Books not working?

[Myopic]

When I buy a book it says "does this specific action when held" but I cannot see the books I have equipped, nor do they appear to do what they are suppose to do.

[NeoRizer]

I think you're supposed to just leave them in your inventory, like buy them but don't use them because it will just destroy the book.

[WUR]

And if you use it how does it work? you have that effect forever? It's not very clear.

[LWRabbit]

You just keep it in your inventory. (Don't use it.)

I kept wondering why I was seemingly able to use the pink guitar weapon infinitely without it breaking, and it turning out I had the "Toy Book" in my inventory. I had forgotten I'd purchased it.

[NeoRizer]

If you use the book you get a permanent +2WP [Weapon Power / Damage] to your character, so by buying all 4 books it's +8 WP.

If you hold on to the books in your actual inventory, then the extra weapon duration takes effect.

I would just buy them and use them immediately for the permanent bonus, forget wasting space on that crap, you never rely on weapons that much any way.

[Urfarah]

After using all of them for the +2 WP bonus, I bought an extra toy book (because the yoyo is op af). That book has been in my inventory forever now but it doesn't seem to be working properly. All toy weapons (laser sword, bicycle, yoyo, guitar and fish, if I'm not mistaken) still break normally, don't know why T_T

[Vodka]

Bought all of them and they never worked. Weapons are useless anyway.

[Urfarah]

So, created a new profile and did some testing. As far as I can tell, if you have the books in your inventory before you use them once, they work as intended. BUT, once you use a book, buying a second copy and keeping it in your inventory doesn't activate the effect that prevents the weapons from breaking. So, it only works if you never use the book.

[LWRabbit]

Originally posted by Urfarah:

So, created a new profile and did some testing. As far as I can tell, if you have the books in your inventory before you use them once, they work as intended. BUT, once you use a book, buying a second copy and keeping it in your inventory doesn't activate the effect that prevents the weapons from breaking. So, it only works if you never use the book.

So it works like food. You can't get the special effect but once.

I'm guessing they are re-using some of the same code. That has to be a bug, though and not intended behavior for the books, right? Or are they wanting you to make a trade-off decision?

[MoArtis]

I'm trying to fix the bug (to add it to my mod). Can you guys confirm that it works when you never consumed the books? Because on my side it doesn't work even without consuming the book.

[Shiggus Diggus]

@ MoArtis You're really doing God's work, so glad you're taking the mantle for fixing bugs, would've thought your mod already did so much good, BUT fixing this issue too? HELL YEAH, I hope it is actually possible!

[MoArtis]

So after a pretty long code-diving and testing session, no surprise the books are super confusing. The code checking if the effect is available is currently using a “player id” (0 or 1, for the player 1 or 2) to grab the useable inventory. But the inventories are stored per character so it should be using a “player character id” (0 to 3 for Misako, Kyoko, Kunio and Riki, in this order).
So the behavior might seem correct if you are playing with Misako (or if you happen to have the books on Misako while playing someone else).

No wonder the bug slip into the release build, it’s a bit nasty to nail down. Also, it seems that they historically called the characters “playerCharacters” which might lead to confusion to what index to use when a function parameter is called “player”. 😅
But I’m pretty sure Wayforward’s QA team tracked that bug down but the studio didn’t had the time or the resources to fix such a non-critical bug for launch.

For anyone interested, I will add the fix to my mod while waiting for an eventual official patch. 😋

@Bad Bax Never Die: You are welcome! An updated version of the mod including the bugfix will be uploaded soon. 😀

[Cyvanhoe]

What I did was buying the book, consuming it on the spot in the buy menu, then buy another one to keep in the inventory, with every available book, on every character. All works fine for me, weapons never break now.

[MoArtis]

Originally posted by Cyvanhoe:

What I did was buying the book, consuming it on the spot in the buy menu, then buy another one to keep in the inventory, with every available book, on every character. All works fine for me, weapons never break now.

I guess you are playing with Misako, right? The books are not working with the other characters due to a bug but more info is always helpful.

[Cyvanhoe]

Originally posted by MoArtis:

I guess you are playing with Misako, right? The books are not working with the other characters due to a bug but more info is always helpful.

No, this is the case with both the girls, though I am playing Single Player, if that makes a difference.

[MoArtis]

The books never worked for other people and me. I only played with Kyoko and then moved to Kunio.

You might have the books in Misako's inventory while playing with Kyoko then. 🤔

If you want to test, you just need to remove one of the books from Misako's inventory and then play with Kyoko. You will notice that the related weapons will break.