What Is Cold Iron?

[Guest Random Guest]

The readme mentiones that greater werewolves (improved balduran's island component) can now only be hurt with cold iron. However, item descriptions don't provide any information about whether a particular weapon is or is not cold iron. I checked NI and found out that indeed some weapons are marked as cold iron. This seems to be a bit random though. Why long sword +2 'varscona' is cold iron, while flail of ages is not? Can anyone, please, explain to me what cold iron is and what is the logic behind marking / not marking weapons as cold iron?

[BigRob]

Cold iron is a weapon that has been made without using fire, that is, it has been forged "cold". Typically this would mean that the iron had to be very pure to start with, since it couldn't be extracted from ore, and would likely have to be either meteoric (just ignore the heating from the fall), or a very rare find. The rarity and skill required to make them gives cold iron weapons that ability to hurt certain things and makes them much easier to enchant.

[Guest Random Guest]

Thanks for the explanation! It's a pity this is not mentioned in item descriptions...

[DavidW]

Thanks for the explanation! It's a pity this is not mentioned in item descriptions...

 

Within the game, it means that greater werewolves can only be harmed by weapons listed as affecting them (Balduran's sword and some dagger, iirc).

[Azazello]

What code would be need to programmatically add this to weapons? There are some weapons, such as from Underrepresented Items Mod, that could be marked as 'cold iron'.

[Wisp]

What code would be need to programmatically add this to weapons? There are some weapons, such as from Underrepresented Items Mod, that could be marked as 'cold iron'.

 

//COPY or COPY_EXISTING item
WRITE_BYTE 0x19 BYTE_AT 0x19 BOR 2 //1 for silver, 2 for cold iron/gold and 3 for both

would do it.

[DavidW]

What code would be need to programmatically add this to weapons? There are some weapons, such as from Underrepresented Items Mod, that could be marked as 'cold iron'.

 

//COPY or COPY_EXISTING item
WRITE_BYTE 0x19 BYTE_AT 0x19 BOR 2 //1 for silver, 2 for cold iron/gold and 3 for both

would do it.

 

Though I don't recommend doing this. "Cold Iron" is just a behind-the-scenes designation for weapons specifically labelled as hurting greater werewolves (it could just as well have been "Blue Cheese"); there's no in-game use of the term as far as I know, and there are clear plot reasons that only specific weapons are supposed to work against the greater werewolves in BG1. (Varscona doesn't count as cold iron, incidentally, though the game-testing superweapon "KILLSW01", which is modelled on Varscona, does. But that's just so it can kill anything.)

[Demivrgvs]

Though I don't recommend doing this. "Cold Iron" is just a behind-the-scenes designation for weapons specifically labelled as hurting greater werewolves (it could just as well have been "Blue Cheese"); there's no in-game use of the term as far as I know, and there are clear plot reasons that only specific weapons are supposed to work against the greater werewolves in BG1. (Varscona doesn't count as cold iron, incidentally, though the game-testing superweapon "KILLSW01", which is modelled on Varscona, does. But that's just so it can kill anything.)

Speaking of this, with IR I've added a small mention in the respective weapon description when the "silver" flag is used, but I'd like to know how this (in)famous greater werewolves uber-immunity works, and if SCS changes it in any way:

- do they still need silver weapons to be hit?

- is it true they require a +3 weapon?

 

If you ask me, considering they already have incredibly high regeneration rate and resistances, I'd kill this ugly feature and make them work more similarly to PnP where they can be "Hit only by silver or +1 or better magical weapon".

 

Long story short, make them immune "only" to normal weapons (BG doesn't have non-magical silver weapons).

 

Even in vanilla game most weapons with the "silver" flag have huge bonuses against shapeshifters, and thus such weapons will still be much more effective against them.

 

P.S It's quite a sad design imo to have a creature immune to 90% of weapons in the game, and then scatter the few ones which work right next to him (e.g. like ToB magic golems). Not to mention that having 4-5 unique items with +x to hit/dmg against shapeshifters is quite a waste of resources, and is certainly not "unique".

[DavidW]

As far as I recall, I just enforce immunity to non-"cold-iron"; I don't otherwise change anything.

 

I don't feel particularly minded to change this in SCS; it's a clearly-intended part of the core game design. (Which doesn't automatically make something unchangeable, but means I tend to lean that way.)