[DEVBLOG#279] Vanilla Quests Expanded - Generator

Hey everyone and welcome to a little announcement post.

As you know, I'm a somewhat creative individual, which often means I have dozens of ideas rattling around in my head. Some of these ideas end up as part of bigger mods, such as Vanilla Factions Expanded series (warcaskets!), however oftentimes the idea is too minor or doesn't fit into any faction mod.

What do I do with such ideas? Well, until now, they were being shelved. 'Maybe I'll use them one day', I always said to myself.

And then I figured: I need some way to give these ideas to you in a form of mods. Small mods, but engaging and fun. And at the same time, I can give you some world quests, which means you get something to do on the world map and you get a cool reward.

As such, this leads me to the first Vanilla Quests Expanded mod that I have designed and is currently in the works.

Vanilla Quests Expanded - Generator is a mod adding a brand new quest chain inspired to some extent by the game of Frostpunk, but kept in the RimWorld theme and style. The end goal of the mod is that the players will obtain a very powerful generator that could potentially supply their colony with all the energy that the colony will need. 

The quest starts the player off with a location of an old, ancient generator that the players can research in order to construct their own generator. It does use a special item to construct it in order to prevent the player from constructing too many of said generators.

That generator can then be upgraded, eventually accepting other types of fuel. In fact, there will be different upgrade paths, depending if the players want to start utilising other resources to power that generator. The upgrade system features special upgrade unlock conditions to give you the feeling of constructing a prototype of a generator - you will have to meet the upgrade conditions before you can proceed.

The Genetron, which is the name of this ancient technology, starts off as a simple generator utilising a geothermal vent underneath it to produce a small amount of electricity. The first upgrade that you will do is attaching large wood-fired furnaces to it to increase the energy production greatly.

As the time goes on, you will add more upgrades to the genetron, with each upgrade improving the fuel efficiency, power output and adding new abilities to the genetron such as tuning, fine-tuning and overloading it.

Once you reach the final stage of the wood-powered genetron path, you will have a choice to either stop upgrading and stick to wood, or change the genetron to use chemfuel. The upgrades go from bottom to the top, which means you will first upgrade the core of the genetron, and with further upgrades you will proceed to upgrade the chimney parts.

Reaching the final stage of the Chemfuel path however is not the end. At that point, you will have a very important choice that will cause irreversible changes to your genetron - you can either branch out into Geothermal path, and not worry about any fuel anymore, or you can proceed down the nuclear path, and burn through uranium to produce more energy than you're ever going to need.

The genetron questline will make all this available to you. You will explore the mystery behind the researcher who came up with this technology, you will explore ancient genetron sites to learn from the prototypes that have failed, and most importantly, you will see the stakes increase as your generator becomes more and more upgraded.

I think this is a really cool approach when it comes to adding some story elements to RimWorld. The questline will offer a very powerful reward that isn't just some game item.

Let me know what you think!