Mod — Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

Arcanum New Balance
ARPG Obscura

  • ⚙️ Mod
  • 🗡️ ARPG
  • 🧙 Arcanum CE

Arcanum New Balance — preview

Arcanum CE — ARPG Obscura is a comprehensive gameplay overhaul for Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, built on top of the open-source Arcanum Community Edition reimplementation by Alexander Batalov. It transforms Arcanum's classic RPG systems into a deep action-RPG experience without changing the original story, world, or writing.

ARPG Itemization

Every item in the world now rolls with a rarity tier — Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Unique, Set and Cursed — each granting random affixes that modify stats, resistances, damage, and skills. Six item sets are hidden across the world; equipping multiple pieces of a set unlocks escalating bonuses and on-hit procs. Bosses have guaranteed unique drops (not yet implemented). A new floating tooltip shows all stats, affixes, and set progress at a glance. Unique items are build enabling and very strong — the chance for them to appear in shops/NPC inventories is 0.1%.

ARPG Crafting

Monsters with rarity can drop magical orbs on the ground on top of their body. These orbs are used by moving them in the inventory onto equippable (non-quest) items. There are 8+ orbs in total:

  • Orb of Awakening — recreates a white item with rarity
  • Identification Scroll — reveals the rarity on an item
  • Cursed Orb — modifies an item unpredictably
  • Orb of Cleansing — removes rarity from an item
  • And more… similar to Path of Exile (Divine Orbs etc.)

You can craft items up to EPIC quality. Sets and Uniques can only be dropped, not crafted.

Overhauled Magic

All 16 schools of magic now have a distinct combat identity. Every school's signature spell deals damage through a unique mechanic: Fire ignites for burn-over-time, Force chains lightning to nearby enemies, Water slows and freezes, Earth poisons, Mental confuses, Phantasm terrifies, Temporal acid-burns and stuns, and so on. Nature's transform forms (Wolf, Lizard, Bear) are fully redesigned as a melee-damage school — each form trades mobility or survivability for powerful on-hit effects.

Inspiration: Arcanum Equalibrium / Terror's Arcanum by TheDragon13 (heavily changed). Not all spells are changed, and some strong spells are untested.

Blood Magic

Necromancy school was always busted. So I changed the mana for life. It's actually funny and still strong. Enjoy.

Tech Rebalance

Firearms are heavily rebalanced with unique distinct combat identities:

  • Knockback — 15% knock prone, 5% knockdown (sniper / elephant gun / tech hammer)
  • Shotgun — multi-target spread hit
  • Flamethrower — AoE splash damage and burn ticks
  • Pyro axe / gun — bonus fire damage
  • And more…

Inspiration: Shark (community member on Arcanum Discord) — with permission. Thank you!

Monster Rarity

Enemies roll as Magic, Rare, or Unique with randomized bonus types: Vampiric, Thorned, Swift, Berserker, Shielded, and more. Unique monsters have procedurally generated titles. Difficulty and loot quality scale with monster rarity. Rare monsters are especially important for orb drops used in crafting.

New Playable Races

Dark Elf, Ogre, Orc, and Lizard Man are restored from cut content and fully playable, with working body types, portraits, and dialog reactions. Each has unique racial stats matching their lore.

Implemented from UAP by Drog Black Tooth + additional Orc art files from F-man (Discord community) — with permission. Thank you!

New Weapon Classes

  • Unarmed weapons (gauntlets, claws) with scaling damage and on-hit effects
  • Throwing weapons with damage-over-time properties by type (bleed, poison, fire)
  • Staves that channel spells on equip, granting lower-tier college spells as active abilities
  • Thorns items (chest, boots, helmet, shield)

Quality of Life

An in-game F9 overlay documents all mod systems for new players. Engine bugs from the original game are fixed throughout. Many UAP fixes re-applied to CE.

New Stats: Life on Hit, Poison on Hit, Fire on Hit, Acid on Hit, Bleed on Hit, Thorns, and more — visible in the character sheet.

Tooltip system: Custom tooltips can display much more text. There is a bug that will sometimes leave graphical fragments on item hover until the inventory is closed — not game-breaking, will be fixed later.

Map System & Endgame: Work-in-progress map system inspired by Path of Exile. Vormatown implemented into the base game (F-Man, with permission). Level cap 99. After the slideshow, the game ports you back to Shrouded Hills and gives you the first map. Maps work like orbs — move onto any equippable item to teleport into a map zone with strong enemies.

Endgame Rift System

Entering the Rift

  • Obtain Map: Hunt high-level monsters (Level 30+) in the main world. Magic, Rare, and Unique enemies have increased drop rates for the Map of the Void.
  • Activate: Drag the Map of the Void onto any equippable item to consume it and open a Rift.

Inside the Rift

  • Distinct Themes: Every Rift rolls one of 5 types: Physical, Fire, Poison, Magic, or Void. The map layout displays thematic scenery and applies matching combat modifiers.
  • Scaled Difficulty: Fight customized pools of monsters (demons, golems, void lizards, automatons). Spawn counts and monster tiers scale up with the active Rift Tier.

Rewards & Exit

  • Loot Chest: Clearing all monsters spawns a Reward Chest containing scaling gold, crafting orbs, high-rarity equipment, a new Map of the Void (pre-upgraded to the next Tier), and a Void Portal Stone.
  • Return Home: Drag the Void Portal Stone (consumed) or the Map of the Void onto any equippable item to teleport back to your exact entry point in the main world.

Screenshots

Installation

The mod is now UAP 2.0.2 compatible.

  1. First install UAP into your original game — see terra-arcanum.com/drog/uap.html#notes.
  2. Then extract my mod on top of it, and replace if prompted.
  3. Everything goes into the folder that holds the original .exe — you can't break anything.
  4. Launch from the new arcanum-ce.exe.

Requirements

Same as the original game.

Shoutouts

Big thanks to everyone keeping Arcanum alive over the years:

  • Alexander Batalov — Arcanum Community Edition
  • sevdestruct — UI fixes for Arcanum CE
  • Drog Black Tooth — UAP
  • F-Man — Orcs art, Vormatown
  • Shark — Tech rebalance inspiration
  • TheDragon13 — Arcanum Equalibrium / Terror's Arcanum
  • CDude, harleyfolgado, Barbarbrick, Jen, and everyone on the community Discord. Viktor

Changelog

Version 0.6.1 — 2026-06-27

Experimental compatibility with UAP 2.0.2!

✨ New

  • Custom leveling schemes for AI followers.
  • Setting to turn off combat music.
  • All AI can now use summoning spells and shapeshifting!
  • NPCs buff before the fight — they now buff themselves before combat, and hopefully don't spam spells too much.

🔧 Fixes

  • Swarm of Spiders portrait loss fixed.
  • Throwing flat 4 AP fixed.
  • Stiletto now ignores resistances.
  • Dweomer Shield / Reflection Shield can no longer be cast on mind-controlled/summoned NPCs.

⚖️ Balance

  • Shapeshifted NPCs can no longer cast spells, for balance reasons.
  • Monster resistance capped at 95%.
  • Flood (Magic Water, 2nd tier) reworked — now fatigues the target, removes 4 fatigue and applies a -2 DEX debuff. Good on "water mana" power-fantasy builds (early game — but you can drain from fatigue even larger enemies, for a cost ;)).

2026-06-21

✨ New

  • Custom fullscreen main-menu background — the image stretches across the whole screen at any resolution, buttons stay centered. Switched to true-color BMP (sharp colors), "cover" aspect (no 4:3 distortion), hid the leftover in-menu game bar, background applied in the Single Player submenu too.
  • Imbue runes — 5 elemental runes (fire/poison/lightning/physical/void). Drag a rune onto a weapon → engraves a permanent bonus. Elemental runes convert all of the weapon's damage to their type + a flat bonus; the void rune = utility (fatigue). Max 1 rune per weapon, icon + description in the tooltip.
  • Quest "Five Sigils" (Viktor) — clear one rift of each of the 5 types → Viktor unlocks selling imbue runes. Progress is reported on every rift entry.
  • Endgame swarm rifts — physical and poison rifts are now hordes (more enemies, closer to the player) instead of a slow trickle.

🔧 Fixes

  • Gate to Gilbert Bates' estate — the guard let you in but the fence gate stayed locked. Now it unlocks after permission ("The gate unlocks.").
  • Set items from endgame chests showed no set bonus (turquoise name but no set info). Fixed — they now show piece count and bonuses and count toward set effects.
  • Weapon speed affixes were reversed — "Swift"/"Fleet" weapons made the weapon slower instead of faster. Now correct (higher speed = faster).
  • Merchant empty after a few days (Shrouded Hills general store) — completely empty stock after a few in-game days. Fixed, restock works.
  • Five Sigils couldn't be completed — reward/progress didn't count for most rift enemies (boars, spiders, elementals). Now the rift completes on killing any type.
  • Runes didn't unlock in the shop after turning in the quest. Fixed — they appear on the next restock.
  • Five Sigils — the dialog was missing the option to accept the quest. Fixed.
  • Reward chest didn't spawn after save/load mid-rift. Fixed.
  • Master Rune duplicated on repeated rift entry. Fixed.
  • Crashes on random encounters — fixed 3 causes (uninitialized slots, hard exit on spawn failure, bad coordinates). Encounters no longer crash.
  • Swarm of Spiders didn't disappear after fatigue ran out (invisible live spiders, lingering portraits). Fixed — the spell ends before you fall unconscious, summons vanish cleanly. Plus an invisible-summon fix.
  • Meditation didn't work (self-target) — fixed (15 HP → 30 fatigue).
  • Read Aura description fixed (leftover damage text).
  • Scroll Speed in settings reset when leaving the menu. Fixed.

⚖️ Balance

  • Endgame reward scaling — the first chest no longer dumps uniques/sets right away (previously ~39% chance). Gentler curve with a cap, max 1 set/unique per chest. First chests are mainly rare/epic; rare drops are genuinely rare and don't flood into all-set at high tier.
  • Rune prices (~2g → 350–400g) and XP for Viktor's quest 4× (2500 → 9900).
  • Read Aura cost 15 → 20.

⚡ Performance

  • King's Inn (Dernholm) FPS drop (60→0) — rarity/set stats scanned NPC inventory dozens of times per tick. Single-pass fix, ~9× faster, FPS restored.

2026-06-17

Uniques

  • Uniques expanded 5 → 10 (5 weapon / 5 armor) with affixes + build-enabling procs. World-random drop only (2% base).

Main-Menu Background

  • Fullscreen custom BG: Art over 600px tall now stretches across the whole screen; buttons stay centered. Two windows — opaque fullscreen BG + transparent centered menu overlay.
  • True-color path: 8-bit .ART rendered brown → added true-color BMP path (tig_video_buffer_load_from_bmp + bilinear blit). menu.bmp → MainMenuBack.bmp across 4 data roots.
  • Follow-up fixes: (a) action bar visible/clickable at bottom → BG window ALWAYS_ON_BOTTOM → ALWAYS_ON_TOP; (b) BG vanished on Single Player submenu → gate widened to MAINMENU / SINGLE_PLAYER / PICK_NEW_OR_PREGEN.
  • Aspect fix: On 4:3 (800×600) the 16:9 image was squished → CSS-cover style crop (no float drift).

Options

  • Scroll Speed reset bug: Getter read perception-based scroll distance (0 in menu) so the slider snapped to min. Now reads/persists the highres config ScrollDist and applies live.

Debug Hotkeys (testing)

  • Ctrl+F10: Boost character to level 30.
  • Ctrl+F11: Force-complete the main story — drops you back to the start with the game flagged as finished. Testing only.

Spells

  • Swarm of Spiders: Count 9 → ~4–5. Summons now reliably dismiss on spell end and always render visible (no more invisible or stuck spiders).
  • Read Aura: Cost 15 → 20.
  • Divination: Slot 5 → "Identify".

Engine Crash Fixes

  • World-map random encounters no longer crash: skip-and-log on object create failure, zero all 5 encounter slots (was leaving slots 1–4 as garbage), and fixed spawn-offset coordinate packing for larger groups.

Performance

  • King's Inn (Dernholm) FPS 60 → 5 → 0: Root cause was stat queries running ~63× O(inventory) passes per stat lookup. Fix: single inventory pass dispatched by item location. ~9× faster, FPS restored, functionally identical. All perf instrumentation removed.

Meditation + Read Aura

  • Meditation (self-target): Did nothing — self-target spells never reach the on-target hook. Moved to BEGIN hook. 15 HP → 30 fatigue.
  • Read Aura: Description fixed (no longer claims damage).

NPC Rarity Level Gate

  • UNIQUE/SET rolls only on NPC critters level ≥ 30.

Resist Affix Nerf

  • 11 resist affixes pulled from 15–40% down to an 8–15% band. Lesser (Fireproof / Insulated / Venomproof) → 10, Spellward → 8, Sanctified → 12, Grounded / Blazeward → 15, cursed (Wraithforged / Abyssal / Stygian / Thunderclad) capped → 15. Values + descriptions updated.

2026-06-14 — Player House + Spell Rework Batch

  • Player house (Ctrl+F8): Void-map clone of the endgame dungeon. Teleport in/out, return + built flag stored on PC pad fields. Chest persists via map sector delta. (Per-save state must live on the saved object — cfg files don't survive save/load.)
  • Lifetaker: Maintained AoE HP siphon via the summon-undead maintenance hook.
  • Summon Tiger → Swarm of Spiders: Summons a lesser spider per empty tile in radius.
  • Options UI + hotkeys: Crash fix (missing options_ui.mes); added Resolution / Window Mode / Scroll Speed / Skip Intro+Logos controls, 8-slot tab limit, Ctrl+F10 level-30 boost, WASD camera remap.

1. Blood Magic

  • Cast Costs: Harm cost set to 7 HP (from 12). Finger of Death (Quench Life) cost set to 70 HP (from 120). Tooltips updated.
  • Lifetaker Siphon: Implemented maintained AoE siphon — drains/heals 5–10 HP every 10s from surrounding enemies.
  • Summon Undead Maintain: Fixed maintenance tick to pay 5 HP per summoned creature every 10s (rerouted through magictech.c loops).

2. Graphics Optimization

  • Tint Lag: Hardcoded XRGB masks/shifts in video.c screen tint loops to enable compiler vectorization.
  • Alpha Blending: Replaced global variable reads with literal constants in color.h helpers to speed up art_blit loops — fixes poison gas / trap overlay lag.

3. Lizard Race Throwing

  • Throw bug: The Lizard Man race couldn't throw items (missing throw animation). Fixed.
  • Art Fallback: Added fallback checks in anim.c to redirect missing TIG_ART_ANIM_THROW to unarmed attacks.
  • Quickbar Lock / Reset: Added sub_465020 call to throw cleanup to restore equipped weapon/shield sprite after throwing finishes.