ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I keep trying off and on to get a handle on how to use terrene and galvanic technomancy effectively, with varying degrees of success. Along the way, I've occasionally thought, "Hmm, this technomancy thing would be easier if the game had this feature." As is my standard practice, I'm accumulating these changes in my new Technomancy Tweaks addon. Here's what I've got so far:

• My terrene technomancer was having trouble keeping track of where all his spiderbots were and what they were doing, so we add a status tracker to the Micro Spiderbot talent. At a glance, it shows the number of active spiderbots you have and the highest of their remaining durations; the tooltip goes into more detail, listing their locations, the actor (if any) they're attacking, and their remaining durations.
• My galvanic technomancer obviously wanted a metallic tinker on her staff for purposes of Galvanic Arcing, and I found myself digging around in the tinker definitions to find out which ones qualify. Easy enough to add that information to the object tooltip; I'm currently showing it for everything, but I can limit it to just weapons and tinkers if people think it's superfluous elsewhere.

I'll add new tweaks as I think of them, or as people suggest them. (And now I've just got to get the earworm " Spiderbot, spiderbot / Has whatever a spider got " unstuck out of my head… )

[Looking ahead, I can see this as a likely candidate for a future version of ZOmnibus, and maybe ZOmnibus Lite, depending on whether we think it violates the "otherwise unavailable information" constraint. Either way, we'd probably need a game option to turn off at least the spiderbot tracker.]

[Implementation notes:

Should have thought of this one from the beginning. Just as a terrene technomancer would want to know where your spiderbots are, a galvanic technomancer using Galvanic Arcing would want to know where your deployed rods are and how they're linked, if only to figure out why they aren't linking the way you expect. That's going out as v1b, adding our info to the tooltip of the existing Galvanic Rods status tracker since it's already there. We also, of course, report the caster's weapon if the system considers it a rod for linking purposes.

Gotta give Occult technomancy some love too. Latest annoyance I've run into there is having my Metaphasic Spin sustain knocked out, and then having to remember which steamsaw I was using with it. I thought of just tagging the steamsaw, and then I thought, "well, why not auto-select it, then?"

So, in v1c, just released, Metaphasic Spin will automatically select a steamsaw from your inventory if it's tagged with the name of the Metaphasic Spin talent. If I've done this right, it should track across localization automatically, so if you're using the Japanese translation, for instance, you'd tag your steamsaw with "メタフェイズスピン". If none of your steamsaws are appropriately tagged, it'll fall back to the usual selection dialog. (If more than one steamsaw is tagged, it'll probably pick the first one it finds, which may not be deterministic, so caveat emptor…)

I don't use the Spiderbot Shield talent often (usually I'm using my spiderbots for Ramming Bot ), but I fired one up recently and discovered that the status display for the Spiderbots Shield effect only shows the remaining duration — which is kind of anemic compared to, for instance, Damage Shield, which nowadays shows both duration and remaining shield strength.

So in v1c.1, we tweak the effect status display to include the number of spiderbots remaining and the current life of the topmost spiderbot: (Hmm, now that I think of it, do we think we'll want a game option to enable or disable this?)