I'm mostly using the GECK to browse rooms and check stuff for the wiki, but I've hit some places where what's listed in the GECK for a room doesn't match the game. I know that some loot is randomized, but occasionally something listed explicitly in a container won't be there in the game.

The latest one: in the Garrets' room in the Atomic Wrangler (Edid "FreesideAtomicWrangler2") is a very hard locked floor safe ("VFSAWGarretSafeFloor01"), and in the GECK the contents are listed as 358 caps plus some random "change" (1-9 caps), and possibly pre-war money and other clutter. But if you go to the safe in the game, the 358 caps aren't there, just the random small amount of caps and the rest of the clutter.

I thought that maybe single caps weren't showing up in containers, but I checked a few other containers that have explicitly placed caps in them, and they were fine. Does anyone have any insight into this?

Many thanks in advance!

- Don

Followup: I found another example. The safe in the Goodsprings Schoolhouse is supposed to have 100 caps, plus change, plus leveled 75% chance 10-90 caps. It only has the leveled caps and change.

On the other hand, the safe in the Tops Presidential suite is supposed to have 241 caps, and it has 241 caps. The ammo box in Carter's room in Cell Block B is suppose to have 173 caps and it has 173 caps.

My working hypothesis is that when a container has random caps plus fixed caps, the fixed caps disappear. Can someone confirm that I'm not on crack?

--Don

I think I've answered my own question. I created a mod adding caps to some containers found in the Tops Presidential Suite:

Container 1: 100 Caps001
Container 2: 1 CapsChange100 (a 100% chance of 1-9 caps, randomly chosen)
Container 3: 100 Caps001 + 1 CapsChange100

The result in-game:

Container 1: 100 caps
Container 2: 5 caps
Container 3: 7 caps

Apparently if you mix a random cap-generating leveled item with a specific number of caps, the specific caps go away. Perhaps this partially accounts for the many disappointing safes and boxes I opened while playing the game - maybe they were supposed to have a bunch of caps, but only had a handful because of this bug.

I tried also making a LeveledItem that had a 100% chance of having 350 caps, then combined it in another container with a CapsChange100, and the result was 351 caps, so you can combine a LeveledItem with a specific number of caps with another random LeveledItem, but you can't combine a specific number of Caps001 with a LeveledItem that has caps.