Away team mod?

[Solice]

I really haven't looked into the MOD documentation in a detailed way yet, but has anyone considered making a sort of "away team" type mod?

As I play the standard game, one of the things that I feel seem under-utilized are the planets. I know you do find artifacts, creatures, etc. upon arriving at planets, but there's no real reason to read the planet descriptions... not really.

It might be interesting to have a mod which gave your ship an "away team" quest item or something. When you went to certain types of planets, you could choose to "search further"... ie. send an away team down to search the planet (if it was of a hospitible kind) and try to find further items.

Depending on the planet, you could lose your "away team" (to hostiles or to random events). You could maybe go back to your home planet to get a new away team or something... not sure.

Anyone have mod experience enough to comment if something like this is possible?

[Solice]

Just to follow up on this, as no-one has posted. I did make an attempt at creating this type of mod, and sortof succeeded, but then ran into a stumbling block.

Basically, I made a mod which added an "away team" passenger, which you could buy at your home planet at the beginning of the game.

Then, at a random planet, I created an "alien ruins on the surface of the planet" quest event. This checked to see if you had the "away team" object, and if you did, it gave you the opportunity to "explore further"... which would give you an item for exploring the ruins to the end.

The problem is, even though I set the conditions for the final part of the quest to check to see if you had the away team item, it seemed to allow the player to "explore further" no matter what.

Anyone tried anything similar to this before?

[Psientist]

Check out my "lessons learned the hard way". It seems you can't remove a passenger once added, so that's kind of out.

However... You CAN set custom variables (e.g., "number of red uniforms aboard=redsuits). Then you can create an arbitrary number of quests that check to see if you have 1+ redsuits aboard (harder than it sounds, there are no arithmetic functions allowed in quest conditions like "greater than or equal to").

Then, you could provide a popup that asks if they want to "search further..>?". Depending on what they reply, the quest can then give items, kill redsuits, etc.

Unfortunately, there is also no "random result" feature, so you have to either have predetermined results in each quest, or have different results occur based upon other factors like what items they have on board, or other custom variables you set.

A random cheat might be x number of quests with a KEYS name like "SETRANDOM". Each quest does nothing but set one custom variable like "MYRANDOM=2" or "MYRANDOM=3". Since the game engine will only allow one (or none) of these quests to be generated at a time, randomly (because of the KEYS flag), you would end up with a sort-of-random custom variable that would change each time you play the game.

But, it's a kludge at best.