Arcanum Mods
Carrier Arachnid
For when you just can't burden Virgil any more...
For those who don't know, Arcanum is an old steampunk RPG by Troika. It's kind of like Baldur's Gate, but with pistols and gears added to the fantasy setting. It has a gigantic open-ended world where you can really develop your character to be whatever you want to be - a fighter, a mage, a technologist, a leader, a diplomat... there are a lot of choices.
One of my personal favorite types of characters to make is one with the background of 'Idiot Savant'. You get a huge boost to your intelligence, but get the 'dumb' dialogue options throughout the game. I like to put points into building an army of mechanical arachnids as soon as I can. Running around with a huge home-built army is tons of fun! However, there are some things the mechanical minions can't do - like carry things. People tend to react badly to my idiot savants because of the 'dumb' dialogue options, and it makes hard to get flesh-and-blood NPCs to join my team to help haul around components and explosives. Well, Arcanum was built with modding in mind, and for the parts of it that weren't, there are amazing sources of information out there like Terra Arcanum, and the Russian fansite Arcanum Club (translated). I didn't begin with any experience in hex editing files or modding games, but using info on these sites I was able to make a new type of Mechanized Arachnid that can carry things.
The Carrier Arachnid is based off of the regular Mechanized Arachnid prototype. It's colored yellow to distinguish it from other types. You can build it out of a mechanized arachnid and an electrical harness. A Carrier Arachnid's strength and dexterity stats are lower than those of the mechanized arachnid, so they aren't nearly as useful in combat - their main purpose is to be pack mules. And if you think the regular arachnids are slow, try burdening a carrier version to the point that it's significantly encumbered - that's kinda fun to watch.
One little quirk about these new arachnids is that you can only access their inventories by 'talking' with them. You can't use the little left/right buttons from another follower's page, because Arcanum is coded to not look for the inventories of mechanical followers there. Instead, click on them (No, they won't collapse!). In the dialogue, you can choose to access their inventory or to collapse them back into item form. I'm considering adding something like this to all mechanical followers, because I always get really annoyed when I accidentally click on a follower and collapse it. When you have a big army and you want to organize them in the followers list, it's a pain to have to recollapse and redeploy every mechanical follower just for the sake of organization.
I have ideas for more items to add, like a type of healing salve that can only be used on mechanical NPCs. I've tested modifying a healing salve in SpellList.mes to only work on mechanical things with great success, but I can't seems to add a new spell to do that. If anyone has ever added a spell to the game, or knows how to do it, please please let me know in the comments or send me an email!
