1 items
About this mod
"Dandelion Baron" attempts to rein in the more egregious aspects of Herbalism's economic impact, and more generally, to moderate the pace of the player's accumulation of wealth.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
INTRODUCTION
I've always enjoyed games that have a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" element. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is certainly one of them. Henry is the literal embodiment of starting with nothing but the clothes on his back. From a skills perspective, he is terrible at everything. There are no magic spells to be learnt to help sidestep this problem, either. No matter what course you plan to chart with Henry, you are going to need the appropriate kit, and will have to cultivate the means to obtain it.
To that end, in my own first playthrough I turned to Herbalism. It quickly became apparent that this was a surpisingly powerful skill. Carrying a small amount of flowers would boost your Charisma; there was a hidden, permanent Vitality boost awaiting you once you'd picked a modest amount of weeds; and in a humorous twist, the skill offered you a way to increase your Strength, and over time, to become a veritable bruiser - all from picking herbs.
But what pushed this skill over the top was the potential financial windfall it offered. Herbs are numerous and regrow quickly once picked. Many, many merchants will buy them. And the game designers, in their laudable desire to strike a balance between realism and player convenience, settled on an implementation of currency wherein 0.1 Groschen was the smallest unit - i.e., any individual thing that could be sold in a store necessarily had to be worth at least that much. Taken together, these gameplay mechanisms combined to allow my Henry to quickly generate a staggering amount of wealth. Before I'd even bothered to venture further afield than Neuhof, my Henry was essentially wearing the best armor money could buy and carrying the best weapons. Herbalism had played an outsized role in that. At that rate, soon Sirs Radzig and Hanush would be bending the knee to Henry, the Dandelion Baron of Bohemia.
I decided that I wanted to start over. This time, I would play using the game's Hardcore mode. But first, Herbalism was going to need to be reined in a bit.
GAMEPLAY CHANGES
1) Dandelions, nettle, thistle and weeds have no financial value. No store anywhere will buy them.
And why would they? They are literally weeds that grow everywhere and are ludicrously easy to obtain in bulk. Merchant interest in them is the equivalent of, say, adding a merchant to The Long Dark who is willing to trade you a can of peaches for every cup of snow you bring him/her. Huh? Are we seriously supposed to regard that as a sensible, equitable transaction?
Anyway, if you need some of these plants for Alchemy, go ahead and pick some. But otherwise, don't waste your time on them.
2) The selling price for the remaining herbs is now half of what it used to be (rounding up to the nearest 0.1 Groschen where needed).
3) Herbs are no longer sold by any stores. If you become an Alchemist, you will be picking all of your own herbs.
This change was made primarily to prevent Alchemy from becoming even more profitable as a result of gameplay change #2 above. But I think it also makes sense from an economic perspective. Any merchant who is not an herbalist or an apothecary is going to view herbs as the province of those two professions. If they obtain any, they will just sell them to the local herbalist/apothecary via an established backchannel business relationship. And herbalists and apothecaries understand that selling herbs just enables unwanted competition for their primary revenue stream.
4) Stores now have significantly less coin with which to buy whatever the player is selling.
Although again, the primary motivation here was to tame Herbalism, this should also help slow Henry's overall accumulation of wealth a bit. As it stands in vanilla, shopkeepers are literally slot machines that pay out on every pull of the handle. With this change in place, they still are that, but with the jackpots reined in somewhat. Hardest hit are the generalist merchants who buy herbs and other assorted knick-knackery.
TECHNICAL BITS
Install this as you would any other KCD mod - unzip it to the mods folder that lives within the top-level KCD game folder (or first create that mods folder if it doesn't already exist). Dandelion Baron uses the newer, best practice method of table patching, so it targets only the game data it means to and nothing more instead of replacing tables outright, thereby promoting maximum compatibility with other mods.
Dandelion Baron was developed and tested against game version 1.9.6 with all DLC installed. It is intended for use with a new game. When I was originally testing it, I did so against my existing save, and I was finding that even after waiting/sleeping for three days to force a shop reset, shopkeepers still had their original currency amounts. I thought I'd screwed up somewhere. But when checking the console, I could see that KCD was finding and applying my table patches. And when I created a new game to test that way, everything worked as expected. I'm pointing this out by way of saying that I don't intend to devote any effort to exploring how to handle games that were already in progress prior to installing this mod. The game engine's save game data persistence behaviors are a mystery to me, and I'm comfortable leaving it that way.
In terms of compatibility with other mods, I used the zzz_ mod folder naming trick to force this mod's table patches to default to late loading and thereby take priority. You shouldn't have any problems unless you are using mods which dramatically alter the game's merchants (e.g., changing shop IDs or shop type IDs - the sorts of things that are obviously going to be breaking changes). In my own case, I carefully cultivated a collection of 22 other mods by combing through every "best of" list that I could find, and none of those have any conflicts with Dandelion Baron's changes. But to be completely explicit about this mod's scope of change, by using it you are essentially saying "I agree to let Dandelion Baron have sole responsibility for the value of herbs, which merchants buy and sell herbs, and for how much coin each merchant has to buy the things I am trying to sell."
MY OTHER KCD MOD
Saddles Have Durability at Kingdom Come: Deliverance Nexus - Mods and community (nexusmods.com)
JCBP.
I've always enjoyed games that have a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" element. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is certainly one of them. Henry is the literal embodiment of starting with nothing but the clothes on his back. From a skills perspective, he is terrible at everything. There are no magic spells to be learnt to help sidestep this problem, either. No matter what course you plan to chart with Henry, you are going to need the appropriate kit, and will have to cultivate the means to obtain it.
To that end, in my own first playthrough I turned to Herbalism. It quickly became apparent that this was a surpisingly powerful skill. Carrying a small amount of flowers would boost your Charisma; there was a hidden, permanent Vitality boost awaiting you once you'd picked a modest amount of weeds; and in a humorous twist, the skill offered you a way to increase your Strength, and over time, to become a veritable bruiser - all from picking herbs.
But what pushed this skill over the top was the potential financial windfall it offered. Herbs are numerous and regrow quickly once picked. Many, many merchants will buy them. And the game designers, in their laudable desire to strike a balance between realism and player convenience, settled on an implementation of currency wherein 0.1 Groschen was the smallest unit - i.e., any individual thing that could be sold in a store necessarily had to be worth at least that much. Taken together, these gameplay mechanisms combined to allow my Henry to quickly generate a staggering amount of wealth. Before I'd even bothered to venture further afield than Neuhof, my Henry was essentially wearing the best armor money could buy and carrying the best weapons. Herbalism had played an outsized role in that. At that rate, soon Sirs Radzig and Hanush would be bending the knee to Henry, the Dandelion Baron of Bohemia.
I decided that I wanted to start over. This time, I would play using the game's Hardcore mode. But first, Herbalism was going to need to be reined in a bit.
GAMEPLAY CHANGES
1) Dandelions, nettle, thistle and weeds have no financial value. No store anywhere will buy them.
And why would they? They are literally weeds that grow everywhere and are ludicrously easy to obtain in bulk. Merchant interest in them is the equivalent of, say, adding a merchant to The Long Dark who is willing to trade you a can of peaches for every cup of snow you bring him/her. Huh? Are we seriously supposed to regard that as a sensible, equitable transaction?
Anyway, if you need some of these plants for Alchemy, go ahead and pick some. But otherwise, don't waste your time on them.
2) The selling price for the remaining herbs is now half of what it used to be (rounding up to the nearest 0.1 Groschen where needed).
3) Herbs are no longer sold by any stores. If you become an Alchemist, you will be picking all of your own herbs.
This change was made primarily to prevent Alchemy from becoming even more profitable as a result of gameplay change #2 above. But I think it also makes sense from an economic perspective. Any merchant who is not an herbalist or an apothecary is going to view herbs as the province of those two professions. If they obtain any, they will just sell them to the local herbalist/apothecary via an established backchannel business relationship. And herbalists and apothecaries understand that selling herbs just enables unwanted competition for their primary revenue stream.
4) Stores now have significantly less coin with which to buy whatever the player is selling.
Although again, the primary motivation here was to tame Herbalism, this should also help slow Henry's overall accumulation of wealth a bit. As it stands in vanilla, shopkeepers are literally slot machines that pay out on every pull of the handle. With this change in place, they still are that, but with the jackpots reined in somewhat. Hardest hit are the generalist merchants who buy herbs and other assorted knick-knackery.
TECHNICAL BITS
Install this as you would any other KCD mod - unzip it to the mods folder that lives within the top-level KCD game folder (or first create that mods folder if it doesn't already exist). Dandelion Baron uses the newer, best practice method of table patching, so it targets only the game data it means to and nothing more instead of replacing tables outright, thereby promoting maximum compatibility with other mods.
Dandelion Baron was developed and tested against game version 1.9.6 with all DLC installed. It is intended for use with a new game. When I was originally testing it, I did so against my existing save, and I was finding that even after waiting/sleeping for three days to force a shop reset, shopkeepers still had their original currency amounts. I thought I'd screwed up somewhere. But when checking the console, I could see that KCD was finding and applying my table patches. And when I created a new game to test that way, everything worked as expected. I'm pointing this out by way of saying that I don't intend to devote any effort to exploring how to handle games that were already in progress prior to installing this mod. The game engine's save game data persistence behaviors are a mystery to me, and I'm comfortable leaving it that way.
In terms of compatibility with other mods, I used the zzz_ mod folder naming trick to force this mod's table patches to default to late loading and thereby take priority. You shouldn't have any problems unless you are using mods which dramatically alter the game's merchants (e.g., changing shop IDs or shop type IDs - the sorts of things that are obviously going to be breaking changes). In my own case, I carefully cultivated a collection of 22 other mods by combing through every "best of" list that I could find, and none of those have any conflicts with Dandelion Baron's changes. But to be completely explicit about this mod's scope of change, by using it you are essentially saying "I agree to let Dandelion Baron have sole responsibility for the value of herbs, which merchants buy and sell herbs, and for how much coin each merchant has to buy the things I am trying to sell."
MY OTHER KCD MOD
Saddles Have Durability at Kingdom Come: Deliverance Nexus - Mods and community (nexusmods.com)
JCBP.