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Height Label for Ruler Designer

This mod labels the approximate adult height of characters created in the Ruler Designer, allowing players to more accurately gauge the height of their customized characters in relation to each other and their wider mediæval world.

The mod is localized in all supported languages and should be compatible with most other mods. For reasons known only to Paradox, localization mods such as this one are not achievement-compatible as they were in the studio's earlier titles; it is, however, entirely possible to use this mod to create your character and copy his DNA into an achievement-compatible game with this mod disabled.

Character heights in Crusader Kings III are stored as a value from 0–255 inclusive, where 0 represents the lowest possible character height, rather than no height at all. As such, absolute character heights are not stored in the game, and must be reconstructed from contextual evidence.

To do this, I compared the relative heights of custom characters created with the extreme high and low height values while viewed at a fixed position and perspective. Although female heights are phenotypically within a narrower band than male heights, Crusader Kings III does not discriminate height based on sex, so I standardized an average 9th–11th century male height of 5' 8 5⁄8" (Steckel, 2004[www.jstor.org]) based on the game's 51:49 male-biased sex ratio to approximately 5' 6 3⁄8", and used this to derive the the following approximate absolute minimum and maximum character height values:

*Except for dwarfs and giants
†Except for Asian and Circumpolar ethnicities

Steckel's study only included samples from Northern Europe, meaning the average height used to derive this data is actually taller than the modern global average. You can see, however, that the hard limits set by the game's character model, as represented by the minimum and maximum heights obtainable in the Ruler Designer, necessarily narrow the distribution of heights, curtailing the appearance of extremely-tall characters who are not considered giants. As a result, I found this data to more-or-less align with the expected values, and thus used it as the baseline for calculating the heights displayed in the Ruler Designer.

This mod arose from my desire to have a better metric by which to gauge the heights of my custom characters, as the Ruler Designer provides no context by which to judge a character's height. As such, the displayed height is the approximate height of the character when fully grown and without regard for traits. The heights displayed for children will be those to which the character will grow as an adult, and the heights displayed for characters with the Dwarf or Giant traits, as well as for extremely-elderly characters whose heights are reduced by the game's aging process, will be inaccurate. In the case of children, I adjudge this a benefit; your twelve-year-old will obviously not remain his current height for long. The limitations with regard to dwarfs, giants, and the elderly are admittedly more unfortunate, and though they could theoretically have been overcome, doing so would have required more significant changes to the UI. This would necessarily have affected compatibility with other mods, the præservation of which I deemed of higher priority than the absolute faithfulness of the height displayed in what are for most players certainly edge cases.

Gene values are exposed to scripts in the Ruler Designer, but—unfortunately—they're not to my knowledge accessible anywhere else in the game. As such, I don't believe there to be any way to display character heights in the character window or in the barbershop, as many people have suggested.

While it should be technically-possible to do so, calculating weight will be complicated both by differences in muscle and fat density and by character weight being affected by both character genetics and a separate character weight value. As such, I have at this point no plans to make a character weight label mod myself, though you're certainly welcome to use the labelling code from this mod to do so yourself, and I will be happy to link to your mod if you do make one.

To report bugs, suggest changes, or contribute to this mod, please get in touch via the Discussions tab.