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Sometimes I really don't understand what the Bethesda folks were thinking when they did certain things. I will say that questionable design choices (or oversights) have been getting less common as more DLC is released, but there's still things done which are just plain dumb. Old World Blues is no exception, but this time around the devs have managed to do something truly unique: screw up things that aren't even part of the DLC.

When installed, Old World Blues modifies a few things that only appear or affect things in the Mojave Wasteland, for seemingly no reason. The impact of these changes isn't exactly game-breaking, but it's definitely game-changing:

- 5mm rounds are 70% less numerous in loot. What this means is that when you open up a random container that contains 5mm ammo you will only find 30% of what you would without Old World Blues installed. The areas worst affected by this are the stashes in Vault 34 and the Jacobstown lodge.

- Vendors sell only one type of certain crafting supplies at a time. This one is a little more nuanced, but I'll try to keep the explanation short. Vendor inventory is usually made up of a number of lists which contain a collection of items that are randomly chosen. One of those lists, relating to crafting items, has been altered so that instead of getting, for example, 2 wrenches and 1 duct tape out of the list if they need three items, vendors will only get one type of item, e.g. 3 wrenches, 3 duct tapes, etc. It may not seem like much, but it can make it more difficult to find certain crafting supplies.

- Most Brotherhood of Steel members have been weakened. A specific NPC class used by a huge swath of BoS NPCs, including patrol members as well as a few named NPCs, was altered. The change reduces the NPCs Strength from 8 to 5, Endurance from 8 to 6, and removes Explosives as a tagged skill, with no replacement. At a minimum, this reduces the health of most BoS NPCs by 20 points, and seriously impacts their ability to use high-strength weapons like the Gauss Rifle.

- Previously empty ammo boxes now contain small amounts of energy ammo. Specifically this means ammo boxes which are empty by default, not ones you have previously looted. The amount of ammo is small - a maximum of 5 energy cells and 5 microfusion cells - but with 64 empty boxes scattered around the Mojave it can add up. This doesn't seem like a bad change at first, but nonetheless this is a change that seems to have been made for no damn reason.*


This bugfix addresses all of these issues, undoing each change completely.

*For those of you who really really want this change to stay, I have included a version which doesn't fix empty ammo cases in the Optional Files section.