Hello all mod makers!

The upcoming Barotrauma update will change some aspects of the status effect and poison systems. These changes will unfortunately cause issues with some existing mods, but we felt these improvements were important to make: the functionality of status effects has been lacking and inconsistent in many ways. Now they function more uniformly and predictably, hopefully making them nicer to use for existing and new mod makers alike.

To mitigate the inconvenience for authors of existing mods, we wanted to make sure to get these changes done before leaving early access. Below is a summary on what has changed and what to do to make mods compatible. After this rework, we aim not to make any mod-breaking changes to the game, so hopefully it will be the last time you need to fix your mods.


We've addressed various inconsistencies in how the status effects are used.

• Firstly, there are changes to the targeting logic. Previously, status effects with the target type "Character" targeted either the user (e.g. of an item or an attack) or the target character inconsistently. The item components affected were Projectile and MeleeWeapon. Attack definitions also suffered from this issue.
  
  This is now changed so that in these contexts, "Character" always refers to the user and "UseTarget" refers to the target. So, if your mod uses the status effect target "Character" to refer to the target, change this to "UseTarget".
  
  
• Status effects can now consistently target a character, an item, or a structure, depending on the context. This allows for example triggering effects when a melee weapon hits a wall.
  
  
• In some cases we'll now need to introduce restrictions in the definitions. For example, using a conditional to check whether the target is of the right type before triggering the status effect (<Conditional entitytype="eq Character"/>).
  
  
• The MeleeWeapon component has a new attribute, "HitOnlyCharacters". By enabling this, the weapon doesn't register hits to walls or items at all. So if you want to use different effects on different targets, use the status effect conditionals.
  
  
• In addition, all the status effects treating "OnUse" as the success state (as the counterpart for "OnFailure"), should now use "OnSuccess" instead. "OnUse" still works, but it will always trigger regardless of the skill or item requirement checks. In addition, If no skill or item requirements are defined, both OnUse and OnSuccess will trigger. Also note that status effects of type "OnUse" now trigger when the projectile is launched, not when it hits the target. For the latter, use "OnImpact".

Our primary goal was to make the poisons work on monsters, to make the Medic a more combat-capable job and on the whole increase the effectiveness of poisons in combat.

Specifically for modders, we've reworked how the skills are gained from doing damage or healing.

• Instead of only using the universal multipliers defined in the SkillSettings.xml, there are now two new attributes for the afflictions: "WeaponsSkillGain" and "MedicalSkillGain".
  These should be used for defining how much the weapons or the medical skill is increased when the affliction is applied. Both default to 0, so be sure to define them for your custom afflictions.
  
  
• Consequently, applying organ damage, which is the main source of poison damage on monsters, now boosts the medical skill instead of weapons skill like it used to. And due to this, applying buffs now also increases the medical skill of the applier.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience, but by making these changes your mods will be compatible with Barotrauma 1.0 once it releases, and you should not need to change them again for the foreseeable future. Happy modding!