Subset Games Forum

What happens when you give an anti bio beam a damage boost? (the crew damage gets boosted per shot, but only if there's no other kind of damage on the weapon.) What happens when you give a bomb <drone_targetable>? (drones will shoot at the bomb inside the ship, but the drone's shot passes through and does nothing.) What happens when you give a beam the charge option? (the game crashes when you try to power it.)

I've spent some good quality time with the Testrel and the Mod Testing Environment to try every weapon attribute with every other weapon attribute and put together the following chart documenting every interaction and interference, as well as testing negative and decimal values:

Complete Weapon Attribute Table (google docs link)

It's my hope that this will make other weapon modders lives a little easier and help me with my (currently unannounced) mod.

How to use this chart
Find one of the weapon attributes you're looking for on the left and follow that row right to the column of the other weapon attribute. Blue and green work, yellow is weird, red doesn't work. If it's a light grey box, switch rows and columns.
Some attributes don't have their own column because they tend not to interact with other attributes. Examples include the boost <amount> attribute and the <power> attribute.
If you see anything wrong or unclear, please let me know!

Some Findings
- Ion weapons deal ion damage directly to the shield sprite; this causes all kinds of bugs, such as the famous ion beam bug but also weird interactions with shield piercing
- Beam weapons don't like a lot of other arguments, and both FTL crash bugs are on beam weapons
- Missiles are basically lasers with some default attributes wrapped in
- Boost damage is weird with multiple damage types
- Multiple shots weapons don't play well with other types
- I still have no idea what <locked> does. It's not <lockdown>.

Since <locked> is on things like the crew teleporter, I would assume that it refers to the 'ion damage' that is applied when the system is on cooldown.

Interesting; I hadn't noticed that (or at least hadn't processed that it was the same tag as on the systems.)

I looked over the list of weapons with the tag and it appears to be every ion wepaon, every bomb weapon, and every person-drone (drone that doesn't fly around in space.)

Still clueless, though, since they don't ion themselves. I would guess it's a tag about animation or usage, not effect - I was scrutinizing effects pretty closely and didn't use the <locked> tag outside of its own specific testing.

Something I noticed with SysDamage when I was testing weapons pre-AE;
Negative numbers healed damage, but also over-healed it.


By using a -1 sysdamage bomb on a non-damaged room outside of battle, I was able to negate the first attack from any weapon on that room. The effect stacks, and is seemingly not even limited by, say, the maximum level of a system.

I believe this is because there is no roof to system health.


The effect has no visual markers, so many people wouldn't notice, but once figured out it could potentially be game breaking.

Definitely needs noting in the list (if it still happens in AE)
If so; possibly worth reporting as a bug? Maybe worth requesting an 'overheal' effect for a new AE weapong

I'm pretty sure that this over-repair does no longer happen since AE. The System Repair Bomb definitely does not add aditional system bars and I don't think any other weapons with negative sysDamage will.

Overall, this whole idea is really helpfull, especially for newcomers. There might be some synergies between attributes that could be mentioned as well. For example how no-damage beams behave together with shield piercing (that does seem to reduce actual shield piercing by one for some reason, observable at the CE Fore focus beam). Further, interactions with Zoltan shields could also be pointed out for certain attributes (certain no-damage weapons can surpass them, others deal double damage and so on...)

featherwings wrote:What happens when you give a bomb <drone_targetable>? (drones will shoot at the bomb inside the ship, but the drone's shot passes through and does nothing.)

That is pretty interesting, I wanted to experiment with that attribute some more. It does not work on combat drones by the way. Does the drone fire continuously at the bomb or just a single time?

EDIT: The over-repair bug will be fixed this next patch..

Matthew wrote:Repair Bombs should no longer over-repair and prevent manning

(does anyone know if they care about bugs that only affect modders? They did fix breach chance on beams)

I've enabled comments - so anyone who has any corrections/additional effects, I'd love to hear them. Didn't know about the 0 damage / shield piercing interaction, so I'll add that to the list. Thank you!

I didn't want to touch the zoltan shields because that's EVEN MORE testing, but I'll also note ion does double damage. Does anything else do double and what can bypass it?

As for the <drone_targetable>, they only fire once when I tested it - the bomb detonated before the drone had a chance to fire a second time. And the shots pass right through. My guess is <drone_targetable> just tells defense drones to fire AT projectiles and the game engine handles the collision the way it handles all other collision; which breaks down with bombs because they can't be collided with.

featherwings wrote:I didn't want to touch the zoltan shields because that's EVEN MORE testing, but I'll also note ion does double damage. Does anything else do double and what can bypass it?

Beams deal their base damage two times to Zoltan shields. That does not work with a beam length of one though. Any projectile weapon with shield piercing, but zero normal damage, seems to be passing through Zoltan shields (if it can also pierce the underlaying true shields of course.) That concerns crew or system damaging pierce weapons, and fire or breach pierce weapons as well. I did not test much how beams with these configurations behave against Zoltan shields.