Korax Mod News

A quick demonstration of playing Deathkings in Korax Mod 5.3 is available on YouTube.

Korax Mod 5.3 is now available on SourceForge and ModDB.

New loot bag system

• Instead of specific monster types dropping predefined items, all monsters now have a chance to drop loot bags of varying sizes
• Adventurer’s Pouch: can contain mana, a few silver, and low-tier artifacts like a Flechette
• Adventurer’s Sachel: in addition to the pouch contents, it can also contain some instant health or food, a gold bar or two, and mid-tier artifacts like a Porkelator
• Adventurer’s Knapsack: in addition to the pouch and satchel contents, it can also contain a large amount of gold, a top-tier artifact like an Icon of the Defender, and even a highly valuable potion that permanently increases your stats

Quality of Life improvements

• Fixed the root cause of the long-elusive bug that caused the world and interfaces to sometimes recall the wrong player class or RPG complexity upon loading a saved game
• You can now start the game in any episode: after setting up your character, you pick your starting hub and will be automatically leveled up and outfitted to an appropriate degree
• Armorer’s hammer can now always be used, regardless of the condition of your armor, and it repairs a percentage depending on difficulty and RPG complexity
• Upon leveling up, the player now receives some mana. The amount depends on level, difficulty and RPG complexity
• On higher RPG complexities, leveling up also reduces the player’s Hunger and Fatigue by an amount determined by difficulty and RPG complexity
• New menu options to automatically assign points on leveling up, to select the detail level of the loot bag pickup message, and to set the threshold where you can start using Armorer’s Hammers

Limited Deathkings support

• You can now play through the Hexen expansion Deathkings of the Dark Citadel, starting the game in any episode you want
• You start at a high level, with all your weapons/spells/class abilities, as well as a few useful artifacts in your inventory
• Instead of shops, you can spend your money to replace your armor with a brand new one any time
• Not being able to modify the maps means the total number of monster variations is limited to that of the original Hexen; to shake things up, the following changes have been made:
  • Standard Ettins have been replaced with Ettin Commanders (whose damage and health has been lowered by about a third)
  • Centaurs have been replaced with Flame Centaurs
  • Slaughtaurs have been replaced with Spectral Centaurs
  • Afrits have been replaced with Afrit Leaders
  • Dark Bishops have been replaced with Dark Cardinals (whose health has been slightly increased)
  • Death Wyverns had their health massively increased

Korax Mod 5.2 is now available on SourceForge and ModDB.

Korax Mod 1.0, the first ever gameplay mod for Hexen, was released exactly twenty years ago on June 14, 2001. To celebrate this occasion, a special 20th Anniversary Edition has been released today that includes a unique in-game menu called “Anniversary Extras”, containing a short history of Korax Mod, a long-lost interview, and player feedback from the early years.

Improvements and fixes:

• The inventory and spellstrip movement bug has been finally fixed
• When RPG Complexity is set to Off, instead of the useless weight/hunger/fatigue indicators a new overlay is shown, displaying the current values of all six D&D abilities
• Healing prayer now doesn’t deduct Faith if the player is at full health
• Create Mana cantrip now doesn’t deduct Magic if the player has full mana stores
• The default roll is now more suitable for the early game
• Feedback messages for class abilities are now always displayed in the top left corner
• All class abilities now respect the sound setting
• Improved the behaviour of the gimme cheats for gaining levels and acquiring all class abilities

Korax Mod 5.1 is now available on SourceForge and ModDB.

Character creation improvements

• The character creation process has been overhauled: rerolls are now standardized across classes, with the sum total of all attributes always the same
• When RPG Complexity is set to off, the roll screen is disabled and the starting attribute values are significantly higher, avoiding the gimped attributes in the early game

Sidekick improvements

• Sidekick NPCs attacks and spells don’t damage the player any more
• The experience from monsters killed by a sidekick NPC now goes to the player
• On Old school RPG Complexity, this experience gain is dependent on difficulty setting: on hard, you only get half the experience than if you’d have killed the monster yourself; on easy, you get double the amount

Player tuning

• The Phalanx martial skill now allows the player to move slowly; in turn, its cost has been increased and its duration decreased
• Spirits Within behaviour optimized and the feedback message now makes clear what exactly happened
• Armor kits now restore 25% more durability
• Animated weapons now react more quickly to player input, most notable the Mage’s Thunderstaff
• Player’s Fireball spell damage slightly increased

Monster tuning

• Dark Advisors don’t resurrect on death any more
• Ettin Commander’s hammer throw now lights up the monster, giving a visual cue he’s about to throw a hammer
• Ettin Commander’s hammer damage greatly reduced
• Lava Dweller’s damage damage greatly reduced
• Ranged animation timings have been modified for some ettin and class boss types.

New options

• Options submenus have been reshuffled and a new section introduced (visual options)
• You can now separately enable and disable screen flashes on damage, screen flashes on item pickup and screen tint effects from other sources (like berserking, being poisoned or under the effects of mana burn)
• The sound effects of class abilites can now be switched on and off
• In addition to the on/off switch for the automatic use of health potions, there is now a second setting (autohealth cooldown) to determine whether to use only one potion per damage trigger

Miscellaneous improvements

• Like Scattered Evil 2.0, KMOD 5.1 is shipping with the latest Vavoom 1.34 release (GNU/Linux binaries are already 64-bit, Windows 64-bit binaries will be added in a future release)
• Ported improvements from Scattered Evil 2.0 (mostly autohealth and berserking related)
• Heresiarch damage skin visuals added
• Lowered the upper limit on the sum of red and green screen tint effects and the strength of damage flashes
• The distribution now includes the full Vavoom documentation as PDF files

Inspired by Hexen creator Raven Software’s top-down action game MageSlayer, today we are introducing Korax Mod: MageSlayer Edition.