Glitter’s BG Mod Making Mod-along, Part II

In this post, we’re going to make our Strange Squirrel–the entity that our quest, Gone Nuts, revolves around.

In principle, we’ll be making the squirrel the same way we made our Tannia NPC. If you missed Part One, you can find it [here].

1. CTRL+F in NearInfinity and find a Squirrel. I used SQUIRL.cre.
2. Right-click, hit “Add Copy Of” and use a unique identifier. I did GGNSq.
3. Let’s take a look at our Squirrel. We’ll be changing it’s scripts/stats/class/level etc in a moment.

Part One: Stats

Here’s how our Squirrel currently is:

Most of this is fine. Our squirrel doesn’t need any Lore or Thief skills, for example. But, if you remember the premise of our quest, this squirrel is actually a polymorphed spellcaster–we’ll need more than 9 INT!

In NI’s main window, switch over to the edit tab. You’ll see something like this:

Scroll down until you see the stats. For me, that’s about 2/3rds of the way down to the bottom.

Double-click on the number 9, and set the stat to whatever you want. I’m going to go with 16. Feel free to adjust the other stats to whatever you want, while we’re here.

Part Two: Yer a Wizard (editing classes and levels)

If we scroll down another few rows, we’ll find the squirrel’s class. It’s currently PREY_ANIMAL and we definitely want to change that. Let’s turn him into a mage. Find and select MAGE_ALL, and feel free to use the filter button. Once it’s selected, you want to hit the Update Value button to save the selected change.

Now, scroll up a smidge until you see the Kit row. Update the kit to WildMage (or whatever else, of course). Note that I have no idea what happens if you select a kit that doesn’t exist for a class (eg–not a clue what happens if you select the Shadowdancer Kit for a Mage. Maybe don’t do that. Or do, find out, and then get back to me.)

Now, mages should know spells. Let’s add some. Keep scrolling down until you get to the spell section.

Let’s give him a Haste spell. Select Memorization Info 10, and at the bottom of the window, you’ll see an Add button. Click that and then select Known Spell. A blank spell template will be added up top, beneath Dialogue.

Select the Known Spell and hit View/Edit. You’ll see something like this.

This is where the BG wiki comes very, very useful. Let’s look up Haste on the wiki. On the wiki page, you’ll see something like this–pay attention to that spell code:

In NI, let’s look for SPWI305. Here it is:

Select Haste, and hit Update Value. Remember to always hit the Update Value button!!!

While we’re here, we’ll change the Spell Level from 0 to 3, and change the category from Priest to Wisard. It’ll look like this now:

Exit the window, and our Squirrel’s Known Spell row will be updated, like so:

Repeat this for whatever other spells you want the squirrel to know. I’ll be doing this for Invisibility, Mirror Image, Magic Missile, and Fireball.

Finally, scroll up until you see the Level First Class row. It’s currently at 1. Let’s set the squirrel’s level, to, say, 8.

Now, we have a Level 8 Squirrel Wizard with 16 INT and a few spells to choose from.

Part Three: NPC Scripts

Finally, we’re going to change the Squirrel’s scripts. If we go back from the view tab, we’ll see this:

Now, what does this mean? Scripts tell a program what to do and when. These scripts tell the NPC what to do and when. It’s the AI, basically.

The blue text means that you can click on it and see what it says. If we click on PREY.BCS, then it’ll pull this up:

DO NOT EDIT THIS. Whatever changes you make to the script will impact every prey creature in the game.

What this script says is–if myself sees a hunter creature (like a wolf) get close, run away. But we don’t want our squirrel running away. So we’re going to remove this script from the Squirrel. Switch back to the edit tab, find Race Script and click on it:

Down below, scroll all the way to the top, where you’ll a None option. Click that, and hit Update Value.

Now it’s time to save our changes. Hit ‘yes’ and overwrite whatever was there before.

Part Four: Adding the Squirrel

We’ll add the squirrel the same way we added Tannia, our NPC from last time. Your tp2 file will now look something like this:

Let’s run the setup-GoneNuts.exe. You might be tempted to just reinstall the mod, but I have better luck uninstalling it, and then running it again to install it. I’m not sure why, but that’s how it is for me. If a reinstall isn’t working for you, try uninstalling and then installing instead.

And, without further adeiu, here’s our squirrel in Trademeet!

Next time, we’ll be implementing some dialogue!

Hope this has been helpful!

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