Better Yum Heart
This mod gives Yum Heart some additional mechanics and synergies to help Magdalene feel more fun and exciting to play as. I tried to buff the item such that it won’t guarantee wins, but will provide enough value to not almost always be worse than other spacebar items.
- Overhealing with Yum Heart causes a red heart to spawn equal to the amount that was overhealed (half and full hearts).
- The game’s internal heart-spawning chances are used, meaning that there is about a 10% base chance for soul heart variants to spawn when overhealing.
- Collecting items like Mitre and Mom’s Pearl that raise your chance of finding soul hearts will also increase the chance that Yum Heart spawns a soul heart variant when overhealing.
- If using Yum Heart would not overheal you, you get 1 red heart worth of healing like normal.
- Every 4 full red heart containers gives the player a dynamic tears up. Since Magdalene starts with 4 red hearts, she automatically gets this tears up to start off with.
- When taking damage that reduces the player’s red hearts below a multiple of 4, a tears up is taken away. Healing equal to or above a multiple of 4 red hearts restores the tears up. Since the player can have up to 12 red hearts, there are 3 possible tears up to receive.
- Configurable with Mod Config Menu.
The problem with vanilla Yum Heart is that if you are using it, you have probably lost your deity room chance. The common consensus among the player base is that Yum Heart is helpful for new players who are frequently taking red heart damage, but unfortunately that makes it of little interest to experienced players. Many will swap Yum Heart with a better spacebar item as soon as the opportunity presents itself, or perhaps opt to play as a different character entirely.
Magdalene is presented as a slower and more tanky version of Isaac. The changes to Yum Heart are ultimately to help make her fill this niche. If you need to heal, Yum Heart still has you covered exactly as you would expect. If you don’t need to heal, creating red hearts to use for later is a good idea. These excess hearts can be used to help make blood donation machines and sacrifice rooms to pay out, or to simply restore your health if you’re taking a lot of damage in fights. Magdalene will now be better at anything that takes away red hearts, and be a more interesting character to play as a result.
In an attempt to make Yum Heart more relevant within the game’s current soul heart meta, overhealing has a small chance to drop a soul heart variant. This is infrequent enough to not be overpowered or reliable, but will occasionally help the player to avoid losing their deity room chance. The soul heart chance scales with items that increase the player’s chance of finding soul hearts, and so Yum Heart will now synergize with items like Mitre and Mom’s Pearl.
On its own I felt that this might be overpowered, so I wanted to include a drawback for spending too much red health. It seems fair that Magdalene would be able to fire more tears in exchange for starting with less speed. There are 3 tiers of tears ups that are dynamically given and taken away depending on the number of red hearts that the player has. Magdalene starts with 4 hearts, so she automatically starts with the first tears up but loses it upon taking any damage. There’s a second reason for including this as a mechanic: the game doesn’t reward the player for having an abundance of red hearts in the same way that it rewards them for having soul hearts. If the player knows that having more red health synergizes with Yum Heart, they might be more willing to take health up items, be more cautious about overplaying red heart games, etc. My hope is that the changes will make for more interesting Magdalelne runs.
Finally, I expect these changes will provide a little bit of extra value on Tainted Magdalelne runs, but not as much as regular Magdalelne due to her inability to keep excess health for long. This has the overall effect of making regular Magdalelne more interesting without taking away from Tainted Magdalelne’s own identity.
I have only tested the mod with Repentance, it might not work without it. This mod is also unlikely to work well with other mods that change Yum Heart.
As always, feedback and bug reports are welcome!
Required DLC:
These DLC should be installed in order to use this item.
The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth
The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+
The Binding of Isaac: Repentance
