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The Problem and The Plan
🕑 Added 2025-09-20 11:45:16 +0000 UTCSo Darkest Dungeon is a weird game with some very quirky mechanics. Modding it is both very simple and very difficult at the same time somehow: Some things are far easier than other games, and other things become excruciating to try to do.
The Puppetmaster, sadly, has fallen into the latter. Let's go from the beginning to see where the problem is:
We begin the fight. The Puppetmaster immediately summons the Understudies. The fight continues, and after the end of the first round the puppetmaster uses its grab move: It forces you to select which heroine it will steal from you.
Houston, we have a problem. See, in the base game the only enemy that does something similar to this is The Hag -- she targets a random hero, initiates a capture attack at them, and the Cauldron is coded to say "I'm a valid captor_empty for this!"
... But what happens if we have three cauldrons? The problem is that the puppetmaster can target a heroine for a grab move, but it can't target a specific Understudy to be the recipient of it.
Here's what happens:
Puppetmaster uses its grab move
Heroine is selected by the player
Puppetmaster initiates the grab move
Heroine is removed from the party
All three Understudies each say in unison "I'm a valid captor_empty for this!"
Aaaaand you end up with this. One hero removed, all three empty understudies magically filled. We're out here printing crusaders.
This is a funny bug, right up until you release the captives. Your party only has 1 empty slot to fill, and suddenly 3 crusaders to fill it with. It releases one, then another, and immediately gets confused and--
"Where do you want me to put this crusader?! There's no rank for that, that's an invalid rank!"
Then subsequently:
"Woah woah woah why do we have three crusaders now?!"
And from here the game bugs out hilariously. You can't move forward, you can't progress the fight, you can't interact with anything -- you get soft-locked and have to end the quest.
So what do we do?
Once again, friends, we must consult the dark magicks of DD modding. Specifically what we're going to use is a Size 0 enemy.
What the hell is a size 0 enemy?
As you know, every enemy in Darkest Dungeon has a size. Size 1 means it takes up 1 rank, size 2 (Like the Hag and the Cauldron!) take up 2 ranks, and size 4 (Like Thing From The Stars!) takes up 4 ranks. But did you know there's a secret fifth size?
If you give an enemy a size of 0 they will be spawned into the fight, but they won't be visible nor interactible. They're a ghost!
You can do fun things with this.
So here's the plan:
Instead of summoning three valid captor_empty understudies at the start of the fight, we summon 1 real captor_empty and 2 fake ones. Let's revisit our previous 'what if?':
Puppetmaster uses its grab move
Heroine is selected by the player
Puppetmaster initiates the grab move
Heroine is removed from the party
Only one of the understudies says "I'm a valid captor_empty for this!" the understudy is filled.
At the same time, the Puppetmaster summons a Size0 enemy with 10HP off-screen. Let's call him... Bill.
Bill has 10HP and an on-spawn effect: When he spawns, target one of the fake understudies and transform it into a real one.
Bill also has a second on-spawn effect: Do 10 damage to himself.
Bill does not get to enjoy existence for very long.
Then, on round two, when Puppetmaster uses another grab, Understudy 2 will be the only valid captor_empty and we get to summon a second Bill to transform the third one!
Et voilà!
Thus, we have solved the awkward problem of grab attacks in this game being strange, bizarre, and difficult to work with!
I hope you enjoyed reading this, and I hope it also serves to explain why it takes so long to make lewd animations happen in Darkest Dungeon.
Kindly,
Ancestress
Comments
Martin Johansen
This is hillarious, and also how I would have solved it as ibwas comming up with ideas halfway through
Rubber Duckie
I remember Black Reliquary did something similar to fix this problem with their Alrune enemy…
