In case you were all still searching for something, I made a similar mod called Thirsty Courier that makes JSawyer's stimpaks apply dehydration. It includes lots of other changes including some weight changes to different drinks and requires a water bottling system, so it's a completely different beast from this, but I was inspired by this comment thread so it might be what you're looking for.
In disagreement with some comments here, I think Stimpaks and other healing should only damage Sleep Deprivation.
Needing extra Sleep means needing extra Food and Water over the long term anyway.
If such healing also damages Starvation, as in the current version of this mod, the player will quickly fix that with Food, and you're back to the constant gorging that's typical of the non-hardcore game, and that's so unrealistic (the human digestive tract can only process so much per day).
Repeated use (= overdose) of Stimpaks could still be harmful or fatal through Sleep Deprivation alone - a severely hurt character would need to alternate Stimpak, bedrest and eating/drinking over hours or days to be safely and completely restored.
To round this out, Nuka-Cola etc should no longer fix Sleep Deprivation at all, but only temporarily boost the stats most harmed by it: say, Agility+1 and Int+1 (I'm surprised Perception is not one of these, in the vanilla game).
Just wanted to say I really like your mod. Like REALLY like it! There are no more "There's a camp full of Fiends. I'll just storm it." moments in my game now. You either kill them from far away or you hope they don't hit you at all in close quarters. Cause if they do... you better have a backpack full of food and water and a nice bedroll near you.
Ok so after half a year of procrastinating I finally booted up FNV and took the plung into hardcore mode and I can only say my reaction after using a stimpack was GOOD LORD WHY HAVE I BEEN FORSAKEN!? In short you were correct saying this was awesome.
Great mod DeeVee. I just downloaded it and tried it out, and after two or three stims I'm already suffering the minor effects.
Not only that, but I hadn't slept in a while which I think is a very likely state to be in during play, and the few stims I took really did a number on me in that regard.
One thing I noticed though is that you haven't done any modifications to healing powder. Now of course there shouldn't be anything as drastic with healing powder as there are with stims, and probably not even have the same kind of effects, but I feel like there should be something negative to it.
Another thing is standard food and survival levels. At 0 survival skill, a gecko steak heals 2 hp a second for 15 seconds, for a total of 30 HP healed. At level 50 survival, it heals 4 hp a second for 15 seconds, for a total of 60 HP healed. You might want to consider lowering the effectiveness of food healing since it ends up being comparable to a single stimpack, but ends up being much more common and easy to find, and hell, to use. Or not, maybe it makes sense that way, something to think about either way.
The last thing that I want to mention to you is the idea of perks. You mentioned elsewhere that you may include other drug effects to this mod, and I think that's a lovely idea. What I think you should do however is add in a perk or three relating to it. For example, maybe if you've got a high enough medical skill, you can take a perk that reduces the negatives from the stim; you could call it "Steady Hand" or something maybe, to reflect proper application of the stim, instead of just stabbing it in there. Perhaps have a picture of an arm with a nice clean needle injecting into it, maybe with a smiling vaultboy face behind it or something.
Another perk idea I have is something related to the Fiends. Very similar to the medical one above, only this one doesn't have a skill based prerequisite and instead relies on total level (perhaps put it at.. 10? 20? This is a point I'm having a hard time coming to conclusions on) to determine whether you can get it. It would be the same as the medical one, only the benefits would be lower, and perhaps extend toward injectable recreational drugs, perhaps reducing their vanilla penalties, and any penalties you are modding onto them in the future. You could call it "Experienced Hand" and the perk icon could be an arm with a bunch of needle track marks in it, with a slightly bent needle going into it with a smiling Fiend face behind it.
Boy that was sure a mouth full, wasn't it? I'll just say again, good mod here DeeVee, I'm going to really enjoy it. Thanks for making it, and please keep working on it.
Yo! I've been dicking around with it recently and hope to have another build up soon. I might even make the effects less harsh on the stim but make the superstorm a massive metabolic Shylock, gouging its pound of nutrients to give you a pound of flesh. Scripting is pissing me off on Hydra. Boo. Healing powder I think I'll reduce effectiveness of, and just make it mostly dehydrating. I realized last night that the Courier eats it, and anyone who's ever shortcut protein powder preparation and gone dry knows how shitty that is. I haven't started modding food yet. But I'm not getting any healing effects from eating, just a minor heal from water. Is that PN doing that I wonder? As far as your perks, I hear where you're coming from but I think Medicine handled that properly: the better you are as a combat surgeon, the more effective you are at putting the stim into your femoral artery at a run, and so the more effective the drug, and so scales the negative. I do think drug resistance is important and got missed in the main game, so will implement that, but it'll mostly dull the 'high' not the negative effects. I'd like to balance it out so that by the end of the game, a major chem user is a shuddering husk, all cankered and fucked up. Imagine your Courier with all his expertise but barely able to survive in combat. There's also going to be stacking and overdose.
Okay, superstims are mostly fatal. That's awesome. So I was looking into the UMOC and it looks like literally no one has a handle on what it is, does, or how it calculates. What I'm wondering is what if I just bypass the in game addiction bullshit, and script symptoms for drugs. How hard could it be to apply varying degrees of crapnitude on an increasing scale with drugs taken? I could even do heart failure, DTs, etc. Imagine - pound that hydra, go into cardiac arrest in combat, and need a stimpak to get the thing pumping again or drop dead in ten seconds. Or get random muscle spasms and paralysis from Buffout? Or get random migraines and blindness from liquor abuse? Or get cancer, and have to stave off its effects with chemo drugs? Thoughts?
Some of that sounds pretty awesome. As for cancer, I'd suggest you put in a way to cure yourself of it completely, just so I don't have to bring 40 pounds of chemo drugs with me to honest hearts or something
I'm going to say this in another post, but I strongly suggest if you put that kinda stuff in, that you put in a perk or two that dull the penalties for this kind of thing. My suggestion is have it related to the fiends in the name and perk picture, or something.
I've always been bothered by how stimpaks are such a 'press to not die' button/hotkey. It makes it hard for the player to not take their health seriously, and this conflicts greatly with the harsh, unforgiving world portrayed in the universe of Fallout. It irritated me how stimpaks can be spammed without any sort of punishment whatsoever. Aside from costing caps (which is only a problem in early game), stimpaks has absolutely nothing to balance its positive effects. This in turn trivializes taking damage and encourages healing abuse.
I really like how this mod handles the balancing of stimpaks. It's a change that is fair, and makes sense. Healing requires nutrition and rest, yet this is never accounted for in the game. What's more baffling though, is that the game already has Hardcore mode to account for the needs of healing. However, I think the punishment for healing could be harsher. For instance, if the needs H2O and FOD are high, the effects of healing diminish. Perhaps foes could take a penalty or two for abusing stims as well, I don't know. You seem to know what you're doing though, so I'm sure whatever you do, it'll be good.
I'm thinking about adding fatigue for NPCs. The only thing is, followers have no food or hydration or rest needs, and anyone giving Fiends enough time to slam enough stimpaks to worry about the results has got other things to worry about. I am working on balancing the mod a bit more and adding in some helpful medicines to counteract the effects of stims, with their own side effects. The next build I hope to implement heart attacks. If the medicines make stims painless again, I'll just remove them.
I'll be tracking this to see where it goes. I think it'll go awesome with this little jobbie of a mod that I can't play without: Tuckered Out.
Sounds like they'll go together like oil and water. What's that? Oil and water don't go together well? Ah, well, let me introduce you to my friend FIRE. He's taught me to be quite fond of the combination. A bit dangerous to have around at parties if you know what I mean.
Only took 17 tries to get that link to work. Ye gods am I rusty.
Hmm... You know, the idea behind this mod reminds me of a discussion I once had with a professional nurse. I was discussing the idea of something like a stimpack, and we came to the idea that even if such a magical device could heal grievous wounds, there'd still actually be a need to consume appropriate biomass for the object to work with. Ignoring how having so many cells rapidly grown from all that biomass might lead to an increased risk of developing cancerous cells and maybe tumors.
I'm kinda of glad that I wasn't the only one who had this idea. And that's awesome. This might is awesome on its idea alone.
That all being said, I question the idea that stims require such extra sleep to work. I can imagine some exhaustion from all the efforts the body put into making new cells, but I have my doubts that it could notable impact a person like that. I'm actually all for a weaker affect on sleep, if you insist on one at all. Possibly a set of options with MCM? Or perhaps a slight hit to AP, since I use Project Nevada and the sprint and bulletime function hit AP and so act like exhaustion, so by extent maybe that might make sense? Might even make jet more useful, I don't know; I usually stay away from in-game drugs due to fear of addiction.
With drinking, from the realism standpoint—as much as can be had when dealing with what is basically magic—I cast doubts that it'd have that much of an affect on one's need to drink. I just mostly figured the thing you needed was biomass to mass-produce the cells, hence why one might need to eat before/after they take a stim. Of course, most of our body is water, and since we are replacing it, we might need a good deal of water, too. I don't know. Though I'd imagine you'd still need food more than water. As alluded to partially before, perhaps if this mod had a MCM functionality to let the player modify how severe stimpacks' effects where, that might help solve all my little questions.
Looking forwards to see where this mod goes. As I'm doing NVB1 again myself, I imagine I'll have loads of fun testing this mod out. Kudos.
Hmm... I can work on that. I hear you: an AP hit would be a cool idea. I'll look if it comes built-in; if I have to script it, we'll have to wait. Sticking my mod in with MCM is beyond my mental capacity and religious faith, atm. Otherwise, yeah, maybe knocking down the sleep amount and boosting the food requirement would be a little closer to real. On the water requirement: my whole idea is simulating metabolic processes, and in the construction of proteins, carbohydrates and water (an electrolyte) are consumed (and waste would be passed, but that's something I can leave well enough alone). For instance, if you do heavy lifting but skimp on your water or go on the Atkins Diet, expect no results. The other thing I want to do is bang DR while the stim is working, since the body would have to pool a huge amount of resources and energy around a spot the size of a quarter, leaving patient drained especially during immediate dose. Imagine experiencing a month of recuperation in six seconds while standing on your feet. It's a surprise the stimpaks aren't just lethal. At the very least, it's ridiculously uncomfortable. Hmm... cancer. If I ever work in how to make alcoholism, smoker's lung and drug addiction actual problems, maybe we can hit the poor player with a good dose of incurable degenerative disease. My courier quit smoking not because cigarettes are uncommon but because he can't smoke in his ranger helmet, and negative effects, being non-cumulative, and addiction, being a 100 cap nuisance with no way to 'wean,' were just straight immersion breaking.
I really am looking at doing a more complete overhaul on the healing/metab systems. The obvious SuperStim, then Autostims, reducing healing powder's effectiveness, Rad-Away, a powerful diuretic per the wiki, being massively dehydrating, etc. I also want to script a mini patch for PN (which is my favorite mod) so that restoring AP sucks up sleep points commensurately, 1/1. Also, since the 'hotter an engine burns' theory shows a lack of efficiency at higher temperatures, I might boost the positives of Supers a bit and make it cause even more harm, incl a chunky hit to DR, and a wipeout of APs. If I cut the effect time of a Super in half, three seconds to do its magic, that would be quite a powerful drug.
Overall, I'm really looking forward to your review of the mod and how it affected your gameplay, primarily in terms of immersion. Future updates to this little plugin will be easy to apply, so track it and I'll keep working on it.
Already have tracked. And from what you've said there in paragraph, I can safely—you, I like you. You've a clever sport. I can respect that greatly.
Just a sidenote: Hydra. You noted wanting to do something with hydra in the description, so I might as well off my 10 cents. I think Hydra is one of the most interesting drugs in the whole game. But it seems so... blasé, for what it's supposed to be. And how it works.
Not to name names, but I once read a certain... ugh, fanfic... and in it, Hydra was wonderfully portrayed in such an extremely interesting way that turned it from a "meh" in my book to being the drug of foremost interest. Although therein, hydra was described as a "large syringe with the image of a four-headed dragon [IE, a hydra] on it", so take it as you will. Drugs in that story made them all so much cooler, and deadlier. "Steady, I discovered, caused nerve damage if used too frequently. Med-X could cause the mind to experience phantom pains. Buffout was damaging my joints and muscles and doing a number on my reproductive system. But the real monster, apparently, was Hydra." And: "[Hydra makes] your body’s natural healing processes fail, and you die cell by cell... One Hydra is bad enough, but two or three… you can drop dead on your feet.”
To elaborate—in that story, hydra was basically like a super stimpack of steroids that worked out and ate nothing but protein and Gatorade. Using hydra in that story made the heroine, and any like her who used it, functionally invincible to all but instantly fetal (eg, Fat Man) due to the absurd regenerate rate; and unlike stimpacks, it was stated that hydra could rearrange bones and other broken parts whilst also expelling foreign materials out of the body. It increased one's heart rate tremendously, too, to allow it to work, and it did it so much that one doctor noted that when the drugs effects faded from the heroine, it would likely cause cardiac arrest. The doctor gave the heroine Fixer to slow her heart rate down whilst under Hydra's effects, to try to make her survive the drug. Although in wasn't addictive in the story (why is it addictive in the first place in-game?), Hydra was noted to be dangerous if the cells begin to grow and reproduce too rapidly, forming cancerous tumors and disfiguring growths. And yet it seems so... bleh, as far as New Vegas treats it. It's just another thing, unless the horrifically overpowered yet equally deadly -to-use drug it was in that story that made it all the more interesting.
Again, just my tens cents, food for thought. God, look at me ramble. It's like I'm trying to get you to do hardcore chem overhaul mod at this point. My apologies.
Honestly, what I would like to do is to replace the increasing 'addiction chance' with a nasty slew of side-effects such as SPECIAL hits, etc. Ones that slowly creep up on you (after like 500 uses of Jet, you should've gone through 3 points of Agility/Endurance/Strength). The bonus would stay the same, but just like with real drug users, soon the PC is just trying to break even on a high. They could be 'perks' with little puky vaultboys with needles and other massively inappropriate grossness.
That description of hydra is a little horrifying. A big horrifying, actually.
Your ten cents are taken into consideration, for sure. I like to keep things simple (note 2kb size to dramatically alter Stimpak), and mainly I'm hitting medicals this time around, which includes Hydra and MedX.
For a quick-fix, I may just give Hydra an extended time of effect, rebalanced penalties (since it's not really healing flesh wounds but breaks, I would focus, in my view, more on sleep hits), or maybe make it a long-acting StimPak with limb healing, and ignore its addiction effects for now. The addiction system in the game is stupid and I don't like it, haven't since FO1: a guy who does five lines of coke for breakfast is suffering heavier negative effects from the drug than a freshman who's parents are sending him to rehab because they caught him using twice. Same for when the two are cut off. You don't get DTs off an afternoon Sam Adams, but off of years of personal neglect and self-pity. Fallout world? You don't get DTs. You get a mild hangover. At the very least you should have a frigging migraine. But no, just the RPG equivalent of morning-mouth.
Oh my god. I've created a monster.
For now, I'm focusing on the classic healers and will expand from there. If I begin fiddling on everything, I will have to ask for assistance with MCM.
One thing, as I add drugs, I may do them in separate Esps, and just have a weird, garish medicine cabinet for all us masochistic HC players. Pick your poison, and its debuggs.
I've saved your comment to my mod WIP file, right next to other cute mods, like weaponizing pencils and making something you can garrote folks with: sneak attack criticals are automatic decap, weapon functionally useless otherwise.
Let me know how this minor adjustment affects your playstyle, though. Knowing others were held just as much in suspense as I was would be hugely gratifying.
reading through this discussion i thought about the different perks you can get from using the 100 doses or whatever of radaway.
negative perks im not sure if its possible to set a time limit on earning perks but say you use x amount of said drug in x amount of time and it counts down from that point or up. gain 20 min or whatever of the debuff and you get this negative perk. and then that negative perk can be removed from not using that drug for x amount of time.
i cant code worth anything and i have no idea if these are possible but just my thoughts on the two of yours discussion.
@ demonocolips Hmm, so like a "you've used 20 jet—you now have -1 endurance, but jet now lasts longer and gives you 1 endurance per hit?" Or mayhap it's possible to mess with the UMOC, the Usage Monitor Effect. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Addiction notes this. So, rather than having this lead to a high chance of addiction, if you go beyond a certain threshold, you start to suffer other drawbacks and penalties? Hydra has none in the base game, but say you were to add a UMOC of 10 that lasts for a rather notable period of time before it fully decays. But say you take another hydra very soon thereafter, and rather than increased addiction, you instead have a chance of dying of cardiac arrest/nasty side effect when the new hydra decays? Is that a thing that makes sense to anybody but me?
@Crushric ...So, what's that fic you spoke of? I find myself intrigued.
Also, better addiction system? Much nastier effects? Cancer?! I've stayed away from drugs simply because I hate the addiction system, but if the idea is fully realised, I may begin taking them!
Oh, um, well—<awkward laughter> That's a funny story, its title. See, uh, it's I... See, I know and remember it, but there may or may not be a reason why I've been so vague about its name and stuff. Because.... well, if I brought it up, I might look somewhat discreditable... Besides, it was only good in the beginning. It started to get a bit overly grimdark [grimderp?] after the end of the second act, where the heroine protagonist got...well, she got her eyes smashed in with hammers, her arms and legs blown off, and then was gang-raped [almost] to death. To the point where I stopped because it was getting over-the-top grimdark and had far too much combat.
But... aww, screw it. Who cares if I look bad. Be brave, me. It was a crossover with something a lot of people hate on. See, its full title is [for it's still ongoing] "Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons" [FoE: PH], or just Project Horizons [PH]. It is a sidefic of the enormously popular and very well-written "Fallout Equestria".
If you hate ponies and Bronies, that's fine. I'll accept that. I'm not trying to make you like anything you hate. But, that said, the original Fallout Equestria was the best Fallout fic I ever read, ponies or no. Its story was legitimately as good if not better and more interesting than that most all the Fallout games proper, since it was a crossover of all Fallout games and DLCs, to boot. The Wasteland in FoE, with magic and all, is much darker, more hostile, and infinitely more unforgiving than the Wasteland in Fallout. And Project Horizons, which had all the interesting drug notes, is the most grimdark thing I ever read, but hella interesting.
So... there. Hate me. Don't. Find and read them or refuse. Whatever. You asked, and I told. Still great stories, even if PH got a bit grimderp there after the second act.
Anyways, I played NVB1 and New Vegas Killers, even. My initial thoughts: "Jesus Christ, why do I have so many auto-inject stimpacks?" And then "Am I some kind of God?" when even with all the combat with the "Welcome to Hell", I still rarely needed stimpacks. And I'm using light armor and That Gun.
You seem to have removed the weight of stimpacks, too. So now I can freely carry 150 of them without issue. I found myself more hesitant to use stimpacks, and now I walk around injured and allow myself to stay injured where before I'd've hopped myself up on a stim or two. But due to my auto-injects, I don't really need to. And yes, even though I got this mod, I refuse to change my play-style and drop my auto-injects. But I'm not going to be making any new autos, though. If you were to "fix" auto-injects, I could actually see situations where my character might drop-dead and starve/dehydrate due to me not paying attention. But sometimes I get hit so hard that I never reach %50 health, and so I have to use manual stims, but in those cases I am so hurt that I need to use super stims.
But, when I do use normal stims, they hurt. I now find myself carrying around a lot of Nuka Cola and Sunset Sarsaparilla, in order to down a ton of them so I can eat away at my sleep meter, since Bottle that Water means my dehydration is rarely hurt due to all the pure water I carry. Then I eat, like, 3 steaks of various animals and I'm fine till I need to hit the 8 button again, which is what I have mapped my normal stims to.
I'm now going to try to complete Novac Public Library, and then try to do Honest Hearts in order to continue testing. I still don't agree so much with the sleeping affects. At least, not until I have a better way of dealing with them on the fly. Like... maybe something like Caffeine pills or an energy drink that will deal with the sleep for a long period, but at the end of its effects I'll get a "crash" and suffer sleep damage. I don't know.
Hahaha. Isn't that interesting? There's no more top-up. I didn't change the weight on vanilla stims, but I saw that little box last night and thought about it… I think I'll add the weight of empty stims then half of Xander root and Broc flower (you're shooting juice, not a smoothie). Last night, added Superstim. Nightmare drug. Okay, tactics talk time: I was moving north of Sloan, and taking out death claws. Got blind sided and nearly killed, brought up Pip to use superstim, hesitated. The debuff was pretty raw. Hit it anyway (I was down to 10% HP, one swipe and I was a goner). The drug hit, brought me up to around 80%, deathclaw swipe took me back down another notch, but in a collaborative effort between surgeons Cass, Boone and myself, sufficiently ventilated said creature. But I was deadly starved, dehydrated and exhausted. I ate what I had left of my supplies, drank two sunsets, but was still effed on sleep, didn't even know if I'd make it to McCarran before dropping dead. I soon after became the first NV player to die from sleep deprivation when I accidentally tapped 8 instead of my binoc hotkey. My Courier's heart just fucking failed while I was walking up a ramp behind Repconn HQ. That is neither here nor there, the desperation for somewhere to crash became intense. I was looting sarsaparillas, slugging them, trying to keep the little pump working for another few hours on sugar and caffeine alone. Made it, but barely, my sleep deprivation was OVER 9000!!!/10. So, in closing, the superstim is risky frigging business. You gotta be careful with it. Next: Finalize Hydra, implement. Add weight to stims and supers. Just for you, Crushric, I'll prioritize autos and implement in another DLC esp.
Note: I'll need to know if 100 medicine/survival skill is just going to outright kill a fool. Also need to figure out how to add MCM for people in the nasty position of being prone to autodeath because they've made their stims too powerful.
EDIT: New idea just hit me: If these stims were the real deal, hospitals and field medics would be equipped to handle the debilitating 'side-effects.' So what I'm thinking is adding in a 'nutrient drip' that you plug onto your character that steadily increases their nutrition, hydration and sleep over the course of a few hours but has its own debuffs (reduced agility for having a frigging IV plugged in, primarily) and can counteract the stims. Who has a good tutorial on loot list and leveled list integration?
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Its a shame,but congrats on the mod!
Endorsed!
Needing extra Sleep means needing extra Food and Water over the long term anyway.
If such healing also damages Starvation, as in the current version of this mod, the player will quickly fix that with Food, and you're back to the constant gorging that's typical of the non-hardcore game, and that's so unrealistic (the human digestive tract can only process so much per day).
Repeated use (= overdose) of Stimpaks could still be harmful or fatal through Sleep Deprivation alone - a severely hurt character would need to alternate Stimpak, bedrest and eating/drinking over hours or days to be safely and completely restored.
To round this out, Nuka-Cola etc should no longer fix Sleep Deprivation at all, but only temporarily boost the stats most harmed by it: say, Agility+1 and Int+1 (I'm surprised Perception is not one of these, in the vanilla game).
There are no more "There's a camp full of Fiends. I'll just storm it." moments in my game now. You either kill them from far away or you hope they don't hit you at all in close quarters. Cause if they do... you better have a backpack full of food and water and a nice bedroll near you.
Not only that, but I hadn't slept in a while which I think is a very likely state to be in during play, and the few stims I took really did a number on me in that regard.
One thing I noticed though is that you haven't done any modifications to healing powder. Now of course there shouldn't be anything as drastic with healing powder as there are with stims, and probably not even have the same kind of effects, but I feel like there should be something negative to it.
Another thing is standard food and survival levels. At 0 survival skill, a gecko steak heals 2 hp a second for 15 seconds, for a total of 30 HP healed. At level 50 survival, it heals 4 hp a second for 15 seconds, for a total of 60 HP healed. You might want to consider lowering the effectiveness of food healing since it ends up being comparable to a single stimpack, but ends up being much more common and easy to find, and hell, to use. Or not, maybe it makes sense that way, something to think about either way.
The last thing that I want to mention to you is the idea of perks. You mentioned elsewhere that you may include other drug effects to this mod, and I think that's a lovely idea. What I think you should do however is add in a perk or three relating to it. For example, maybe if you've got a high enough medical skill, you can take a perk that reduces the negatives from the stim; you could call it "Steady Hand" or something maybe, to reflect proper application of the stim, instead of just stabbing it in there. Perhaps have a picture of an arm with a nice clean needle injecting into it, maybe with a smiling vaultboy face behind it or something.
Another perk idea I have is something related to the Fiends. Very similar to the medical one above, only this one doesn't have a skill based prerequisite and instead relies on total level (perhaps put it at.. 10? 20? This is a point I'm having a hard time coming to conclusions on) to determine whether you can get it. It would be the same as the medical one, only the benefits would be lower, and perhaps extend toward injectable recreational drugs, perhaps reducing their vanilla penalties, and any penalties you are modding onto them in the future. You could call it "Experienced Hand" and the perk icon could be an arm with a bunch of needle track marks in it, with a slightly bent needle going into it with a smiling Fiend face behind it.
Boy that was sure a mouth full, wasn't it? I'll just say again, good mod here DeeVee, I'm going to really enjoy it. Thanks for making it, and please keep working on it.
I've been dicking around with it recently and hope to have another build up soon.
I might even make the effects less harsh on the stim but make the superstorm a massive metabolic Shylock, gouging its pound of nutrients to give you a pound of flesh.
Scripting is pissing me off on Hydra. Boo.
Healing powder I think I'll reduce effectiveness of, and just make it mostly dehydrating. I realized last night that the Courier eats it, and anyone who's ever shortcut protein powder preparation and gone dry knows how shitty that is.
I haven't started modding food yet. But I'm not getting any healing effects from eating, just a minor heal from water. Is that PN doing that I wonder?
As far as your perks, I hear where you're coming from but I think Medicine handled that properly: the better you are as a combat surgeon, the more effective you are at putting the stim into your femoral artery at a run, and so the more effective the drug, and so scales the negative.
I do think drug resistance is important and got missed in the main game, so will implement that, but it'll mostly dull the 'high' not the negative effects.
I'd like to balance it out so that by the end of the game, a major chem user is a shuddering husk, all cankered and fucked up. Imagine your Courier with all his expertise but barely able to survive in combat.
There's also going to be stacking and overdose.
So I was looking into the UMOC and it looks like literally no one has a handle on what it is, does, or how it calculates.
What I'm wondering is what if I just bypass the in game addiction bullshit, and script symptoms for drugs. How hard could it be to apply varying degrees of crapnitude on an increasing scale with drugs taken? I could even do heart failure, DTs, etc.
Imagine - pound that hydra, go into cardiac arrest in combat, and need a stimpak to get the thing pumping again or drop dead in ten seconds.
Or get random muscle spasms and paralysis from Buffout?
Or get random migraines and blindness from liquor abuse?
Or get cancer, and have to stave off its effects with chemo drugs?
Thoughts?
I'm going to say this in another post, but I strongly suggest if you put that kinda stuff in, that you put in a perk or two that dull the penalties for this kind of thing. My suggestion is have it related to the fiends in the name and perk picture, or something.
I really like how this mod handles the balancing of stimpaks. It's a change that is fair, and makes sense. Healing requires nutrition and rest, yet this is never accounted for in the game. What's more baffling though, is that the game already has Hardcore mode to account for the needs of healing. However, I think the punishment for healing could be harsher. For instance, if the needs H2O and FOD are high, the effects of healing diminish. Perhaps foes could take a penalty or two for abusing stims as well, I don't know. You seem to know what you're doing though, so I'm sure whatever you do, it'll be good.
I am working on balancing the mod a bit more and adding in some helpful medicines to counteract the effects of stims, with their own side effects. The next build I hope to implement heart attacks.
If the medicines make stims painless again, I'll just remove them.
The things we do for fun!
Sounds like they'll go together like oil and water. What's that? Oil and water don't go together well? Ah, well, let me introduce you to my friend FIRE. He's taught me to be quite fond of the combination. A bit dangerous to have around at parties if you know what I mean.
Only took 17 tries to get that link to work. Ye gods am I rusty.
You know, the idea behind this mod reminds me of a discussion I once had with a professional nurse. I was discussing the idea of something like a stimpack, and we came to the idea that even if such a magical device could heal grievous wounds, there'd still actually be a need to consume appropriate biomass for the object to work with. Ignoring how having so many cells rapidly grown from all that biomass might lead to an increased risk of developing cancerous cells and maybe tumors.
I'm kinda of glad that I wasn't the only one who had this idea. And that's awesome. This might is awesome on its idea alone.
That all being said, I question the idea that stims require such extra sleep to work. I can imagine some exhaustion from all the efforts the body put into making new cells, but I have my doubts that it could notable impact a person like that. I'm actually all for a weaker affect on sleep, if you insist on one at all. Possibly a set of options with MCM? Or perhaps a slight hit to AP, since I use Project Nevada and the sprint and bulletime function hit AP and so act like exhaustion, so by extent maybe that might make sense? Might even make jet more useful, I don't know; I usually stay away from in-game drugs due to fear of addiction.
With drinking, from the realism standpoint—as much as can be had when dealing with what is basically magic—I cast doubts that it'd have that much of an affect on one's need to drink. I just mostly figured the thing you needed was biomass to mass-produce the cells, hence why one might need to eat before/after they take a stim. Of course, most of our body is water, and since we are replacing it, we might need a good deal of water, too. I don't know. Though I'd imagine you'd still need food more than water. As alluded to partially before, perhaps if this mod had a MCM functionality to let the player modify how severe stimpacks' effects where, that might help solve all my little questions.
Looking forwards to see where this mod goes. As I'm doing NVB1 again myself, I imagine I'll have loads of fun testing this mod out. Kudos.
Hmm... I can work on that. I hear you: an AP hit would be a cool idea. I'll look if it comes built-in; if I have to script it, we'll have to wait. Sticking my mod in with MCM is beyond my mental capacity and religious faith, atm. Otherwise, yeah, maybe knocking down the sleep amount and boosting the food requirement would be a little closer to real. On the water requirement: my whole idea is simulating metabolic processes, and in the construction of proteins, carbohydrates and water (an electrolyte) are consumed (and waste would be passed, but that's something I can leave well enough alone). For instance, if you do heavy lifting but skimp on your water or go on the Atkins Diet, expect no results. The other thing I want to do is bang DR while the stim is working, since the body would have to pool a huge amount of resources and energy around a spot the size of a quarter, leaving patient drained especially during immediate dose. Imagine experiencing a month of recuperation in six seconds while standing on your feet. It's a surprise the stimpaks aren't just lethal. At the very least, it's ridiculously uncomfortable. Hmm... cancer. If I ever work in how to make alcoholism, smoker's lung and drug addiction actual problems, maybe we can hit the poor player with a good dose of incurable degenerative disease. My courier quit smoking not because cigarettes are uncommon but because he can't smoke in his ranger helmet, and negative effects, being non-cumulative, and addiction, being a 100 cap nuisance with no way to 'wean,' were just straight immersion breaking.
I really am looking at doing a more complete overhaul on the healing/metab systems. The obvious SuperStim, then Autostims, reducing healing powder's effectiveness, Rad-Away, a powerful diuretic per the wiki, being massively dehydrating, etc. I also want to script a mini patch for PN (which is my favorite mod) so that restoring AP sucks up sleep points commensurately, 1/1. Also, since the 'hotter an engine burns' theory shows a lack of efficiency at higher temperatures, I might boost the positives of Supers a bit and make it cause even more harm, incl a chunky hit to DR, and a wipeout of APs. If I cut the effect time of a Super in half, three seconds to do its magic, that would be quite a powerful drug.
Overall, I'm really looking forward to your review of the mod and how it affected your gameplay, primarily in terms of immersion. Future updates to this little plugin will be easy to apply, so track it and I'll keep working on it.
And from what you've said there in paragraph, I can safely—you, I like you. You've a clever sport. I can respect that greatly.
Just a sidenote: Hydra.
You noted wanting to do something with hydra in the description, so I might as well off my 10 cents. I think Hydra is one of the most interesting drugs in the whole game. But it seems so... blasé, for what it's supposed to be. And how it works.
Not to name names, but I once read a certain... ugh, fanfic... and in it, Hydra was wonderfully portrayed in such an extremely interesting way that turned it from a "meh" in my book to being the drug of foremost interest. Although therein, hydra was described as a "large syringe with the image of a four-headed dragon [IE, a hydra] on it", so take it as you will. Drugs in that story made them all so much cooler, and deadlier.
"Steady, I discovered, caused nerve damage if used too frequently. Med-X could cause the mind to experience phantom pains. Buffout was damaging my joints and muscles and doing a number on my reproductive system. But the real monster, apparently, was Hydra."
And:
"[Hydra makes] your body’s natural healing processes fail, and you die cell by cell... One Hydra is bad enough, but two or three… you can drop dead on your feet.”
To elaborate—in that story, hydra was basically like a super stimpack of steroids that worked out and ate nothing but protein and Gatorade. Using hydra in that story made the heroine, and any like her who used it, functionally invincible to all but instantly fetal (eg, Fat Man) due to the absurd regenerate rate; and unlike stimpacks, it was stated that hydra could rearrange bones and other broken parts whilst also expelling foreign materials out of the body. It increased one's heart rate tremendously, too, to allow it to work, and it did it so much that one doctor noted that when the drugs effects faded from the heroine, it would likely cause cardiac arrest. The doctor gave the heroine Fixer to slow her heart rate down whilst under Hydra's effects, to try to make her survive the drug. Although in wasn't addictive in the story (why is it addictive in the first place in-game?), Hydra was noted to be dangerous if the cells begin to grow and reproduce too rapidly, forming cancerous tumors and disfiguring growths.
And yet it seems so... bleh, as far as New Vegas treats it. It's just another thing, unless the horrifically overpowered yet equally deadly -to-use drug it was in that story that made it all the more interesting.
Again, just my tens cents, food for thought.
God, look at me ramble. It's like I'm trying to get you to do hardcore chem overhaul mod at this point. My apologies.
Honestly, what I would like to do is to replace the increasing 'addiction chance' with a nasty slew of side-effects such as SPECIAL hits, etc. Ones that slowly creep up on you (after like 500 uses of Jet, you should've gone through 3 points of Agility/Endurance/Strength). The bonus would stay the same, but just like with real drug users, soon the PC is just trying to break even on a high. They could be 'perks' with little puky vaultboys with needles and other massively inappropriate grossness.
That description of hydra is a little horrifying. A big horrifying, actually.
Your ten cents are taken into consideration, for sure. I like to keep things simple (note 2kb size to dramatically alter Stimpak), and mainly I'm hitting medicals this time around, which includes Hydra and MedX.
For a quick-fix, I may just give Hydra an extended time of effect, rebalanced penalties (since it's not really healing flesh wounds but breaks, I would focus, in my view, more on sleep hits), or maybe make it a long-acting StimPak with limb healing, and ignore its addiction effects for now. The addiction system in the game is stupid and I don't like it, haven't since FO1: a guy who does five lines of coke for breakfast is suffering heavier negative effects from the drug than a freshman who's parents are sending him to rehab because they caught him using twice. Same for when the two are cut off. You don't get DTs off an afternoon Sam Adams, but off of years of personal neglect and self-pity. Fallout world? You don't get DTs. You get a mild hangover.
At the very least you should have a frigging migraine. But no, just the RPG equivalent of morning-mouth.
Oh my god. I've created a monster.
For now, I'm focusing on the classic healers and will expand from there. If I begin fiddling on everything, I will have to ask for assistance with MCM.
One thing, as I add drugs, I may do them in separate Esps, and just have a weird, garish medicine cabinet for all us masochistic HC players. Pick your poison, and its debuggs.
I've saved your comment to my mod WIP file, right next to other cute mods, like weaponizing pencils and making something you can garrote folks with: sneak attack criticals are automatic decap, weapon functionally useless otherwise.
Let me know how this minor adjustment affects your playstyle, though. Knowing others were held just as much in suspense as I was would be hugely gratifying.
negative perks im not sure if its possible to set a time limit on earning perks but say you use x amount of said drug in x amount of time and it counts down from that point or up. gain 20 min or whatever of the debuff and you get this negative perk. and then that negative perk can be removed from not using that drug for x amount of time.
i cant code worth anything and i have no idea if these are possible but just my thoughts on the two of yours discussion.
Hmm, so like a "you've used 20 jet—you now have -1 endurance, but jet now lasts longer and gives you 1 endurance per hit?"
Or mayhap it's possible to mess with the UMOC, the Usage Monitor Effect. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Addiction notes this. So, rather than having this lead to a high chance of addiction, if you go beyond a certain threshold, you start to suffer other drawbacks and penalties? Hydra has none in the base game, but say you were to add a UMOC of 10 that lasts for a rather notable period of time before it fully decays. But say you take another hydra very soon thereafter, and rather than increased addiction, you instead have a chance of dying of cardiac arrest/nasty side effect when the new hydra decays? Is that a thing that makes sense to anybody but me?
I'm still working on this, fine-tuning the next release. SuperStim.
Also realized, I should split it up between drugs (with one overall esp merge thing) so the folks w/o DLC can also enjoy where they want to.
...So, what's that fic you spoke of?
I find myself intrigued.
Also, better addiction system?
Much nastier effects?
Cancer?!
I've stayed away from drugs simply because I hate the addiction system, but if the idea is fully realised, I may begin taking them!
Oh, um, well—<awkward laughter> That's a funny story, its title. See, uh, it's I... See, I know and remember it, but there may or may not be a reason why I've been so vague about its name and stuff. Because.... well, if I brought it up, I might look somewhat discreditable... Besides, it was only good in the beginning. It started to get a bit overly grimdark [grimderp?] after the end of the second act, where the heroine protagonist got...well, she got her eyes smashed in with hammers, her arms and legs blown off, and then was gang-raped [almost] to death. To the point where I stopped because it was getting over-the-top grimdark and had far too much combat.
But... aww, screw it. Who cares if I look bad. Be brave, me. It was a crossover with something a lot of people hate on. See, its full title is [for it's still ongoing] "Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons" [FoE: PH], or just Project Horizons [PH]. It is a sidefic of the enormously popular and very well-written "Fallout Equestria".
If you hate ponies and Bronies, that's fine. I'll accept that. I'm not trying to make you like anything you hate. But, that said, the original Fallout Equestria was the best Fallout fic I ever read, ponies or no. Its story was legitimately as good if not better and more interesting than that most all the Fallout games proper, since it was a crossover of all Fallout games and DLCs, to boot. The Wasteland in FoE, with magic and all, is much darker, more hostile, and infinitely more unforgiving than the Wasteland in Fallout. And Project Horizons, which had all the interesting drug notes, is the most grimdark thing I ever read, but hella interesting.
So... there. Hate me. Don't. Find and read them or refuse. Whatever. You asked, and I told. Still great stories, even if PH got a bit grimderp there after the second act.
Anyways, I played NVB1 and New Vegas Killers, even. My initial thoughts: "Jesus Christ, why do I have so many auto-inject stimpacks?" And then "Am I some kind of God?" when even with all the combat with the "Welcome to Hell", I still rarely needed stimpacks. And I'm using light armor and That Gun.
You seem to have removed the weight of stimpacks, too. So now I can freely carry 150 of them without issue. I found myself more hesitant to use stimpacks, and now I walk around injured and allow myself to stay injured where before I'd've hopped myself up on a stim or two. But due to my auto-injects, I don't really need to. And yes, even though I got this mod, I refuse to change my play-style and drop my auto-injects. But I'm not going to be making any new autos, though. If you were to "fix" auto-injects, I could actually see situations where my character might drop-dead and starve/dehydrate due to me not paying attention. But sometimes I get hit so hard that I never reach %50 health, and so I have to use manual stims, but in those cases I am so hurt that I need to use super stims.
But, when I do use normal stims, they hurt. I now find myself carrying around a lot of Nuka Cola and Sunset Sarsaparilla, in order to down a ton of them so I can eat away at my sleep meter, since Bottle that Water means my dehydration is rarely hurt due to all the pure water I carry. Then I eat, like, 3 steaks of various animals and I'm fine till I need to hit the 8 button again, which is what I have mapped my normal stims to.
I'm now going to try to complete Novac Public Library, and then try to do Honest Hearts in order to continue testing. I still don't agree so much with the sleeping affects. At least, not until I have a better way of dealing with them on the fly. Like... maybe something like Caffeine pills or an energy drink that will deal with the sleep for a long period, but at the end of its effects I'll get a "crash" and suffer sleep damage. I don't know.
See you soon.
I didn't change the weight on vanilla stims, but I saw that little box last night and thought about it… I think I'll add the weight of empty stims then half of Xander root and Broc flower (you're shooting juice, not a smoothie). Last night, added Superstim. Nightmare drug.
Okay, tactics talk time:
I was moving north of Sloan, and taking out death claws. Got blind sided and nearly killed, brought up Pip to use superstim, hesitated. The debuff was pretty raw. Hit it anyway (I was down to 10% HP, one swipe and I was a goner). The drug hit, brought me up to around 80%, deathclaw swipe took me back down another notch, but in a collaborative effort between surgeons Cass, Boone and myself, sufficiently ventilated said creature.
But I was deadly starved, dehydrated and exhausted. I ate what I had left of my supplies, drank two sunsets, but was still effed on sleep, didn't even know if I'd make it to McCarran before dropping dead.
I soon after became the first NV player to die from sleep deprivation when I accidentally tapped 8 instead of my binoc hotkey. My Courier's heart just fucking failed while I was walking up a ramp behind Repconn HQ.
That is neither here nor there, the desperation for somewhere to crash became intense. I was looting sarsaparillas, slugging them, trying to keep the little pump working for another few hours on sugar and caffeine alone.
Made it, but barely, my sleep deprivation was OVER 9000!!!/10.
So, in closing, the superstim is risky frigging business. You gotta be careful with it.
Next:
Finalize Hydra, implement.
Add weight to stims and supers.
Just for you, Crushric, I'll prioritize autos and implement in another DLC esp.
Note: I'll need to know if 100 medicine/survival skill is just going to outright kill a fool.
Also need to figure out how to add MCM for people in the nasty position of being prone to autodeath because they've made their stims too powerful.
EDIT: New idea just hit me:
If these stims were the real deal, hospitals and field medics would be equipped to handle the debilitating 'side-effects.'
So what I'm thinking is adding in a 'nutrient drip' that you plug onto your character that steadily increases their nutrition, hydration and sleep over the course of a few hours but has its own debuffs (reduced agility for having a frigging IV plugged in, primarily) and can counteract the stims. Who has a good tutorial on loot list and leveled list integration?