Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - Enhanced Edition [Modding - Request] How do you mod the EE?

Hello everyone!

I am new around and I have started to play Divinity EE and found it lacking in certain departments, like merchant restock (one hour, Larian? Seriously?) and the lack of an item/save game editor.

Now for the latter, I have no skills in programming whatsoever, but for the former I wish to try to modify whatever files deal with this merchant issue.

As such, how do I mod the Enhanced Edition game, to make merchants restock their shelves faster ? Conditions include a smaller time frame or on bartering window open.

A step-by-step guide would be IMMENSELY appreciated and upvoted :thankyou:

Best wishes!

Hello Drakkanis,

I'm not sure if it's a good idea to increase the potential restock frequency even more than EE already did: every hour and whenever the character level difference between the trade requesting character and the character who triggered the last restock is >= 1. Gameplay preferences aside, this has a serious technical reason:

There is a limit of item handles the engine can use (64,000 as far as I remember from Raze). This limit will never be reached by most players, though there are some reports from players that probably did (there might be another problem with high item amounts, maybe FrauBlake who did much research knows some more ).
The more often traders restock their inventory and create new handles for every generated item stack (every item stack has a handle, a unique ID, not every item; if a stack gets splitted up a new handle gets created) the faster you'll reach the limit (there are more situations where new handles are generated, crafting for example). And considering that you seem to be a passionate crafter and trader you likely will.
So if you're determined to let traders restock on every trade request (without time or level condition) it's probably necessary to overall improve the handle and item economy of the game (FrauBlake did that to a certain extend in his XC_Bags mod, as far as I know). And that would require quite a lot of time and knowledge.

I don't want to prevent you from doing this modification and if you would like to do that I or others modders can show you how to remove or reduce the time frame; it's not a big deal. But I would not recommend to do that. Don't you think that restocking every hour and after level-up (on trade request) is quite much, since time passes during talking, exploring and fighting?

I did not really do a lot of research, I'm only guessing ;-)

Abraxas pretty much said the most important stuff why a more frequent trader restock is not a good idea.

To modify restock frequency however, you might not need programming skills because we could show you the code part that needs to be modified, you'd only have to handle things in the story code editor properly.
(Specifically: the restock happens through story code in the game's internal 'programming language' Osiris)

I was a crash victim myself in my first two playthroughs, but until now, what we have as info does not explain my crashes to me. With the info Raze gave us, handle overflows cause game crashes. But I have no idea how this could have happened because both crashes I had happened when I changed zones. So I came to believe that on top of the out of handles problem, there might be a 'too many items in zone' problem. And this is what I changed in XC_Bags by cleaning up trader inventories when traders restock. There is no official confirmation though, that a 'zone overflow' could exist, only the out-of-handles crash is confirmed, if I remember correctly.)

There is not very much we modders can do about the 'handle problem' other than being careful not have to too many of them being created.
The only thing we could do would be to give advice how players could avoid excessive handle creation.

By the way, trader restock in Classic was after 4 real time hours (or on character levelup), so it's gone down a lot in EE already ;-)

Thank you Abraxas and FrauBlake for letting me know of these pitfalls regarding restocking.

I have another one for you: is there any way to mod the appearance of the Backpack items? To have them at least color coded, if you cannot rename them ?

Best regards!

That is easy, I've done that in my mod.

All you need is a root template with a unique icon. For each different backpack, you need a different root template, because icons are defined with the root template. If you only want to name them differently, you need to create multiple 'links' between a root template and a 'stat' and give those stats different names.

It is probably more difficult to create good looking icons, at least that was the case for me ;-)

It's another thing to change the appearance of backpacks in the world, how they look when outside the inventory, that's far beyond my abilities and I used existing graphics of other things for that.

You can download Abraxas' 'Better Logistics' or my 'XC_Bags', extract them and have a look at how we did things.
To extract both, use Norbyte's extractor tool. (Both are in zip files if you download them from Nexus.)

'BetterLogistics' doesn't contain new icons, only adds a few root templates and stats. So only 'XC_Bags' can tell you more in that regard.

Edit:
But you probably want/need a tutorial... We don't have any on this yet. Most information is scattered around the forum and partly dates back to pre-editor or Classic Version times.
Maybe FrauBlake or another modder finds time to provide a short guide on this issue, otherwise I may write one at the weekend or next week (maybe to a similar extend and as detailed as my last guide).