State of the 'Rim - April 2021

Hey everyone,

I wanted to update you on my progress over the last month.

Work has been insanely busy, as always, but I was really productive over the past few weeks, so Iā€™m in a good place. This is my Spring Break, so Iā€™ve taken the opportunity to rest and work on some of the backlog thatā€™s accrued over the past few months.

Hereā€™s what Iā€™ve done:

1. I updated Blade & Blunt. This is the second major update to my combat mod. 1.3 brought some much-needed changes to combat regeneration and to blocking that helped boost sword-and-board players up to the level that other builds were performing at.
2. I updated Manbeast and fixed all of the bugs that Iā€™m aware of. Most of these bugs were related to curing lycanthropy. I also made some improvements to Animal Senses and Howl of the Hunt.
3. I made smaller updates to Aetherius and Mundus, mostly fixing typos and shuffling a few bonuses around on stones.
4. Iā€™ve updated all of my mods (yes, every single one) on the Xbox. This was a long time coming. Adamant especially was much further behind than it should have been. Sorry about that.

Besides the Blade & Blunt update, most of my work this week was ā€œmaintenanceā€ type work--nothing exciting from a user perspective, just tweaked numbers and squashed bugs. But there was one exception. I decided to start working in earnest on Adamant 5. I want to talk about why.

I mentioned in my previous post that I sometimes switch from working on one mod to another when I feel stuck. Even though Iā€™ve made tons of measurable and exciting progress on Mysticism 2, the update is justā€¦ a long way off from being finished. Iā€™ve been dedicating almost all of my modding efforts exclusively to Mysticism since before Thanksgiving break, but the simple fact is that I need about a month of full time work to complete the update--and thereā€™s no way in hell Iā€™m going to get that time until the summer.

If I had been way more productive over Christmas, I might have been able to finish over Spring Break, but as yā€™all know I had to take a break around January or so. This is basically the aftershock of that decision.

Mysticism 2 is still a high priority for me, but for my own sanity I want to spend the rest of the school year working on projects that actually feel like I could finish them. Thatā€™s why Iā€™ve pivoted to Adamant 5.

Adamant 5 is going to be the biggest update to Adamant since 3.0, and itā€™s going to come with an extremely thorough rebalance of the mod. I also really hope that Adamant will stay in the 5.x seriesā€¦ well, basically forever. I know Iā€™ve said this before w/ Adamant 3, but I want Adamant 5 to be the last major update to the mod. Thatā€™s not to say that nothing will ever change, but I want to keep the changes as small as possible going forward.

For now, I am pretty sure Iā€™ll be able to share at least a beta of Adamant 5 byā€¦ around the end of the month? Thereā€™s a lot of work left to go, but I was able to knock out quite a bit over the break. I expect the next month of work to be relatively relaxed before a final push in May/June to finish the year. Obviously, these things can be unpredictable. As always, Iā€™ll keep you updated, whether itā€™s here or in my discord.