Adding cutom monster spawn | adding new creature

[Vexxter 5]

Hello folks!
I hope you don't mind that my introduction to the community will already be in a form of quite technical query.

After the death of my SSD few months ago (lost a level 129 seraphim, made in a "legit" way), I decided to take a break from the grind and utilise the knowledge you share on this forum (read that as playing around with "balance.txt" file ).
With "simplified leveling procedure" I managed to get a new serpahim to level 200 and was trying to optimise its build, which is rather heavily gear-dependent. So recently I was trying to farm some level 235-252 equipment (acquiring level 240-245 armor set items etc.). Most of that was achieved by re-killing the nameless guardians and as result I'm now looking for a way to break this routine and simplify things a bit...

I started to wonder if it would be possible to create a custom spawn of some monsters and the location I am considering for that is the colosseum in the Multiplayer Island. I've already read in some other thread that there are 3 ways of adding custom spawn and in my case it would be preferred to just use the spawn.txt (I wouldn't trust myself, if it was necessary to mess with the game code other than using these config .txt files). Therefore I would appreciate to learn your assessment - would this be possible at all? If so - what would be the best method of doing that,

I was also thinking of the best mini-bosses to spawn and came up with the idea of creating a new monster that would be the exact replica of an existing one, but with few stats slightly enhanced. Do you know if that'd be even possible and preferably with the use the "creatures.txt" file? I particularly would like to create a copy of those large/green scorpions from the desert and raise their "dangerlevel" stat to 9 or 10, so that they could drop orange/legendary items.


Lastly, I'd like to sneak in the question about the max level cap of enemies per region. I noticed that, even though in the CM Patch the enemy level cap of all regions was set to 0, there are still some regional restrictions. For example, for a lvl200 seraphim with survival bonus of around 99%, the western part of elven realm - kobolds only get up to level 204, while mobs in the Wastelands and Crystal Plains get up to level 236. This is followed by Dryad Island and Blood Forest (where monsters are level 235). Just as a fun fact - the highest level enemies I encountered were fiery skeleteons summoned by the elite demon mages at lvl249 (followed by regular demon mages, who summon lvl246 sekllies and Harbringers of Death from Blood Forest that summon pack of mobs at level 247).
So back to the question - do you know if it would be possible to set all regions to have the same cap as the Wastelands? It's not super important, was just wondering if it's possible.

Will highly appreciate your comments/responses!

Thanks
Vexxter

Edited October 17, 2022 by Vexxter

[idbeholdME 394]

5 hours ago, Vexxter said:

Lastly, I'd like to sneak in the question about the max level cap of enemies per region. I noticed that, even though in the CM Patch the enemy level cap of all regions was set to 0, there are still some regional restrictions. For example, for a lvl200 seraphim with survival bonus of around 99%, the western part of elven realm - kobolds only get up to level 204, while mobs in the Wastelands and Crystal Plains get up to level 236. This is followed by Dryad Island and Blood Forest (where monsters are level 235). Just as a fun fact - the highest level enemies I encountered were fiery skeleteons summoned by the elite demon mages at lvl249 (followed by regular demon mages, who summon lvl246 sekllies and Harbringers of Death from Blood Forest that summon pack of mobs at level 247).
So back to the question - do you know if it would be possible to set all regions to have the same cap as the Wastelands? It's not super important, was just wondering if it's possible.
 

Can't help you with the spawn, but to increase the level cap of all the regions in the game easily, just increase the last number of this line in the balance.txt file:

Spawn_OffsetHigh = {0,35,80,120,175},

To like 250. That will ensure all enemies can always scale up to your level. You can increase the spawn offsets for any difficulty (the last one is Niobium).

 

And regarding the "simplified levelling procedure", the best non-cheaty thing I can recommend is simply removing or at least drastically reducing the ludicrous XP penalties that begin after level 100. Makes the levelling experience sooooo much smoother.

Edited October 17, 2022 by idbeholdME

[Vexxter 5]

2 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

And regarding the "simplified levelling procedure", the best non-cheaty thing I can recommend is simply removing or at least drastically reducing the ludicrous XP penalties that begin after level 100. Makes the levelling experience sooooo much smoother.

Hi,thanks for suggestion and can confirm that this is exactly what I did by changing the below stats as follows:
  ExpLS100 = 999
  ExpLS125 = 997
  ExpLS150 = 995
  ExpLS175 = 994
Also found it it one of the threads here, I also cheated slightly with MP_experience a bit by setting it to 3x the normal, as I was feeling really curious how would the build behave in the top levels asap (playing the single ascpect - exalted DW seraphim).

As for the mosters cap, I will experiment with the "Spawn_OffsetHigh", thanks.

[idbeholdME 394]

1 hour ago, Vexxter said:

Hi,thanks for suggestion and can confirm that this is exactly what I did by changing the below stats as follows:
  ExpLS100 = 999
  ExpLS125 = 997
  ExpLS150 = 995
  ExpLS175 = 994

Really close to mine. I only have a slightly higher penalty for 175. I'm rolling with:

  ExpLS100 = 999,
  ExpLS125 = 997,
  ExpLS150 = 995,
  ExpLS175 = 992,

The original penalties are absolutely ridiculous. It makes it so that by level 150, killing enemies basically becomes pointless for XP and the most efficient method of gaining XP is spam farming the same quests over and over because quests are not subject to the XP penalty. If anybody ever reached 200 under vanilla conditions, I can only commend their patience but I absolutely wouldn't want to go through that experience, which probably mostly consisted of doing thousands of the Cursed Forest quest chain runs. Speaking of which, the difficulty rating of the Blood Forest quests was obviously done by someone who had no idea about the difficulty ratings of the base game quests. You get 4 star quest XP for doing 2 clicks in many steps of that quest chain which is why it was the go to XP farming method for the late game. Not the style of play I'd enjoy for hundreds of hours  

I'm currently at level 189 with my Seraphim, mostly grinding bosses. And it still took an extremely long time to reach this level.

[Vexxter 5]

On 10/17/2022 at 5:53 PM, idbeholdME said:

Spawn_OffsetHigh = {0,35,80,120,175},

To like 250. That will ensure all enemies can always scale up to your level. You can increase the spawn offsets for any difficulty (the last one is Niobium).

So, I just wanted to report an interesting finding. It seems that the highest Spawn_OffsetHigh value I can set for Niobium, without causing issues is 214. When setting it to 215 and higher, I noticed that monster levels in the Wastelands region simply... restarted! At the stat value 215 all monsters in the Wastelands are now level 1 and getting higher, the more I increase this factor.
Interestingly enough when this value is set at 214, the monsters in the Wastelands/Crystal Plane are still 236. My assumption is that with character level 200 and it's survival bonus within the range of 95-100%, it shall only encounter enemies that are higher no more than 36 levels than one's own. The few exceptions that I mentioned earlier might be resulting from the summoning combat art that is further bumping the level of a spawn - this includes fiery skeletons spawned by demon mage (up to level 249) / elite temple guardians spawned by generators inside great machine (level 245) / pack of BF monsters spawned by Harbringers Of Death (up to level 248).

I'm aware that this might be just a bunch of useless information as I'd expect that most Sacred 2 players are not messing around with lvl200 characters, therefore this can be treated just as a fun fact.

Edited October 18, 2022 by Vexxter

[idbeholdME 394]

9 hours ago, Vexxter said:

So, I just wanted to report an interesting finding. It seems that the highest Spawn_OffsetHigh value I can set for Niobium, without causing issues is 214. When setting it to 215 and higher, I noticed that monster levels in the Wastelands region simply... restarted! At the stat value 215 all monsters in the Wastelands are now level 1 and getting higher, the more I increase this factor.
Interestingly enough when this value is set at 214, the monsters in the Wastelands/Crystal Plane are still 236. My assumption is that with character level 200 and it's survival bonus within the range of 95-100%, it shall only encounter enemies that are higher no more than 36 levels than one's own. The few exceptions that I mentioned earlier might be resulting from the summoning combat art that is further bumping the level of a spawn - this includes fiery skeletons spawned by demon mage (up to level 249) / elite temple guardians spawned by generators inside great machine (level 245) / pack of BF monsters spawned by Harbringers Of Death (up to level 248).

I'm aware that this might be just a bunch of useless information as I'd expect that most Sacred 2 players are not messing around with lvl200 characters, therefore this can be treated just as a fun fact.

Interesting. I've been slowly increasing it to make the lowest level areas keep up with my level. Currently have it at 205 with character level 190 and 95.2% survival bonus. Enemies are currently level 223 in the Great Machine (and everywhere else from Act 2 up).

But I think I've figured out the reason for the behavior you described:

It seems that the game is doing some inner calculation with the Spawn_OffsetHigh value and survival bonus. The spawn offset number gets multiplied in the same way as monster levels by survival bonus. And if that number ends up higher than 252 (which is the max level the game can handle/is programmed to consider), it will just rollover to 1. Which makes sense. Because if we assume that max monster level at level 200 and 100% SB is 236, we can calculate that SB is increasing enemy level by ~18% of its value.

And if you do 215*1.18, you land at - you guessed it - 253.7, which is over 252 so it rolls over. But when you do 214*1,18, you land at 252.52. When it comes to levels, the game always rounds down, so it's rounded down to 252, which is the absolute max level for anything in this game.

So the highest you can increase the enemy level with the Spawn_OffsetHigh value is 214, considering a very high survival bonus (97%+), before we breach 252 and due to the game logic being unable to work with numbers higher than 252 when it comes to levels, it rolls over to 1.

But this theory has 1 issue - it would have to reset the levels of all enemies in the game. But as it only happens in one area, I then checked region.txt

 

Every sector in the game has min and max levels specified in there. For example:

mgr.regionSetup(123,{
    name = "Region 09 - Canyon (90003)",
    minLevel = 27,
    maxLevel = 38,
    musicProfile = 19,
    roomSetup =  1,
    dungeonSetup =  7,
})

And funnily enough, 38+214 = 252, but 38+215 = 253, once again surpassing 252. It is mostly likely this, that is causing the overflow. The sum of maxLevel in region.txt and Spawn_OffsetHigh must not exceed 252. It just so happens that Wasteland maxLevel is exactly the same as level 215 increased by max survival bonus:

(215*1.18) - 215 = 38

which is why it brings Wasteland into overflow territory.

Also, the highest area level in the game is the dungeon with the Big Machine:

mgr.regionSetup(124,{
    name = "Region 10 - Big Machine Dungeon (90005)",
    minLevel = 28,
    maxLevel = 40,
    musicProfile = 7,
    roomSetup =  1,
    dungeonSetup =  7,
})

Meaning that the highest Spawn_OffsetHigh you can safely use is 212. Still a huge improvement over the vanilla 175.

Theoretically, bumping all the low level area levels high enough in this file so that it could spawn level 236 (max achievable enemy level) enemies should be enough. I've experimented a bit with it in the past, but results were really inconsistent and I never came back to it. But it changes it globally, not per difficulty.

 

But big thanks for the info. I love figuring out strange maths and theories when it comes to in-game systems and interactions. I am 99% sure that my theory for the enemy level reset is correct  

Edited October 19, 2022 by idbeholdME

[Vexxter 5]

I am using CM Patch v1.6 and when I check my region.txt file all the regions have both the minLevel and maxLevel set to 0. But the rest would perfectly align with what you wrote.
I find it funny that the lvl252 hard limit doesn't apply for gear , as I had few armor sets drop for lvl255 (obviously unusable).

[Vexxter 5]

19 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

It seems that the game is doing some inner calculation with the Spawn_OffsetHigh value and survival bonus. The spawn offset number gets multiplied in the same way as monster levels by survival bonus. And if that number ends up higher than 252 (which is the max level the game can handle/is programmed to consider), it will just rollover to 1. Which makes sense. Because if we assume that max monster level at level 200 and 100% SB is 236, we can calculate that SB is increasing enemy level by ~18% of its value.

Edit: You were really close I actually found the factor in the balance.txt that tells the game % of monster's level advantage at SB 100%, after changing the values I can confim, that by raising it I'm able to raise the threshold of monster level scalling.

UBspawn_fact = 175,

[idbeholdME 394]

15 hours ago, Vexxter said:

Edit: You were really close I actually found the factor in the balance.txt that tells the game % of monster's level advantage at SB 100%, after changing the values I can confim, that by raising it I'm able to raise the threshold of monster level scalling.

UBspawn_fact = 175,

Good find on what the UBspawn_fact value does. So it's 17.5% of SB.

But either way, if you bump it to where it would spawn enemies over level 252 , I assume that it's going to reset the monsters back to level 1. That would happen at 265 with 100% SB. So I wouldn't put more than 260 into it.

Edited October 20, 2022 by idbeholdME

[Vexxter 5]

Actually there is no point in putting it over 200. No matter if I go with value 220 or 230 - all monsters, everywhere seem to go no higher, than level 240. So there must be another limiting factor...

[gogoblender 3,071]

On 10/17/2022 at 6:43 AM, Vexxter said:

Hello folks!
I hope you don't mind that my introduction to the community will already be in a form of quite technical query.

After the death of my SSD few months ago (lost a level 129 seraphim, made in a "legit" way), I decided to take a break from the grind and utilise the knowledge you share on this forum (read that as playing around with "balance.txt" file ).
With "simplified leveling procedure" I managed to get a new serpahim to level 200 and was trying to optimise its build, which is rather heavily gear-dependent. So recently I was trying to farm some level 235-252 equipment (acquiring level 240-245 armor set items etc.). Most of that was achieved by re-killing the nameless guardians and as result I'm now looking for a way to break this routine and simplify things a bit...

I started to wonder if it would be possible to create a custom spawn of some monsters and the location I am considering for that is the colosseum in the Multiplayer Island. I've already read in some other thread that there are 3 ways of adding custom spawn and in my case it would be preferred to just use the spawn.txt (I wouldn't trust myself, if it was necessary to mess with the game code other than using these config .txt files). Therefore I would appreciate to learn your assessment - would this be possible at all? If so - what would be the best method of doing that,

I was also thinking of the best mini-bosses to spawn and came up with the idea of creating a new monster that would be the exact replica of an existing one, but with few stats slightly enhanced. Do you know if that'd be even possible and preferably with the use the "creatures.txt" file? I particularly would like to create a copy of those large/green scorpions from the desert and raise their "dangerlevel" stat to 9 or 10, so that they could drop orange/legendary items.


Lastly, I'd like to sneak in the question about the max level cap of enemies per region. I noticed that, even though in the CM Patch the enemy level cap of all regions was set to 0, there are still some regional restrictions. For example, for a lvl200 seraphim with survival bonus of around 99%, the western part of elven realm - kobolds only get up to level 204, while mobs in the Wastelands and Crystal Plains get up to level 236. This is followed by Dryad Island and Blood Forest (where monsters are level 235). Just as a fun fact - the highest level enemies I encountered were fiery skeleteons summoned by the elite demon mages at lvl249 (followed by regular demon mages, who summon lvl246 sekllies and Harbringers of Death from Blood Forest that summon pack of mobs at level 247).
So back to the question - do you know if it would be possible to set all regions to have the same cap as the Wastelands? It's not super important, was just wondering if it's possible.

Will highly appreciate your comments/responses!

Thanks
Vexxter

Lovely First topic Vexxter, and delighted you have met up with idbeholdME for this wonderful old-school convo of Sacred's often-awesome gaming beautifulness

Very pleased to meet and welcome to the forums!

 

gogo

[idbeholdME 394]

21 hours ago, Vexxter said:

Actually there is no point in putting it over 200. No matter if I go with value 220 or 230 - all monsters, everywhere seem to go no higher, than level 240. So there must be another limiting factor...

You could try the region.txt and increase the min and max area levels, see if it has any effect. Might be a way to push the enemy levels higher but could also just be a 240 hard cap on monster levels. No idea.

Edited October 21, 2022 by idbeholdME