Succession Law Loss Patch for EK2
Made a little EK2 patch after hitting an annoying bug in my own playthrough; figured some of you might run into the same thing, so sharing it here. It’s called Succession Law Loss Patch for EK2.
I was playing Domihaus of Echoing Cliffs on the Interregnum bookmark — the Minotaur chieftain from Jam’s New Cultures and Map Edits for EK2, which adds the Minotaurs and their Shamanism faith. A few years in I wanted to switch him from Minotaur Shamanism over to the Cult of Heroes. The moment the conversion went through, my Laws panel dropped all succession laws. Not "switched to a fallback", not "showed a warning", just blank. Nothing to enact, nothing to change, nothing for my heir to inherit on. I reloaded to make sure I hadn’t misclicked, reproduced it, and realised the game was just silently broken for my character.
Digging into EK2’s law files, it happened that rule_by_might_succession_law, the one tribal Minotaurs get via Contempt for the Weak on their Shamanism faith, is gated on the doctrine parameter rule_by_might_succession_active. When you convert to any faith that doesn’t carry that tenet, CK3’s can_keep check strips rule_by_might the moment your faith flips. That alone is fine, the issue is that nothing replaces it. EK2 has deliberately steered tribal rulers away from the vanilla confederate/partition chain (#EK EDIT: tribes use house unity in their own comments) and toward the clan_*_partition_succession_law family. But that family keys off has_house_unity_stage, and for a house that’s never had its unity initialised (which is basically every Minotaur chieftain starting under rule_by_might) every clan_* law’s can_have returns false. Combine that with the fact that confederate/partition/high_partition have an EK edit excluding tribal governments from their potential, and the math works out to this: there’s literally no native partition law that can apply to a post-conversion tribal ruler whose house has no tracked unity. The slot gets stripped and stays empty forever.
The fix is a single custom succession law sitting inside EK2’s own succession_order_laws group, with all the restrictive conditions relaxed (can_keep, can_have, can_pass, and potential all set to always-yes) so nothing can refuse it and nothing can strip it. It carries the partition_succession_law flag so it occupies the same slot rule_by_might vacated, plus can_change_succession_laws and can_change_partition_succession_laws flags so you can freely transition out of it the moment you qualify for anything else: rule_by_might again if you re-adopt a Contempt for the Weak faith, single_heir once your culture researches primogeniture, the proper clan_* variants once your house actually has a unity stage, and all the elective laws when the usual requirements line up. Mechanically and visually it’s cloned from clan_impassive_partition_succession_law down to the partition share, the opinion modifiers, the widget name, and the display name itself, so the Laws panel shows "Impassive Succession" rendered with the clan-law widget, and you’d have to look at the raw law ID to tell it apart from a vanilla clan law.
Beyond my own case, it should help anyone in EK2 who converts a tribal character away from a Contempt for the Weak faith (or other faiths with very specific succession laws). It’s not just Minotaur Shamanism to Cult of Heroes, the same gap hits any path out of any rule_by_might-granting tenet, so anyone on a tribal start with that tenet runs into it the moment they change religion. Jam’s submod makes it more likely to come up since it adds a lot of tribal Minotaur starts built around Minotaur Shamanism (and other pariahs of the like), but any future EK2 content or other submods that add new faiths or tenets along those lines get the same safety net for free. If you’ve ever had a playthrough where your Laws panel went weirdly blank after a religion change, this is probably what happened and the mod is basically an insurance that there’s always a valid succession law in the slot, and that you can change away from it whenever you qualify for a better one.
