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About this mod

A simple and comprehensive loot scarcity mod using event-based scripting. Trust us. Bring a magazine.

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Famine
Trust us. Bring a magazine.
Requirements:
Dead Money
Honest Hearts
Old World Blues
xNVSE
JIP LN NVSE Plugin
JohnnyGuitar NVSE
ShowOff NVSE Plugin (optional)



Description

Famine is a simple, customisable, and comprehensive loot rarity mod, utilising dynamic removal of items held by containers and enemies, or placed in the game world. It makes loot much more scarce, creating a harder gameplay experience.

There are a couple of extra scarcity related features:
  • Armour and weapon conditions are dynamically reduced to make repairing harder and to prevent the vanilla exploit of selling valuable weapons dropped by enemies.
  • Plants will sometimes have been harvested already when you find them (the Courier isn't the only one foraging the Mojave). This also affects Cloud Residue around the Sierra Madre
  • Mines have a chance to break when disarmed (player-placed mines are exempt).
  • Loot in the Caesar's Favour containers will be reduced.

Famine is very similar to Unfound Loot, but has a much simpler set of options and scripts. Almost all the code is taken from similar systems in JSawyer Ultimate, Mojave Arsenal, Water Overhaul, and Loot Assist. I've basically made almost all of this mod before, just not specifically done the loot removal bit, so I thought I'd offer the option.

Mods with lots of options make me sort of feel like I'm playing a spreadsheet that I have a constant urge to tweak, which is why I made Famine as simpler alternative to Unfound Loot. I've deliberately kept only a small number of essential options, but these include customisable removal percentages for the item categories. In this case, I have the added hot take that probability is a mathematical phenomenon and not something humans can perceive, so gesticulating over an array of rarity options has never seemed too worthwhile in my opinion. Use whatever suits your taste.

Some other miscellaneous points and features:

Spoiler:  
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  • Items are ignored based on a fairly complex, but logical, set of conditions. For example, quest items, owned items in the world, books, playing cards, notes, and atmospheric junk are all ignored. The list is more extensive than that, but you get the idea; things that shouldn't be edited won't be edited. The criteria has been part of my other mods for a while, so it's a pretty proven formula.
  • Famine has a tighter set of conditions than Unfound Loot, allowing more containers to be edited when they logically should be. For example, Unfound Loot skips all owned containers, but Famine doesn't. This is to avoid a strange loot disparity occurring between owned and unowned containers. The wide berth in Unfound Loot is (I assume) to make double-certain to avoid merchant stock, but Famine excludes them using a different set of conditions elsewhere anyway.
  • All scripting uses events. No runtime scripts at all, the same as all of my mods.
  • There are four categories of items to configure rarity for: Aid, Ammo, Misc, and throwables (grenades, mines, thrown weapons). This conforms to how items are sorted in the inventory tabs.
  • The chance of items being removed from locked containers is decreased by 50% by default.
  • The chance of aid and misc items being removed from creatures (except robots and Super Mutants) is decreased by 25% by default. These items are typically meats and pelts.
  • All items, regardless of whether they are from containers, actors, or placed in the world, are treated the same when it comes to removal (noting the few exceptions mentioned above). There is an option for items placed in the world to have a lower removal chance, but this is disabled by default. There are no separate options for different types of containers, or different types of items other than the categories above. I don't think this is necessary for the same reason as the probability point mentioned previously. If you use a mod like this, you want items to be generally rarer, not 10% rarer in scenario A, and 20% rarer in scenario B, and 0.34% rarer in C, etc. That sort of difference cannot really be perceived unless you analyse your loot drops in a spreadsheet after dozens of hours of gameplay.
  • As people on the xNVSE Discord know, I like optimisation. The scripts are all based on the optimised Mojave Arsenal scripts, using the newest xNVSE methods, with a few extra features. One such feature is the use of statistical mathematics to shortcut the need to roll random numbers repeatedly when determining how many items in a stack to remove. Instead, a single roll is made, and statistical theories (the normal and binomial distributions) are used to convert this one roll into the number of items that will be removed. This is significantly quicker than rolling individually for each item, even for just two items, and produces (approximately) the same result. It also provides greater variety than just multiplying the item count by a flat percentage (i.e. the mean of a binomial distribution). The end result is that loot counts are always statistically varied, without using intensive scripting. I've also avoided repeated calls to UDFs, by rounding up all containers and items at once, and passing them to a single UDF to process as a chunk, rather than individually.
  • Famine is INI customisable only, because it removes the need for huge MCM scripts and prevents you (me) from fiddling with stuff unnecessarily when playing the game.
  • Mojave Arsenal and Water Overhaul's loot edits are supported.
  • Famine has a system for handling respawning containers, which is something that Unfound Loot doesn't do. At present, I only use it for the Caesar's Favour containers, since virtually every container in the game doesn't respawn, so it isn't really a major concern. I may expand the implementation in the future.




Installation

This mod requires the following:

Standard installation procedure: add the file to your data folder and check in the game launcher or your mod manager of choice. Load wherever.


Customisation

Full instructions for customisation can be found in the included INI file. The eight options are:

  • Enable/Disable low conditions loot
  • Removal percentages for AID, AMMO, MISC, and throwable weapons
  • Removal chance multiplier for items in locked containers.
  • Removal chance for items placed in the game world (not in inventories).
  • Removal chance for aid and misc items carried by creatures.
  • Chance of breaking a mine when disarming
  • Chance of flora being pre-harvested

Additionally, you can customise the removal chance on an item-by-item basis by creating an INI file (it must have a .ini extension) in the "config\Famine\Custom\" directory. Simply add a section as follows and specify the item's EditorID and a multiple to be applied to the chance of removal:

[FAMINE]
Ammo9mm=0.5

The example above will decrease the chance of removal for 9mm ammo by 50%. Setting the multiplier to 0 will mean the item is never removed.


Uninstallation

This mod can be safety uninstalled at any time and will have no permanent effects on your game. Just delete the file and you're good to go.


Compatibility

This mod uses dynamic scripts and will be compatible with everything. The only caveat is if you use another mod that also increases rarity, you will get a compounded effect.

Harvestable flora not included in the vanilla game or DLCs is not supported by default, but it will be if it is added to a form list. The same goes for mines with the breakable mines option. Tale of Two Wastelands is the only mod I know that adds new flora, and I don't know of any mods that place new types of armed mine to the game world.


Debug

Spoiler:  
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For now, the items that are removed are not deleted. They are instead stored in a remote container. If, for whatever reason, you need to access this container, you can type the line below into the console. An example is if a item is removed that shouldn't be, although the conditions are robust enough that this will likely never happen.

PWBFamineBoxREF.Activate Player

You can also enable debug mode, so that Famine will print information to the console. Be warned, it's a fair amount of text, so it will probably drown any other console prints. You'll be in no doubt if the mod is working, though.

Credits

The image used for this mod's cover is a free use skull vector created by freepik - www.freepik.com


My Mods

I spend a lot of time creating and supporting my mods, so any donations are gratefully received.