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Overview:
This is a mod for game Lab Rats (the original one). I really like the original game, but there are some things that bother me about it. The original game is full of low probability events that made me feel compelled to savescum, to my own diminished enjoyment.I decided it would be easier to fix the game than to fix my compulsion, so that's exactly what I did! The game still rolls plenty of dice, but overall it's much more predictable.
This is a mod for game Lab Rats (the original one). I really like the original game, but there are some things that bother me about it. The original game is full of low probability events that made me feel compelled to savescum, to my own diminished enjoyment.I decided it would be easier to fix the game than to fix my compulsion, so that's exactly what I did! The game still rolls plenty of dice, but overall it's much more predictable.
Updated: 6/11/2018
Game/Creator: /
Modder: ApolloM
Mod Version: 1.0.0
Game Version: 1.0.0
Language: English
Features:
If you're new to Lab Rats all you really need to know is that this mod will make the following changes to the feel of the game:
- Less reloading
- More sexy scenes
- A more rewarding strategic element
- A stronger focus on your own character's progression
- A more noticeable feeling of corruption for the girls as time goes on
- Less replayability. That's not a typo! You'll see more of what the game has to offer in a single playthrough with this mod, so you'll have less incentive to go back.
More detailed information including spoilers follow within the spoilers.
Influence and Resistance Changes
You'll encounter far more influence and resistance changing scenes in a playthrough of this mod, compared to the original. For this reason the magnitude of all such changes has generally been reduced substantially.
Serum Scene Difficulty Levels
In the original game, the further down the list an action was the more influence it earned. Sex would always earn more than flashing, for example. This is not always the case any more. Now every action is classified as either easy, medium, or hard according to its influence requirements versus the girl's influence score. Anything above her influence requirements is hard, anything within a short distance of her influence level is normal, and anything she's well past has become mundane and easy. The amount of influence earned is now based entirely on the difficulty *at the time*, and never on the 'absolute difficulty' of the action.
This means that convincing a girl to perform that first handjob is usually just as rewarding as the first sex. It also means that near the end of the game there may not be any advantage to sex over the handjob whatsoever, which I think is a good thing because I'd prefer to enjoy the scenes that most appeal to me at the time.
Player Character Progression
When I set out to create this mod I wanted to be able to enjoy the sexy scenes more, but there's a problem: the game only gives you a limited number of actions. Adding character progression seemed like a logical addition to make this possible. As you gain experience brewing serums you will become more skilled at it, allowing you to create more serums per action.
Red Serum
Part of what I wanted to do was to make the game more strategic by making advanced serums more useful. In the original game I rarely found a great reason to bother with them at all. To encourange the use of Red serum I had to make it cheaper to produce, so now you spend fewer blue serums creating them and you also gain two vials of Red for each action brewing them. On top of that, the price of advanced serum supplies has gone down slightly, and there is a special late-game ability to haggle the prices down even further!
In addition to making it easier to acquire, I made Red serum stronger in its niche. Now, Red serum has an even harsher resistance penalty, but it also the only way to make a girl perform a hard action. Hard actions are worth a lot of extra influence compared to normal, so they can allow you to supercharge a girl's corruption. As a side effect of the new serum scene difficulty levels, it's worth noting that there is no difficulty higher than hard, ever. In a sense this turns Red serum into a proper mind-control drug, capable of making even completely pure girls do whatever you like.
Purple Serum
Just like Red serum, Purple serum is now much cheaper and easier to produce. And, just like Red serum, its niche has been strengthened. Now Purple serum causes even less resistance gain, but girls will barely be affected by it at all. Only easy actions will be possible on Purple serum. As it happens, in the very last stretch of the game a girl usually finds every action easy, so eventually there's nothing but upside.
Special Trainings
Compared to the original game, the basic difficulty of any action is probably exactly the same. However, many scenes now become easier according to various special trainings you've performed with a girl. There were a scant few examples of this in the original game, but now its quite common. In addition to this, the minimum influence required to begin special trainings has been lowered from 60 down to 45. This was done because with all the other changes, getting a girl above 100 influence is a real challenge.
Resistance
It works the same way it always did, but in my experience the balance in the original game felt way off. The original game provided you a very limited number of ways to reduce resistance which you'd quickly use up, then a girl could basically hit a wall and end up with high resistance that effectively locked her out of the rest of the game. I've made a few minor tweaks to resistance lowering scenes to make them last a bit longer before becoming useless, and I've also made it so that high resistance scores can cause greater daily drops in resistance. You'll still need to manage resistance very carefully, especially since you're probably going to repeat scenes quite a lot more often than you did before, but it should *feel* a lot better now.
Event Probabilities
In the original game Vren had a system that made the chances of any given event more likely the more times in a row that they failed to trigger, but then reset the chances back to normal when they did trigger. Many events in the game still work this way, but I've taken that idea and expanded upon it with something that I call "growth events". Basically, some events now get permanently slightly more likely to trigger in the future each time they are triggered. This has a really cool effect on the feeling of the game: now girls really feel like they're getting more and more corrupt. It feels as though they're becoming more comfortable approaching you for sex (in the shower, after sleeping in or napping, at bed time, etc), and perhaps getting more and more desparate for your attention.
In addition to those changes, most events have had their probabilities tweaked in some way or another. In general the aim was to make things less rare, without going overboard.
Cash
Whereas the original game seemed to want to force you to think very carefully about where you spent you money, causing sensible players to probably miss a lot of great scenes, this mod tries to make most things attainable in the same playthrough. Cash will still take some managing, but some particularly expensive events have become cheaper, and so has advanced serum supplies and Mom's Monday morning offers.
Time
Part of an effective power-gaming strategy involves not wasting time, but the original game had a lot of great scenes hidden behind low-probability events. I've already addressed this issue in many cases by making events more probable (or making them into growth events), but I didn't want to basically turn everything up near 100% because that would have made things feel like a cheat mod. Instead, I went back and changed things so that many actions no longer advance the clock if nothing comes of it.
Texting a girl no longer costs an action. Finding Lily not home no longer costs an action. Finding a girl in the Lab and choosing to just have a quick chat instead of doing something usually doesn't cost half a day.
These changes are not particularly exploitable. Generally if dice-rolls are involved I've made sure the results are stored and repeated, and that's if the menu option is even still available. You won't be able to spam all sorts of actions in one time period and get ten times what you normally would out of it.
Specific Changes You Might Not Notice
Since most events aren't really referenced in any dialog, some of my minor changes might go completely unnoticed. The three specific examples that spring to mind follow:
* Lily's event when playing video games can now trigger during mornings.
* Nora won't stay back late at the lab on Friday evenings.
* Steph won't come in early to the lab on Monday mornings.
* If you go to the lab in the afternoon and find the girls out to get drinks, choosing to tidy things up to impress them can guarantee a successful trigger of the Steph & Nora threesome action later on the same day, if you try for it.
Installation:
- Download the official release of Lab Rats from Vren's Patreon (and become a patron if you're not already!)
- Download the zip file for this mod.
- Extract the mod files into the 'game' directory of the full game, overwriting the original files for each conflict.
- Launch the game like you would normally.
Change-Log:
CHANGE-LOG HERE. DELETE IF NO CHANGE-LOG AVAILABLE
FAQ:
Can I load save games from the vanilla release?
No.