I have been searching the net for any information I can find on how to implement wands that can be equipped as weapons. I can make the item in baseitems but cannot fathom how to tell the engineto use them for attacking (ie, cast their spell). Any insight would be appreciated.
Good jobs on all the great content.
If you can post the line of the baseitems.2da or even the whole file we could take a look there if maybe there’s one option that was not set correctly.
Edit: Wait, what do you mean for “attacking”? Like a weapon? Or an item use to target an object and cast a spell on it?
What you can do with wands (or rods) is to make them off-hand equippable, and such that they must be equipped in order to use them or gain their powers or abilities. For example, an equippable Wand of Missiles must be equipped in the off-hand in order to use it to cast Magic Missile. As far as I know, that’s pretty much it.
I did this a dozen years ago, so I don’t remember exactly how it’s done offhand (pun not intended :)). But I use these extensively in Sanctum of the Archmage. (The modules’ most important item, the Control Rod, is implemented in exactly this way.) I’ll go look at the baseitem.2da entry in Sanctum to remind myself how it’s done and follow up.
I went back to look at this again, and I think the only substantive changes needed to baseitems.2da are to the Equippable Slots field, and (maybe) to the “Weapon Size.” If you set equippable slots to 0x00020 (off-hand) that should do it. (I tried setting rods to 0x00030, but I don’t think that made any difference.) I used weapon size 2 for wands and 3 for rods, but that’s something you might want to experiment with. Changing AC_Enchant will let you set the type of any AC bonuses you put on them when equipped (I used 3 for “shield”). Other things you might play with are the maxprops and itemprops.2da entries for them.
Hope that helps!