State of the ‘Rim - May 2023

Howdy everyone!

The release week for Stormcrown went incredibly well. We've earned an amazing 494 endorsements as of the time of writing, and we’re #1 in the Mod of the Month competition with a small lead over the excellent Sirenroot mod. Thanks to everyone who supported the release of Stormcrown! Delta and I really enjoyed the surprise release, and I can’t believe I managed to avoid accidentally spoiling it early.

I wanted to give you an idea of what to expect from me for the rest of the month of May. When I left for my break in March, I had a few open projects. Mostly, these were updates to existing mods–specifically Pilgrim, Scion, and Manbeast. These updates are still sitting in my queue, and at some point in the next two weeks, I’d like to work on finishing them up and releasing them.

Besides these updates, I have a few other projects I’m working on. First up is an addon for Adamant that replaces the Shout perks in Speech with four new Bard-themed perks that allow you to buff yourself and your allies by playing instruments. It’s likely that this addon will be rolled into Adamant itself in the future, but I’m not in a rush to remove Shout perks from the mod just yet.

In addition to all of this, Colin and I are almost finished with Blade & Blunt 3.0. In this update, we’ll be migrating both the weapon parry and the new armor caps over to the DLL. We’ll also be adding several new features to the DLL that are designed to support the Block perks in Adamant and improve their implementation.  Finally, we’ll also be introducing a new injury mechanic, integrating the Sneak addon into the main plugin, and creating a setting that will increase the difficulty of your game in the background as you level up. All three of these new settings can be enabled or disabled with an edit to the .ini file.

Oreo and I have begun work again on Artificer - An Artifact Overhaul, which has been on the back burner for a while. We’ve actually already made a bunch of progress (as represented by the Thaumaturgy 1.3 release), though we took a short break for Oreo to make an update Lawless. Artificer will require Mysticism and Thaumaturgy, and at this point a release date in June is possible but by no means guaranteed.

Besides Artificer, the next mod I want to release is Sorcerer - A Staff and Scroll Crafting Overhaul. I’ve shown some teaser images from this mod on the Patreon already. What we had lacked until now was a good solution for broad compatibility. Currently I am working with a new co-author to get a Synthesis patcher made for Sorcerer, so that we can release it along with the mod for people who want to use Dareni’s wonderful spell packs or Enairim mods like Apocalypse and Triumvirate. We are making good progress and I will let you know how things go. It’s possible this could be ready before Artificer, just because of the different requirements for each project.

Ultimately, the next two months are going to be about clearing my plate so that I can focus on Armorer - A Smithing Overhaul, which is going to be one of the biggest releases in the history of Simonrim. Obviously, I can't make any serious predictions about when it will release right now.

As always, you can keep up with what I’m doing by hanging out on my Discord, or at least keeping an eye on the announcements channel. I will let you know when I’m ready to release some of these updates. Until then, cheers!