Not sure whether the player was intended to have the choice of two endings and simply pretends to have lost the sphere, but it leaves Professor Dall at an unfortunate cliffhanger. Well, seeing how he reacts upon learning that you went against his directions and gave away a priceless artifact could be even worse. The Dall Sphere is one of those curious cases of quest items that intentionally can be donated.

nms 27 Jul 2018:

Actually, George pulled my change preventing donating quest items to Sisters, but it hasn't made it into a release yet.

george moromisato 27 Jul 2018:

I didn't remember about the Dall sphere when I pulled that change.

I'm undecided. On the one hand, I like offering the player choices, even if they don't necessarily help. But on the other hand, there's little harm in preventing the Dall sphere from being donated. On the gripping hand, we might want to do something interesting if the player does donate it—maybe they get a double-secret Domina power?

megas 27 Jul 2018:

Unless the power is a one-shot or not very useful, donation would become the correct choice. The modern reward of a non-unique explorer from Dall is not as compelling as galactic map when Dall was introduced.

nms 28 Jul 2018:

I think we could set the filter to a function that checks if it matches the criteria or has sisters.donation data.

Edit: That looks like this. Of course, it reintroduces the original issue of the ticket. Maybe there should be some acknowledgement that you failed the mission. But I hate being able to fail a mission just by not having an item in your hold at a particular time. So there would have to be a way to run code when you donate it (or it falls into a gravity well).

Edit 2: OK, that wasn't too difficult. I just had to make the donation screen evaluate the items in the donation table so they can be code. This is good for translatability anyway. Now the mission just needs to fail and have appropriate dialog if you return with the 'destroyed or 'donated status.

george moromisato 8 Sep 2018:

Fixed in 1.8 Beta 3.

  • I incorporated @NMS's changes to allow donation and set the appropriate state on the mission.
  • I've added custom text to the mission when the player destroys or donates the sphere.