r54 – Permanent Transformation

A new optional game setting has been added:  Permanent Transformation.  With the permanent TF mode enabled, the items and events that would normally turn you back to human cease to work.  For instance, Doc Nalf can’t change you back to human anymore and Krista’s humanify syringe fails.  Slugs can’t get their legs back just by losing to a fox.  You’re as stuck in your new form as most of the NPCs in The Underworld are.

Be warned, the new mode makes the story content largely unbeatable.  This mode is not intended for your first playthrough or for new players (and thus defaults off unless you specifically enable it during character setup in chapter skip).  Rather it is a “playable bad end” mode where you are guaranteed to get stuck in a particular form.  (Not to be confused with hard bad ends / game overs — these do not stop you from playing, only advancing.)  This mode is for when you want to go into one of the dungeons and become a permanent resident with the other denizens there 😉

Permanent TF Options

When creating your character (in Chapter Skip), you can choose one of the following options for transformation permanence:

• Normal – After initial transformation, you can transform to another species or back to human.
• Nonhuman Only – After initial transformation, you can transform to another species but NOT back to human.
• Permanent (Pure) – The first transformation you receive locks you to that kind of transformation for all body parts.  (My personal favorite and probably the best integrated, recommended to try this one)
• Permanent (Chimera) – Each body part is permanently stuck, but they can be mixed. This allows for hybrid forms like dracows, etc.

Pure permanent mode has a bonus suboption:  Redirect Blocked Transformations.  With this mode turned on, any blocked transformations will be converted to transformations of your destined form, making it harder to avoid your inevitable furry fate.  For instance, if you’ve started becoming a panda, eating catnip will make you even more of a panda instead of a catgirl.

New Defeat Logic + Scenes

Under the hood, a number of core game systems have been reworked to support permanent TF.  Best of all, this has improved regular mode playthroughs as well.  No longer will enemies try to transform you if you’re already transformed — now they’ll do a regular sex scene instead.

To support this, there’s three new basic defeat scenes available:  submissive sex with generic dicked NPC dom, submissive sex with generic NPC dom with vagina, and sex with mermaid swarm.  These should cover all the cases of enemies that can now skip trying to transform you if appropriate.  (More varieties and custom versions may be added later, too).

There’s also some brief scenes to handle you being stuck in permanent form: Sasha being unable to change you back in the farm, Krista being unable to change you back after the dragon temple, Doc Nalf unable to change you back at the hospital.

All of the above are fairly short, but add some nice flavor for your new permanent predicament.  All of the game’s included enemies and chapters / extended chapters have been updated to recognize when the player is in permanent TF / otherwise untransformable and should react accordingly.  So, for instance, if you’ve become a cow permanently and wander into the sewers, the titslugs & frogs should understand that and rather than try to change your species, will just do a regular sex instead.  Alpha Slugs won’t try to change your species if you’re already stuck as something else (even a non-sewer species), but will still offer to become your dom and try to make you into a breeder variant of your preexisting species.

Updated Mods

New methods are available to the modding system (technical details).  In terms of existing mods interacting with permanent TF:

• For transformation mods, I’ve gone ahead and taken the liberty of adding support to all publicly available transformation/species mods to support the new system (mod authors may want to see the above link to see what I did). I fixed up a few things while I was in there too, like adding support for Pig TF to add weight gain to the player as was previously referenced in the flavor text, fixing exceptions where I found them, etc.
• Simple monsters already support the system with no changes required.
• Advanced monsters (primarily just the wyverns) have not yet been updated to add a new player defeat scene to support losing to an untransformable opponent, but feel free to request it if you want it.

Misc

• Guards now recognize exposed udders as something they can grab.
• New text variable for grabbables.
• Fixed some tiny text spacing bugs.
• More automated tests, especially around all the permutations of permanent TF & always feminize mode.  This revealed a few previously unknown bugs, which have been fixed:
• Fixed bug where if you did a horse tf, then a something else tf, then returning back to horse tf, it will now correctly re-grow horse dick again (if not female).
• When player resetting back to starting characteristics (mostly only happens after hydra tf), your belly fat weight will be reset correctly as well.
• Fixed a bug with spider TF, where text referenced spider teeth TF, but actually it gave player spider ears (which aren’t a thing for spider, at least as originally written).