ELEMENTAL SHIFT
Coding and writing by Song, Additional graphics by AssumedPseudonym & Aury
Alpha 0.98.11 now available via Dropbox for game versions 1.9.2 and later.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Requirements:
- Transcendence version 1.9.2 or later
- Corporate Command
Recommended
Song 'N' AssumedPseudonym's Superior Sounds (Multiverse link)
Instructions
- Download ElementalShift.TDB from Dropbox.
- Save the file to your Extensions folder (if you are on the Steam version you may not have this by default, just create one in the game directory)
- READ THE KNOWN ISSUES further down this page. This is not a bug-free mod.
- Start a new Stars of the Pilgrim game with Corporate Command and Elemental Shift enabled (and SNAPSS, if you have it). New starting ships (and tweaked vanilla/CC starters) will appear at the end of the ship selection list.
But what is Elemental Shift?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Escaping closed development once again after many years, this comprehensive overhaul and enhancement of Stars of the Pilgrim and Corporate Command is back as a public alpha!
- Lead a swarm of new and improved auton types into battle, maybe even in a tweaked, slightly-nicer-to-start-in Constellation class!
- Experience one of fifteen new starting ships, including the Ronin/B, Scorpion, T31, and the mighty Mouse. You can also upgrade to numerous new and modified hulls throughout the game!
- Meet new and exciting NPC factions. And kill most of them.
- Enjoy over 200 new weapons and ammunition types, with tweaks and changes to more than 80 vanilla and Corporate Command guns and missiles as well!
- New systems await your explorations. Admittedly, they are entirely made up of placeholders right now!
- Trade with new friendly and neutral stations and enjoy a more immersive experience with expanded guard, escort, and traffic tables!
- Amuse yourself with detailed and extremely canon-friendly item descriptions!
- Lose yourself in the same world that you've played through before. Just....more of it.
- Surprises await, as familiar ships and stations have been significantly altered across the game. Don't assume things are always as you remember them!
- Hi, so you've probably noticed what I'm doing with the first letter of each of these bullet points. If you haven't, go back and look!
- It really isn't easy, let me tell you...anyway, (ahem) Shoot space Nazis!
- Featuring over 700 new things, a complete overhaul of the fuel system, major rebalances and innumerable small tweaks and changes, Elemental Shift is a labour of love, finally ready for the public gaze!
- Take a new trip through Stars of the Pilgrim and Corporate Command as you've never seen them before! Or heard, if you have not yet installed SNAPSS and do so as well, hint hint!
Okay, that's enough of that. It's almost 11 at night and I'm running out of vaguely in-date screenshots. So...
Elemental Shift has been my project for....a very long time now. About a decade, which puts it...okay, probably slightly ahead of the other megamods in terms of progress, but still a long way behind where I'd hoped.
But now it's getting close to completion. I'm aware I've been saying this for several years but I actually mean it.
This mod is not intended to transform the game beyond recognition. It's an enhancement mod, not a total conversion. If you can't quite tell where the original game ends and ES content begins...bugs notwithstanding...I've done my job. Most of the weapons, stations, ships, and tweaks have been done, a lot of content that wasn't possible for me to maintain has been offloaded onto George and put into the game proper (notably the outlaw miners). My next stages are system and topology creation, missions, NPCs, and some plotlines. These are hard, and it's going to take a long time. So in the interests of testing, I'm putting the mod out as an alpha now, to see how it runs in the background while I try to work out my next steps.
Please be aware that this mod is not finished: There is placeholder content. There are a lot of missing things (plot, for starters). There will be bugs that you will encounter as you play, some of which are related to core engine functions, some due to transdata problems complicating balancing procedures, and others due to the mistakes and omissions that build up over a decade-long amateur development process. I'm hoping to open up the Ministry section for Elemental Shift (there is one, though it's not much used by me) at some future point to help with collecting these. Known issues (as of 0.98.9) include:
- Reactors that use non-levelled fuel criteria (eg "all fusion fuels") will feature nonsensical level ranges on the UI. This is a core engine bug.
- Core and corporate command missions that spam small craft (especially hornets and corsairs) are significantly harder than tyey should be in this mod because of armor rebalances.
- Some older content has inconsistencies and/or decidedly incorrect values for various parameters due to changing systems and various rebalances over the years.
- Eden's Apples and counterfeit Eridani mineral water cannot be sold to the Victoria Nightclub (there's a core-side check for items that I need to work around)
- Some NPCs have questionable balance for where they appear in the game.
- In the Cyclops HQ mission, the various NPC ships will spread out due to their different speeds.
- Tweaked vanilla and CC playerships lose their place in the ship select screen because the game assumes they're from the mod, rather than changed by the mod. This is a core thing that I can't fix.
- Gaian terraformers will repeatedly create copies of their secondary weapons, generating hundreds if not thousands of high-end guns. This is due to a core bug - you may choose to exploit it or not as you see fit, it's on the honours system until the bug is fixed.
- Sung ships will not recharge their shield generators due to a core game bug - the recharge code for superconducting shields looks for specific UNIDs rather than attributes so I can't hook it into that system.
I'm planning to fix some of these in the short term. Others require longer-term changes to the Transcendence engine itself. But in the version I'm putting up, they're all still here.
Despite this, the mod is generally stable (stable enough not to force people to wait even more years for it to be ironclad) and should work reasonably well on an up-to-date copy of Transcendence compatible with API53. In addition, Corporate Command is required to launch the mod, and the use of SNAPSS is highly recommended: the two mods are designed to work together. This mod has not been (and will not be) tested for compatibility with other extensions, registered or otherwise. You are of course free to alter your own copy of the mod to get other mods to play nicely with it... just please don't redistribute it.
I hope you enjoy Elemental Shift. It's been a wild ride making it, and