TRUE WASTELAND ECONOMY 2.2

---------- Important Notes (read before installing) ----------

If you are updating an older save file from TWE version 2.0 or lower to TWE 2.1 or higher: please use the 'reset mod' option in the first MCM menu the first time you load your file. Not doing this may result in errors.

If you are using TWE along with Project Nevada: Extra Options: Please make sure the item frequency levels in the Unfound Loot module in Project Nevada:EO are all set to 100%. Not doing this will not cause major conflicts, but will result in lower loot levels than intended by either TWE or PN.

If you are installing/adding TWE to a game that is already in progress: Be aware that the Unfound Loot module will clear loot from containers and areas that you have already visited in-game. This means that your "stash", safehouse, or any place you may have been storing items will be effected. If you do not want this to happen in a specific area, you can either leave the module disabled, or do this:

-Disable Unfound Loot
-Navigate to your stash/safehouse
-Use the "mark cell as safe" option in the Unfound Loot page of the MCM menu
-Re-enable Unfound Loot

After that, your stash will never be cleared (although items will still degrade/rot over time if you are using the Item Degradation module).

---------- Changelog ----------



---------- Overview ----------

Personally, vanilla New Vegas always felt far too easy to me. After playing the game for a few hours, I found myself craving a truly harsh Nevada desert. I wanted my character to have to struggle to survive, to occasionally starve to death, run out of ammo and meds, or be forced to steal or make some other tough decision in order to get by. 

There are many excellent mods for New Vegas to enhance the game's difficulty, but very few which attempt to provide the experience I describe. In fact, many overhaul mods inadvertently end up making the economy side of the game even easier than vanilla, by increasing global damage without decreasing the amount of ammo available.

True Wasteland Economy aims to address all these issues, by overhauling the entire economy of New Vegas from the ground up. It is organized into five separate modules: Item Attrition, Economy Enhanced, Unfound Loot EX, Corpse Loot Reduction, and Misc Tweaks. Each of these modules alters the game at a fundamental level to make things interesting and strategically challenging for the player. With all modules enabled, the economy of the game is completely transformed. Items are on a timer; old food will rot away, medicine will go bad and even sturdier items will suffer wear and tear, eventually rendering them unusable. Almost every source of items/money is dynamically reduced via scripts: now the wasteland feels barren, providing just barely enough for you to survive.

Your character will be fighting to fend off poverty and starvation at every turn. You'll be forced to make tough sacrifices, manage your limited resources wisely, and do things for caps you never thought you'd do -- as you'd expect in a post-apocalyptic world.

Find the mod too difficult? Or want an even more brutal experience? No problem! Open up the MCM menu and adjust the settings to suit your playstyle, or even disable parts of the mod you don't like. The choice is yours.


---------- Modules ----------

Economy Enhanced:

This module employs several sophisticated and interrelated systems to completely revamp the barter system. Now every area/merchant in the game is endowed with unique trading preferences and characteristics. No longer can the player simply dump all of his junk at the first person he encounters and still turn a profit! Saavy couriers will soon learn to be strategic about the places and people they trade with, and skilled mercantile PCs will even have the option of making a living solely through trade, by identifying and exploiting lucrative trade routes.

Supply and demand: Rather than a fixed, flat price, item values now fluctuate from one area/vendor to the next. For example, military outposts value guns, ammo and armor above all else, driving the prices up in those areas. Conversely, arms are less valuable within the sheltered confines of New Vegas, but high end whiskey and prewar clothes will fetch significantly higher prices there. Factional affinities also play a role in the trade process: NCR controlled areas will spit upon Legion currency, and vice versa.

Specialization: In EE, people who specialize in certain categories of items will pay more for them. A doctor will pay more (but also charge more) for medicine. The flip side of this is that he'll be less willing to trade for (and more willing to sell) that suit of power armor he doesn't even know how to use. Just as the player can increase his profits by selling to the highest bidder, it's possible to save a good chunk of caps by buying items that people have no use for. A trade-oriented character should keep his eyes peeled for items that seem out of place and check prices frequently.

Haggle willingness: Not every merchant in the game is willing to negotiate on prices. Generally, the larger and more well stocked a store is (think Gun Runners or Van Graffs) the more fixed its prices will be, and the less powerful the player's barter skill will be. This is not an entirely bad thing, as these stores have also been made more forgiving towards players with low barter skill. Meanwhile, small time merchants are more willing to haggle, which can be a boon for a courier with the right skills, but a source of misery for others.

Connectedness: This new system reflects the general flow of goods through the Mojave. The lower connectedness is, the more intense the effect of supply and demand on item values becomes. This can either be an annoyance or an opportunity for the courier, depending on how he exploits the situation. Connectedness increases as hostiles are cleared from the roads, and decreases whenever NCR, guards, or anyone else who keeps the road safe are killed. Killing even a single merchant is a huge blow to connectedness. Over time, connectedness will slowly return to an average baseline, so the player will need to stay active if he wants to have an impact on it.

Cost of Living: Cost of living varies from town to town and effects all buying and selling prices, with highly populated areas such as New Vegas having the highest buying and selling prices and rural and wilderness areas having the lowest. As in real life, this generally encourages a flow of goods away from farms, ranches and salvage areas and towards urban areas.


Item Degradation:

Item Damage: This module causes items in the game world to rot, rust, break, and otherwise degrade over time, transforming them into unusable junk items. Powerful scripts ensure that items will be effected regardless of whether they are in the player's inventory, a container, or dropped into the game world. TWE tracks and applies 6 separate categories of item damage, including time, physical, fire, water, radiation, and EMP. The amount of damage applied to the items in the game world largely depends on the player's actions, and where he stores his items. For example: resting or waiting will cause items to rot, swimming and bad weather will rust or dilute items, combat damage will cause fragile items to break, being set on fire or hit with an explosion will burn items, radiation will cause food and drinks to become irradiated, EMP will scramble electronics.

For the above reasons, items in the player's inventory are very susceptible to damage, making it highly advisable to store items safely whenever possible. Safely stored items will only be effected by time damage, ie, food will still rot and medicine will still expire, but all other items will remain safe. The best place to store items is indoors and in a container. Items placed outdoors will take some damage (physical and water) to reflect weather conditions. Radiated and/or underwater areas are poor places to store items, as items placed there will take massive radiation/water damage over time.

TWE supports 50 different item categories, each with its own degradation rates. Each category functions differently. For example, food rots quickly over time, but can take a beating and still be edible. Meanwhile, glass bottles stay good forever if undisturbed, but are highly susceptible to breakage if the player gets into a fight. A more specific example: eggs are more fragile than bread, but eggs can be submerged safely, while swimming will cause any bread on your character to become soggy and useless.

Degraded items in containers or in the player's inventory will have somewhat generalized descriptions such as "Broken Glass Bottle". They have no barter value, and no useful attributes. Dropping the items will destroy them instead of placing them in the game world. Meanwhile, degraded items on the ground will appear normal until picked up, at which point the Courier will "notice" the degradation, and the item(s) will transform into junk versions.

Refrigerators: Vanilla refrigerators now have a useful function, as they can be used to partially protect food, medicine, etc. from deterioriating over time. Items placed in a refrigerator will decay at a slower rate, but only if the refrigerator is equipped with batteries. Energy cells, microfusion cells, electron charge packs and fission batteries can all be used to provide refrigerators with power. To "install" batteries, simply place them inside the refrigerator along with all the items you'd like to preserve. Refrigerators will slowly consume batteries over time -- once the batteries run out, items will begin to decay at normal rates.

For more detailed information about item categories, environmental effects, and more, see the included readme file.


Unfound Loot EX:

A rework of the Unfound Loot feature from the awesome Project Nevada. This module will dynamically and semi-randomly remove a percentage of items from the game world. No longer will you find heaps of valuable goodies in every area you explore. Useful items are few and far between, and they'll be in different locations every time you play. Unlike the original Unfound Loot, my version is set up to include containers and corpses, and does not exclude any DLC or mod-added areas and items - meaning the economy will be consistently punishing wherever you go. This module avoids touching most misc items by default, so that interiors don't become too ugly and barren.


Corpse Loot Reduction:

This module adjusts the amount of usable items, as well as diminishing the condition of items your character can salvage from dead enemies (or allies, or neutrals...) Now, killing a single foe won't net you enough loot to sustain you for days. Some corpses will have even less items than usual depending on the manner of their death - killing with poison or sharp objects causes less item damage than explosions and sledgehammers. Dismembered bodies have less useable salvage, and ash piles will never contain any useable loot! Different types of creature/NPC have different amounts of loot; furthermore, this is somewhat effected by the player's skills -- a player with higher repair can salvage more loot from robots, while higher survival gives a better chance of acquiring pelts and meat from creatures. Luck also has a small effect on the amount of items each corpse has.

Misc Tweaks:

This module adds some small economic tweaks to the game. It adjusts the respawn timer on plants, making harvesting more realistic. Now you can only harvest plants once per in game year. Misc Tweaks also adds a "breakage" rate for harvesting plants, as well as disarming mines. No longer will you come away from game locations with a pack full of useful herbs and explosives. Note that particularly skilled characters will still be able to gather useful material, though still not as much as in the vanilla game.

Again, all modules are highly configurable through MCM - if there's a feature you feel is too punishing or would like to disable entirely, there's likely an option for that.


---------- Requirements ----------

NVSE v4.5 (or greater)
JIP LN NVSE Plugin
The Mod Configuration Menu

---------- Installation Instructions ----------

Extract the .esp to your Data folder and enable.


---------- Conflicts ----------

TWE does not touch any vanilla assets, so it should be compatible with 99.99% of mods. Having said that, here are the .01%:

Economy Enhanced currently will not effect merchants added by Barter World Reloaded. You can still use both mods and see the effects on vanilla merchants.

Any "auto loot" or "auto pickup" mod, or mods that alter the way items are added to the player's inventory. Depending on how they work, these mods may add items to player's inventory before TWE's scripts have a chance to work on them.

If you're using TWE with Project Nevada, you should only enable the Unfound Loot feature in PN or PWE, not both. Using both at the same time will not cause crashes, but is redundant and will leave you with even less items than intended.


---------- Known Issues ----------

TWE has been very carefully designed to not break your game. TWE does not use or alter any of the game's vanilla assets, which means it should be compatible with 99.99% of mods out there. There has never been a single report of TWE causing crashes, corrupted save games or any major game breaking issues.

Having said that, there have been rare reports of TWE having minor compatibility issues with very heavily modded setups:

- TWE may interfere with Project Nevada's food/item changes. To prevent all issues, disable the Unfound Loot options in Project Nevada (set all loot probabilities in that mod to 100%).

- TWE's Item Degradation/Econ Enhanced modules simply fail to execute in some rare cases. This is likely caused by an issue with NVSE and/or JIP Plugin; if you experience this please comment in the bugs section.

---------- Future Plans ----------

I intend to update this mod pretty regularly. I have a few tweaks and additions that I'm already working on, and of course, I hope to incorporate feedback from all you wastelanders in future versions. What I make will be highly contingent upon the comments and general response I receive.
That said, here's what's on the drawing board at present:

DLC version - mostly a cosmetic change. Right now, item attrition only recognizes vanilla items. Items added by mods or DLC will degrade into "junk" (for misc) or "garbage" (for ingestibles). An optional patch could extend the mod's item recognition so that DLC items degrade into more specific and descriptive junk items and use more specific attrition rates.

Visual Junk Items - At the moment, junk items are simply a way to track what kind of item degradation the player has suffered. If you try to drop them into the game world, they'll simply disappear. In the future, I may try to find meshes/textures so these objects can be seen and interacted with visually. I may also make junk items "recyclable" through crafting, and add some meager benefits to using them, so that (for example) rotten food can still be eaten, just with less benefit than normal food.

Crafting Tweaks - At the moment, I haven't touched the crafting system at all, despite the fact that it is an easy source of caps and good items. The chief reason is that I can't think of a way to make the crafting system less OP that won't simply irritate most players. One idea I'm considering are adding a 'crafting failure' chance, that will result in the player's components being converted to junk items or simply being lost. I'd definitely welcome suggestions as to how to make the crafting system less of a free ride. 


---------- Acknowledgements ----------

JazzIsParis - For creating JIP Plugin and updating it just so I could add new features to my mod!

Luthien Anarion - For creating Lutana NVSE Plugin without which this mod would not be possible.

The Project Nevada team - For making PN open source and for designing such an essential mod.

Arwen - For making Arwen's Realism tweaks, which proved that realism, micromanagement and insane difficulty could form the basis for a great mod.

You - For playing :)


---------- Modder's Notes ----------

This mod is open source and can be edited, reuploaded, cannibalized into other mods, etc. Have fun!