TimeBender25 thanks for the feedback.

Testing the loot table takes a lot of time and I thought I saw loot that was not in the table before, but well. For the AI that's different because I was able to check the seeking range for example and I was able to escape while before they tracked me until they finished me off (at the very start without equipment).

Anyway, I looked at the rustboundmagic files listed in my patches first, to see if they have changed and they did not. Then i checked the indexes in my patches and they are as you suggest they should be, and they also match with the rustboundmagic files.

To be really sure I was counting well I decided to use a tool to parse the JSON. The sentry loot table is patched using "/server/behaviors/8/dropsByType/*/-", so it's already 8 as you suggested, and the parsing confirmed the index is right:

cat rustboundmagic-2.5.7/assets/rustboundmagic/entities/creatures/elementals/sentry/entityelementalsentry.json | sed -r 's/[\t ]*\/\/.*$//' | jq .server.behaviors[8]

(JSON does not support comments officially but everyone use them and jq does not support it, so I removed them using sed)
And the result is:

{
"code": "harvestable",
"duration": 3,
"dropsByType": {

…

Also I checked the logs, using VS 1.20.12 too, and there is no patching error.

Could you check things on your side and tell me if I made a mistake or misunderstood?

I know I'm late and this is a small mod, but I wanted to point out that when running this in 1.20.12 there's an OffByOne error in modifying the AI and Loot Tables of the Sentry and Drone.

You're trying to modify the entity AI at index 8, when it's actually at 7. And the entity loot table at 9, when it's actually at 8. This is 'cause the vanilla drifters have them in those indexes, but Rustbound removes a duplicate despawn call (but only for the Sentry, Drone, and Ravager) which shortens the length by one, shifting everything forward.

The result is the only edits that go through are the spawn rate decrease and disabling of Ravagers. The loot tables get unchanged and the AI is default.

I figured this out 'cause I wanted to make an addon for Rust Drops that supported the Rustbound magic enemies and saw this mod in the log alongside my own errors.

Thanks jayu for the tip

Menelos ConfigLib can make patches configurable without too much effort

glarmer there's still a few things to make things easier on the gringing side in `ModConfig/RustboundMagicConfig.json` but there was no config for the mobs, I don't know if there's a way to make the patches configurable, probably not, so I'm open to balancing suggestions :-).

Thanks for this! Previously I was editting the json of rustbound magic each update - this is much better lol