Aotrs Liches and Skeletons
This mod introduces liches and animated skeletons to game, implemented as xenotypes, in combination with Humanaoid Alien Races.
Liches and Skeletons was developed for 1.5, prompted by the discontinuation of "Wa! Real skeletons Continued)" when Mile had to discontinue support for that mod between 1.4 and 1.5. As it felt like noobody else was going to make liches or animated skeletons for Rimworld, I decided to attempt the task myself.
Credits:
Mod compiled by Aotrs Commander
RedMattis, Oskar, Sarg, Erdelf and Mile, whose mods (in the dependant list) I am standing on the shoulders of; RedMattis in particular can be credited with about 80% of the mod's code (and with some additional direct help to boot!) I have merely attempted to paste this together into a hopefully-functional unit.
Emu on Discord for helping with the coding for GenePrunderExtension code to deal with the errant ears and noses!
Dexter-Feldoh III on Discord for firstly trying to help me blunder through realising C# coding was a step too far and then generously doing the C# coding for the lich transformation book.
Contents:
Two skeleton xenotypes: Spirit-Bound Lich and Animated Skeleton
Animated skeletons are fundamentally negative-energy powered constructs. They are mindless, with their only capabilities derived from whatever default "programming" their animating spell had, and some limited psychic echoes from the corpse itself.
They have no blood, do not eat or sleep and are immune to poisons, diseases and most other effects.
Spirit-Bound Liches are skeletons whose bodies are "haunted" by a bound spirit (usually, but not always, the original owner) in a way not dissimilar to a location-bound haunt, like a haunted house. On top of the traits they share with skeletons, liches produce a cold aura, and heal from damage rapidly. They can consume, but do not need to. While strictly, they do not need sleep, liches typically require some hours of meditation per day to regain their mana. (This is represented in game organically by having no sleep need and letting the player set meditation to gain psyfocus.)
Three additional simple endogene xenotypes:
Elf, Orc and Dwarf. Kalanothi Elves, Orcs and Dwarves. So-named for the elves from the Aotrs planet Kalanoth where the definitions were codified. Due to the prevalence of Harbinger Retrocasual Probability Engineering, these types of elves, orcs and dwarves are quite common in the galaxy and possibly beyond, even when arising from apparently otherwise entirely unrelated worlds.
Two factions, The Army of The Red spear faction (the titular Aotrs) and the Skeleton Horde, comprising masses of animated skeletons, with some more advanced lich commanders. Both liches and skeletons from these factions may be of various endogene xenotypes, including the above.
Starting scenario with three liches (a modified classic start).
You should, in theory, now be able to butcher lich and skeleton corpses, which will return a skull and bones, if you have Rim of Madness Bones (recommended!) (Note: this may give you a second skull if you've previously used "extract skull.")
You can now find/buy a special type of textbook, that in addition to its usual features, contains a spell to permanently transform a pawn into a lich (by adding the lich xenotype). This works on HAR races with endogenes on initial testing, but be aware there may some oddities if you use it on HAR races I am not currently aware of.
(I could in future add a similar book for animated skeletons, but in general, the no-learning mindless thing makes them pretty poor colonists, so I have, for the moment, not implemented that.)
General notes:
The colour of a skeleton is defined by hair colour. At the moment, it is set to a fixed value in the Gene defs, due to the only way I could get the eyeglows was to paint them on the forced head types. (I looked at the plausibility of doing facial animations, using just eyes (i.e. eyeglows), but ultimately concluded that it is beyond me. I toyed with a variant of eye colour genes - but that doesn't work with Facial animation, unfortunately.) If that problem could be fixed, bone-as-hair-colour would in theory allow liches to paint their bones (to diversify skeleton pawns).
Liches can eat: needs are set to 90%, so they should be able to eat (for fun and drugs etc.), but do not require it.
Liches and animated skeletons can still be anesthetised (with all attendant side effects) so as to permit the addition of bionics etc. Note that it may not be possible to add a full suite of bionics (other mods depending) if the liches don't have anything to replace/install.
Known Issues:
Additional body parts (tails, tentacles) will not be skeletal. Thanks to the GenRemoverPatch, genes that would not make any sense or would display should be removed when the Skeleform Gene is applied. I have gone down the list of genes in the dependant mods (at time of writing) with a criterion of removing all skin-based genes (aside from colour), ears/noses etc, fur and anything that made sense. I have left chitin-based genes as well as horns. Some tails (those which grant manipulation) have been left in, as well as wings (though strictly speaking, they probably should be removed, I felt leaving it in was better). Gene instability genes and many different headforms have also been excluded. This should hopefully keep the skeletons skeltal. I have also added this support for the genes from most of Vanilla Races Expanded genes. If additional genes become a problem, they can be added to the list.
Liches and skeletons are affected by fungal forest toxins (this is hard-coded into alpha biomes and affects mechanoids and such as well, and is beyond my ability to fix).
Liches are likewise still vulnerable to gene infection (they theorhetically should not be, but again, the coding at the other end seems to ignore the does not effect flags).
No facial animation: As noted, beyond my capabilities to have the eyes animated, sorry.
Creating new liches/animated skeletons currently has to be done the hard way, via using archite gene extractors and genepacks.
1.6:
None, tenatively?
Compatibility:
Not compatible with Combat Extended (I don't have the slightest idea how to do that).
Otherwise should be compatible with most other mods that don't conflict with the dependancies.
(The test run pack included 395 mods, including Save Our Ship 2, many Vanilla Expanded mods, Alpha Biomes, Alpha Mechanoids.)
Future Possibilities:
Better way to handle eyeglows (and weight the chances of which head (and therefore colour) they spawn with). (In turn, potentially allowing bone colour to be dyed.)
Way to butcher corpses for bones as above.
Meditation need instead of sleep need...? This might only be pertinent for psycasting. The simplest way would be to make them not sleep like the animated skeletons and just leave meditation organically for actual psycasters, but hat would be a fairly significant buff again.
Names lists.
