Why did I make this mod?

I feel (as do many others, I've found) that the prevalence of power armor in the game and the ease at which it can be accessed ruins both the fun and game balance. Being able to acquire numerous suits of PA out-the-gate also ruins any elation a player may have when they acquire that suit of T45 in the game's intro quest. I wanted to do a more modern, lightweight take on fixing those problems. A quick solution for those of us vanilla-lite Fallout 4 players that don't want to overload our games. Something you could drop in any load order and just forget about. No unnecessary bells and whistles, no intrusive messages, no severe compatibility problems - just a one-and-done fix. 

How does it work, exactly?

The plugin is very simple. I designed a few new leveled lists, each with multiple layers of random dice rolls to produce results. The parent layers, IE the top lists, have a set "chance none" integer, meaning the game rolls the dice on whether to produce power armor at all when they trigger. From there, some of the actual armor sets also have a similar dice roll, and each individual piece of armor within those sets also has one. 

I simply used some publicly-available injection scripts to drop those leveled items into the power armor leveled lists: "LL_Armor_Power_Set" and "LL_Armor_Power_Set_Partial". These two lists are responsible for producing power armor on the various frames distributed throughout the game world. The scripts run at the start of the game when the mod is installed, flood these leveled lists with multiple instances of my new lists, and then shut down.

That's it. From there, power armor becomes a wasteland rarity. Most generic, non-unique power armor frames will be empty.

So wait, It doesn't actually remove or edit anything?

Nope! The power armor frames still spawn as usual, but now they very rarely produce full sets of power armor. A full, vanilla armor set has a roughly 1 in 12-ish chance to spawn - but in my experience testing the mod it can actually be quite lower in execution. The new primary LLs have a 97 percent chance to produce nothing - this is the most prevalent leveled item. The secondary lists have a 75 percent chance to produce nothing, and these are a bit less prevalent.

This system just affects leveled power armor frames found throughout the world, and shouldn't affect unique sets found in the DLC, or things like the T45 set in the museum of freedom. It also shouldn't affect the power armor that spawns on NPCs.

So, how exactly do I acquire sets of power armor now?

Pieces of power armor will still, albeit VERY rarely, spawn on frames in the world. The new lists will produce a much more varied array of results for those pieces - such as different linings and much lower possible starting HP. This means you might occasionally find a few pieces of useful armor on frames that may be in need of repair, or even mismatched partial sets. And, very rarely, you may just find that full set you've been searching so hard for. Level scaling has been modified as well, meaning that the power armor that does spawn will not always be scaled to your level - you might still find T45 at level 30+. Overall, the boring vanilla scavenging method is now much more inefficient, and is no longer the ideal way to gather and hoard power armor.

In the wake of this new power armor scarcity, buying power armor pieces or killing power-armored enemies is a much bigger deal. I imagine the easiest way to get a full set of power armor will be to kill someone for it - which is probably how it shOULD HAVE BEEN IN THE FIRST PLACE, BETHESDA!! I imagine those unique, one-off sets of power armor and/or modded power armors, like the T49 or Ultracite Power Armor, will now also be more useful for combatting scarcity.

What about *Compatibility*?

This mod edits zero vanilla files. It works by firing off a few one-and-done injector scripts, and that's that. Therefore, it is technically compatible with everything.

However, the injected LLs are matched the vanilla leveled items perfectly in terms of leveled entries. This means that mods which edit/add to these vanilla lists at different or higher levels may entirely overwrite this mod. I tested the T65 armor mod, which directly adds the armor to the two aforementioned leveled lists at around level 40ish, and it does completely overwrite this mod - meaning that the T65 just starts popping up everywhere at those levels. These types of mod conflicts will require patching preserve SPARS's changes, plain and simple. BUT - and it's a big but - they will not break your game, they will not crash your game, and they will not cause performance issues. And that is something I consider to be a big win.

You also shouldn't have an issue with script bloat, as the scripts run once, at start, then shut down. I checked to make sure there aren't any possible infinite loops or calling of problematic game scripts in the functions or events. And overall, everything seems well-contained, wrapped up, and tied off with a neat little bow. Granted, I'm far from an expert, but these scripts aren't incredibly complex, either.

Credits

The scripts I use for these types of mods are from publicly available modders' resources by ABlindMan and DankRaft. I have renamed their source scripts to ensure that any changes I make do not interfere with other mods that use their scripts.

Honorable mention to Progman for making Some Assembly Required, one of my all-time favorite mods and a clear inspiration for this mod.