Links

• CurseForge page: Maglucen: Drakeling Tweaks
• DevLog: How I hooked a vanilla Drakeling without remapping it
• Quick note: Detecting a vanilla shoulder buff with BPNotifyOtherBuffActivated

Overview

Drakeling Tweaks is a small ARK: Survival Ascended mod focused on changing vanilla Drakeling behavior without turning the creature into a remap or replacement.

Visual note: The thumbnail for this entry is a generated concept image, not a real in-game screenshot.

The first feature restores Drakeling Gift of Knowledge stored XP when the kill comes from:

• XP_TAMEDKILL
• XP_UNCLAIMEDKILL

The mod now also exposes cooldown scaling for:

• Breath
• Biome Boost
• Gift of Fortune

It also adds a couple of reward-side quality-of-life toggles:

• optional buff info display when stored XP is granted
• optional Hoard Chest disabling when stored XP is awarded

The main constraint from the start was keeping it lightweight. I did not want a remap, a replacement creature, or anything that would tie the save to a custom Drakeling class.

What It Does

• restores only the excluded non-wild stored XP cases
• adds percentage-based cooldown control for three Drakeling abilities
• optionally disables Hoard Chest rewards when stored XP is granted
• optionally shows a short buff info message when stored XP is granted
• leaves wild-kill behavior alone
• works with existing and future Drakelings
• exposes simple server-side percentage config values through GameUserSettings.ini

Why It Was Worth Doing This Way

The most interesting part was not the XP amount itself. It was finding a clean way to hook into vanilla shoulder logic without touching the Drakeling class.

That same compatibility-first approach mattered once the mod grew beyond XP restoration. Expanding the config surface was useful, but I still wanted the project to stay focused on targeted Drakeling behavior changes instead of drifting into a broader creature overhaul.

Implementation Summary

The final setup uses two buffs:

• one buff on the player detects when the vanilla mounted Drakeling buff appears
• from there it resolves the Drakeling reference and applies a second buff
• that second buff lives on the Drakeling
• it listens to BPNotifyExperienceGained
• it filters XP_TAMEDKILL and XP_UNCLAIMEDKILL
• and it handles the XP restore logic from the Drakeling side

That keeps the XP feature narrow and avoids turning the project into a creature overhaul.

For the newer cooldown settings, the mod reads integer percentage values and applies them against the Drakeling’s current base cooldowns:

• BreathCooldownMultiplierPercent
• BiomeBoostCooldownMultiplierPercent
• GiftOfFortuneCooldownMultiplierPercent

Using percentages keeps the config readable:

• 100 = current default cooldown
• 50 = half the current cooldown
• 1 = 1% of the current cooldown

For bootstrap, the first step was ModDataAsset -> Additional Default Buffs, but that only covered players when they spawned or respawned. Existing living survivors could still miss the detector buff, so the final version added a server singleton through ModDataAsset -> ServerExtraWorldSingletonActorClasses that applies the detector to logged-in players if they do not already have it.

Key Decisions

• No remap and no replacement. That was the main constraint.
• No timers as the base solution. The final route was event-driven.
• Simple external config. Values come from GameUserSettings.ini as integer percentages.
• Bootstrap had to work on already-living survivors. That is why the final build uses both the default buff route and a server singleton actor.

Important: the config category was renamed from [DrakelingTamedXPMultiplier] to [DrakelingTweaks]. Existing settings must be moved to the new section.

[DrakelingTweaks]
NonWildKillXPPercent=100
BreathCooldownMultiplierPercent=100
BiomeBoostCooldownMultiplierPercent=100
GiftOfFortuneCooldownMultiplierPercent=100
ShowBuffInfo=False
DisableHoardChests=False

Those values are then converted into internal percentages:

• NonWildKillXPPercent
• BreathCooldownMultiplierPercent
• BiomeBoostCooldownMultiplierPercent
• GiftOfFortuneCooldownMultiplierPercent

For XP restore:

• 0 = current official behavior
• 100 = full restoration for the excluded non-wild kill XP categories

For cooldowns:

• 100 = current default cooldown
• 1 = 1% of the current cooldown

Result

This project matters to me because it combines:

• a very specific gameplay problem
• a compatibility-first runtime solution
• a small technical hook that became the foundation for a broader Drakeling tweak mod

Follow The Project

If you want the public page for the mod, use the CurseForge link above.

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