[Succulent] 2024-12-01-1620 is now available! (A New Beginning)

fearedbliss · Dec 1, 2024

Hello all,

I'm happy to announce Succulent 2024-12-01-1620! This contains a few last changes that will put a bow tie on Succulent, and starts a new era of maintenance, refinement, and stability. Almost from a perspective as if I was working at Blizzard North, but didn't have to worry about money. We could continue to learn, improve the game, refine it to its pure essence, while still keeping the original feeling, pureness, minimalism, and elegance of Diablo II 1.05b, 1.07/1.08, and 1.09b, and also taking learnings from 1.10.

2024-12-01-1620

Restored item level requirements back to their default values.
Restored the number 5's font to the original font.

As always, you can download the mod by visiting the Succulent page, or by visiting the Resource Manager.

The funny thing is that my original mission when I started to work on Succulent's ancestors was that I wanted to basically have pure Diablo II, but some things needed to be fixed, but it should be done in a mindful way (although I did go in a wild extreme over the years lol, it was fun lol). I went back to my old repos and looked at the first commit I made in Succulents ancestor's timeline. It reads:

Sun, May 6 16:53:25 2012 -0400
D2Enhanced 1.0b for 1.13c

I just wanted Diablo II ... but Enhanced lol. IIRC this timestamp is not necessarilly fully accurate since I think I may have started it a while before that, but I imported into version control on that date. Reason I suspect this is that a bunch of commits look like they are incremental backups of each D2Enhanced version leading up to the present. All of them have very close timestamps. But anyways, the last version of D2Enhanced released was "D2E 2.7b for 1.13c". After that my commit message says: Renamed mod to Vanilla Frosting, 1.00F for 1.13C. And I gave a reset to the version numbers. Many years later I ended up making some breaking changes with the stash sizes which I ended up just saying "let me make the breaking change by just considering Vanilla Frosting 'complete', and I'll give myself the opportunity to rename the mod, and make any breaking changes based on my current mindset and interpretation of my experience. Succulent was that continuation. So with this release, it finally feels like I've come back full circle but in a really nice and beautiful calming way. Succulent is faithfully making changes to the core Diablo II systems in a way that still feels respectful of the original spirit of what Blizzard North wanted, and of course this is my interpretation and biases of that experience, mixed in with my own mindfully watched desires.

Succulent includes all of the changes Singling has, and Singling is also mindfully made in that it tries to only contain non-gameplay modifications that don't affect the psychological state of the player, so this is a very fine balancing act of what should be allowed into Singling and I feel anytime you are trying to maintain some sort of "pure" or "legit feeling" experience, or using any tools or mods to carefully craft your experience, there is definitely a mental cooperation that needs to happen between the user, and the object of the discussion. So yea, Singling is pretty lean. Cactus is also as well, it archives everything and streamlines it in a way that tries to preserve everything just the way the authors made it, but make it completely accessible (especially in an offline way, drm free way). The only change Cactus makes to the original files is the no-CD fix provided by @galaxyhaxz (thank you <3), since modern computers don't normally come with CD drives anymore. Coming back to Succulent, you can see the layering approach used to carefully isolate responsabilities, at least in way that psychologically makes sense to me and makes me happy, _and_ provides some sort of modular architecture. The user can decide what type of experience they are willing themselves to experience. Do they want a strict just Vanilla approach? Are they fine with using something like Singling where there are no gameplay modifications, but it still improves on some technical aspects of the game, or some particular stuff (like create HC char without beaten SC, or CPU Fixes, or players command - with the last one being the most controversial if anything), or will the player be fine with jumping into a mod, but maybe it could be a mod that is still similar to the Vanilla experience, or at least in spirit and technical/conceptual application. Overall, one thing I've learned with these past 10+ years of development is that sometimes the best thing to do is to keep the essence of the goodness that you are experiencing, and try to faithfully and tactically implement improvements and changes where needed. Not for feature bloat, but to retain what you already love. And to not be scared to make any sort of change, but also to be mindful that having inbalances in games is actually part of the experience. To paraphrase Erich Schaefer, I remember him saying something along the lines that the imbalances in Diablo II are intentional, or that not everything needs to be balanced. Some characters have an easier time through the game in different situations, while others may have an easier time. The strategy that the imbalanced character would use to deal with the situation are actually interesting themselves. Therefore we don't need to have everything balanced. However, in the name of the art and mastery, when we take money out of the equation and just think about it from a pure love purespective, we would always strive to perfect ourselves, and not in a rushing way since I don't believe rushing to get mastery in anything is healthy, but rather to slowly and carefully take your time to live your life and perfect what you want to do over time, and live your present moment. There's a lot of stuff going on to it's nice to live your present. Of course, I'm coming back to Diablo II and smashing dem monsters, and that will be my present at that moment.

Jonathan