TLDR:  Loot is redacted and moved to more realistic places, mostly behind locks. Edits over 4,500+ hand placed items in the game, not counting leveled lists and containers which were also significantly overhauled.

Testimonials:

deviant2023 wrote: "This mod is a MUST for realism, and an actual challenge at survival rather than just making gun fights harder like other realism mods."

Kay123 wrote: "Vanilla loot felt like a joyride ... This time around, I had to crawl through ducts with a half-irradiated character before I was able to scrounge up the parts needed for some RadAway."

goonygoogoo11 wrote: "been playing for a while now with this and its pretty much perfect, feels like real survival now."

prodigium wrote: "I just gotta say though I really appreciate this mod. So far it has made my second playthrough much more interesting."

Romanus wrote: "This mod has completely changed how I play the game now."

HrvojeRaznjevic wrote: "This is the best mod for FO4. Essential mod for everyone IMO."

Description:

This mod is a loot overhaul, which means it touches on the loot and resources in the game wherever they may be. This means worldspace and cell references, leveled lists, NPC records, vendor price and respawn time gamesettings, settlement loot production from water furniture and activators, flora crop records and more. All of these are connected to the loot system and production in the game and each of them by themselves can allow the player under default settings to be swimming in loot of many varieties, all of which can be subsequently sold for a lot of caps. So a multi-threaded, mixed arms approach is needed, you cannot simply modify one of these things and call it an overhaul or have the desired impact of difficulty and relatively realistic strife this mod strives for.

A number of items have had their appearence in the game reduced such as Chems/Meds, Junk, Ammo, Guns, Power Armor, Clean Clothes, Bobby Pins, Water and Food in just about every aspect of the game and many were placed back inside locked containers. Animal part loot drops off slain creatures require the Wasteland Survival Guide 'Hunting the Wastes' Magazine #9 perk, like their stingers and hides and so on.

In Fallout Loot Overhaul most high end items like Stealth Boys, Mini Nukes, high explosives to name just a few are now either solely available at random intervals or are set to not respawn to prevent meta-gaming there where-abouts and nabbing the same ones over and over again after the cell resets.

The mod also readjusts placement of items such as post war weapons in pre war safes and adds dirty water to the poor, clean for the wealthy and bosses now typically have a decent cap stash. Many of the items that have been nearly eradicated from the worldspace and interiors like pre-war foods, beverages and cigarettes are now placed in higher level locked containers, safes and boss containers. Furthermore all locked containers now actually have extra loot in them!

The Scrounger perk is revamped and only gives the ammo type that each individual enemy is carrying. No more laser clad enemies dropping .38's! Scrounger now drops more ammunition but does so in fewer containers than vanilla. In the vanilla game it would spawn in dressers and coolers among others, now it is focused on a smaller set of more appropriate containers. It also now gives a few extra rounds when dropped in a container compared to when dropping on an NPC, where vanilla previously made no distinction.

Guns of all types are far less frequent in containers, in the worldspace and most importantly less frequently wielded by NPC's such as non boss, non legendary non unique Raiders, Supermutants, Scavengers and Minutemen.

It also overhauls crop and water production which were cut in half, this was done to remove excessive gain from workshop loot and make you expend more found/bought crop loot to achieve the same yield. It was silly to think someone can survive on two carrots a day. This change makes supply lines much more useful as they can be used to feed small but densely packed settlements without enough space to have large crops. Just like in real life, some places need resources to be shipped into a location for it to be sustainable, Las Vegas being a good example. And if you are worried that a lot of the basic water pumps might look weird, there are a number of examples in third world countries where there are water pump 'stations' that have and use quite a few crude pumps to deal out water to the nearby populace. And naturally you can also use supply lines to ship water in from more water-filled locations.

The ability of the player to harvest crops has been removed as it was too easy to abuse to get free crops. That's crazy talk you might say! But you now have to buy and loot seeds from vendors and containers. Wild crops however now give you normal crops to plant for your settlers to grow food. Also crops are now actually present on farm vendors for purchase, which is a good place to look if you need to feed your settlements. The removal of wild crops is a non issue as they are not featured in any recipes nor have any special attributes over normal crops.

Vendor prices have been edited as well to make the wasteland a less fair and giving place, this is because bartering is a part of the loot system, it is the end part where you turn in all your loot for caps to buy the loot that you really want. Two game setting values were changed to accomplish this: fbartermin and fbmartermax, now respectively 3 (min) and 6 (max) up from the default 2 and 3.5.

Vendor respawn time was also increased by x3.5 from 2 days to 7 and the amount of caps they have were increased by x3.5 to match. For a world filled with so many caps, it was odd that vendors had so little and refilled their stock at a relatively unrealistic rate.

Legendary weapons and armor are also reduced in drop rate by the mod roughly 60 to 75%. These items are arguably the most over-powered loot in the game and yet they are handed out mostly to non-boss generic enemies opposed to unique and named boss characters (which is just weird to be honest), they now spawn less on legendary enemies.

Fallout Loot Overhaul also edits the text dealing with containers, it removes containers psychically telling the player that they are empty since that can actually happen now.

All of this really does not even scratch the surface of what this mod does to loot, the total list of changes would far too numerous to list, but these should give you a general idea of what the mod is about.

Be sure to let me know if there are any issues or bugs.

Recommended Mods:

Sleep Doesn't Heal (Or anything that stops sleep from healing you and your limbs)

Level-up Doesn't Heal

Food Don't Heal/No Food Health Bonus/Removed Food Health (anything that removes or reduces healing from foods, load FLO after them so FLO overwrites)

No Passive Health Regeneration (Or anything that removes or reduces natural healing/rad loss perks/mags)





Any mod that removes items in cells or worldspaces due to an engine limitation may cause frame drops in some urban areas of the game.

Compatibility:

Mods that edit leveled lists, containers, flora crop records, water pumps/purifiers, the bobby pin box misc item reference and Gunner/Raider/Super Mutant/Synth NPC records are going to conflict. Whichever mod you prefer should be placed lower in your load order in your mod manager. Conflicting mods are typically a small issue and can rarely harm your game.

If you have the spare time, it is relatively easy to create a compatibility or 'merged' patch for almost anything using FO4Edit/xEdit once you know the basics. There is a guide on the program here. It might seem daunting or too complicated but most of it is just understanding what a few colors mean and then dragging and dropping things as needed.

Saved/Existing Games:

You will not see any difference until you go to an area you have never been before or when the cell resets for those areas that you have, which by default takes about a week. The reduced water production and crop output levels can be a shock to a saved game with a lot of settlements. Just think of it as a dry spell in an ever changing wasteland that is trying to kill you. It is not longer as simple as "those who arrive, survive".

Install:

Use a mod manager to install automatically or just copy the Data folder into your Fallout 4 folder and use a mod manager to activate it.

Update Instructions:


Updating from version 2.4 or later to 2.96+:

1.) Travel to a small empty interior, like the cellar in Sanctuary.

2.) Save the game in a new slot, exit.

3.) Remove the ESP and Scripts the mod adds.

4.) Start the game and load the above save, you can ignore the missing plugin warning.

5.)Create a new save and then exit the game.

6.) Install the updated version of the mod.

7.) Load the latest save, save again in a new slot.

8.) Play.

Updating from any other version:

Copy the Data folder into your Fallout 4 folder, just says yes when asked to overwrite.

Uninstall Instructions:

1.) Travel to a small empty interior, like the cellar in sanctuary hills.

2.) Save the game, exit.

3.) Remove the ESP and Scripts the mod adds.

4.) Start the game and load the above save, ignore the missing plugin warning.

5.) Create a new save and then exit the game.

6.) Clean the latest save with a saved game script cleaner.

Credits:

- GaRRuSS (Translator)
- Bethesda
- xEdit team