Modding Construct 8

[Donkeyton]

I'd love to make Construct 8 a little more versatile and useful, especially towards the endgame. Maybe enable him to use items, like a Chemist, or something along those lines. I know he doesn't have weapon animations, so I don't want to go there. But I'm just wondering if there are any hardcoded limitations to worry about before I try to mod him. For instance, would I be able to give him the Items ability without any crashes or issues?

Thanks in advance.

[Donkeyton]

Well, I went ahead and started doing this anyway. For science!

Obviously Construct/Worker 8 is a monster, so I didn't want to mess around trying to give him human equipment or jobs. Instead, I tried to add some non-spell abilities to his "Tasks" skill set. Gave him some Squire abilities, like Focus, Steel, and Tailwind. Also gave him Choco Cure for healing. He may be slightly overpowered now, and his animation for Choco Cure is buggy. I might remove that ability. But everything works.

[Kaijyuu]

Things you need to watch out for with monsters is they cannot spend MP, their animations can be buggy with certain abilities (as you've seen), and equipment doesn't work quite right.

The MP one can be particularly devious since monsters under your control will still be able to use MP costing abilities (without it actually using their MP of course), but AI controlled ones will refuse to use them if it appears they don't have enough MP (due to draining, breaking, etc) despite being perfectly able to.

[Donkeyton]

Got it. So that probably rules out my Terminator-esque fantasy of giving him guns, right?

What about Items-based abilities? Martial Arts? I assume the latter would work, but maybe not the Items?

[Kaijyuu]

Try and see? I don't remember which humanoid animations correspond to which monster animations.

[Donkeyton]

My assessment so far: a good 90% of animations are buggy, though the abilities seem to work. My theory is that you can give Construct 8 (or any monster, for that matter) pretty much any human ability aside from abilities that consume MP. (Have not tested abilities known to be hard-coded: items, jump, bard/dancer, etc.). So long as you don't mind the occasionally bizarre/glitchy animation, and you can put up with it, the abilities will work fine.

Personally, I don't mind if Construct 8 has a bizarre Chakra animation, so long as he can perform Chakra, which he can. (I switched out Choco Cure for Chakra, given that the latter is slightly less powerful than the former, and is limited by height. Choco Cure was too powerful in his hands).

I haven't tried weapons and equipment, but my guess is that they won't work.