Reverse-Engineered Shield Belts
Description
Shield belts can be researched and crafted rather early for being spacer technology. This makes sense from a design perspective as early protection options for melee fighters are limited. However, I don't find it very logical/immersive that you can make these miraculous devices right after figuring out how radios work. This mod excuses the relatively low tech requirement and research cost by introducing a new ingredient to the crafting of shield belts: shield belt projectors. The aim is to make discovering shield belts more immersive.
Researching shield belts only grants the kownledge to calibrate and wire projectors, allowing your colonists to assemble the belts using the projectors. However, crafting projectors themselves requires additional effort. Projectors can be attained by trading, disassembling shield belts at a machining bench, or crafting your own at a fabrication bench (after researching "Shields"). The "Shields" research project will require your colonists to analyze a shield belt projector. The core idea is that while assembling a shield belt is possible with industrial-level tools, your colonists can't craft the vital parts needed without spacer-level tools.
If the mod "Vanilla Apparel Expanded - Accessories" is enabled, ranged shield belts require modulated shield belt projectors. I find that ranged shield belts way too easy to get for being game-breaking. With this mod, I want ranged shield belts to resemble mastery over shield technology. A new research project "Modulated Shields" grants the knowledge to craft modulated shield belt projectors, but unlocking it requires analyzing a projector prototype. Making a prototype is meant to be a personal project of one of your skilled crafters (10~12+ in crafting) in which they experiment over a longer time period (meaning a crafting recipe with high work amount). A skilled crafter must expend 4 regular or 1 modulated shield belt projector and a lot of time to make one. Note that you can still always buy ranged shield belts or modulated projectors from traders. Making a prototype from a modulated projector significantly cuts down work.
Balance
Being my first mod, this is a purely XML mod which touches recipes, research projects, and work amount plus ingredients of shield belts. Making your own shield belts will require more work than simply researching the "Shields" project, but nothing else was changed. Shield belts require multiple projectors to prevent abuse by recycling shield belts to cheapily get better quality ones (disassembling always yields one projector of the matching type). I tried to balance the market value of projectors around materials plus some for work amount. As a result, normal quality shield belts are worth slightly less than the projectors needed to craft them. I haven't changed the value of shield belts as I don't know if that might mess with balance elsewhere (i.e. raid points or trader inventories).
Credits
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[*] Art was done by myself using Affinity without any fancy tools. The mod uses downscaled 128px icons but includes a zip containing 512px variants.
[*] I used Rimworld's assets as references and as a style guide.
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Permissions
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[*] You may use the 512px icons to make your own patches if you prefer playing with higher resolution (or anything else - just don't claim them as your own, please).
[*] You may make patches, translations, or forks for this mod.
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I welcome feedback and would like to hear your opinion on the decisions made in this mod, especially concerning: costs/ingredients, effort/complexity of unlocking research, icon size, rarity in trade, and work amount.
If requested, I might make a variant of this mod which excludes the additional effort required to unlock crafting your own modulated shield belt projectors (or learn how to add mod settings...).
Hope you enjoy and thanks for reading.
