Null Classes

Fourteen trades, and every one of them now does something.

Null Classes replaces vanilla's six classes with fourteen professions. Each one owns a trade — one job it does cheaper, faster or with less waste than anybody else can. Until version 0.1.2 that was a promise the roster could not keep: nine of the fourteen trades were described on the character screen and honoured by nothing in the game. They all work now.

You pick your class freely. Nothing is locked behind anything. What the class decides is which work the settlement needs you for — not what you are allowed to do.

What each trade actually buys

• Smith — draws rivets straight from scrap metal, with no ingot, no crucible and no trip to the anvil.
• Sellsword — beats a dented plate straight with scrap, where everyone else must smith a fresh chain as well as a fresh plate.
• Warden — anything they forge carries permanently more durability, stamped on at the moment of crafting. It is keyed to who made it, so the advantage is a thing they hand to other people.
• Delver — takes a fifth more metal out of the same raw ore than anyone else can.
• Kilnwright — chars coke in a sealed crock, skipping the refractory oven, its iron hatch door and the twelve-hour wait.
• Tiller — turns a compost heap by hand instead of sealing a barrel for twenty days.
• Herdsman — limes a scraped hide with potash, cutting three days of tanning out of the middle of the leather chain.
• Engineer — laces sailcloth from raw flax, unspun and unwoven: sixteen fibres for the four sails that otherwise cost sixty-four.
• Cartographer — cuts three sheets of parchment from a whole medium hide that is worthless to everyone else, and works flax without the barrel.
• Wayfinder — builds sextants, compasses and beacons out of ruin salvage where others need smelted brass.
• Weaver — the clothing tree, over a hundred recipes of it, is theirs alone.
• Marksman — bows and arrows are theirs alone.
• Gearwright — the device that tames locusts is theirs alone.
• Chancer — the sling is theirs alone.

The last four reuse trait codes the base game already defines, so those classes inherit the game's own exclusive recipes rather than inventing new ones.

A trade is a price, not a permission

Every item in the game is still made the ordinary way, by anybody, at the ordinary cost. A trade never unlocks an item — it only ever makes one cheaper, faster or less wasteful. A smith's rivets cost the same metal as everyone else's; what the trade buys is the forge session. A tiller's compost costs twice the muck; what the trade buys is twenty days.

So a solo player is never shut out of anything, and a settlement missing a trade is inconvenienced rather than blocked.

Any trade can be earned

Each class owns exactly one trade trait, and exactly one Null Skills ability grants that same trait to anyone who earns it. A forester who reaches Stakecutter gets the warden's trade without being a warden. A miner who reaches Prospector assays ore like a delver. Play long enough in the right tree and you can hold a trade you did not choose at creation — which is what stops a fourteen-class roster from making any single player essential.

Every class costs something

A class is three advantages and two real penalties, and the penalties are ones you will feel. The sellsword carries armour's weight without the drag, then walks 10% slower and is heard by animals 30% further out. The marksman shoots beautifully and hits like a civilian in melee. The chancer's improvised kit mines faster and wears armour out 20% faster. The kilnwright's lungs are not what they were.

No class is the strong one. They are fourteen different sets of things you are now bad at.

Before you install it

• Adding this to a world that already has characters costs everyone one class re-pick. A character's class is a saved string, so retiring vanilla's six leaves an existing character holding a code the roster no longer contains. Nothing crashes and nobody is disconnected — but while the code is unresolvable that character is refused every trait-gated recipe in the game, which includes over a hundred of the base game's own clothing recipes. The fix is per player: an admin grants them allowcharselonce, they run /charsel and pick again from the new roster. It is not destructive — the game only re-issues starting gear on a first selection, so a re-pick leaves armour and inventory alone. A fresh world avoids the whole errand.
• Null Skills is required and the game enforces it. Without it this mod will not load at all — which is the right failure, because the trades would be unreachable and unearnable both.
• The trades themselves live in the sibling mods. This mod declares the roster and the traits; the recipes and behaviours that honour them ship in Null Smithy, Null Skills, Null Compass and Null Cartography. Install this alone and the classes work, with their stat bonuses, but the trade advantages have nothing to act on.
• Every player needs it. The engine reads the class list on both sides, so a client without the mod cannot match the server's roster.
• Vanilla's six classes are retired — all six, deliberately. A roster that is half ours and half the base game's is not a roster.
• If your world has temporal stability turned off, the gearwright's trade cannot be earned by anyone who is not a gearwright: the ability that grants it lives in a Null Skills tree that only exists on a world with stability on.
• Two of the engineer's bonuses still do nothing. Rotor torque and machine throughput are shown on the character sheet and read by no code yet — the consumers are designed and not built. The engineer's trade works; these two numbers are decoration until they are wired up, and they will start working without you reinstalling anything.
• Content only. No code, no Harmony patches, nothing here to break on a game update.
• English only. No translations ship.

Credit

The roster, its traits and the retirement patch are original content — nothing here is forked from anyone. MIT, with LICENSE and NOTICE inside the zip; NOTICE also covers Null Skills, which is a fork (of Xandu's XLib and XSkills, MIT) and credits him accordingly.

About this mod

Built for Null Ossuary — a small community that runs its own game servers. This mod was written for our own Vintage Story world, ran there with players on it before it was published, and is free for anyone's server or singleplayer game.

Found a bug, or want to argue with a design decision? Every mod has its own board on our forums: nossuary.com/forums. The community, the servers and the rest of the Null mods are at nossuary.com, and the Discord is linked from there.

 

AI disclosure. This mod was built with help from an AI coding assistant. The design, the gameplay decisions, and every choice about what the mod should do are mine; the AI wrote and revised code, tests and documentation under direction and was reviewed before anything shipped. Bug reports and feedback are read and acted on by me.