Transcendence Patches Collection

[Nemiah]

It's a bunch of extensions that patch/override stuff like making items have Elemental Shift attributes, increasing the amount of stars in the base game on the way to the Galactic Core, increasing the ore spawn rate on asteroids, giving star systems in HS2 names, and making stations in other mods produce and consume trade.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to make an extension that patches the galaxy map override in Project Renegade.

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Warning: The patches for The Stars Beyond may cause conflicts and incompatibility issues with future versions as it's in active development and stuff might get changed while the patches I created fall behind the latest versions. If so, don't run a new game with the TSB Patches and play it normally otherwise you'll have a saved game that could get bricked by removing the patches/override - the same applies to the rest of the patches.
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The "Item Graphics Override" requires the graphics in the 'resources' folder of the Mining Pack Mod to work.

Get the Mining Pack Mod here: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=4959

After downloading the Mining Pack Mod unpack the 'resources' folder inside of the archive into your Transcendence 'Extensions' folder.
If you don't have an 'Extensions' folder make one by creating a new folder inside of the same folder as your Transcendence game and rename it to 'Extensions'.

Update 09/13/2025 - may cause save game crashes

[Arisaya]

Hi, while we appreciate the enthusiasm, there are quite a few issues with the TSB/HS2 patches - both with the technical way that the patches are implemented, but also in the very nature of trying to patch something that is actively being developed and even has upcoming updates which get broken by these patches, as well as in not actually understanding how licensing/copyright works.

The license is incorrect:

• Pointing this out more as an educational example of how copyright works
• No License specified on the content = Fully copyright/all rights reserved.
• You're not in trouble, but I am going to invoke copyright holder rights here for technical reasons because....
• You are using hard-overwrites (basically mostly copy-pasted aside from your changes) instead of type overrides on content (TSB/EUC/HS2) that has not yet been released under a permissive license, you are technically distributing a bunch of stuff out-of-license, but...
• The real issue is that your patches are kinda creating a compatibility nightmare if users aren't diligent and uninstall the patches before upgrading. Unfortunately using type overrides doesnt entirely fix that issue, but it makes it less likely to occur (however I know in some of these cases, it will occur)

Our general thoughts on patching this active-development content is:

• Short term patches for TSB/EUC/HS2 are probably a waste of your time & effort - patches that revive dead & abandoned content are more worth the time rather than a patch that breaks on the very next release
• Due to this content being under active development, I would ask that if you ARE going to do short-term patches for them, put a warning to users to remove the patches before updating to the next version, and if they encounter issues, to remove the patches and re-test before reporting the issue, because HS2 and EUC (as dependencies) can be updated without TSB itself being version bumped.

As for technical feedback:

Here is how to create <{Type}Override>s: (see the ???Override section)
https://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=84283
You should include only the parts you are changing in the override, not the entire type definition.

The TSB Trade patches are broken

Any TSB/EUC/HS2 patches should not redefine the <!ENTITIES ...> - instead they should just import the relevant UNID library. Here is an example for TSB's:

Code: Select all

	<!ENTITY TSB_unidTSBUNIDLibrary						"0xA00A0003">
	<Library unid="&TSB_unidTSBUNIDLibrary;"/>

TSB/EUC/HS2 are not at a stage where preserving savegame compatibility is a top priority, and so UNIDs will get shuffled around (and in fact are getting shuffled around in the next version). Trying to manually re-define them here is a fast way to ensure your patch causes the game to crash on load.

Because TSB/EUC/HS2 are under active development, making patches at this time is more likely to cause compatibility issues with future versions than not, especially because you are using hard overwrites instead of overrides (though even overrides can still cause issues)

• Because you are hard-overwriting the stations in the trade patch, this patch WILL break the new encounter spawning system in TSB 0.4.4.0
• Note that a near-future version, probably within 0.4.4.0-0.4.5.0, is introducing a new station inventory system, which is why this isnt fixed in the current version. Because you are using hard-overwrites, this will definitely break future versions, meaning it will be necessary for people to uninstall the patches
• The 0.4.4.0-0.4.5.0 versions will be replacing the placeholder system names in TSB/EUC/HS2, which again is going to cause conflicts with the actual new names and some edits to the topology.
• A future 2.0 alpha version will have some changes to topology that these patches will break when TSB/EUC/HS2 all upgrade to using those.

[Arisaya]

I forgot to mention: if theres something that doenst work with the <Override> system, thats probably either a bug or a missing feature and should be reported as such on ministry! viewforum.php?f=60

[relanat]

Nice work, Nemiah.

I like the way you have named star systems that are different. Ariral can be a desert sytem or an ice asteroid system or others. A very good way of mixing things up. In SOTP for example Orthrus is aways a binary system, it is a bit predictable.

Keep the mods coming, much appreciated.

[Nemiah]

Thank you for the feedback and support!

I didn't know what kind of systems I wanted those to be, so I decided to make them randomized.

[Arisaya]

Answering some of the stuff from discord here since these are things others can learn from too

• The crash with the TSB Trade patches appears to be bad formatting in the <!ENTITY blocks (which really shouldnt be there in the first place since you can just import the UNID library which has all of those declarations instead of redefining them) - there might be other errors with them too, but that was a quick issue that stood out.
• An edge case problem I forgot to mention last time with patching actively developed things, is that it breaks saves and completely blocks upgrading unless done in a very specific way. Technically, for TSB's upcoming 0.4.4.0 version, this isnt an issue since 0.4.4.0 is explicitly breaking savegame compatibility, but in other cases, if the content being patched is updated, but the patch conflicts with it, the users cant just remove the patch because the savegame expects the patch's own UNID to be there - but if the conflict now breaks savegames, the only option is to roll things back (if the save didnt get soft-corrupted [tlisp data corruption], at which point all hope is lost). I think its probably just a better rule of thumb to avoid patching anything that is still being actively developed to avoid this situation.
• "No license = full copyright" basically means that if a License to redistribute/reuse/modify the code is NOT provided by the author, that means that by default the author is reserving those rights exclusively for themselves at this time and other people cannot use the code. For example, Arisaya Debug Tools is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license (which since its a precompiled TDB, can be found in ADT_vvLicense, you can view it by doing (typTranslate &ADT_vvLicense; 'license) - this returns the license text - therefor, you can reuse/redistribute/modify the original code from Arisaya Debug Tools in line with the terms of the Apache 2.0 license (which is considered permissive and opensource) - its more intended to allow people to create extensions to it or patch it if we have to abandon it for whatever reason. This version of TSB however does not yet come with a license - its too incomplete and in active development for us to want to deal with the compatibility headaches of people copying the xml, and we have not figured out what terms we want to apply on the art assets.