implement an asset that requires power?

I personally like the idea of being able to progress my base and show it developing along with having additional end-game items to work towards but was hoping for some feedback. I might be in waaaay over my head, not considered how complex this will be or it may be viewed as a completely unnecessary and pointless endeavor.

Criticism and feedback very welcome

Thanks for your time / help!

 

[meganoth]

9 if not 10 out of 10 overhaul mods have those advanced workstations. Sadly not a new idea at all and sadly every overhaul mod out there seems to do the same workstations with just a different skin, all enabled with schematics, often also level gated and often there is also a perk that gets you the schematic.

I'm sorry, I may sound very ungrateful for all the effort the modders have done (and the effort you want to do), but I would have hoped for a bit more variation or a fresh idea here and there. 

Maybe there are no good variation, the only idea I could come up with in a minute is a rather weird one: How about workstations that you grow out of special seeds you first have to find, i.e. lets call it biotech. Maybe you even have to create the seeds by random mutation in a bio-workstation. I like weird though, your mileage might vary

On the positive side this gives you lots of examples to study how it is done. Just ask one of the modders if you can adapt his code (usually an attribution is all that they want) and if he says yes, try to change it how you like it. Using electricity for it seems to be a much harder problem, at least electrical workstations are seldom if they exist at all (an old A16 mod is the last one I have hearsay evidence of electrical workstations). Maybe someone reading this can give you more info, you might also search the forum for relevant threads, I seem to remember this was a question recently.

 

[convergent]

There is certainly room to think outside the box - imagine a group of blocks that you need to find. Each gives a small radius area buff and you cannot do x action unless you have all of the buffs.

You could make assembling a machine or whatnot your focus, using existing models and have something new

 

[Guest]

@meganoth Thanks for the response mate. Yeh I'd looked mostly at modlets rather than the overhaul mods so I may have missed that being done already, so will check them out. At the very least it will be an interesting project for me to play around with! Appreciate the suggestion.

I understand yours and @convergent's point regarding originality. In reality, the whole basis for my idea has come from other RPGs / Survival games so certainly not original!

Sadly, for the more original ideas I've had they're just too complex for me to know where to begin, so wanted something a bit more easy to try first

Again, appreciate your input guys! Will do some more digging,

Cheers

P