Too many bad wands

[roachit]

One thing that has been bugging me about this game is that seemingly 99.9% of the wands you find are horrible. They range from useless to insta-suicide and, as far as I can tell, the game has no way to "safely" test new wands like how you test your homemade guns with a string before using them for real.

Anyway, the problem seems to be that the game generates wands by picking spells and effects completely at random and arranging them completely at random. Does anyone know of any mod that makes the wand generation a little bit smarter?

[Prodeses]

Game does not care about your safety. But you are not supposed to find "good wands". There are wands with good stats and random spells, bad wands with some% of good spells and everything between. You are supposed to carry few in to Holy mountain, rip spells off and combine the useful ones (this is situational) in fitting wand(s).

Testing spells should be done carefully and only a few spell at a time. Read the spell description (even tough they are not too useful often). Use trigger/expiration spells for testing and make sure your test wand isn't shuttle one. When building homemade guns you need to know purpose and function of the parts. Same goes here. Except to lose few finger during progress.

There's also a mod called "Improved Wand Generation" but it appears to be outdated.

[DivineEvil]

I personally don't use mods pretty much anywhere other than some games where some good MP servers need them. Other than that, the game is not designed to have "balanced randomness". That's might be its most fatal flaw, but that's how its designed. The availability of spells and the stats of the wands scale with the biome, so its not entirely random, but it does expect you to experiment and as consequence to die, a lot, again and again, so that you obtain knowledge of what different spells and perks do and what dangers different areas and enemies present.

Overall, given the accumulated knowledge, 99.9% of the useless wands turn into 50/50% good stat wands with 30% practically useless spells, 30% conditionally useful ones, and another 40% of spells that can turn you completely unkillable for the rest of the play safe for the few very peculiar bosses, given that you know how to combine them into the good, fitting wands.

[tom five]

Kind of defeats the entire purpose of the wand crafting system. You're supposed to learn what the spells do so that you can use that knowledge to combine them in interesting and powerful ways. Sure, you're gonna die a lot while testing wands, but only for so long. You'll figure it out. That's the whole point. That's part of the core gameplay loop.

Or you can just skip most of that and hit up the wand crafting guides on the wiki. The Expert Guide: Draw is a big help if you're already familiar with the basics.

[MyUrp1]

Carry the wands to the holy mountain. Put together something that seems useful. Walk over to the statue on the left and start firing at it to see what happens. 95% of the time you won't die.