"We got guns. They got guns. All Gods' children got guns."

Does the above quote summarize your feelings on the Fallout 3 combat system? If you're like me, and I know I am, you found your main weapon and back up weapon at level 3 and they're both guns. You also have a melee weapon "in case you run out of ammo" though you're not too sure that will ever happen. By level 5 you have several of each of your core weapons and a many many more you'll probably never use. By level 10 trashcans and filing cabinets across the wasteland each house more guns than an Enclave armory, as you keep dumping all that extra weight. It would take week in real life to sell all the extra weapons and ammo filling up in your Megaton house. The first time you ever put skill points into Unarmed or Melee was at level 18 because you had all your other skills maxed. If this sounds like you, and you're not happy about it, then this is for you.

Life in the Wasteland, is about to change.

I present for your consideration http://fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=9022.

For those of you not familiar with my original mod, it was made for the purpose of reducing the amount of guns, and by extension ammunition, found in the world of Fallout 3. It did this by making enemies spawn with melee or unarmed weapons rather than firearms. I had taken a psuedo-break from modding in order to play through the DLC, now thats done and I'm working on modding almost exclusivley. I want to expand on the Savage Wasteland concept and offer additional options to compliment it. I have some mods half-way finished while some are half-way started, this is where you come in. I got a lot of feed back last time about things people wanted added, removed or changed. I intend to use this post as a place for me to bounce around ideas and get some feed back. Hopefully this works out so that upon release any further updates are to fix little bugs. Also it's a lot easier to intergate some of these ideas before they are all put together in a final product. So here goes:

Fewer Gun Wielding Maniacs
This is an update of the original concept. At first I had setup the weapon rarity by NPC faction how I saw fit, this time around I want to give you the decision over how much firepower each faction gets. I will setup some preset levels and allow you to pick and choose a level for each faction. The levels I am planning are these:
None - Vanilla, need I say more?
Low - 1 out of 3 chance of spawning with out a gun
Medium - 1 out of 3 chance of spawning with a gun, small chance of having a schematic weapon
High - 1 out of 10 chance of spawning with a gun, good chance of having schematic weapons
Extreme - Very low chance of spawning with a gun, good chance of having schematic weapons, most guns will be schematics

While I would like this to be lore friendly, I don't plan to have a whole lot of variation between factions, ie don't set the enclave to extreme and complain about only finding one plasma weapon in all of Raven Rock. I would, however, like to have some variation in weapon choices between factions. Slavers should favor blunt weapons so as not to damage the merchandise, BOS would prefer a powerfist and Enclave would better be able to construct deathclaw gauntlets, mercinary groups might like the idea of peppering someone with poisoned darts.


Savage Companions
I thought that this would be a relativley easy plug-in to make, maybe take a week to get it done. Ha! This has caused me all kinds of heart ache. The concept is to allow companions to make intelligent decisions about when and where to use ranged weapons. There are options, when talking to your companion, to heve them switch between ranged and melee combat. I have added a third option of "follow my lead" which makes the companion switch between ranged and melee when you do, pretty simple right? Once I can get the bugs worked out I would also like to have companions reappropiate thier own weapons/armor/ammo.


Savage Wasteland - Unfound Loot
By Stevedog


Description
Unfound Loot
Did'ya ever wonder who leaves valuable items just laying around for you to find? If the wasteland were really a dog-eat-dog, brink-of-survival, dare I say "Savage" wasteland this stuff would be hard to come by. What this mod achives is random chances of finding the "hand placed" loot based on the PCs luck. If you make the luck roll the stimpak/pistol/ammo is there, if not it gets deleted from the cell never to return. This is a Beta version so it does not yet affect merchant stock or increase the value of any rarified items Also it currently it only replaces Medical Items, Ammo amd Guns. It also has 3 levels High, Medium and Low. Low gives the player a 10% chance of finding an item for each point of Luck, however in true Fallout fashion a Luck of 10 only gives a 95% chance. Medium gives a 5% chance per point of Luck, and High gives a 1% chance per point of Luck. Unfound Guns has one extra level, Extreme. Extreme gives the same 1% chance as High but any guns found in the game world will be broken (health at 0%) No Unique Weapons are affected, the list of Ammo and Medical items replaced is as follows:

Unfound Meds
BloodPack
Buffout
Jet
Med-X
Mentats
Psycho
Rad Away
Rad-X
Stimpak

Unfound Ammo
10MM
308 Caliber
32 Caliber
44 Magnum
556MM
5MM
Alien Power Cell
BB
Dart
Electron Charge Pack
Fat Man
Flamer Fuel
Micro Fusion Cell
Missile
Railway Spikes
Shotgun Shell
Small Energy Cell


Physician Heal Thyself - I don't think I'll be including this in the final version of Savage Wasteland
I've been working with another modder on revamping the medical system in Fallout, where we have had creative differences I defer with the idea that I can create a similar but seperate medical mod geared more towards the Savage Wasteland concept. There are the simple things; stimpaks and bloodpacks heal over time, 1 hour of sleep doesn't take you from broken bones and almost dead to perfect health ect.. The more complex part of it is to bring back the First Aid Kit and/or Doctors Kit from the first 2 Fallouts.


DLC
Having now experienced the "complete" Fallout 3 as Bethesda had intended it to be, I would like to expand my mod as well. I would like to bring weapons found in the DLC to the rest of the wasteland. I am also looking at a way to bring some of the new "bullet-sponge" enemies down a notch. Unless you want to take on an Overlord armed only with a Combat Knife. More on this below


Operation Anchorage


The Pitt


Point Lookout


Mothership Zeta


Broken Steel


Bullet Sponges
I had originally thought of creating "battle weary" robots. After 200 years not all the robots would be like new, some would be nearly destroyed, perhaps some would have adapted thier combat AI. But this left DeathClaws, MireLurks and Behemoths. With the DLC there are even more super tough creatures. Weapons could be deadlier, but a lot of mods do this and I don't want unneccisary conflicts. How about some perks/perk trees specific to some of these enemies. For example a 3 rank perk called Groovy Ghoulie that gives damage bonus to ghouls, 1st rank +50% to ferals, 2nd rank +100% to ferals and roamers, 3rd rank +150-200% against ferals,roamers and reavers. Just a thought.

Any and all input is both welcome and appreciated!

How would the heal and such work? I'm a big fan of FWE, but I also use Savage wasteland + FWE's option worn weapons to simulate the lack of guns and I would love it if the extra heals and such were optional.

The idea of unfound loot really is excellent. Kudos if you manage to pull it off. I too use SW with FWE's worn weapons.

My perfect vision of the savage wasteland would be 65% of the place being melee and unarmed, but using a wide variety of pre-war and cobbled together stuff (like the excellent junk weapons mod), 30% having worn out hand-me-downs and homebrew weapons like a pipe rifle, and 5% having the remaining working good condition weaponry, that 5% being the Brotherhood, the Enclave, and the cream of the merc crop and highest ranked raider warlords.

If you play FWE+SW+MMM, ammo is quite a problem unless you sell everything that isn't bolted down and do regular vendor runs, so I'm not sure how the ammo problem would be managed.

It would be awesome if you could feel like a kid at xmas after slogging through Fort Bannister just for the chance to get a pristine hunting rifle or desert eagle. I mean making the mundane items something really special.

Sorry to ramble, but that's been my dream world for a long time.

I completly forgot that part!

My plan is to have each segment both optional and configureable. Want the First Aid Kit but not the other changes? Bam! You got it. Don't ever hire companions? Bam! Don't use that option. Refuse to get Mothership Zeta because it's only available on the GOTY? Bam! Bam! You get the idea.

As to the healing, the First Aid Kit would be an equipable item that gets used to heal you, but its condition degrades and has to be repaired/replenished with the various medical item found in the game. It wouls be a bit like a portable My First Infirmrary, and with stimpaks greatly reduced I hope it gets seen as a life saving option.

I don't personally use FWE, but I know its wildly popular. I'll definatley use it to test compatability. It made too many changes for my liking, but there is a lot in there that I do like the sound of. Especialy the worn weapons, that was genius! I would love to have worn weapons in my game. Hopefully Mez can get the menu system working to turn each of the features on and off. I'm hoping to add an ingame menu system so that Savage Wasteland can be reconfigured on the fly, but after looking at all that entails I'll wait a bit on trying to pull that off. There are a number of weapons in both the Junk Weapons mod and FOOK that I would love to have in Savage Wasteland. As to not finding enough ammo, that why I want it customizable. If youv'e got a mod that already makes these changes, you can keep using it, if not you can use mine.

Update Time:

Fewer Gun Wielding Maniacs:
I am looking to get this to work 100% through scripting, that would maintain compatability and be much easier to customize and expand to the DLC; it would also allow for changes to be made via ingame menu. However that will take some time to develop. Alternately I could stick with my tried and true method, its easy but fairly time consuming. This method would require seperate esp files per faction for each level ie. SW_FGWM_Raider_Low, SW_FGWM_Raider_Med, SW_FGWM_Raider_High, SW_FGWM_Raider_Extreme, SW_FGWM_Slaver_Low, SW_FGWM_Slaver_Med, Ect... That means I would create abot 3 dozen esp files(not including the DLC), and you would pick from that the few that you want. If anyone wants me to put in the work to do this I will, otherwise I'll focus more on the scripted-menu approach.

Unfound Loot:
Preliminary testing has shown no issues with lagging or crashing due to running the multitude of scripts when you enter a cell. As with Fewer Gun Wielding Maniacs I want to have this contolled by an ingame menu. However because I'm still developing and testing I plan to create several esp files anyway. Item rarity will be based on Luck, so I have the following levels:
Low - Each point of Luck give a 10% chance of finding each item
Med - Each point of Luck give a 5% chance of finding each item
High - Each point of Luck give a 1% chance of finding each item
I also think that I will have seperate files for Weapons, Ammo (will include Genades and Mines) and Medical. I may also include the items used to create schematic weapons.
Bottom line is I'm pretty sure I got this working!! :celebration:

DLC:
It should be relativley easy to include Overlords in Fewer Gun Wielding Maniacs, Then I think Point Lookout would come next.

Again if anyone has any suggestions or requests I'm open to them.

Okay, I've run into a bit of a snag on Fewer Gun Wielding Maniacs. Once I get down the high and extreme levels I want to have the wasteland rabble wielding schematic weapons. There is the wonderful Junk Weapons mod that I will definatley, at the very least, make a compatability patch for! This combined with the vanilla schematics weapons will give me a fairly good arsenal to work with. There is a big hole however and I'm hoping someone out there has somethings to fill it; the Unarmed catagory,it's Deathclaw Gauntlet or nothing! Is there a mod already out there that allows you to make unarmed weapons? Has anybody ever played with the idea and perhaps has few models laying around? I'm not looking for anything too extravagant or exotic just some variety, maybe Wonder Glue + Leather Belt = Makeshift Sap Glove, or Leather Armor + BBs = Actual Sap Glove, or maybe someone just jammed their hand into a toaster and are hitting people with it. Any input on this would be helpful.

The good news is that Unfound Loot is coming along quite nicely. I hope to have a beta version out in the coming weeks! Right now I'm working on UnfoundMeds and UnfoundAmmo. I'm planning to also have the following:

UnfoundWeapons - Guns and Melee will be seperate

UnfoundItems - This would be any item that can be used to make a schematic/junk weapon. I'm still debating whether or not to make this, If half the wasteland has make-shift weapons there wouldn't be all those spare parts out there, but there would also not be a need to collect those parts because the pre-assembled weapons would be ubiquitous.

UnfoundFood - For all the pre packaged food and drink found in the game. Even when using mods that required you to eat and drink I still had over a hundred pounds of food in my Megaton fridge. Should I include quest items in this mod?

What category would stealthboys go under?

Oh yes, question. With FWE, MMM, and Weapon mods kits, where would I put your first version of Savage wasteland load order wise?

I tested it with MMM and WMK and it didn't seem to be affected by the load order in relation to those. I just recently downloaded FWE and am still reading through all the readme files, as far as I know there shouldn't be any conflicts, therefore it can go before or after. I'll check it out with FO3Edit when I get back to my play computer and let you know. Unless someone already knows and wants to interject.

Sounds awesome. I look forward to when you have these up and running.

Couple of random thoughts:

1) The menu system is coming along in FWE, which will make many (not all) of the changes configurable (either on/off or alternative settings). One nice thing about this is that the menu could include settings that something like savage-wasteland needs/uses and be a lot more compatible. A compatiblity patch (CP) for S-W could set the various globals or in-game settings that it needs and tie into the menu system.

2) I'm considering adding the worn-weapon module directly into FWE (i.e. not having it an optional module), since it fits well and will simplify compatiblity issues. I haven't heard anyone having a big problem with it, so it's something to think about. I know you already know this, but the worn-weapon and S-W modules both edit the leveled spawn lists to increase the proportion of melee to ranged enemies. Similarly, worn weapons works by creating new "worn weapon" lists and "good weapon lists" for each faction, changing the base leveled item list to reference the worn or good lists. A CP could likewise play with the proportion of good-to-worn weapon's being spawned.

3) Regarding the healing stuff . . . have you looked at the TRIAGE mod posted on nexus . . . I think it's a really well implemented healing mod (heck, that's why it's part of FWE) that does many of things you mentioned in the first post. It doesn't add the "medical kit" item itself, but it does require you to carry around braces + surgical supplies in order to keep your limbs healed up, makes stims heal over time, no more insta-sleep healing, etc.... much less complicated than the Real Injuries mod.

EDIT: just saw your post . . . I don't know the full extent of what S-W changes. It will probably override the melee-to-ranged spawn lists, but that's fine.

Hey Mez, thanks for the input

1-I feel menus are the way to go, I had the idea to make the menu before I had the ideas to make the mod! My first step is to get it all working, then I'll get to work on the menu system

2-Now that you mention it I do remember seeing that you changed the spawn lists for Worn Weapons, so which ever mod is loaded last will dictate what the actual gun to melee ratio would be. But as long as the worn weapons themselves are in leveled lists they will still show up. Which is good becaue I plan to make them a permanent part of my game.

3-I've tried out many many medical mods, I don't specifically remember Triage but that doesn't mean I haven't tried it. I could get away with just having a portable medkit, but I would like to do the rest of it both for my own self gratification and to make sure those medial changes fit in with the savage theme. (though it seems most of them already do)

As to compatability, I'm playing with different scripts to alter the spawn ratios rather than altering the spawn lists directly. This would also make it easier to develop a menu system.

What I might suggest for Operation: Anchorage, is an option to not have benjamin follow you, for those stealth type characters, to add energy weapons and big guns to the first part of the dlc, to add some more ammo in the equipment loadouts, and give the soldiers more types of weapons.

Hmm...this is quite a hard one actually.

The only thing I can come up with is for The Pitt, as you have said . The only thing I can think of is Turrets mounted around the area . Also you may want to arm some of the raiders with better weapons such as the mini gun, flamer, missile launcher etc, as this WOULD intimidate.

Turrets..everyone loves turrets! That's not a bad Idea. Honestly I'll propably work on Anchorage and The Pitt last, Ive got plenty to do right now and it will give me time to put some more thought into them. Thanks for the suggestions, keep'em coming!

Oh I almost forgot, I have a beta version of Unfound Loot up on the nexus. I've changed my original post in this topic to include both the link and the description. Right now it just changes the Medical items and Ammo, my next step is to add explosives and guns, then make all the items wildly expensive to buy.

My original concept for Unfound Loot was actually an enhancement to the Scrounger perk. I had the hand placed ammo turning into the ammo for whatever weapon the player had equipped. (Pretty cool huh!!) Then I got the idea to tie the loot items to luck, and my script no longer worked after that. So I'd like to take this opportunity to post a big Thank You to both Kinguin and WillieSea for showing me how random numbers are actually used in the GECK, instead of they way I was trying to use them.

I've been looking for something like this. There are far to many guns in the wasteland. Home made guns should be much more common.
I think you should look around for more player-made weapons that looks like they where made from scrap. Not sure there are any. But I know there's at least Molotovs.

And the BoS and Enclave should still have weapons. To them I think you should just lower the chance for them to have an energy weapon or big gun, make the Assault Rifle the standard.

I'm coming up short on finding scrap weapon mod, I'm hoping there are some modders out there that like my mod would be willing to make some weapons that I can use. Otherwise I have to do it myself, and I've not had a lot of experience modeling for this type of thing.

I hadn't really noticed before that the Enclace doesn't use Small Gun weapons, I'll look into addressing this.

In working on Unfound Guns I got a few ideas that I wanted to put to see if there were any objections.

A)In addition to the High, Medium and Low settings I'll add Extreme. Extreme will have the same 1% per point of Luck as in High, but all weapons found will be completley broken, that is condition of 0%. That would explain why they were just sitting there.

2)I was mulling seperating the mod by weapon class, ie Unfound Small Guns, Unfound Big Guns and Unfound Energy Weapons not just the general catagory of Unfound Guns. I'm not really commited one way over the other, but I would like to have it decided before I start working on it.

D)I was planning to apply the same Unfound model to making various "junk" items more rare. Would there be an interest in Unfound Skill Books? Or perhaps the skill books you find will be geared to whichever skills you're weakest.

If
anyone has any opinions on any of these let me know
elseif
anyone has anything thay want to see added/removed letme know
else
I'll just make the command decision and you end up with whatever that is
endif
end

I have just finished reading up on FWE and all the mods that that were intergrated into it. Between Triage and Real Injuries it think about 98% of what I was originally wanting to create for my mod has been done, and done better than what I was planning. I will instead focus Savage Wasteland on the original concept, covered for the most part by Fewer Gun Wielding Maniacs and Unfound Loot. For anyone terribly heartbroken about this I will still be working on the last 2% for myself and if asked would share. (pauses to listen to the chirping of crickets)

The good news is that I can get the whole thing up and running much sooner!

I'm humming right along on Unfound Guns; with the exception of Warrington Train Station, everytime I load the cell my GECK crashes :brokencomputer:

But as I go along the one thing that keeps bugging me is that I released the Unfound Loot plugin with very little testing, that's why I consider it beta. Mathematically on paper it should be solid but if anyone has used it and has experienced any problems please let me know. I'm just copying and pasting the same script over and over changing 3 lines for the rest of unfound loot, so if there are any issues I'd like to fix them now before there are 100+ scripts to correct.

Okay, I am almost ready to release Unfound Guns, for those of you who wanted gun rarity I think this is a big step in the right direction. I have one major road block and I'm hoping there are some folks out there willing to help me out.

Warrington Train Station. :swear:

There are 2 weapons in that cell, there is a Missile Launcher on a bridge and a Sniper Rifle sitting on a window ledge overlooking that same bridge. Whenever I try to interact with either of those 2 weapons my GECK locks up. I've been trying several times a day for the past 2 weeks and it's severly impeading my progress. If anyone is willing to lend a hand; at the very least I need to know the health of those 2 weapons.

Thank you.

I double clicked them and "stuff" came up.

Pressing a button labeled "edit base" revealed that:

Missile Launcher Health = 100
Sniper Rifle Health = 100

(I'm only guessing that was what you needed. :S )

What else do you need to know? I could take screenies if you tell me where to go.

Thank you Xepha!

What I need to know is this:
double click on the weapons to bring up the Refrence box
The 3rd tab is labeled Extra
There is a field named Health%

What I'm actually doing to make this work is to replace every weapon in the game with a "dummy" weapon, the dummy is just a misc object with a script attached that checks the players luck against a random number. The dummy then, if the luck roll passes, spawns the real weapon and the dummy deletes itself. For things like Stimpaks and Teddy Bears it is sufficient to simply spawn the item. For weapons you need to put in the health percent otherwise they will all spawn fully repaired. I have come up with many, many, many ideas on how this could be used. Instead of luck the spawns could be dependant on players health, level, karma, quests passed, armor/weapon equiped ect.. the dummy items can spawn specific objects, random objects or multiple objects. I'm doing the heavy lifting of replacing all items in the game. Once completed I would like to add in some more variables, but if any modders can think of something they would like to do with it I would gladly let the beta version be a modder resource.

Ah-ha! I saw that but wasn't really sure what I was looking at (don't think I've ever double-clicked a weapon before. )

So,

Missile Launcher: Health % = 10.0000
Sniper Rifle: Health % = 15.0000

All sounds very intriguing by the way. :thumbsup:

Perfect!

Thank you very much!

Hopefully I can now finish this up and release it in a few days!