Glitter’s BG Mod Making Mod-along, Part 4

Let’s take a quick break from dialogue and make some items! We’re going to be making our unique quest item, a magic polymorphing cloak called Estelin’s Intent.

The goal for this item is to let you polymorph into a squirrel and still be able to cast spells. Shout out to suy and Jarno Mikkola over on the G3 discord server for their help!

Before we get into the post, I just wanted to say that this item was a little complicated and maybe I should’ve started with something like a sword or a ring. But I didn’t, so here we are.

I am all for doing things the easy way and not reinventing the wheel. I know already that there’s the Cloak of the Sewers that lets you polymorph into a rat, slime, and troll. Like with our NPC, we’re going to find the Cloak of the Sewers, right-click, and select “Add Copy Of”. I called my new cloak “GGNSqC” for GGN Squirrel Cloak.

First thing first, I wanted to delete the option to polymorph into a troll or jelly. The first effect is for the rat. I knew this because, when you click on Item Ability 0, there’s this:

So we click the other two rows and hit the Remove button at the bottom.

Congrats, we now have a cloak that will let us polymorph into a rat!

But we want to be a squirrel, not a rat. Here’s where staying flexible comes in. It took me a while to figure out how to polymorph into a squirrel and I needed a decent bit of help from more experienced modders. But if I didn’t have that help or if it just flat-out wasn’t possible, it wouldn’t mean that we’d have to ditch the mod or the story or any of that. I would’ve added a dialogue line or two about how Estelin enchanted this cloak to turn him into a rat, but decided in the end that he wanted to be a squirrel instead. And voila! Now we have an explanation as to why a rat cloak is in a squirrel mod.

But anyway, turns out that it is possible, so here’s what we’re gonna do. Click on Item Ability 0, and then hit the view/edit button. It’ll pull up another window with all the different effects. Click on Effect 18, the Create Weapon. We’ll finally get to this window:

See that Resource row with the POLYRAT.ITM? That is what makes us turn into a rat. So we’re going to make a copy of POLYRAT, edit the copy to be a squirrel, and then plop it into Effect 18 right here.

Here’s our copy of POLYRAT.ITM, which I called GGNpoly.ITM:

Since we also want to have spellcasting enabled, go ahead and delete Effects 0-4, Effect 6, and Effect 7. Click on the Polymorph effect, and then do View/Edit. You’ll see this window:

Two things we want to do here. First, we want to change Polymorph type from 0 to 1 (so it’ll say Appearance Only). This way, we’ll have spellcasting available. Next, we want to change the Resource from POLYRAT.CRE to a squirrel.

One you do that, save everything.

Now, we go back to our cloak. Click on Item Ability 0, and then hit the view/edit button. It’ll pull up another window with all the different effects. Click on Effect 18, the Create Weapon. Change the resource from POLYRAT.ITM to the new item you made. Should look something like this:

Save your item. Now all we need to do is load up our two new items in our .tp2 file!

Here’s what I put in mine

COPY ~GoneNuts/items/GGNSqC.itm~ ~override/GGNSqC.itm~ 
     SAY NAME1 ~Cloak~
     SAY NAME2 ~Estelin's Intent~
     SAY DESC ~This enchanted cloak was Estelin's first attempt at changing his world. But the enchantment wore off quicker than he liked, and so he decided to go for a more permanent solution. He was happy to give it to you--after all, he doesn't need it anymore. This cloak lets you polymorph into a squirrel once per day and doesn't disable your spellcasting.~

COPY ~GoneNuts/items/GGNpoly.itm~ ~override/GGNpoly.itm~ 
     SAY NAME1 ~Claws~
     SAY NAME2 ~Claws~
     SAY DESC ~These claws are sharp!~

For the cloak, SAY NAME1 is the unidentified name. SAY NAME2 is the identified name. Now our file looks like this:

Finally, create an items folder in your GoneNuts directory. Drag & Drop the new items you made from your Override folder into the items folder. It’ll look something like this:

You might notice that one says .ITM in caps and the other is .itm in lowercase. This is fine.

Anyway, uninstall the mod, reinstall the mod, and then load the game up. To test your item, you can add it to your inventory via console command. Assuming you have it enabled, you can hit CTRL+Space. Then type: C:CreateItem (‘GGNSqC’, 1). That’ll add one GGNSQC into your inventory. You’ll have to identify it first. But go ahead and give it a test!

It works! Squirrel!Khesadrin is casting a spell!

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