State of the 'Rim - November 2021

Hello gamers, 

It's been a while since I wrote up a "State of the 'Rim" post. As you know, the school year has been super rough for me (and every other teacher I know). Fortunately, I've still been able to make some time for modding. In fact, I've done a lot more modding than I expected recently, on account of a minor mental breakdown which caused me to pull back from work pretty heavily (no more staying in the classroom til 8 PM for me). Delta & I released Thaumaturgy in October, and the launch when pretty well. Since then, we've also put out some updates to support both Thaumaturgy and Apothecary, as well as a few other updates that were needed. 

For the past two weeks, my attention has been focused solely on Mysticism 2. My first goal was to figure out where exactly I left off in June (you can get the gist from one of the older State of the 'Rim posts if you want), so I started by doing a second pass on Alteration and Illusion. Both of these went pretty quickly. After that, I went through elemental spells in Destruction, which all seem done to me. Right now, I'm working on two things--Absorb Health spells, and Poison spells. Once I finish them, I have two more tasks: I need to make a second pass over all of the non-offensive spells in Restoration, and I need to work on Sun spells. 

As you can see, both Restoration and Destruction are pretty close to finished. Alteration and Illusion are practically done--I doubt I'll do much more than fix typos from here on out. That just leaves one school, Conjuration. Honestly, I haven't touched Conjuration since like, 2019 and I have no idea how long it will take me, but I have a hard time imagining it will take me too long. There is one task I'd like to look into (making new bound weapon variants) but if it comes down to it, I'd rather push that task off for a later update than delay Mysticism 2 for it. 

I have three weeks of school left before Christmas break, and then I have two weeks off. I should be able to squeeze in 2-3 days of full modding during the break, plus an afternoon here and there as we travel around.

I've been hesitant to give a target date for Mysticism 2, because I've done so twice before and been wrong both times. However, I think it's possible that Mysticism 2 is finished in 2021. A release in January is a bit more likely. It all depends on how many days I'm able to squeeze in to work between now and when my break starts.

What's next after Mysticism 2? Well, a few of my older mods need updates. I'd eventually like to completely rewrite Blade & Blunt to make use of a DLL, SPID, and maybe Scrambled Bugs (don't worry nerds, I'll keep a B&B Lite file around for console users and such). Scion and Manbeast both need some love to account for the changes that have happened in Simonrim over the last year (especially with Apothecary and Pilgrim).

There are also two new mods on the list, one for artifacts and one for shouts. I'm not in a particular hurry to get to the shout mod, but I do want to finish the artifact mod. I imagine work will begin on that as soon as I finish Mysticism 2 (mainly because my two co-authors, Delta and Oreo, are chomping at the bit to get started already).

Finally, I'd like to finish up the 5.x series of Adamant. Adamant 5.4 and 5.5 are almost guaranteed at this point. My hope is that Adamant 5.5 can reach a stable point both on PC and on Xbox, and that I can leave it at that. I feel that I've reached the limits of what I can do for Adamant w/ the tools available to me. Any further development on perks would require me to add SKSE and SPID dependencies, and potentially also a DLL. I've been heading in that direction mentally for a while, but with the recent release of AE, I'm not in a hurry to get there--plus, I can use the delay to make sure that Adamant 5.5 is as good as it can be.