The Loot Wheel - a simpler, modder-friendly version of the Treasure Wheel

[Nyzer]

One of the questions I saw often from those seeking to use TLW as a base mod for their work was: "What if I want to change the items? What would I do about the Treasure Wheel after doing a Rendezvous?"

For a fair while, our answer has been to shrug and suggest that either the Treasure Wheel should be dummied out in your patch, or to roll up your sleeves and dive into the event commands, painstakingly adjusting every set of loot.

However, early on in the Treasure Wheel's production, Elric commented that Kokojo would love the concept for his mod, Call of Power, in which guests would silently join the party after fights. These guests had a treasure chest for a sprite, and their purpose was to be stripped of their gear before they were auto-dismissed.
Once the Wheel was made public (or was shared with him; I forget which), Kokojo himself expressed the same sentiment.

However, not even Kokojo was finding any real success in taking the Treasure Wheel event and customizing it to work as he wanted, just because of how stuffed the event was, and difficult it was to edit it.

He and I ended up discussing the issue for a while, until one day I suggested keeping the treasure box guests so that he could set up a similar event to use their gear to populate some loot tables. A bit later, I realized that if that was an option, so was using the gear of the units in the ENTD. There are 16 units, after all, which means that if we divide them into half common and half rare loot, we can have up to 8 different options for each type of equipment. That's certainly smaller than some of my loot tables currently are in TLW, but it's still a fairly respectable amount. More than adequate for the Wheel's needs. So, I got to work, and built this new variant: the Loot Wheel.

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So how can you set up the Loot Wheel's loot? There are two sets of things to edit: ENTD and some of the early event commands. You should also make sure to import the included EVTCHR so that the treasure chests show up properly - many of the new treasure chest palettes are blank in the Treasure Wheel version.

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You'll want 16 units in the ENTD, with the first 12 set to both Always Present and Randomly Present*.  They should all be set to the same special Unit (such as 02 Ramza) to make sure they have the same spritesheet. They should have IDs of x90-x9F.

*(Using both will cause the unit to spawn automatically Erased, and trigger the "Zalera bug" that prevents units with Always: Float from having the Float animation. After all, we don't want the chests to have a Float animation.)

At the start of the event, it builds loot tables from the units' Right Hand Weapon, Left Hand Shield, Head, Body, and Accessory slots. The first eight units are used to generate common loot. The last eight are used to generate rare loot. The first eight units' War Trophies are also used to generate Consumable loot, with their Bonus Money set to the number of those consumables you'll get. These item types don't always have to match the loot category - for example, you can put katanas in the war trophies slots and they'll be awarded just fine. However, the Loot Wheel will still call them Consumables. Additionally, the game has different bytes for Right Hand Weapon and Right Hand Shield, or Left Hand Weapon and Left Hand Shield, so it's best not to mess around with the equipment slots too much.

If an equipment slot is left empty, the loot wheel will ignore it when figuring out its loot tables. If that equipment slot is empty for the entire set of common loot, every chest of that type will be converted to Consumables. If that equipment slot is empty for the entire set of rare loot, any rare upgrades for that category will award the common loot, but also with some bonus JP. If a common unit's War Trophy slot is empty, it'll be set to Item FD - normally Phoenix Downs. If Bonus Money is set to 0, it'll get a random value between 1 and 9.

You can also adjust any of the first 12 units' Faith in order to force them to spawn as a specific chest.

Common loot:
- 2 will be a Weapon Chest.
- 3, Shield.
- 4, Helmet.
- 5, Armor.
- 6, Accessory.
- 7, Consumable.

Rare loot:
- 8 will be a Rare Weapon.
- 9, Rare Shield.
- 10, Rare Helmet.
- 11, Rare Armor.
- 12, Rare Accessory.
- 13, since Consumables won't upgrade to Rare, will be a Mystery chest, which holds one random piece of common loot, and awards bonus JP.

Loot+:
- 18 will be a Weapon+ chest, which holds a common weapon and awards bonus JP.
- 19 will be Shield+.
- 20, Helmet+.
- 21, Armor+.
- 22, Accessory+.
- 23, Consumable+.

Units that don't have hard-set Faith can never reach these values, and any unit with Faith higher than 32 (which is still below the lowest possible minimum random Faith range) will have their loot category randomized.

Speaking of randomized, you can actually just leave units' equipment set to Random if you like. As long as you aren't planning to get Unique equipment from this event, you can handle normal and rare rewards by setting the first eight units to be around the Party Level, and the last eight to be something like Party Level +10. Setting the units to different Jobs (but keeping their Units as the same special units) will allow them to spawn with different gear; for example, you can use Archers, Knights, and Wizards to get a good mix of different randomized equipment.

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As for the event commands: In the event itself, there are a few lines near the top that determine how many chests you can open and how rare chests are handled. You can set the odds of rare chests spawning at the start, the odds of common chests granting you a free upgrade when you open them, whether or not multiple common chests can become rares at the start or just one at most, whether or not the player can pay gil to upgrade individual chests, and how much gil that would cost. And this is all in addition to being able to hard-set chest types via their Faith in the ENTD.

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The last thing to mention is that, since these lists are indeed generated by the ENTD, you will need to set up multiple ENTDs for multiple different sets of rewards. Normally, in TLW, there's only one Treasure Wheel event. Going with the Loot Wheel, unless you want every Rendezvous to use Random loot, you'll need to set up a new event for every single different set of loot, and alter the Rendezvous events' final PostEvent(x81,x????) command to point at the correct one.

The good news is that this is relatively simple to set up. You can copy and paste the ENTDs, and just have to adjust units' equipment, War Trophies, Bonus Money, and/or Faith accordingly. You can also copy and paste the event scripts, just adjusting those first few lines accordingly. Same thing with the ATTACK.OUT and conditional stuff. It's a bit more work than it would be to just adjust the ENTDs if we'd set it up this way from the start, but it is still very doable.

[Heisho]

Thanks a lot for this Nyzer, this is pretty much what I was looking for. I hope something like this can be done the Deeps of Murond as well since I'm changing a lot.

[Nyzer]

Nope, that can't be so easily edited.

[Heisho]

Oh bummer. Sorry to bother but since I do not know too much of events I would like to know if could it be possible to just keep the New Game+ and dummy out the rest of the stuff?

[Nyzer]

You could probably replace the existing NG+ event with a custom one that just does NG+/Continue+/Ending, but you'd have to disable all the correct variables to reset progress accordingly. Wouldn't be a hard task, just a tedious one.

[---HattoriIga---]

I was left with a question. but from what I read of what you wrote about this treasure wheel, it only works for a mod with the TLW function, in a vanilla ISO there would be no way to use it.

[Nyzer]

The setup would be a little different - setting victory events in ATTACK.OUT to jump directly to the appropriate Loot Wheel event, and not using PostEvent commands - but as long as you used the Event Instruction Upgrade Hack, and know some of the basics of setting up event flow, you could.

I can't see myself ever making a vanilla-friendly version though, just because one of the things that makes it so viable in TLW is that there are more event & ENTD slots. I made the original Treasure Wheel with its long bloated event-set loot tables specifically to avoid using a lot of event/ENTD slots on it, since that was either before things were condensed or before I knew how they were.

[3lric]

I was left with a question. but from what I read of what you wrote about this treasure wheel, it only works for a mod with the TLW function, in a vanilla ISO there would be no way to use it.

Do you think thats's maybe why it was posted in the TLW section?

[---HattoriIga---]

Do you think thats's maybe why it was posted in the TLW section?

sorry I didn't really see that point


I'm traveling through the topics and I had forgotten that it's on TLW

[Nyzer]

Kokojo learned that any Loot Wheel chests that spawn with Float-bestowing equipment would float during the Wheel event. This can be fixed by deliberately activating the Zalera bug (set units to both Always and Randomly present) and adding in twelve Draw commands to deal with the fact that the chests now spawn pre-Erased.

And so, the event script has been updated.