Alright, glad to hear it works now. Still, very strange, can't say I ever encountered something like this before. Mm, everyday a new wonder in these lands of Elysium.

it came back to normal after a restart, thx for your quick reaction ;) i don't know why that happened.. no other mod.

Uh, huh? No, that would not be intended, but in my game they are still 1x1, just checked, and my version should still be the same as the uploaded version, so that confuses me a little. A conflict with another mod, perhaps?

fairies are so big! 2x2, only 1hp... is it intended? thanks!

I'd have to agree about it being a rather tame invasion. Maybe the veil between the underworld and overworld being thin would be another tame one, with it mostly spawning random spirits scattered around that are easy to disable (usually). The fungus spawns are certainly the easiest to handle, though annoying if you rely on herbs or fungus and don't have much in the way of poison resistance.

Yeah, I just noticed, I misread the original question a bit. I thought, there were swamps spawning around the base, which confused me. But mushrooms spawning in forests and swamps would be perfectly normal for the base game event. Fungus year? Mushroom harvest? Something like that.

Those would then spawn anywhere on the map, but since some of them are forest stealthy you would probably only notice those close to you at first. It is probably the most tame invasion event the game has to offer, and easy to miss, since the flavour text seems to imply it is only about resource income.

As Nathan mentioned, there is a random event that spawns neutral mushrooms in random woodlands and swamps over the course of a few turns. You probably got that without noticing or being aware of what it did.

Yeah, I tested it again in the same game as before and it seems the "forbidden Ground" ritual isn't spawning neutral mushrooms anymore. It's really weird I never had random mushrooms spawn a few turns in a row taking over my land before.

That is certainly not meant to happen. For the mushrooms you might have the seasonal event that increases fungi income for Witch and Troll King, which also causes neutral mushrooms to spawn everywhere. But the swamps? Never seen something like that myself, and I can't even imagine what might cause it, sorry.

Not sure if it's a conflict with other mods I'm using, but after I used the ritual "forbidden Ground" in my main base each turn after, neutral mushrooms start showing up in the forests and swamps around my base, is that meant to happen?

Been trying this out, and it's great as always, I love your work Pascal.

It's very flavorful and thematic, and alot of fun in SP especially.

You have got the book then! To borrow the words of H. P. Lovecraft "to the truly imaginative this book is a talisman and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream". Take care though because the rabbit-hole goes deeper than anyone can know. Cheers!

Thanks for the compliment. And I had not heard about the Encyclopedia before, but it looks very fascinating on a first glance. Reminds me a bit of the monster manuals from tabletop/pen&paper-games which I always like to read, just real in this case. Well, not 'real' real, but real folklore.

Hey Nathan, I would like to congratulate you for your exquisite mod. Ever got the chance to peruse the Encyclopedia of Fairies of Katharine Briggs? (Available for free @internet archive.) Give it a go, it is great stuff. Cheers!

Thank you kindly, I am a writer after all, so I always appreciate when people enjoy the writing part so much.

Altough I have to admit, nothing of that was really planned from the beginning, it just developed over time. I had a different twist in mind at first, until I decided I would like another direction better. Which is how my process usually works, probably.

Since the save-breaking update I've conquered ~2/3rds of an enormous map in preparation to make war upon the planes, cracked the secret at the end, and I am impressed at how you've foreshadowed the twist in the atmosphere and background.

So much coheres - the suppression of memories as punishment, the sinister turn the fae take in winter (the cold! the endless cold from whence they came!), the nature of wellsprings hinted even from the start (where does all that energy come from?), the way Winter Altars grip the land in cold (encouraging you to lean more on winter units that ignore it) even as they protect and fortify ancient forests by making them impossible to burn... all camouflaged by surface explanations, the need for another punishment than execution for immortals, the common associations of winter fae, etc etc, even as they hint at the truth.

This is just, legit it's REALLY GOOD writing, the way you've wedded mechanics and story together. Good fucking show, thude.

Empowered critters are... A pain, in the Primal Plane. In small numbers, still little threat, but if you stumble upon a hoard of them? Or one of the special, Primal Plane unique monsters? Yikes.

Primal boost is a strange thing, is does not create any new or different units, but permanently enhances them and even changes their names without influencing their representation in many lists. You can still double-click a Primal Forest Guard in army view, for example, and all Forest Guards primal or not are selected. Basically nothing else in the game works like it.

You probably have to right-click and inspect the units individually, to find the Primal ones among them. Due to their increased Hp they tend to stay closer to the front-middle compared to their un-empowered counterparts.

I suspected that could have been the case. but I've not seen any actual improvements to the standard units from that effect at all. or them being turned into any other kind of unit in the unit list.

Every unit upgraded from a Forest Spirit counts as an animal and can profit from this ability, only exception are the Searing Hawks, as they no longer belong to the forest after what the Gnome Smiths did to them.

I alluded to it in the class description, all soldiers of the Court being animals with mind and soul, or something along those lines, but that is easy to miss, probably. The ability itself is not very impactful with how little units are empowered every turn, but it might give some ideas about visiting the Primal Plane with Forest Communion and Pathway between Worlds to upgrade a whole army there.

what units is the primal node ability of the upgraded wellsprings meant to improve? is it just normal animals that you need to befriend animal to get? or am I missing something?

Lol I love Auto spawning.

Indeed, there is that option, thanks lol

Right, directly above the mod name at the start of this site is the link, thanks Ddraig Lleuad. I wouldn't have known myself where to look for it at the moment, because I have my own link "My workshop" which I always use when needed.

@Faceless: I wanted to tone down my habit a bit to put (auto-spawn) roaming units everywhere in my mods, so I only used a select few for the 3rd level rituals. But when there are now people asking for more of it, how could I stop myself.

@Feraa if you scroll up to the top, there should be an option to go to 'Nathan Pascal's Workshop'. Or maybe this link would work? https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/profiles/76561198041235838/myworkshopfiles/?appid=1606340

Very cool mod! I would love to see some sorta of autospawn spell. Maybe something that spawns 2-3 fairies. that roam around. Maybe just make normal fairies semi-stupid. Maybe a second level to the tree that fairies spawn at from time to time.

Fair enough lol I've a question unrelated to the mod, though. Is there a way we could see all the mods you've made without scrolling through the workshop, hunting for your name? Your profile is private, so I can't do my usual route of going to the workshop additions via the profile lol

Update is out now. Team event problems are now solved thanks to HSmasher's advice. Also, now there is a new Commander for the Wild Hunt as promised and the casting of "Blood of the Stars" is much, much more powerful now.

Awaken the Wellspring can now be cast all year around, mostly because I want the AI to better use it. In my last game AI did quite well with the class, which is always nice. But in general it seemed a bit to restrictive for such an essential ritual.

And lastly, we returned to normal citadel recruitment for commanders. The auto-spawn system was way to inconsistent, too low in early game and too high in late game, although it still remains as a very rare event. With a higher recruitment rate for Princes and the additional Huntsmarshal offers this should be enough commanders, I hope.

With such high praises I get a bit nervous, my next class might not live up to the expectations I may have build up. But I am still very glad to hear how well the Forest Court is liked.

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However, I have a savegame warning for the next update, which will probably be uploaded in a day or two. A new commander type and some new unit variants added for the late game after "Blood of the Stars" has been cast will make the update incompatible with older savegames.

As always, I would recommend to copy the mod from the workshop directory into the native CoE folder [user]/AppData/roaming/coe5/mods/[insert The_Forest_Court folder here] to continue a game undisturbed by the update.

Now this... This is excellent. The amount of depth to it is remarkable, and the flavour is right up my alley. This single-handedly got me to pick up the game again. You've outdone yourself.

Mrm, more commanders, less commanders? Mrm. Maybe add some more commanders for summons, reduce the free spawn rate? Many other base game classes do summon commanders regularly, would not be out of place at all. Fairy Queen would be a natural candidate.

I think, by the..... 4th year in, I had 2 princes, a maiden, and a crone. I then lost that maiden shortly later to a deer tribe ambush, seizing an ancient forest. Rip. Lol

Maybe we just had really good rng. My buddy had a group of 13 commanders, 6 individual scout commanders, a crone and her 5 maidens... He was rolling in them. Granted, this was also about 10 years in. I'd say... it was about 2 commanders a year.

Also, yes. It's a blast to when that happens in our favor, even if it *does* make us that much more OP. I used to play campaigns as the Demonologist in which I specifically try to charm as many enemy commanders as I could using succubae lmao

Personally, I still somewhat struggled with commanders in my last game. I dunno if I just had bad RNG or if Verro had good RNG, but yeah. I certainly had MORE than I used to, but it wasn't as much as I prefer. That said, I did lose a few over time to random baddies that were being a nuisance.

Phew... I fixed the events for multiplayer, I think, added Dryad Groves to the 'Garden of the Fair Folk' ritual to be transformed back into an Ancient Forest, added a Wild Hunt Commander and made the absolute end-game quite a bit more impressive.

No idea when I find time to do a final test run again, I am always afraid I might have unintentionally broken something else while changing things. Well, I certainly would not break it intentionally, of course. You know what I mean.

That is very good to know, now I am somewhat relieved that I never used this particular mechanic in my work before, but I feel the pain of planning something awesome only to then discover it fails due to some weird technical quirk no one can explain. I hope you find a satisfactory solution for your next project.

Now I really have to check out your work.

I play almost exclusively multiplayer co-op these days so glad to help when I can. Another multiplayer anomaly worth mentioning, since I just found it not long ago, is the way rituals interact with variables is more limited in multiplayer than it is in singleplayer; you can increase and decrease as many variables as you want as many times as you want with a ritual in singleplayer - you can only increase and decrease a total of 1 variable each, once each, in multiplayer. I have no idea why; but it ended up breaking a system I spent an entire week working on in my next mod. I'd never used rituals to modify variables before, so it was very frustrating to discover.

Too many, noted. Might tone the numbers a tiny little bit down then. RNG is always really hard to predict and balance...

We had plenty of commanders on our last playthrough, enough we were using them as scouts. I'd almost say too many.

Huh, so many commenty while I was away.

RBrandon: Commanders are much more frequent currently, I think, but I have yet to see more feedback, maybe I am alone in this assessment. I will put a Wild Hunt commander on my list, and maybe I will find something for the absolute late-game too, although having sacrifices all year around already is a balance-breaking power spike in many ways. But yeah, just like with my Bloodmancer mod something there feels still missing, maybe. Glad you enjoyed it overall!

Feraa: I always was afraid of this possibility, but on the other hand it just is the madness we all love about CoE, must have been a cool game indeed.

HSmasher: There always is a little more to learn, I am grateful for the advice. I barely touched multiplayer in all my hours with the game, so these nuances still elude me, and events are their own beast entirely for me. I completely forgot that squareowner has its own event number, to be honest.

Oooh. I do so enjoy your two mods as well lol

For most things it also means you have to stick to squarevents over playerevents because playerevents have the same or a similar problem with teams.

Edit to below: 'once per player' should be 'once per player per square'

Hey, I saw your bug report with events, I encountered the same problem in my Baron mod and found a workaround; the problem is the game basically sees a team as one player with multiple simultaneous turns (and all involved classes played as well, to an extent), to get around this I have all of my 'once per player' events take place on an independent player's turn, since it can never have a teammate (I use '+player 29' just because I like the fluff of everything happening on El's turn) - also for things like +class use -3 or -4 situationally instead of -2, -2 just simply doesn't work for multiplayer. -3 and -4 will affect things properly in a way -2 doesn't.

I got lucky in one of my last games with this mod, as I managed to confuse one of the commanders of the Rakshaksha or whatever. This happened to be one of the Sacrifice using commanders, so not only did I have access to undead monkeys, but I also had year-round sacrifice collection lmao It's always nice when you can charm/enslave/confuse enemy commanders and reap their rituals and abilities.

Hey, really enjoyed the mod. Units and lore are a fun take on fairy tales - both the fantastic and the more sinister. A personal favorite of mine is the fairy knight. Love the idea of an absolutely minuscule knight shredding its foes and the whizzing assault is a fun attack.

Also enjoyed the [REDACTED] lore at the top end. Did think the payoff for getting the endgame online (after sovereign) was pretty weak, unless I'm missing something.

It also seemed to me that it was really difficult to get many commanders. I have not played since the change to commander recruitment so disregard if that is already solved. I also had the thought that the Wild Hunt could use its own themed commander.

Overall really quality stuff! Thanks for making it!

Ah, glad you could solve it. I just tested it and it worked fine, but since I only tested with myself as the only human player I could never have replicated this specific problem.

But after you solved it, it gave me another idea and now I understand the issue. Above in the description I warned against using two Forest Courts in a team, but the issue seems to be team games in general. Something about them messes with events that ask for the current player, as team players are considered the same player on a weird technical level, it seems.

I'll make a bug report in the forum about it. Thanks for letting me know, much appreciated.
And have fun with the game now!

So slight correction, the forest court must be in slot 1, host doesn't matter.

No, it did not, so that's likely the culprit then. We tried again with him hosting, and it appears whoever is host, it works for, so if multiplayer, just make sure the host is the forest court, and no problems! Thanks for your time!

Mm, multiplayer is always a bit strange with mods and especially modded classes, from what I have heard. Did the Spirit Wellspring turn into a Dormant Wellspring during Winter as it is supposed to?

Those have the collect sacrifice attribute, like any commander (Demonologist or Priest King, for example) would use it, nothing weird or fancy there. Mm, I will see if I can find something, but currently I have no real ideas on this, sorry.