Moebius Toolkit

Moebius Toolkit is a desktop application (with a web-based alternative for your convenience) which consists of a set of loosely related modules. All of them have been useful to me while playing and discussing the Baldur’s Gate games, mostly for powergaming, balance checking (e.g. for mod creators), discussing the design of the videogames and AD&D 2nd Edition or just satisfying my curiosity.

This project is an application for all major operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux). To get all the features you need to download the package for your operating system, and start the application.

However, as a convenience, if you just want to try something quickly without having to download and extract anything, you can try a special build on the web browser that still retains most of the features (but the real, native application is still highly recommended). The web version misses that it can’t access your disk, so it can’t parse your game files (it uses some predefined data for the charts). It looks a bit awkward at times because it’s supposed to be a desktop application, but it’s constrained by the environment that the web browser supports.

Try it for yourself, and just visit the link (and feel free to share it):

https://moebiusproject.gitlab.io/moebiustoolkit/

Visit us at the Theorycrafting forum at Gibberlings3.net. Ask questions, see numbers and charts done by other people comparing builds and weapons, and get in touch with the community.

You can use the following places:

The author prefers the latter for reporting issues, but use the site that suits you better.

Additionally, feel free to ping @suy on the Gibberlings3 Discord server.

This is the more ambitious and less extravagant module of the application (the one whose purpose is immediately understandable if you know about Near Infinity or EEKeeper), but it’s also one of the more incomplete ones. For now it’s able to index the list of BIFF files (the internal ZIP-like files that pack most of the game content), and show the list of spells, creatures, items or 2DA files. The 2DA files are plain text based tables, and hence are browsable, but not editable yet.

The plan for the browser is transitioning from a proof of concept to a tool that can replace the unmaintained EEKeeper in the future, so it can edit your saved games to fix issues, tweak things, or outright "cheat". On the roadmap there are planned a few unique features to make it more useful for modders.

This is by far the more complete module, as it was almost the only component of the first public release of Moebius Toolkit, and the project that started it all. It consists of some controls where you can input a large amount of combat stat values, and which produces a chart with how much average damage per round it would do to, as a function of the armor class of the opponent.

This tool can help you optimize your character or party build (for those that care about it), or help you reason about the balance of items or opponents added to the game (for those who create or use mods), or just have fun seeing your own assumptions about how the numbers would be, when you actually sit down and see them calculated with math instead of intuition.

See Damage Comparisons for some example comparisons, and get inspired to make your own!

This simple calculator is much less mature than the Damage Calculator, and more limited in scope, so it’s way less useful for now. Similar to the previous one, it allows to show the damage dealt by a setup for a character compared to another. Please, feel free to submit feedback on how you would like this visualized. In this case, it’s mostly an experiment to show how can a detailed view of a single hit can be broken down into pieces (a feature that it’s planned for the Damage Calculator).

This simple module just shows a fixed chart with the outcome of how repeating an action improves the probability of it happening. It’s easier to understand with an example…​

If you hit a character with a Dart of Stunning, it has to make a save or be stunned for 7 rounds (provided it’s not immune, of course). If you know the number of the Save versus Spells score of the creature, you instantly know the probability: an 11 means a 50% chance, and each point over it means the character has a harder chance (it needs to roll higher). Each point above 11 is 5 percent points harder (increase the chance to succeed by adding 5), and each point below 5 percent points easier (the reverse). So a 13 score means you have a 60% chance of stunning the target.

But what if you hit them two or three times? Then the calculation is fairly hard (or at least tedious) to do by hand, because you would have to use the binomial distribution.

With a glance at the chart, and hovering the mouse over the right spot reveals the results: look at the column with the 11/50% result (or the one that you expect the opponent to have), and pick up the right level of the stack (the second for two tries, the third for three, etc.). The value is shown in the top left corner, and in this example it would be 75% chance for two tries, and 83% chance for three.

A small module that charts the progression of level vs experience, or THAC0 versus experience. Both can be charted at the same time (with different axis, given that level goes up, and THAC0 goes down, and the values are different), so it’s possible to compare at a glance classes that typically are said to be provide a similar experience, like Bard versus Fighter/Mage (as shown in the figure).

This module is one of the few that actually read from the real game data (not just some built-in tables), so it is only enabled if you have done the setup in the Welcome page. This means that the charts will look different if you load the game data from Icewind Dale or Baldur’s Gate, or if you have modded your game to change the level progression of any class. This can be a nice feature to modders that want to review their changes to the level progression for balance purposes.

This is a very simple module that charts the XP needed for a class to reach a certain level, stacked on top of another class at a different level. Intended mostly to compare some dual class combinations, and to illustrate graphically how different can be dualing to different classes, or the huge impact that can be dualing from a level 13 Fighter instead of 9.

This module loads the experience tables from the real game data, so it won’t be enabled if you have not setup the location of your game in the Welcome page. The charts will also look different depending on the game that you use (and if you have modded it), as Icewind Dale has different experience tables for some classes (or if you modded Baldur’s Gate to have some progression like in Icewind Dale).