Artifact Rebalance

[Zetaplx]

About the PR

Big changes to how artifacts work on a fundamental level! We've had concerns over artifact balance for a long time, hopefully addressed by the why / balance section, but these changes are hopefully to address all of them and restore some of the fun to have big nodes!

Depth Based Node Effects

First and probably biggest change has to do with how node effects work! There are three levels of effect:

• Root, consisting only of depth 0 nodes
• Main, containing depths 1 and 2
• Deep, any node of at least depth 3

The deeper you go, the rarer and more powerful the nodes become. Some nodes that were available anywhere are now only viably found in deep nodes! Want a complete recharge node? Find it on a deep node. How about a bunch of steel or plasma? Deep nodes only! And that elusive cash node? It is both rare and only found on deep nodes unless you are very lucky.

There are three benefits to this approach:
1 - It allows us to keep powerful nodes but make them harder to reach
2 - It makes the abuse of such nodes harder as it increases the odds of there being other sideffects that will also be activated when used.
3 - It combines with another change (next section) to create an additional incentive for purchasing large artifacts (currently something that is literally never done).

To go along with these changes, and with the moving of several effects to main or deep only, some new node effects have been added such as individual tool nodes for different tool types, the ability to get varying amounts of materials with higher tiers giving more material, a partial charging node, and more! (You can even get bananium from a fairly rare node!)

Making Large Artifacts Good

Lets face it, large artifacts suck.... They are just as effective as small ones, can't be created from artifact fragments, can't be carried on your person, and require a whole large storage container for safe transportation. There are genuinely no upsides to large artifacts as they currently are, which is a shame because it is one of the primary exports for the Science Trade Station.

My solution: Make their trees bigger. Much bigger.

This accomplishes a few improvements at once:

• It makes the completion of a large artifact a large investment with great rewards in points and in cash if you chose to sell the thing.
• As large artifacts have more nodes, they also, by necessity, have more deep nodes than any handheld artifact (handhelds on average have maybe, and i mean maybe, 1 deep node. Large artifacts always have multiple deep nodes meaning better chances for bigger rewards).

The purchase of a large artifact is now a large event for any science department or research vessel to undertake over time. It will take a long time to work through activating all the nodes and handling the multiple active node effects.

Why / Balance

A lot of science people were very sad to see our fun artifact effects disappear, but on the other hand its pretty clear that the ability to very quickly and easily get silly amounts of stuff was absolutely busted. This aims to fix that in two ways:

1. allow for different tiers of artifact node effect so rarer and more powerful nodes are more difficult to get, not just a random chance, but physically more difficult to reach.
2. limit the unending potential of artifact glue by making a hard limit and probabilistic limit on the amount of times a node may ever be activated.
3. Incentivize the purchase and research of full sized artifacts by making them both more complicated and thus more valuable.

Artifact Node Shattering

This may be the final nail in the coffin for artifact glue, and it may require some ongoing tuning if too harsh, but artifact nodes now have a chance to shatter when activated too many times. The probability starts at zero, and stays there until you have activated the node a number of times equal to the max durability of the node. From there, the probability grows on a curve with two control points: 20% chance to shatter at 10 extra activations, and a 100% chance to shatter after 25 activations.

Shattered nodes can never be activated again through any means. No glue or other effect can currently restore a shattered node (other than an admin turning off the shattered variable on the node I guess, so divine intervention?). Having a shattered node doesn't impact any other aspects of an artifact at preset, but it does let out a little glass break sound.

Technical details

• Created 12 new entity tables for artifact node effect generation. 3 full tables with the proper odds, 3 handheld tables with odds for handheld only effects, 3 defaults for large artifacts, and 3 defaults for handheld artifacts.
• Modified the prototypes for spawned artifacts to increase all node tree sizes in basically every way possible for large artifacts
• Slightly increased the size of handheld artifact node trees (to increase the odds of getting 1 deep node)
• Created the shattering system and linked it with the analysis console UI
• Modified the effect generation system to utilize 3 different entity tables based on the depth of the effected node.

Media

An analysis console showing a shattered node:

A large artifact for comparison in size with the above:

An example of the varience in size for large artifacts:

An example of a small artifact with a depth 3 node:

Some examples of the new node effects:

Requirements

• I have read and am following the Pull Request and Changelog Guidelines.
• I have added media to this PR or it does not require an in-game showcase.

Breaking changes

• old default artifact tables have been removed. Any entity relying on that will fail to load nodes properly.
• Some XAEs have had their names changed or have been outright removed. Artifacts with these nodes in game should simply regenerate those node effects. It does, however, give an error in the admin menu. Should be monitored on next shift.

Changelog

🆑

• add: A bunch of artifact nodes have been added/restored!
• tweak: Artifact nodes can now shattered if activated too many times
• tweak: Large artifacts now have much larger node trees