A Better Third Choice

This mod is meant to enhance several of the less interesting, or less thoughtful, events in the game with more dynamic choices. In particular, seven core events that by default have only two options, have been given a third option (and in special cases more) that will hopefully give the player a larger range of interesting decisions to make during a run.

SEVEN enhanced and improved events! Numerous secrets and hidden interactions!

The following events have been altered:
"Ancient Writing"
"Scrap Ooze"
"Secret Portal"
"Shining Light"
"The Nest"
"The Sssssserpent"
"World of Goop"

Each of these event by default had only two options, many of which were either "Do the event" or "Leave" which caused them to feel less interactive, and thus less fun to find.

"A Better Third Choice" gives each of these events a third option, to provide a little more opportunity for thinking, should the player desire that.

The mod also includes a number of special interactions, and hidden surprises for players to find, so be on the lookout for those!

There are options in the config menu of the mod to enable or disable each event individually, as well, so players can customize which events they would like to add the third option.

Normally, I include some notes on design goals in this section, but due to this mod being a collection of smaller, less extensive changes (though by no means lower quality), I have elected to include a brief overall synopsis, and then provide a more in-depth set of thought in a discussion thread. As a side note, I have also elected to divide it in this manner, as my previous writeups had to be trimmed down to fit the character limits of the display page which left me frustrated having not fully explained everything.

Anyway, this collection strays from the design ethos of my previous mods in a key way. First and foremost, with all the prior releases, I chose events that felt not well balanced, or frustrating to encounter, or had an excess of potential compared to what they delivered, either from a theming perspective, or a gameplay perspective. With this collection, we decided to select a subset of events that are not necessarily poorly balanced in any way, but rather that just felt boring. Most of these events feel very binary. There’s a clear situation in which you choose option A, and in some rare cases, you choose option B. The player already knows what choice to make the moment the see which event they’ve found. For many of these, the second option isn’t even a true choice, it’s just choosing to ignore the event.

With this in mind, the core design goal became "Let’s make the player always feel excited about *something* when they find an event." Another way to think about this is that we wanted to minimize situations where the player sighs upon seeing which event they got, or even worse, the player absentmindedly auto-clicks on the one obvious good choice and moves on without having any kind of reaction.

Another major design goal was to provide fun secrets to discover. One of our favourite interactions in the game is being able to trade the Blood Vial relic to the vampires instead of the usual cost. While we have always included a little something in that vein in the previous mods, this collection provide an ample opportunity to explore that space and really create some fun and thematic interactions in (and across) the events.

The last major design concern was lore and theming. As with all previous events, I have tried to always have a thematic justification for why an event allows for each option. Naturally, some events (both in vanilla, and modded) do a better job of this than others, but the core concept is of the utmost importance in the design process.

Again, if you are looking for more specific and in-depth thoughts, look in the discussion thread.

I hope you have a good time with this mod, and I welcome any and all feedback.
Special thanks to 旅渚Lastcel for the Simplified Chinese translation!

Additionally, if anyone is interested in providing translations for this or any of my mods into other languages since I don’t speak any non-English language well enough to feel confident in translating, don’t hesitate to reach out!

If you enjoyed this mod, consider checking out some of my other mods:
A Better Note
A Better Sensory Stone
A Better Match
A Better Knowing Skull
A Better Forgotten Altar
A Better Lab