Persona Weapons Unbound

About

Empire traders and quests never give you the persona you want. Now you can close the gap: at the fabrication bench, with techprint gating, component costs, and balance settings that keep it feeling earned.

---

Trait Customization

• Add and remove bladelink traits at the fabrication bench

• Convert a base monosword/plasmasword/zeushammer into its persona variant by adding its first trait, installing an AI persona core

• Remove all traits to revert a persona weapon back to its base form, refunding the core

• Full vanilla validation: max trait count, exclusion-tag conflicts, and sole-trait restrictions are all enforced

Reprogramming Costs

Bladelink traits are facets of the persona's personality, not bolt-on parts. Changing them means forcefully reprogramming the persona with advanced components that burn out in the process.

• First trait / last trait costs or refunds exactly one AI persona core

• Every other change costs advanced components in both directions - additions and removals - reprogramming is destructive, there are no refunds

• Component count scales with weapon quality above a configurable threshold; the settings page shows a live cost table

• Real-time cost preview before you commit

Rename

• Rename the persona using vanilla's bladelink namer, or type your own

• Ideology relic names stay locked and can only be changed through ideology reform, as intended

Three Ways to Customize

• Weapon gizmo: select a weapon, click "Customize persona", and pick a colonist

• Workbench menu: select a colonist and right-click a fabrication bench to customize their equipped or carried weapons

• Ground weapon menu: right-click a weapon on the ground to send a colonist to the nearest operational fabrication bench

Research & Crafting

A single ultratech research project, Bladelink Customization, gates everything below - it requires Advanced Fabrication and (by default) one Empire-sourced techprint.

• Persona weapons are ultratech; customization requires a fabrication bench (or a VEF-recognized equivalent)

• Craftable base monosword, plasmasword, and zeushammer recipes, each individually toggleable - craft the base weapon, then install a persona core for a fully in-colony bespoke persona weapon

• Techprint requirement is a live-applied slider (0-3); setting it to 0 removes the requirement entirely, no restart needed

Optional Trait Discovery

• Restrict available traits to those seen on persona weapons held by the colony, in a caravan, or on hostiles - no persistent save state

• Hostile-held sources show in the list but can't be added until the weapon is captured

---

Mod Compatibility

• Requires Royalty DLC

• Safe to add to existing saves

• Safe to remove from saves (safe-to-ignore red errors only)

• Coexists cleanly with Unique Weapons Unbound (this mod's sibling for Odyssey Unique Weapons) - disjoint identifiers and complementary trait filters, so both can run together

• Automatically compatible with most mods that add new persona weapons or bladelink traits e.g. More Persona Traits. No hard-coded def references

• Modded workbenches that inherit fabrication bench recipes (VEF's RecipeInheritanceExtension, e.g. VFE's compact fabrication bench) are detected automatically

• Works with CE, PUAH, Ideology, integrates with Vanilla Persona Weapons Expanded

---

FAQ

Q: Do I need the Royalty DLC? A: Yes. This mod builds on Royalty's bladelink weapon system.

Q: Do I need Odyssey too? A: No. This mod is Royalty-only. If you also want to customize Odyssey's unique weapons, check out the sibling mod Unique Weapons Unbound - the two coexist without conflict.

Q: Why can't I customize [weapon name]? A: Only weapons with a resolvable base/persona pairing via vanilla's bladelink system are supported. The three vanilla persona weapons (monosword, plasmasword, zeushammer) work out of the box; modded persona weapons work automatically if they use CompBladelinkWeapon.

Q: Can I customize weapons from other mods? A: If the mod adds persona weapons using vanilla's CompBladelinkWeapon system, they're automatically supported, including their own traits and namers.

Q: Is this imbalanced? A: That's up to you. The default settings require research, a techprint, and meaningful component costs. If you want it harder, raise the component costs. If you want it easier, wind them down or skip the research entirely. Your colony, your rules.

Q: Can I interrupt a customization job safely? A: Yes. Each trait or cosmetic change is a separate crafting job. Interrupting won't lose resources; unfinished work is simply cancelled.

Q: What happens to a bonded weapon's bond? A: Adding the free-wielding trait or reverting a bonded persona weapon to its base form severs the bond - both cases show a confirmation warning first.

Q: Was this made using LLMs!? A: Some of the grunt code, and most localizations. I'm a software engineer by trade, and have been writing code for 25 years. All code is manually reviewed and tested; all bug reports and mod-conflicts followed up personally as time and detail allows. All art is either commissioned from humans, hand-authored in Krita, or both.

Localization

English, Simplified Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Additional requests, and corrections from native speakers, are very welcome.

Links

GitHub - Source code, bug reports, and feature requests

(https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3707263149) - the sibling mod for Odyssey's unique weapons Hero art by IcyWithCheeseCake