[Mod Idea] Mod name confidential. Also need help finding an inactive user.

[DolphyBlueDrake]

Before I address anything else, I need to get this out of the way: I need to find the modder who had been working on this mod before vanishing in 2013: http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3819

I've looked all over for any trace of the modder who was working on the mod so I can request their help with resources, but to no avail. I need to get in contact with them for a mod I'm working on. I won't be posting the mod here, necessarily, but the point remains that I need to contact this modder, but it's like they just fell off the face of the Earth.

I was planning on making a little mod that would expand on the special pony event that can occur. You'd have a chance of one of them stowing away in your shuttlecraft, then they'd offer to join your crew to make up for none of them offering much help (I did a lot of work to get the ghost sprites independent from the human sprites. I have the code of Crew Diversity to thank for that). If you decline, they still give you some scrap and upgrade your reactor by 5. If you accept, one of sixteen different possible members of that race could join your crew, with twelve of the possibilities becoming level 2 in one skill, two of the possibilities joining with all skills at level 1, and two of the possibilities joining at level 2 in all skills.

Then, there'd be a 50% chance of a Rebel Dreadnought Cruiser showing up to destroy you before telling the Rebel Fleet about the planet you found so they could return in force to conquer it and enslave the planet. The ship would be insanely overpowered, complete with an artillery system that fires Anti-Ship Battery shots. The planet helps out by somehow imitating Anti-Ship Battery shots with their abilities. If you manage to destroy the cruiser/kill its crew, you dismantle it for a lot of fuel, scrap, missiles and drones, and the planet then rewards you with a huge supply of scrap, as well as upgrading your reactor by 10 and all of your other systems by 1.

But, the Dreadnought will try to escape once you get its hull down from 25 to 5. If it gets away, you are given the option to either chase it or continuing to flee from the Rebel Fleet. If you decide to flee, you get no reward, and you just leave. But if you decide to pursue the fleeing cruiser, your warp signature is made untraceable, thus halting the Rebel Fleet for a large number of turns. A quest marker will appear, and that's where you try to finish it off.

At the beacon, you find the crippled cruiser undergoing repairs at an automated Rebel-only shipyard. The enemy captain tries to flee again, but the jump to the repair station fried the cruiser's FTL drive, forcing them to fight back. They'll have 10 hull points this time around, all of their systems will be weaker, they'll have less reactor power, and their Anti-Ship Battery will be offline. They still put up one heckuva fight, but if you destroy the Dreadnought/kill the entire crew, you dismantle the entire cruiser as well as the Rebel repair station, resulting in a ton of scrap, fuel, missiles and drone parts. The planet you protected then rewards you with a mountain of scrap, upgrades your reactor by 15, and upgrades all of your other systems by 1. I'm going to add a weapon or something as another reward, but I can't go any further for now.

I had special plans for this mod, and I don't care what you think about me for wanting to make this kind of mod. If anyone can either help me find out what happened to that modder or maybe assist me with crew sprite creation, I'd be extremely grateful. I tried using the mantis sprites as a base, but I failed miserably. I'd love to make the sprites customizable beyond simple male and female (since ghosts happen to also come in male and female versions) like what the Diverse Crew mod does, but without sprites of any kind, I'm stuck. (Well, I found a simple sprite set, but it was horrid all because it diverted from the top-down view everyone expects in FTL. It replaced it with frontal, side, and rear views, and it's just awful!)

If you can help or at least find the idea interesting, by all means, respond to this thread. If all you have to say is the kind of stuff that drove the aforementioned modder to pull a Houdini by going inactive and pulling all of their resources they had links to, then stow it. I've heard it all before, I'll probably hear more of it again, but remember Justin's rules. Such comments don't belong in this thread, and I'm not going anywhere.


(On a different note, I've been working on updating the Haunted Rigger mod to work with Advanced Edition content. I even added a type B layout for the ship!)