State of the ‘Rim - July 2023

Howdy everyone!

Sorcerer released on Friday, July the 7th, and it’s currently crawling up the trending page and into the Hot Files. Things are very competitive right now (as I’m writing this, the least-endorsed mod on the Hot Files is Xav’s Ancient Falmer Armor, which has 264 endorsements) but it looks like Sorcerer will make it up there soon.

Sorcerer was a very fun project to work on. It reminds me of Hand to Hand in that it extends Vanilla gameplay in a new and yet very familiar/intuitive way. It also enables new build options and build variety, both for dedicated mages, “weird” mages like sorcerers and scroll casters, and less-magically inclined characters who would just like some goddamn healing scrolls. Also, more than any other mod before, Sorcerer feels like a true “collaborative effort” among a large number of people. Many thanks are due to to Delta (who made the tables), Sparx (who worked on staves and provided some of the original inspiration to the project, Squeegee (who made the patcher and is doing a ton of support for the patch page), Janquel (who came out of retirement to patch for us) Parapets (who made COCKS and I4, which powers the logic of the scroll enchanting table), and Jelidity (who is a co-author on I4 and made custom icons just for Sorcerer).

I had intended to get Sorcerer done in June; however, I had some IRL issues come up that took most of my attention during the month of June, so I fell a bit behind. My plan for the rest of July is to finally get around to those Scion/Manbeast updates I’ve been putting off (for real this time? I think?) and also to release Gourmet - A Cooking Overhaul. Gourmet will essentially be a more robust version of Apothecary - Food and Drink, that comes with an exhaustive set of recipe and ingredient tweaks as well as a thorough rebalancing of the many, many vendors who deal with food in one way or another. (Did you know that every major town has at least one specialized food vendor? Probably not, since in Vanilla there’s almost no reason to interact with these vendors). It will also come with a light progression system, as the player will need to purchase (relatively cheap) recipes to cook most foods, and there will also be a few cookbooks that can boost the player’s skill as a chef.

After Gourmet, my next major release will be Artificer. I’d like to release Artificer in August, hopefully in the earlier part of the month. Artificer has had a very long development cycle–not quite as long as Mysticism 2, but still hefty. I lost inspiration to work on the mod and tabled it for a bit; it also got pushed backwards when I quit teaching in 2022, and then again when I took my break earlier this year. However, it’s finally getting close to release–and in a much better state than it would have been if I had released it last year. There will be a handful of really killer features in Artificer, things that no other artifact mod really has, and it will be another awesome piece of the Simonrim puzzle–a puzzle that is shaping up to cover nearly all of the game at this point.

When Artificer is done, the next thing I’d like to work on is a three-part update project: Mysticism 2.4/2.5, Adamant 6, and Hand to Hand 2. Mysticism 2.4/2.5 will add a few more spells and make some balance changes to the mod, and will bring the mod very, very close to its “complete” state. Adamant 6 will be a major update that adds new requirements to the mod (SKSE, SPID, KID, and Scrambled Bugs). Hand to Hand 2 will be an update that actually removes some of these requirements, and also removes just about every change that Hand to Hand makes outside of the specific Hand to Hand and Security trees. The reason for this update is that there are a number of ways that I would like to improve Adamant, but all of them require SKSE. I’ve tried to shuffle some of those improvements off into Hand to Hand, but unfortunately a lot of users won’t download Hand to Hand if they don’t intend to actually play a punchy character. So those improvements get lost–and, to be fair, you can hardly blame someone for not realizing that the “real” block tree for Simonrim is buried in Hand to Hand. Adamant 6 will fix all of this while allowing me to break completely new design ground, and it will further cement Adamant 6’s role as the premiere V+ perk overhaul. I’d like to imagine all of this could happen in late August (I’ve already made a bunch of progress on A6 in the background), but of course these things always take a little longer than planned.

What’s after that? Well, two things. First, Starfield releases in early September, and I’m very interested in seeing what modding opportunities Starfield brings. I’ll definitely be playing on day one. More relevant for Simonrim is the development of Armorer; after I finish the Mysticism/Adamant/Hand to Hand update trio, I’ll begin full-time development of Armorer. I expect it to be my biggest release this year–maybe one of my biggest releases ever– and it will require a lot of dev time and a lot of support. Some of the base framework is already in place, and even playable, but because the mod has such a large feature set, it’s really impossible to know how long it will take. This is why I haven’t committed to full-time development of the mod yet, even though there’s already a lot of hype for it.

Alright, that’s a breakdown of what I’m up to, including a release calendar for the next two months and some thoughts about what comes next. As always, I’ll be active just about every day in the Discord, so you can always find me there if you have questions. I’ll make a new post here when Gourmet is ready for release. Until then, cheers!