This game's economy is an illogical, wildly imbalanced mess. For any experienced player who actively scavenges and knows what's best to sell for profit, becoming rich is almost trivial, that much is obvious. In light of that, a lot of mods in the "making the game more challenging" category focus on changes to bartering, making vendors charge you many times the base value for their goods and pay you a lot less for yours. That does help, but only to a point. I don't think it's a complete solution.

The real problem, I think, is that many items (particularly weapons) have far too much value, making it too easy to get rich by scavenging and selling them. Attempting to fix this by slanting the barter system in the aforementioned manner just results in already expensive weapons being so obscenely expensive to buy that it's almost never worth it, and makes all normal items (like chems, skill books and such) utterly worthless compared to them.

The weapon values in this game are wildly inconsistent with little rhyme or reason to them. Many common weapons are worth hundreds or even thousands of caps, even when there's no logical reason they would be at all valuable. Melee weapons are especially prone to this. Their value seems to be determined solely by their effectiveness (and even then it's haywire). For instance, the common combat knife is worth 500 caps. The nail board is worth 250 caps. They're both worth more than a laser pistol! (175 caps)

So, to improve the economy, I intend to make a mod overhauling the values of almost all weapons, many weapon mods, some armors and a few other items, so that they compare to one another more logically and are generally a lot cheaper overall. Not to make them easier to buy, but to make them a lot less valuable to sell. The problem is, how best to go about it? I know my way around the GECK and it's very simple to change the 'value' field for each item, but editing a whole record to change one line would have massive potential for conflicts with the many other mods that alter weapons. There would be no way anyone could use such a mod without extensively merging its price changes into various other mods they use.

http://newvegas.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=44348 alters the weights of many items. It claims to avoid the conflict problem by altering the weights with scripting. I'm hoping I could use the same method to alter item values, but I examined that mod in FNVEdit and I have absolutely no idea what I'm looking at. I don't understand scripting and I have no idea where to start or what tools to use. So, I've run into a roadblock. If anyone could help me out with this, it'd be much appreciated.