RPG Maker VXA/MV/MZ Damage Flow

An infographic to teach people how the damage/recovery is calculated in vxace!
This infographic is made by @Archeia and @rhyme.

Thank you to these people for helping me figure out the EXACT flow and formulas :D

Recommended that you open this image in another tab or click on it over here if your resolution is over 1300~

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Thanks so much for this, it helps so much! I wouldn't have tried to do this myself... This explains so much. Thank you again!

Very nice damage flow chart. This can help out alot of people such as myself to make battles, skills, and attacking items more interesting.

Nice work!

Really thanks for this help, it helped me a lot in my database management, specially spells.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

you guys are the best

Wow, Ness thanks a lot! This will help us developers balance out skills a lot more effectively, I'm sure it will come very useful to many. :3

Nice flowchart there.

Small typo: In the Element Rates box, second line, 100% is supposed to be 1000%.

EDIT: Wait actually, it's 101% and that is counted as weakness. :o

100% is Normal default.

Thank you so much for this it is helping a little bit.  I am still having problems with items that cause damage as in making a poison you can throw during battles to hurt enemies.  Everytime I try it it says it didn't effect the enemies.  I will keep trying to figure that out though, this will help with spell casters I think a lot more as I am extremely new to everything.  

I have a question about the damage flow. I've understood all you have shown us but I have a problem in my game with a skill that is linked to a common event.

From what I've seen, the damage calculation takes precedence over the event call. Is there a way to make the event call takes place before the damage?

@Herensuge not by default - by default all common events called by skills are processed at the end of turn, after all skills have processed their damage.


However, there are several scripts (depending on which maker you use) that allow calls to common events at any point during the sequences. Please make a post in script or plugin request asking for a link depending on which maker you're using.

I've seen this flow chart a few times now on the forums, I imagine that nothing here/on it, is irrelevant to MV?


(Asking because I don't 100% know, still learning the program).

wrong, exactly the opposite - everything here applies to MV.


MV has reprogrammed the engine in a different language to allow for deployment to other devices, and made some improvements to details and the editor in the process, but the basics (which are displayed in this flowchart) are exactly the same.


That is why even the title was changed to "VXAce AND MV" damage flow after MV was released.

Huh, interesting, Battle flow is more complicated than I thought!


Psst, he used a double negative, so he's right. "nothing here/on it, is irrelevant" is the same as "it is all relevant"

This will help alot! Thank you!


(i think im gonna print this and place to a wall  :unsure: )

@Archeia - Is there a place where we could see all the elements that could possibly go into a damage equation? Stuff like collapse_type and such. I ask because while I was studying your VX Ace Lite version of Starfield I found some interesting damage calculations with variables in them, such as collapse_type, that I was unaware of. If you could show us these if would be greatly appreciated. :)

@Wyn Wizard that would hardly be possible, because the answer is "any script sequence".

All makers send the damage formula through an eval function to have it calculated, and that means that XP, VX and VXA accept any ruby script expression there and MV accepts any javascript expression there.
That can basically be anything that is defined either by the script language, by the core engine or added by any script/plugin to the engine.

@Andar - That changes things drastically, since I was previously unaware of this. So you are saying that I could essentially write a damage formula that can calculate random numbers, to simulate die rolls, inside the equation calculator itself? That's amazing. I've been here for 4 years now and I'm just now learning this. Mind telling me anything else I should know about Ace? XD

since we don't know what you learned in those four years and what not, any answer would be guesswork.

However, you could try the link "starting point for new users" in my signature - I collected many tutorials and tips in there, including some of the lesser known options of the makers - like how they automatically simulate a 2-level-dungeon in a single one-level-map and so on.