[SHIPS] Gemstone Cruisers

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porcu93
Posts: 103
Joined: Sun Sep 13, 2020 5:32 pm

[SHIPS] Gemstone Cruisers

Postby porcu93 » Mon Jan 25, 2021 10:54 pm

WARNING: THIS SHIP PACK REQUIRES HYPERSPACE TO FUNCTION.
I'm also 90% sure this mod is not compatible with Multiverse, so don't blame me if stuff broke on your save or something.

NEW: starting from V 3.0 the pack comes with 2 vanilla bugfixes, a new expanded store that will replace the vanilla one and 3 new ships, each one with their own weapons. Also, all 6 ships in this pack have their own special Crystal Vengeance effect and cloaking room, can install the Temporal Manipulator system, have a higher reactor cap with lowered scrap prices, a system cap of 10 and have my Artillery Enabler and Clonebay Gas Remover mods incorporated. It will also revert the Hyperspace hacking fix, so now in this ship pack you can power down hacking while it's mid-space without making it explode.
Deep in the Crystal Homeworld, 6 strangely advanced yet quite old ships have been recently discovered, each one of them looking like gemstones. During the exploration and recovery of these ships, very old songs from Earth were playing, some simply being instrumentals, others in a now lost language. It seems that each ship had its own purpose when in combat, as described in the data log found in one of the still functioning computers. Roughly translated, each ship has a basic description with instructions to maximize the odds to win in battle, thus the crew for each one of them has been assembled and assigned.
Each ship also comes with some new weapons and a ship-specific Crystal Vengeance, or Gemstone Vengeance in this case.
And speaking of weapons, here is what I made for this pack:

Burst Crystal Mark II
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Power required: 2
Cost: 80
Rarity: 4
Attack: 3 crystal shards, each shard deals 1 damage, 10% breach chance, 10% stun chance, pierces 1 shield layer, any Defense Drone can intercept the projectiles.
Cooldown: 12 seconds.
Trivia: a better version of the Crystal Burst Mark II, it's funny how switching the position of 2 words would make a weapon better.


Crystal Flak Gun
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Power required: 2
Cost: 70
Rarity: 3
Attack: 3 large crystal debris acting as decoys plus 2 medium and 1 small crystal chunks all fired at once with a radius of 42, each medium and small debris deals 1 damage, 10% breach chance, 10% stun chance, pierces 1 shield layer, any Defense Drone can intercept the projectiles.
Cooldown: 10 seconds.
Trivia: this weapon went through various iterations, with the one in this pack being the final one. The projectiles, on the other hand, were a pain to make, so I rage-quitted making the sprites and took them from another weapon pack. Credits for the projectiles goes to Chrono Vortex, you can find the version he made in his weapons mod pack here.


Dual Shot Crystal
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Power required: 1
Cost: 45
Rarity: 3
Attack: 2 crystal shards, each shard deals 1 damage, 10% breach chance, 10% stun chance, pierces 1 shield layer, any Defense Drone can intercept the projectiles.
Cooldown: 11 seconds.
Trivia: this is a Dual Laser but in Crystal form, which is quite the buff to the original weapon.


NEW WEAPONS INTRODUCED IN V 3.0:

Chain Burst Crystal
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Power required: 2
Cost: 60
Rarity: 3
Attack: 3 crystal shards, each shard deals 1 damage, 10% breach chance, 10% stun chance, pierces 1 shield layer, any Defense Drone can intercept the projectiles.
Cooldown: 17/15/13/11 seconds.
Trivia: I always felt that Crystal weapons are weak for being hard to obtain, so I decided to take and upgrade two of them with some Advanced Edition stuff.


Crystal Enhanced Beam
Image
Power required: 2
Cost: 60
Rarity: 2
Attack: 140 pixel long beam, which deals 1 damage per room, 40% breach chance, pierces 1 shield layer.
Cooldown: 16 seconds.
Trivia: given that making new beam weapon models is still quite a pain for me, I just took a Pike beam and changed the extremity on the right of the image above.


Heavy Chain Crystal
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Power required: 3
Cost: 65
Rarity: 3
Attack: 1 crystal shard, dealing 2-5 damage, 20% breach chance, 20% stun chance, pierces 1 shield layer, any Defense Drone can intercept the projectiles.
Cooldown: 16 seconds.


Hull-Bust Crystal
Image
Power required: 2
Cost: 50
Rarity: 2
Attack: 1 crystal shard, dealing 2 damage, 10% breach chance, 20% stun chance, double damage in systemless rooms, pierces 1 shield layer, any Defense Drone can intercept the projectiles.
Cooldown: 13 seconds.

Each ship also comes with 2 hidden augments: a Gemstone Vengeance customised for each ship that will activate 80% of the time you take damage and the enemy can't easily dodge, and a "Gemstone Imbued Armour", which provides the ships a 10% chance to negate hull damage and system damage.
And with all the behind the scene stuff explained, here are the ships:


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This ship is your basic starting point for a gunship, with a powerful weapon combination and some decent crew for manning and to deal with obnoxious boarders. Somehow the design of having this kind of weapon combination might have inspired the Kestrel's original loadout. Or was it the other way around? Anyway, this ship's Gemstone Vengeance will shoot out a sapphire shard that will always breach, ignores all standard shields and deals 2 hull damage. The ship's Artillery is similar, but the shield pierce is 2 with a low breach and stun chance, but it fires 3 of them.


Image
Probably the best boarding ship you'll ever get, for vanilla standards, this ship comes with the well known Zoltan Shield Bypass that every enemy boarding party has (apparently), a Reconstructive Teleport to heal your boarders when they get back, a level 2 4-crew Medbay next to a level 2 4-crew Teleport in case you need one, and a Dual Crystal Shot to kill auto-scouts, and you don't even need to pay the 40 scrap for level 2 Weapons. Oh, also 2 Crystal and 2 Mantis for a board-lock-kill tactic with level 2 Sensors. And yes, you can buy the Clonebay. If the ship ends up getting damaged, the Gemstone Vengeance will fire an heavy ionized emerald shard, that will ignore standard shields and has a 50% chance to cause a breach and always stuns anyone in the room, with the ship's Artillery weapon firing 4 crystal shards, but these are a weaker version, as they do less ion damage and have a lower chance for breaching and stunning.


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Yes, it's an automated ship that starts with crew, it's something you can do with Hyperspace without the use of augment and/or events. The ship also comes with a Crystal Flak Gun and a Pike Beam, because why not. Just make sure you have a backup plan in case you lose all your crew and your systems are breached, as this ship doesn't use drones and isn't equipped with Slug Repair Gel. And when the ship receives damage, 3 small ruby chunks is what the Gemstone Vengeance will fire, each one will ignore all shields and has a 60% chance to punch a hole in the room. And speaking of small ruby chunks, this ship is capable to equip a special Artillery weapon that makes the Federation C Artillery a kids toy: 9 small crystal chunks fired by something similar to a Flak Gun Mark II, but these projectiles are quite precise.


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Love may or may not be in the air in this ship, but the hate for the enemy ship's hull is in the form of its loadout, given that I wanted to go for a hull-bust starting setup. The Gemstone Vengeance also hullbusts, but also always breaches, ignores normal shields deals 2 damage by default, with the Artillery also dealing 2 damage and hull-busts, but it fires thrice, pierces 2 shields and has a low chance to breach and stun.


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This ship has quite a few tricks up its sleeve: vanilla crystal weapons enhanced with the chain effects added in the Advanced Edition update, the same goes for the Artillery, which increases on damage dealt. Unfortunately you can't really apply chain effects to a Vengeance weapon, so I decided to just make it deal 4 damage by default, which is equivalent of the Artillery that has chained once and always breaches.


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Why the name? A few months ago I got my hands on my old necklace with an obsidian shard on it, so I went with Obsidian and not another precious gemstone. Also it mirrors the Ruby's weapons but the Crystal effect is switched to the other weapon. And speaking of, the Artillery is basically the Federation A/B weapon but 40% shorter, a lower cooldown and a 80% breach chance per tile, and the Vengeance is a third of the Artillery's length but always breaches, and the fun thing about beams used as a Vengeance weapon is that the enemy will be hit even while cloaked.


People who played the ships:
Rand118
- v 1.0 Gemstone B Hard Difficulty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQIhQ1vQYf0
- v 2.0 Gemstone C Hard Difficulty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZnuJuFONj4
- v 2.0 Gemstone A Hard Difficulty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqwKy4egJ3A
- v 3.0 Gemstone D Hard Difficulty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYHIcJoQ8GA
- v 3.1 Gemstone E Hard Difficulty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wDAx0VitbI
- v 3.1 Gemstone F Hard Difficulty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmgiuSVJZ1M

Another pack done, and no system changes at all, as there was no need for it, so here's the download link, enjoy ^_^
v 3.1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cpRa0Z0Hnyr1oxeLyRpMMfD2RIKrKGId/view?usp=share_link

Credits for the Crystal Flak Gun projectiles goes to Chrono Vortex, you can find his version of the same weapon concept in his weapons mod pack here.

Code: Select all

Changelog:
v 3.1: lots of changes to the pack
- removed shield image duplicates;
- removed parts of code no longer needed;
- reordered and commented the XML code to be more readable for others;
- all shield images are now aligned to be in the same place as the vanilla Crystal ships, their placement are already aligned;
- minor grammar fixes and text changes;
- changed the ship cloaking images a little bit to be more "glow-y";
- added a missing blue option for the Temporal Manipulator on the Stasis Pod event if you use the Rock Plating blue option;
- regarding the Stasis Pod event, all ships can now do the event like any ship with the Rock Plating, but there's a 50% chance you'll get 2 hull damage on top of the rewards;
- changed the store to show all weapons 80% of the time and my modded weapons 20% of the time in all sectors.

v 3.0: MASSIVE EXPANSION UPDATE:
- added 3 new ships, each one with their customised cloak and artillery;
- removed redundant images;
- all ships will trigger a custom Vengeance effect based on the ship itself and with a higher chance to hit in case it is projectile based;
- minor hull and gibs fixes;
- the Cloaking system's glowing image is now themed with the ship;
- the reactor cap has been increased to 35, the scrap cost has been reduced;
- the system cap has been increased to 10;
- added the Temporal Manipulator as an installable system;
- incorporated the Artillery Enabler mod and Clonebay Gas Remover standalone mods;
- hacking will not explode when deactivated while it is travelling;
- added a new store, which replaces the vanilla one;
- Hull Missile is now usable for missiles related blue options (vanilla bug fix);
- Combat Beam II now uses the correct images when on and when firing (vanilla bug fix);
- included a much needed level 2 Clonebay blue option for Slug sectors (vanilla bug fix, probably).

v 2.1.1:
- removed the custom Artillery charge bar indicator in preparation for the upcoming Hyperspace release;
- fixed some typos plus some minor rewording in some places.

v 2.1: fixed some tooltips and actually making the artillery tooltip show generic text.

v 2.0: MAJOR UPDATE:
- rebalanced the cost and rarity of the weapons;
- redrawn the weapon sprites;
- minor changes to some floor images;
- almost not noticeable changes to the hull and gibs glow;
- each ship now has its own personalized cloaking image;
- new addition: if you also download the "Artillery Enabler" mini-mod, each ship will have an optional installable artillery system, with the tooltips being generic and the indicator with colour coded markings depending on the ship;
- the mod will now show a short description on Slipstream Mod Manager.
Sapphire-22/09:
- changed the Heavy Laser I with a Heavy Crystal I;
- switched the position of Hacking and Teleport;
- new Artillery: Heavy Burst Crystal, a weapon that fires 3 crystals, each dealing 2 damage and ignores 3 shield layers.
Emerald-JST_MNK:
- new Artillery: Ion Burst Crystal, a weapon that fires 4 crystals, each dealing 1 ion damage and ignores 1 shield layer.
Ruby-30/07:
- removed the Starting Crew augment and its related event chain, as it is no longer needed;
- thanks to some Hyperspace magic, the ship is now an auto-ship with a starting crew on board without the use of events or augments;
- moved the Teleport system to the empty room on top of Hacking;
- new Artillery: Crystal Flak Artillery, basically the Federation C Artillery but with a Crystal twist, a better projectile precision, some extra projectiles and ignoring 2 shield layers.

v 1.0: initial release.
Last edited by porcu93 on Fri Jun 09, 2023 5:22 pm, edited 10 times in total.
User avatar
porcu93
Posts: 103
Joined: Sun Sep 13, 2020 5:32 pm

Re: [SHIPS] Gemstone Cruisers

Postby porcu93 » Fri Jun 11, 2021 10:33 pm

v 2.0 update: minor improvements on some images, some weapon balancing and new optional (with a mod) artillery added, more info in the changelog.
User avatar
porcu93
Posts: 103
Joined: Sun Sep 13, 2020 5:32 pm

Re: [SHIPS] Gemstone Cruisers

Postby porcu93 » Tue Apr 25, 2023 8:23 pm

After a very long time I've finally pushed another major pack update that add 3 new ships and new stuff. You can read more in the first post.