Merchant and Progression Overhaul

Welcome to Merchants and Progression Overhaul mod! If you're reading this it means that, for one, you actually know that you need to carefully read a mod description before installing it (praise on you, I'm proud!) and secondly that you are at least interested in what this mod can offer. In this case, without further ado, let me illustrate what you will (and will not) get by installing my mod for your playthrough.

On its core, Merchants and Progression Overhaul has the objective of renovating the gameplay options offered to the player. The first and most important feature is that both of Roderika and Hewg has been given options to purchase stuff from them, according to their role at the Roundtable Hold. This means that Hewg will sell smithing stones, while Roderika will sell gloveworts.

Another pretty big feature is the revising of the currency mechanic. Usually you would buy using your runes, but this means that those runes won't be used for leveling up. With this logic in mind, now every single merchant in the game world will have Starlight Shard as a currency, and every trade will be made using those items, which of course have been made farmable for the sake of accessibility, with a fairly high drop rate; with the exception of certain enemies, every single enemy you will encounter will now have a 40% chance of dropping one Starlight Shard.

The only exception to this logic is Merchant Kale. Since you haven't many chances to gather Starlight Shards when you first meet him, and given that he sells pretty valuable and useful stuff for the early game, you will still use runes to buy things from him. Moreover, the amount of shard you can stock in your inventory has been raised to 999, so you won't be forced to make back and froth from a site of grace to buy multiple copies of the most valuable stuff. All this, of course, will also inherently means that you will be able to unlock Spirit Ashes from Seluvis more easily.

The main and more complex part of the mod revolves around the mechanic of obtaining new equipment. The main reason things has been done this way is because I wanted to give experienced player a fresh and new sense of progression while playing, and to make them feel like they are really going somewhere by taking some specific steps that felt too optional befor. So here's the thing: in the vanilla game you would get Bell Bearings from specific locations of bosses, and you would unlock new stuff from Twin Maiden Husk for giving them said Bell Bearings. For starters, this mechanic has been completely abolished. Bell bearings has been deleted from the game (at least the ones obtained by killing bosses and exploring certain legacy dungeons or specific locations) and instead of them you will find a stock of the goods that you will normally unlock by giving the Bell Bearing to Twin Maiden Husks. But how do you unlock new stuff, you might ask? It's ac