ArchaeologyKit 2.0.3b, Beta Prelease

NEW in this update

• Fixed Ancient era mission objective for Forgotten Hollow
• Improved Archaeology Dig social event and museum docent interactions
• Increased chance of finding relics on specific lots from 1:25 to 1:15
• Some missions moved from level 2 to 3 in the Museum Archaeologist mission career
• Additional bug fixes, feature additions

About the Archaeology Dig social event

You can either hire or select sims that have Archaeology skill level 6 and higher to go along on the dig. TIP: The Museum Docents all have Archaeology skill 6, so if you visit museums and get acquainted with some of them, you can select them to help with Dig events (for free).

When the event starts, there will be one dig pile spawned for each archaeologist at the event. They will all route to them and begin establishing a dig site, and then excavating dirt clumps. If there are a lot of archaeologists involved, it might get a little chaotic while they sort out which dig pile they are going to work on, but they will all eventually find something to do.

As they find dirt clumps in the dig piles, they will get a star above their head with a number between 1 and 5, as shown above in the screenshot. This indicates how many dirt clumps they currently have. They can hold a maximum of 5, and if they find more than that, they are discarded.

Your host sim can select Collect Archaeological Finds on them, and the other sim will give them all of the dirt clumps they currently have. The expedition Host will do this autonomously if you let them.

For the goaled version of the event, my advice is to focus on trying to find two authentic artifacts in the eight hours you have to do it. It’s more challenging to do this in 8 hours than I expected. There are more goals available than usually show up, and I’m still working on that part of it.

Both the goaled and non-goaled versions of the event are likely going to leave your sim with a dozen (or several dozen) dirt clumps, which should hopefully lead to enough to pay the rent for the rest of the season.

I made relics easier to find, after I had to to extract 31 dirt clumps to find Brave Sir Robin’s Amulet during testing one very long day. It stopped being fun after extracting 14 of them, so this should be an improvement.

I also moved the Forgotten Hollow mission from the Ancient categories to Medieval, for general backstory reasons having to do with events that took place after the medieval battle described in Smede, Vol 3. Speaking of Smede, most of the books have had text entries added with additional historical material.

Note

The suit of armor has a problem. You can’t always authenticate it indoors, since the height of the armor and the archaeology bench together is taller than the ‘normal’ sized wall height. When you try to authenticate it indoors in a small-walled room, it fails to start. I’m not sure what to do about this yet. 

It works fine if the walls are tall enough or outside. But I’m not sure how to detect the ceiling height of a room in the mod’s code so that I can provide an explanation to the player. I could just remove the suit of armor as an artifact, but I like it, lol. It’s the perfect artifact. So, not sure about that yet.

Change Notes

• 6/23/2022, 2.0b, First beta preview release
• 6/26/2022, 2.0.1b, Beta preview release, added Send Away for Authentication interaction, more Moonwood Mill integration, added the ability to sell artifacts to Museum Docents.
• 7/7/2022, 2.0.2b, New Sulani cultural artifacts, relic bug fixes and improvements, improvements to museum docent situation, improvements to Study for Historical Insights interaction, Brindleton Bay mission objective label corrected
• 7/17/2022, 2.0.3b, Fixed Ancient era mission objective for Forgotten Hollow, further work on archaeology dig social event and museum docent interactions, increased chance of finding relics on specific lots from 1:25 to 1:15, some missions moved from level 2 to 3 in the museum archaeologist mission career, additional bug fixes