Community/Modding Balance Guide

Community Content

This page was written as a friendly guide by the original author. It may not follow the same standards as the rest of the wiki, and may contain ideas and opinions that may not be considered objectively useful to every player or modder.

This guide was written by Darkly77, who made Invasion (among a few other bits).

Intro

Balance is a tricky thing to get right. From what I've seen, players want to feel like they're playing optimally, making good decisions instead of having items make the decisions for them. This means that:

• If an item is too weak, players feel cheated.
• If an item is too strong, players feel like they're cheating for using it.

Seeing just 1 unbalanced item can change a player's opinion against not just one mod, but mods in general... so no pressure then!

Downsides

Downsides are important because they give the player interesting choices. But an item doesn't have to have a downside, if the positive effect is specialised -- eg. turrets, Piggy Bank, Scared Sausage, or Crown. For these items, their benefits are niche enough that, while they might help you, the real downside is the cost investment.

So generally, a downside is needed if the positive is a general stat boost, but might not be if the positive is a unique or specialised effect.

Rarity

Common

Common items are probably the hardest to balance, because they appear so often, and set the overall direction your stats will learn towards.

A good point of reference in vanilla is HP Regen (more so prior to v0.8.0.3, before its commons got buffed). Players often mentioned that HP Regen is weak, because its 3 commons all work against your other survivability (reducing Luck, Life Steal and Consumable Healing). While taking one of those common items won't have a huge impact on your run, having all 3 have downsides in the same area (survivability) has a dramatic effect... the result being that HP Regen feels too situational, and forces you to specialise in it too early.

Making decisions for the player takes away their freedom of choice. But by offering the player difficult, interesting and varied choices instead, items can be more engaging and fun.

Rare

Rare items can massively help turn the course of a run, taking you from behind the curve to just in front of it. They shouldn't be so OP that you're given a free win, but they don't need to be too specialised either, letting you offer strong stats that benefit most builds.

Legendary

If a Rare can tip the balance in your favor, a Legendary can be a run decider. No items should be completely OP, but it's OK for a Legendary item to come close to that, especially if it's specialised. So an item like Jet Pack is very strong, but because it's useful for pretty much any build, it's not so strong that it's an instant win. Whereas Spider can potentially offer an enormous and run-deciding DPS increase, but -- since it depends on your build having multiple different weapons -- it only reaches its full power potential when your build meets such less-used criteria.

Another thing to consider is that, while Rares are more likely to appear in shops, they're still very luck-dependant, whereas Legendaries can be guaranteed drops in higher Danger levels. This is why some players feel that higher Danger can actually be easier, because you can stock up on one or more Legendaries, and that can carry your run.

Bonus Effects

If you feel like a certain stat is underused in vanilla (and perhaps in other mods too), then it's probably underused for a reason -- eg. how Elemental Damage is often only useful to specific builds or loadouts. So if your modded items depends on one of these underused stats (eg. an item that gives you Dodge based on your Elemental Damage) then one way to offer more items to get stats that synergise with your new content is to deliver that stat is with stacked positives.

This is where an item gives a slightly weaker version of 2 stats, one of them being something universally helpful (eg. Melee Damage), the other being your chosen overlooked stat. This lets players take it to invest in their general build, while essentially banking the second stat as a potential bonus for if/when your item that uses it appears, without making their build suffer for it, or bloating the item pool too much with potentially useless items.

Costs

There's a lot that could be said about costs, but it's probably easier to just refer to vanilla here. There's also a Balancing section on the Modding Notes page here on the wiki, which lists the average costs for items and weapons by tier:

• Modding Notes > Balancing

Your own costs should fall somewhere within those average boundaries, depending on its power and versatility. Generally, powerful items cost more, while specialised ones are usually cheaper to pick up, giving the player a choice of taking something with potential utility later, or saving their cash for something more closely related to their current build.

Effects

The most interesting items are usually ones that add new effects to the game. But coding new effects can be tricky, especially if you're new to modding, so a good place to start is by looking at the effects from vanilla, and seeing if there are new ways you can use them. A list of vanilla's effects is available here:

• Modding Effects

I need to update that page for v0.8.0.3, but until I do, this mod migration guide covers what's change/removed, and in particular, lists the new effects from v0.8.

If you want to add your own effects, BFX is a good point of reference. You can search its code for an effect key to see how it's implemented, which can teach you a lot about where some of the most important vanilla code is.

• BFX (GitHub)

Content Based on Other Media

I learned about this the hard way. When I made Invasion, I used items from the game Space Gladiators, including their effects. That game has 2 types of healing, so I just swapped them out for HP Regen and Life Steal. But this meant that HP Regen in particular became very prominent in Invasion, which made the game a bit too easy. So the tip here is: Add effects based on what makes sense for vanilla, rather than what's thematically appropriate for the thing your mod is based on.

Vanilla Balancing

The best tip I can offer is to check vanilla! Its items are exceptionally well-balanced. There's an interactive item grid that shows them here:

• Modding Items