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Crystal Rarities

I love mining crystals. I enjoy hunting through asteroid fields and eventually stumbling on that big payday. But in vanilla, crystals' little blinking lights are a pain to spot for my old-man eyes. Then with the introduction of a "cooldown" on crystals spawning in 3.0, crystal mining became extremely un-fun.
With that in mind, I set out to make mining crystals great again.

NOTE/WARNING: This mod could definitely be considered "cheat-y" or unbalanced. I originally created it because I enjoy hunting for crystals and hate the early-game credit grind and thought others might be looking for something similar. If you're looking for a version that ONLY has the glow, check out here (or see "links" section below).


+ Changes the color of crystals to the following:

• Bandannite - Very common - White
  
• Menelaene - Common - Green
  
• Aguilite - Rare - Blue
  
• Mitonene - "Epic" - Purple
  
• Burnite - "Legendary" - Orange

+ Added a glow to all crystals so they stand out more in the asteroid field

+ Removes the "cooldown" on picking up crystals:

• Previously, when you picked up one of the rarer crystals (anything except Bandannite), it imposed a multi-minute timer where nothing else could spawn. This turned "hunting for crystals", into "waiting for crystals to respawn". To remedy this, the cooldown on all crystal pickups was completely removed.

+ Complete re-write of crystal spawns:

• Spawns are now defined on a per-Sector basis (this means I can buff/nerf crystal spawns of particular sectors without affecting the rest!)
  
• Spawn CHANCES are based heavily on how big an asteroid is (larger asteroids have a higher chance of spawning a crystal)
  
• Overall spawn CHANCE favors Sectors with big asteroids
  
• Spawns no longer based on who owns a Sector (so taking over a Xenon Sector won't suddenly change what crystals spawn there)

• Will conflict with mods that change crystal spawn rules (objectspawnrules.xml)
  
• Will conflict with mods that change crystal colors
  
• Will conflict with Crystal Finder
  
• Will (obviously) conflict with the other version of this mod

Hit "subscribe"

To UNinstall, just "unsubscribe"! (if for some reason that doesn't work, delete the folder "Crystal_Rarities")

• Thanks to Shuruna and their Crystal Finder[www.nexusmods.com] mod, which gave me the base/inspiration for mine.
  
• Thanks to everyone on the Egosoft Forums and Egosoft Discord for all the knowledge they imparted on me.

Nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/x4foundations/mods/451
Egosoft Forum: https://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=181&t=425759
Crystal Rarities - GLOW ONLY: https://steamproxy.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2193267394



Change Log:
3.0:

• Added support for new sectors added by both DLCs (Split Vendetta and Cradle of Humanity)

2.0:

• Slight increase to range glow can be seen
  
• Slight increase to intensity of glow
  
• Complete re-write of crystal spawns. They are based loosely on asteroid size/density, but are on a per-sector basis (this means I can tweak sectors individually). Currently SUPPORTS Split Vendetta sectors, but they do not have their own custom rules at the moment.

1.3:

• Another update to the intensity of the glows on the crystals in an attempt to make them less harsh
  
• some tweaks to hopefully reduce color distortion as well

1.2:

• Attempted to dial down the intensity to reduce glare on the screen/cockpit
  
• removed save requirement from mod (it is safe to remove from / add to a save at any point)

1.1: added support for Steam Workshop (changed mod ID and moved loose files to ext_01 cat/dat
1.0: initial release