The Stick Horse Mod.

First presented here: http://forums.runicgames.com/viewtopic.php?t=28802

Oh, the noble Stick Horse, the steed of brave knights who wish to ride across the lands, wind blowing through their hair... but cannot afford to acquire and feed a living, breathing mount. Or would simply prefer to not spend their downtime mucking out stables.

The Stick Horse Mod will address the concern (assuming there ever was one) of the lack of player mounts in  Torchlight 2.  Systems for real player mounts in any game require an extraordinary amount of work, even more so if there is to be mounted combat. Alternatively, the humble Stick Horse will be incredibly simple to implement, and more importantly... is just plain funny.


For all statistical intents and purposes, the Stick Horses will be a series of shields, except that their inherent block chance and armor values will be replaced with an inherent bonus to run speed. They will be found with the same selection of magic qualities that any shield can have, (including increased armor or block chance) and will be valid for any skills that depend on a shield. That's right, engineers will be able to bash monsters in the face with their trusty steed.

A custom model will have to be made, and several skins for it. An actual Torchlight horse's head and the shaft of a weapon would probably do the trick, reskinned to look plush or wooden.

The only difficult element I can foresee is a purely optional one; getting the stick horse to emit some kind of horsey sound effect when equipped. Real horse noises? The player class imitating horse sounds? A fake hoof-clopping while running around?  There isn't much precedent for this kind of effect on equipment; althought Torchlight 1 had the fabled "Sword of Adam", it's special sound effects were just set to replace normal attack noises, and shields.... don't generally have any associated sounds to replace. If it is possible to make equipment grant a spell effect or aura while equipped, then that might work; just set up a custom spell that has no actual effect or visual component, that merely emits sounds periodically.

By far, out of all of the ideas I will present here, this seems the most likely to be actualized.