ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Pretty much every Alchemist ever who has gotten the EoR tinker-making talents has wanted to attach tinkers to their golem's equipment. In theory it's convoluted but doable, if you can wear the equipment yourself — which might not work so well for that massive voratun greatsword or plate mail that requires STR 60 to wield.

That's why I'm working on an addon to simplify that, Tinkers for Sidekicks. Here's what I've got so far:

• From the player's inventory dialog, you can choose "Attach to item" for a tinker in the player's inventory, and it should list any suitable equipment worn by either the player or the golem as attachment candidates.
• From the Interact with the Golem equipment dialog, you can choose "Detach from item" or "Detach tinker" for anything in the golem's equipment, and the detached tinker should properly return to the player's inventory. "Attach item" also works for stuff in the player's inventory, and only the golem's equipent will be listed as candidates.
• Drag-and drop in the Interact with the Golem equipment/inventory dialog appears to work the way you'd expect in my tests so far; so does the "Gameplay | Swap tinkers" game option.

This should also work with worms that walk, mecharachnids, or any other sidekick from other addons if it allows inventory access. For those, though, you won't have the equivalent of Interact with the Golem, which will make detaching tinkers harder — which is why we recommend also using Interact with the Worm, Interact with the Mech, or Interact with Sidekicks, as appropriate for your chosen sidekick.

Now, some of the tinker-handling code really wasn't designed to account for the case when the actor with the tinker of interest in inventory and the actor wearing the equipment we're trying to attach the tinker to aren't the same actor, so I basically had to replace large chunks of said code. In particular, any other addon that plays around in the area of Actor:doWear(), Actor:doWearTinker() and/or Actor:doTakeoffTinker() is likely to have compatibility problems with this addon. As always, let me know if you run into any problems.

[Looking ahead, I have no idea whether anyone would consider this cheating, but considering the aforementioned potential compatibility problems, I'm kind of leery about adding it to ZOmnibus.]

Frequently Asked Questions:

Hey! I'm controlling my golem, and my equipment doesn't show tinkers!

Well, your golem doesn't have the ability to make or manipulate tinkers, so the game assumes it doesn't need to show tinkers in the equipment dialog. The tooltips for your equipment should still list any attached tinkers, and you can access the tinkers directly by viewing the golem's equipment via the Interact with the Golem talent. (This is why we recommend also using Interact with the Worm, Interact with the Mech, or Interact with Sidekicks with this addon, since without them, other permanent party members will face similar problems.)

Sometimes wearable equipment bits like weapons or armor frequently have long names — often long enough that the attached tinker annotation isn't even visible on the tiny "which thing do you want to attach this tinker to?" dialog, leaving you staring at the dialog trying remember which of your daggers had the viral injector attached and which one had the poison groove.

This is exactly the sort of place where the inventory dialog's horizontal "ping-pong" scrolling would be useful. Took a bit of work, but v1a now has that: The image shows multiple sidekicks, but it works just as well if you're just attaching tinkers to your own equipment.