Update 10-24-2025

I noticed a bunch of weapons had nonsensical volumes. While updating these, I realized that half of weapon attack speed was being derived from weapon volume. This didn't make any sense, so I rewrote the melee attack speed formula and functions.

• Melee attack speed is now derived primarily from weapon weight, then modified by weapon length vs the height of the wielder. This greatly benefits especially large characters, and may limit the weapon choices of smaller ones.

• Strength now bonuses the speed of melee attacks according to the weapon's weight. Each point of strength above 10 shaves off 1/100th of a second for every 500g of weapon weight. This doesn't sound like a lot, but it stacks with the existing bonuses from dexterity, melee skill, martial arts, and other sources.

Nearly all weapons have had their volume, weight, and length adjusted to far better match their real world values.

Because all of this dramatically adjusted attack speeds for most weapons, a full review of base damage, to-hit, and techniques was done for all melee weapons and tools which are useful as such.

• In general, blunt weapons are a bit less accurate than they used to be. This matters less for actually hitting targets most of the time (except for especially small and evasive ones) and more for scoring critical hits. To be overly general, batons remain fairly accurate, bludgeons are neutral, and hammers work at a penalty. However, hammers tend to do more damage relative to attack speed as they concentrate force in a smaller area. Tradeoffs!

• In general, cut weapons, swords especially, are very accurate and have very good base damage. This is to make them more reliable as they weren't as good as they ought to have been.

• Stab weapons haven't changed too much. Some, like the pike, are now quite a bit slower, while others enjoy a slight speed upgrade.

• Overall, and again speaking very broadly, the intended design is that bash weapons are reliable but unspectacular, stab weapons have many drawbacks but the highest ceiling when wielded by a very skilled fighter, and cut weapons fall somewhere in the middle, providing many benefits and a high ceiling but often being frustrated by enemy armor.

Removed a lot of nonsensical and largely unused junk weapons and made the existing ones more accessible and more worthwhile.

Several metal weapon recipes are now book-only. For the most part, the only autolearned ones are the extremely simplistic or crude designs.

Flails now use the average of strength + intelligence for their bash damage calculations, just like whips.

The sharpened pipe is no longer a fencing weapon as it's quite heavy. The pointy stick and sword bayonet are now fencing weapons.

Fixed an issue with Light Bones applying its extra bash damage if even a fractional amount of damage got through your armor.

Removed the Gizzard trait, which was making Avian mutants get 40% less kcal from their food. This is not anything like how gizzards work IRL.

Made Light Eater shrink your stomach by 10%. Reduced its metabolism-slowing effect from 33% to 15%.

Combined Slow-Footed with the Ponderous trait, as they did more or less the same thing.

Renamed Ponderous, Very Ponderous, Extremely Ponderous to Slow-Footed, Sluggish, and Ponderous.

Removed the Earth Sleeper and Aquatic Sleeper mutations, which were only on Batrachian and redundant with its Aqueous Repose.

Removed the Hummingbird Beak mutation. Liquid diets are an interesting idea, but Avian mutants rely on their beaks for basic functionality and making them roll the dice on one of the best mutations in the game or bricking their character is just bad. Also, a man-sized bird drinking out of tiny little flowers didn't make any sense.

Fixed an issue with cars crashing into terrain in nonsensical ways.

Fixed an issue with Dense Bones giving a flat 4hp instead of the stated 5%.

Fixed an issue with BOUNCE ammo types, particularly as concerned the Chain Lightning CBM.

@Abe submitted a fix making the Phase Immersion Suit properly acidproof.

Fixed a longstanding bug where gaining a mutation that pushed items off of you would duplicate their contents.

Backported a fix to NPCs from DDA, which should prevent them from getting traits that they shouldn't from their professions and hobbies.