I wanted to post a mini review / feedback from my experience with a comparison between Vanilla Psycasts Extended (VPE) and Rimworld of Magic (ROM) which is another mod that adds magic to the game.

==Vanilla Psycasts Extended==
VPE adds a lot more utility, flexibility and choice to psycasting to the game and it is a much welcome fix to the poor implication of the DLC.

Pros
- The ability to unlock and expand other trees is a vast improvement on the original system, making your character a jack of all trades
-Access to unlock different focuses means that you have a lot more choices about character setup and pawn utility
-Anyone with a Psylink neuroformer can be a psycaster and they are able to be purchased by traders rarely
-Doesn’t add any new techs so you have all content unlocked right away.

Cons
-Meditation is really holding this mod back from being great. Focus is a bar that you can cast out of, it goes down over time and risen by meditating at your focus. This means every day the pawn needs to spend time at the focus and if you cast any skills, you need to spend more time there. Also, what makes this worse is that if your mediation gained is really high and it takes no time to gain it back, they still sit there while being full of focus.
-Due to the mass number of skills / trees that you have access to, your hotbar turns into small little squares that give you information overload. This can be mitigated by playsets, but that is such a manual task that will keep changing as you learn new skills and expand the number of casters in your colony.
-Some skills are super powerful, some are pretty useless

== Rimworld of Magic ==
ROM is a pretty massive mod, it adds a bunch of lower tier techs, 12 magic users, 6 physical type combat classes, gear and a bunch of stuff. The design on spellcasting is more on a few themed skills that you build up as you level instead of having a very wide range of skills. This means that you have less to understand while you invest time to build them up to become really powerful.
Mages cast from a mana bar that very slowly generates, if their bar gets too low then they start getting huge debuffs on their body. Where Physical classes have a bar that regens pretty quickly and are more locked behind timers on recast.

Pros
-Limits who can be a mage / physical class by a trait (makes it less common)
-Mages classes all generally have some kind of utility that is useful as well as offensive skills.
-Physical classes can be a strong frontline which is what core rimworld is missing
-There are strong healer mages that can cure wounds, remove scars, regrow limbs and even bring back the dead. Though they are generally not all on the same class

Cons
-Pawn can be really overpowered at times, going head-to-head with a whole raid and winning
-There is a lot of lower tier techs that are added which can be an issue if you use mods like “tech advancing”
-Fighting against magic users can be devastating to your colony
-There are elemental events which can summon constant attackers that you might not be able to deal with


==Which one?==
Right now, I have to say ROM feels a bit better to play due to mages feeling a lot more useful and less finicky than psycasters. I think what could fix this is reworking mediation, right now if you don’t meditate you lose all ability to do any casting and the higher the bar is the faster it goes down. This is a huge problem because it means that to be able to do anything you need to waste so much time doing nothing.

On top of that, meditation is linked to Solitary relaxation which you can get bored out of, spending more time on it and getting less focus back. Even if you have a full focus bar, you are only getting a very small number of skills off and you have a huge heat bar that is never close to being filled and empties rapidly.

Due to the fact that VPE goes wide with the number of skills instead of tall as ROM does it makes it visually harder to read plus a bit more hectic with understanding and using different skills. I would love to see this changed into focusing deeper on single trees instead of giving us access to all trees to a similar system to ROM. This could make each tree feel more unique and powerful.

Overall VPE is a much-needed expansion over the existing systems and I hope that it keeps getting worked on.