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About this mod
An expansion of critical effects and related perks for Fallout: New Vegas, based on the classic Fallout games.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
- Donations
Important: ICE includes a custom critical message system. This means that in your lStewieAl's tweaks settings you should set bNoCrippleCriticalMessages = 1 and bPatchCritical = 1 to disable vanilla critical messages. 
The original Fallout games had a deep and elaborate system of critical effects accompanied with colorful descriptions. When Fallout 3 came along this system was removed in favor of a very simplistic one, which then found its way into Fallout: New Vegas. The goal of ICE is to restore as much of the old critical system as possible, thus adding a lot more variety to the game's combat, and most importantly - returning the Sniper perk to its former glory.
Main Features:
- The original critical system inherited by New Vegas from Fallout 3 is preserved, but expanded with a plethora of new effects.
- Every creature type in the base game and DLC has been given a custom critical table (a total of 55 tables are included) based on the tables from the classic Fallout games (the tables are tied to Body Part Data, which means most mods will not require compatibility patches to work with ICE).
- Every time anyone (you, or any other NPC or Creature) lands a critical strike, they roll to get a combination of extra effects from the target's critical table. The final effect depends on the roll, type of target, and limb hit.
- Possible effects include: extra damage, (limited) armor-piercing, knockdown, knockout, instant cripple (for the limb hit), blindness, and instant death. These will occur in various combinations specified in the critical tables, and will be accompanied by custom messages.
- An entirely new feature has been added to the game, also based on the classics - critical failures. These can affect any creature or NPC in the game (even mod-added ones), including you. Every swing with an Unarmed or Melee Weapon, or shot with a Gun, Energy Weapon, or Explosive weapon, has a small chance (depending on the target's Luck) to result in a critical failure (the chance is also lowered for automatic weapons, or weapons with a high rate of fire). The effects range from brief disorientation, to breaking a limb, to instantly breaking your weapon and setting you on fire.
- Several perks and traits have been modified to work better with the new critical system. The changes are:
- Sniper - now requires level 24, 6 Agility, 7 Perception, and 90 Guns OR 90 Energy Weapons. In addition to its normal function, this perk now also raises your Critical Chance with Guns and Energy Weapons by 10*Luck, up to 100.
- Slayer - the attack speed bonus has been lowered to 20%, but this perk now also raises your Critical Chance with Unarmed and Melee weapons by 10*Luck.
- Better Criticals - now has the same effect as in the classic games, adding 20 points to your critical rolls, meaning you have a better chance of getting stronger critical effects. This replaces its normal effect.
- Fast Shot - fire rate bonus has been increased to +30%, and the accuracy penalty has been replaced with a 30 point penalty to critical rolls.
- Trigger Discipline - has been given a major rework. The fire rate penalty has been increased to 30%, and the accuracy bonus has been replaced with a new ability - aiming with sights or scope for 5 seconds without firing will grant you a bonus +40% critical chance for the next shot only. You will get a slight tunnel vision effect to indicate that the bonus is active.
- New Trait: Jinxed - this trait returns from the classics essentially unchanged, making both you and everyone else in the game 5 times more likely to suffer a critical failure in combat.
Compatibility:
Most of ICE's features should generally be compatible with anything that doesn't add new Body Part Data objects, or new body parts to existing ones (changing already existing body parts is fine). This is quite uncommon. In my 170+ file loadout only two mods do this - YUP and MadAce's Ragdolls, both of which I've made compatible out of the box. However, this will almost certainly cause compatibility issues with TTW in particular, because of its extensive changes. If you want to make a compatibility patch for a mod, you can do so simply by adding new critical tables to the data\config\ICE folder.
Spoiler:
Here is a detailed explanation of the critical table JSON file format: the root object contains the limb objects, which can be "head", "torso", "leftarm", "rightarm", "leftleg", "rightleg", and "brain". Each limb object contain 6 data objects - "data1" through "data6" - which represent entries on the critical hit table. Without any modifiers:
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Here is a detailed explanation of the critical table JSON file format: the root object contains the limb objects, which can be "head", "torso", "leftarm", "rightarm", "leftleg", "rightleg", and "brain". Each limb object contain 6 data objects - "data1" through "data6" - which represent entries on the critical hit table. Without any modifiers:
- "data1" has a 20% chance of occuring
- "data2" has a 25% chance
- "data3" has a 25% chance as well
- "data4" has a 20% chance
- "data5" has a 10% chance
- "data6" normally has a 0% chance of occuring, and can only happen with the extra modifier from Better Criticals.
Each data object contains the following entries:
- "damage" - represents an extra damage bonus in fractions of the original attack's base damage. This bonus ignores armor.
- "effects" - a bitmask representing additional effects, converted to decimal. The effects, are, in order from leftmost to rightmost bit - armor piercing, blindness, instant cripple, instant kill, knockdown, knockout.
- "stat" - Actor Value Code of the target's stat to roll against for additional effects. -1 means no stat check will be performed, and the three other entries ("statmod", "extraeffects" , and "extramessage") corresponding to the check can be omitted.
- "statmod" - a modifier to apply to the stat for the check. Can be a positive or negative integer (or zero).
- "extraeffects" - a second effect bitmask, specifying additional effects to apply if the target fails the check.
- "message" - represents a message to display for this critical effect. It is appended to the end of the standard message, which is always on the form "(Target) was critically hit in the (limb)".
- "extramessage" - a message to further append to the end of the regular message if the target fails the check.
In practice, you should simply copy one of the existing critical tables, rename it to match your Body Part Data object, and modify it to suit your purposes.
The one thing that may cause compatibility issues is the perk and trait changes. Please load ICE after any mods that make changes to perks.
Known Issues:
- Radscorpions may sometimes get critical effects for the wrong limb. This is because their vanilla body part data has an error in it that YUP hasn't fixed (one of the legs is mistakenly marked as a claw).
- Deathclaws in the vanilla game use Super Mutant body part data for some reason, which means that they will also use Super Mutant critical tables instead of a special Deathclaw table. This can be fixed by installing Ragdolls by MadAce, which adds a unique body part data object for Deathclaws.
Credits:
- ItsMeJesusHChrist for the Jinxed trait icon, taken from Consistent Pip-Boy Icons.
- The classic Fallout teams for writing most of the messages that I reused for this mod, as well as for inspiring it in the first place.
- Kanhef from the No Mutants Allowed forums for figuring out what the critical failure tables are in Fallout 2 back in 2007, which has been very helpful as a reference.