Requires xNVSE

I love DUST a lot. It's a perfect opportunity to play Fallout: New Vegas without all those quests you've already experienced doing for a hundred times.
Although some things didn't sit with me well so I've decided to make some tweaks and changes to make Dust a bit more enjoyable and varied experience.

This modification requires both Manan's Tweaks and DUSTed Dust since those mods fix a lot.


Barter is now Inventions. Inventions governs quality of life perks and doesn't have effects on bartering anymore. For now it has three new perks:

Comfortable boots: (Inventions 45, END 6) - Lets you use Fast Travel in Dust. Fast travel restrictions have been redone, before it was a global setting for every cell so any player house or location-changing mod would change that and allow you to use fast travel again. Now it's scripted and you can use any cell-changing mods you want - Fast Travel will only be available with this perk. Script runs once after your game loads so it doesn't affect game perfomance.

Self-taught Power: (Inventions 75, INT 7, Science 40) - Power armor training.

Power Fitting: (Inventions 90, Science 50) - You can now improve any t-45d and t-51b power armors at workbench. This includes NCR t-45d. Every type of upgraded armor has it's own advantages, although balanced and not too strong. For some you will also have to find some rare components.

It always bothered me how leveling often felt useless because of downsides that perks had. For example, what's the point in taking a perk that makes you do +10% damage to women and -10% damage to men? Almost every horde of enemies is both men and women so you won't gain something useful. Also weapon-specific perks: DUST is considered a survival game where you find a lot of weapons in bad conditions and your ammo is usually low so you're supposed to use many different weapons. I didn't like that so I changed it.

Almost all of the perk downsides are removed. To balance it, some perks now have a slightly weaker effect and some require higher stats to obtain. Couple of examples below:

Pack Rat - Items with a weight of two pounds or less now weigh half as much.
Was: INT 5, Barter 70. Who would level up Barter in DUST?
Now: INT 6, AGL 7, Survival 75

Grunt - You do 25% more damage with 9mm and .45 Auto Pistols and SMGs, Service Rifles, Assault and Marksman Carbines, Light Machine Guns, Frag Grenades, Grenade Rifles and Launchers, and Combat Knives but 25% less damage when using any revolver, lever-action firearm, dynamite, knife, or hatchet.
Grunt now - You do 20% more damage with 9mm and .45 Auto Pistols and SMGs, Service Rifles, Assault and Marksman Carbines, Light Machine Guns, Frag Grenades, Grenade Rifles and Launchers, and Combat Knives.

Grim Reaper's Sprint - If you kill a target in V.A.T.S., 20 Action Points are restored upon exiting V.A.T.S. Your Action Points regenerate 50% slower, though.
Grim Reaper's Sprint now - If you kill a target in V.A.T.S., 15 Action Points are restored upon exiting V.A.T.S.

And so on, you get the idea.

• Weight for a point in STR increased from 5 to 7 to make STR more valuable and to let you use Inventions with power armors
• You don't lose sanity while killing characters that are evil or very evil
• XP reward for finding locations is now 40 instead of 20
• Both hunger and dehydration rates will increase twice as slow. Sleep rates are unchanged.
• Gas bombs weight has been reduced to 1.5 instead of 5
  

• More perks for Inventions skill
• Inventions-based ending
• More crafting
• Change Speech to Devotion. This should be interesting.
• Naming fixes since there are still lots of doors incide cells that don't have correct naming.
• Bugfixes
• More individuality in combat situations.