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While I'm loath to discuss something as potentially game breaking as this, however I think the best way to solve a problem is to discuss it in public. As such, I'm going to explain exactly how you can, as a cultist, gain access to every single cult power in under five minutes. All you need is some time, and a room all to yourself. Then I'm going to suggest ways to solve this issue.
Addendum: I don't know how well know this is, I discovered it by chance but I digress.
The intended system behind brute forcing the cult magic system is to enter a word into the tome and see if it creates a working rune, you test it and if it works you go ahead, if it does not you have to heal the hefty damage and do the next line.
To understand how this trick works you require a understanding of how cult runes appear and work to an extent, so I'll make it simple.
- If you create a rune that will not work, it will generate a randomly made rune and rune colour.
- If you create a rune that works, it will create a bold blue/red rune that will always be the same rune (So the EMP rune will always appear as that sprite)
The only runes that are a exception to this rule are the armour/shell runes. They always appear as a randomly coloured rune, but that does not change anything.
It takes five minutes for one person, who knows what they are doing, to get every single cult power. It takes even less time if they only get words they specificly want (As in under a minute if they only solve one or two words).
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How do we solve this?
Your first answer would be to say "Why don't we just make all the runes randomly coloured"?
Sadly that would not work. Cause even if you still had to test each rune in succession (as intended) you can still heal the damage and get one or two words in short order, or all of them if you get a healing bot (Or steal a medkit). On average I can test two runes before I have to use one healing item, so in a best case scenario I could test thirty runes per medkit.
The second possible answer would be to simply kill/crit a cultist if they get the wrong rune. That would work, but that would be very damn punishing, not to mention if you get told the wrong words and/or someone decides to "troll" you by intentionally handing out the wrong words.
A final answer I can think of is to make triggering a false rune drain a lot of blood from the player, meaning you could only get away with one or two before your blood is very low. Sadly that would require a medical overhaul to do (Goon med anyone?)
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Call it an exploit or intended behaviour. But access to all cult powers in under five minutes seems to powerful in my opinion.
Thanks for reading.