Nature's Beauty Bug

[Guest Ginette Reno]

I'm not sure if this an EE bug or a SCS bug, but my party members have been hit by Nature's Beauty and it seems to be causing weird thaco issues. The blindness I can dispel/remove either via dispel magic, heal, or cure disease. That part works fine. But what I've noticed is even after dispelling it, my thaco maluses do not get removed. For example, Sarevok is a level 28 fighter in my game. He should have base thaco 0. When I cure him of the blind, he has base thaco 4 still. 

I have tried everything: cure disease, dispel magic, heal, greater restoration. I can always remove the blind via the right spells, but the thaco malus never disappears. I even tried killing Sarevok, but when rezzed he still had the thaco loss.

For mods, I have SCS/Ascension, and I'm running the Enhanced Editions for BG. So far the only way I can see to fix this is by changing my thaco via EEkeeper, but I'd hate to have to do that every time an enemy hits me with this spell

[jmerry]

I've seen that base THAC0 4 thing too, notably in my no-spellcasting run. Could this be the cause?

In the vanilla game, no enemies use Nature's Beauty. Except for Faldorn, if you're so utterly idiotic as to attack her outside the challenge pit. And of course, enemies don't last long enough for this to matter if you use this on them.

So, if this is a bug with the spell, it's likely a case of a vanilla bug being exposed by SCS; the "permanent" blindness doesn't get removed properly. The only relevant change I'm aware of in SCS is the component that lets True Sight cure blindness for the caster. Which to be fair, is a bit wonky; the cure effect has a "temporary" duration, unlike all other such effects.

Testing is needed.

[jmerry]

OK, I did some of that testing. In vanilla; the only modification I made was to give NB a non-party-friendly projectile.

 

It's definitely the spell, and definitely the "instant/permanent until death" duration (timing mode 1) on the Blindness effect that's the problem. Here's what happened:

- Cast Death Ward on all party members. Then cast Nature's Beauty, affecting all of them. Save.

- All party members now have minimum vision, base THAC0 four points higher than it was, and a "blindness" portrait icon. The portrait icon is the only part that shows up in the creature file as an ongoing effect.

- Cast various cures; Cure Disease, Neutralize Poison, inquisitor Dispel Magic. All remove the portrait icon. The first two restore the affected character's vision, but not their THAC0. The third doesn't even restore vision. Save again.

- "Cured" characters now see normally and have no ongoing effects associated with NB, but still have worse THAC0. Permanently. Even death and resurrection doesn't help.

 

Thinking about it - the best fix seems to be to change the timing mode on that blindness effect. Testing Instant/Permanent (mode 9) ... now there's a Blindness effect in the save, and base THAC0s are unchanged. Cures work fully, including dispels, but death and resurrection doesn't. OK, a normal long duration, like the 1000 hours on Polymorph Other, is the way to go. Attaching a quick fix...

Oops, that was the testing version with a changed projectile. Attaching fixed fix...

Nature's Beauty fix.zip

Edited March 7, 2022 by jmerry
Fixed the fix

[subtledoctor]

What opcode is used for the thac0 penalty? Some opcodes permanently modify the .CRE stats if applied with timing mode 1, such as opcode 0. IIRC, opcode 54 is prone to this for thac0 modification, while opcode 278 is not. I think. Maybe vice versa? Anyway, if this is correct then the easy fix is to switch the one used by the Nature’s Beauty spell from 54 to 278, or whatever.

Alternatively, don’t worry about which opcode behaves which way, and just apply the penalty with timing mode 0 and a duration of 126144000, which I think is about ten in-game years. 

[jmerry]

The effect in the spell isn't an opcode 54 or 278. It's just opcode 74 (blindness). Which clearly shouldn't ever be used with timing mode 1, because of this behavior.

I went with a mere 300000 as the duration in my quick fix, same as Polymorph Other. If it's long enough for one "permanent until dispelled" effect, it's long enough for another.

[subtledoctor]

On 3/7/2022 at 12:58 AM, jmerry said:

The effect in the spell isn't an opcode 54 or 278. It's just opcode 74 (blindness). Which clearly shouldn't ever be used with timing mode 1, because of this behavior.

Oh, huh. That seems like a proper bug, then. EDIT in response to the post a little bit further on: I mean a proper engine bug, not an SCS bug. 

On 3/7/2022 at 12:58 AM, jmerry said:

I went with a mere 300000 as the duration in my quick fix, same as Polymorph Other. If it's long enough for one "permanent until dispelled" effect, it's long enough for another.

That’s... about 3 days? (I mean, it’s not exactly “permanent but I guess it doesn’t really matter. No one’s going to walk around blind for three days. Though, props if they did!)

Edited March 9, 2022 by subtledoctor

[jmerry]

Yeah. As far as I can tell, timing mode 1 blindness decomposes to its component parts, which are then applied as permanent changes to the stats in the creature file (vision range reduction, to-hit penalty which goes into base THAC0, AC penalty which goes into base (natural) AC). Effects that cure blindness can restore vision range, but the others can't be reversed so easily.

 

300K game seconds is actually more like 40 game days; remember that it's 300 game seconds to a game hour. Though I think I'll up that to 30 million (>10 years) when I code it for my tweak mod.

[Gwaihir]

May I ask a question? My current game has a bunch of Nature's beauty spells:

I checked most of them (not all) and they have a few spell abilities, each with an effect (among others) op74 with timing mode 1. I downloaded the fix from this thread, but that's for SPPR704.SPL only. I have to assume that at least one of those spells is going to be used against me by some mod added enemy and screw my party, so I would like to change all the others as well. If I understood this correctly, I need to change the effect that casts blindness for every spell ability of each .SPL file. Is it enough to set timing mode 9 (instant/permanent) and duration 300000?

Edited March 7, 2022 by Gwaihir

[subtledoctor]

I can’t do it right now but realistically someone should do a hotfix mod that copies all spells and 

LPF ALTER_EFFECT INT_VAR silent = 1 match_opcode = 74 match_timing = 1 timing = 0 duration = [some number between 300 thousand and 126 million] END

That would take care of it. 

[jmerry]

I'll update my tweak to do that. And the same to Blindness portrait icons with that duration, for a sort of consistency. This will be a component in the next version of my tweak mod.

And done. I just uploaded that version (2.1) with this new component. See here.

Edited again ... that hotfix I posted was based on the vanilla version of the spell, which lacks the SCS bits related to unhiding certain animations if the caster was invisible. The WeiDU-ized tweak linked here is definitely better.

Edited March 8, 2022 by jmerry

[Luke]

@jmerry, @subtledoctor

Never mind.

Edited March 8, 2022 by Luke

[Guest Ginette Reno]

For what it's worth, I did some more digging on this, and it may be an EE bug, not a SCS/Tweaks bug. See this thread: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/1169654#Comment_1169654

That thread reports a similar issue where remove fear spells were adding a permanent morale modifier to targets. So this Nature's Beauty bug maybe similar to that. 

I can confirm as well that if you encounter this, you can fix it via EEkeeper by simply modifying your thaco back to the appropriate level. My recent SCS run was on Hardcore. I didn't notice a ton of enemies using this spell, thankfully. I'm not sure how much that changes on Insane, if at all.

 

 

[polytope]

I can confirm this is not an issue on the original ToB engine, I must be one of the only people who still play with it and it's for this kind of reason (although blindness in vanilla gives a 10 point penalty to THAC0, instead of 4, unless you have other engine modifications).

Incidentally, as far as druid spells go, Nature's Beauty was much more in need of a nerf than Creeping Doom; the former disables everyone permanently without a save, and possible defense except magic resistance, the latter only interrupts spellcasting for three rounds! Plus the damage and removal of stoneskins, but you don't cast if for damage when a Firestorm would usually serve better.

[subtledoctor]

Seems like Beamdog probably messed it up when they tinkered with it to change the penalty to -4  

44 minutes ago, polytope said:

Incidentally, as far as druid spells go, Nature's Beauty was much more in need of a nerf than Creeping Doom

As usual, the answer is Spell Revisions.