Craftable Weapons for Hives Expanded
A haphazard addon that allows you to research and craft the weapons from Hives Expanded belonging to the Western Hive and Southern Hive, with the unique textures applied. No bones, though.
Getting custom weapon textures to work in Kenshi is hard, and I had to make some dubious workarounds to make this function which I will talk about more below. If you want a more straightforward addon with less oddities, check out Weapon Blueprints for Hives Expanded.
This addon places blueprints for the Hives’ weapons in their respective territories. Western Hive blueprints are sold by their traders & caravans, while Southern Hive blueprints can be looted in their buildings.
Before you can craft these weapons, you first need Hive notebooks to spend on your own research. This will unlock 2 new weapon smithies for the Hives with their respective weapon grades. After this, you can perform further research for each new weapon grade using more notebooks and, eventually, AI cores for Edgewalker-tier grades.
In order for the mod to work smoother and more consistently, I have slightly altered the available weapon grades, but only for the player’s crafts. NPCs should not be affected at all.
The weapon grades are as follows:
- Hasty Production & Model I – Level 25
- Basic Production & Model II – Level 40
- Advanced Production & Model III – Level 60
- Superior Production & Model IV – Level 75
- Queens Tribute & Model V – Level 80
Yes, this will allow you to craft weapons reaching up to Edge 3 in quality. Be responsible with that extra power.
So, why did I have to use a workaround like this? Kenshi’s method of applying textures to weapons is very restrictive, and makes it difficult to implement any weapon with unique textures unless you make them impossible to craft. If you were to craft a unique weapon under normal circumstances, the game would put the vanilla weapon textures onto it and result in a mess.
The texture is based on the model of the weapon, such as those listed above. Therefore I needed to make the crafted weapons come in a different model, and for that I needed to make seperate smithies so they wouldn’t place these unique textures into the normal weapon smithy.
There are various drawbacks to this. Weapons can be crafted in a smithy not meant for them, which will cause them to have incorrect textures if you do that. The critical success mechanic can also cause one of your Hive weapons to come out in a vanilla weapon grade, making them look wrong too. This mod is far from perfect, and you may need to spend extra time getting the weapons to come out right.
If you have any issues or suggestions, feel free to let me know!
