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[some person i guess]

been getting back into df modding after a few years of not playing the game, also happen to be getting back into neopets at the same time and figured the two would probably combine pretty well. so i took a look around and yoinked toxicshadow's neopets mod (and the primal mod, for the sake of making my life just slightly easier when it comes to tyrannian petpets and stuff like that) (edit: fixed the hyperlinks) and have been slowly chipping away at adding Basically Everything I Possibly Can From The Site to it (is that cool btw? i feel weird about just taking someone else's mod off the forums and changing things without asking. i'm not really planning to post it as a mod on its own, this is more of just a personal thing.)

and so because of that, i need to add in a custom metal for maractite. i've never really added in a custom material before, i mostly just messed around making creatures, so i did a bit of looking around on the wiki and testing and realized a little bit of a problem. which is that weapons like swords seem to work just as fine underwater as they do out of water (didn't test with projectiles though, typing this out is making me realize i should probably try that and see if anything interesting happens), with no real difference in performance due to water resistance.

and ignoring water resistance is maractite's Literal One Defining Characteristic (aside from just looking cool).

i have a couple other issues involving creatures and plants and stuff that i wanna tackle, but for now what i'm most interested in is

1. is water/fluid resistance a thing that exists in the game?

2. if not, what would be a good way to either fake it or give maractite some other interesting quality to set it apart, since it's meant to be sort of a magic metal (like adamantine, but viable for blunt weaponry and with less fun involved)? the [HARDENS_WITH_WATER] tag caught my interest for a second, but i'm pretty sure using this highly valuable weapons grade material to make casts would be kind of a waste. neopets isn't exactly super hard on the worldbuilding side of things, so in a lot of cases there's not a whole lot to go off of in terms of "okay, how does this thing actually work?", meaning i kinda just have to conspiracy-theory-corkboard together what useful info i do have and just build off that.

[Mobbstar]

(is that cool btw? i feel weird about just taking someone else's mod off the forums and changing things without asking. i'm not really planning to post it as a mod on its own, this is more of just a personal thing.)

Some people would be flattered to have their work proliferate like this.  You should shoot the respective authors a message if you haven't already.

1. is water/fluid resistance a thing that exists in the game?

I doubt it is modelled because it hardly comes up.  Most (unmodded) things in the water either are unarmed or drown.

2. if not, what would be a good way to either fake it or give maractite some other interesting quality to set it apart, since it's meant to be sort of a magic metal (like adamantine, but viable for blunt weaponry and with less fun involved)?

How about unique maractite weapons akin to "obsidian shortswords"?  That way you can give it a fearsome velocity multiplier, at least.  (Whips are famously powerful among blunt weapons because of their low contact area and high velocity.)

I found a specific item called Frosty Maractite Bow, maybe that in lieu of ordinary maractite weapons, and make the ammo from water?

Besides that, it is possible to make interactions that only work in water, but I cannot think of any way to give creatures these abilities specifically when wielding maractite.  (I have done something similar for the pyromancer in manymancy if you need an example.)

[some person i guess]

How about unique maractite weapons akin to "obsidian shortswords"?  That way you can give it a fearsome velocity multiplier, at least.  (Whips are famously powerful among blunt weapons because of their low contact area and high velocity.)

definitely a good idea, i think i was focused so hard on the material properties themselves that i forgot making custom weapons was an option. gonna have to take a look at the item files and see what i can figure out!

I found a specific item called Frosty Maractite Bow, maybe that in lieu of ordinary maractite weapons, and make the ammo from water?

Besides that, it is possible to make interactions that only work in water, but I cannot think of any way to give creatures these abilities specifically when wielding maractite.  (I have done something similar for the pyromancer in manymancy if you need an example.)

ooo, that sounds perfect if i can figure out how to pull it off! gut instinct says something could probably be done with contact syndromes, but according to the wiki items made of whatever material you want to transmit the syndrome don't actually work, so that might be a bit tricky.

...though i did just have a thought about that as i'm typing this out

is it possible to make a creature using a workshop reaction? because having a maractite bow creature could be a very messy way of allowing someone to actually do the interaction. though that now raises the issue of how to get the bow to actually fire at the target, because if this is some kind of attack interaction in the creature raws then i'm fairly certain that's just gonna cause the archer to fight their own living maractite bow. which is a very funny mental image, but not exactly useful in this case at least. if this ends up being something that actually works out, then it might lead into the possibility of cursed weapons, which is a context where that kind of thing might actually sorta work. kinda. maybe.