"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.

The original purpose of this mod was 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 have expanded 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 about things people wanted added, removed or changed. I'd like to think that I've been very open to making the changes that people have asked for, and for trying to accommodate differing opinions for those who want varying levels of wasteland savagery. I intend to use this post as a place for me to bounce around some more 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. My current working model gives all factions access to all weapon types and allows you the player to select the exact percentage chance of what types of weapons NPCs spawn with broken down by Faction. I this fully fleshed out and working for Raiders only, I'll be adding the rest of the factions in the near future.


Savage Companions - Still haven't got the bugs worked out of this one, I have put it on hold for now.
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
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. The next version should be done in a few weeks and covers all weapons, ammo and ingestibles. It will also have a menu system for changing the rarity by item type. Future plans include giving the Unfound Loot tratment to the schematic weapons components as well as all the other trash laying around, and also for Skill Books and Bobbleheads. I'm also working on making the items you find random, that stimpak you were hoping to find may or may not be there, it may not even be a stimpak anymore.

While not officially part of Savage Wasteland I have also been working on a mod called Crippling Injuries which make crippled limbs mean a bit more. It need some more content but what is there should be pretty solid. If you are brave you might want to check it out.

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 fully intend to expand all of the above items to the DLC. 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

Spoiler
Well not much can be done here. I'm thinking about adding a scribe that can offer you a temporary skill boost in the ranged catagory of your choice. After all you would not have spent your time building up weapon skills for weapons you cannot find.


The Pitt

Spoiler
To be lore friendly, the "raiders" need to be aptly armed to intimidate a large group armed with auto-axes. I'm not sure what direction to take there. I would like to add other ammo types to the ammo press and perhaps make the new ammo more expensive to create.


Point Lookout

Spoiler
Sweet Christmas! This place should be called Point Load-out! The reason its a swamp is because the weight of all the guns and ammo found there keeps pushing the land underwater! Fewer Gun Wielding Maniacs and Unfound Loot definatley need to cover this area.


Mothership Zeta

Spoiler
Well it would make a lot of sense that aliens would have an advanced arsenal, but then they wouldn't need it against lightly a unarmed/lightly armed populace. :shrug:


Broken Steel

Spoiler
The main issue here would be the final assault, but you have the power over how well armed they will be.
Other than that I'm not sure what else needs to be done NPC-wise.


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.

While on the subject of perks, I like perks, I would like to see more perks. While play testing and brainstorming I've had a few ideas on "savage" perks that could be fun. When I have a more coherent list and explanations I'll post these for feed back.

Any and all input is both welcome and appreciated!

Grossly over powered IMO.

Yeah, I agree. Thats more of a starting point for the types of things I'm thinking about. I’ve refined the basic idea a bit and put it out on the “wish list” thread. If enough people kick the idea around I’m hoping someone can pick it up and run with it. Once I got some of the other pieces of Savage Wasteland put together, if nobody has started working on it I’ll go ahead and start work on it, although some of my ideas for those types of perks go well beyond the realm of Savage Wasteland and would be better left as a separate perk pack. More specific to Savage Wasteland I would like to create some perks that really add some depth to Unarmed and Melee combat and also some fun stuff in the same vein as the Scrounger/Fortune Finder perks. I don’t know how useful it would actually be but I thought it would be cool to have a “Jonesing” perk, this would factor addiction and number of times addicted into the formulas for finding meds. A jet addict with a luck of 2 might be forced to have to buy jet because they will have a very hard time finding it, but if their luck was 8 or 9 they feel like there is at least 1 hit of jet in every place they visit. Of course it would be better if addiction were not so easy to cure.

Great work on your second thread, Steve. I remember reading the first one back months ago, and hoping it would really take off.

Your mod is impressive as hell now, since the last time I installed Fallout. You've really outdone yourself. The idea you have about addictions...that would be really, really sweet. It would be neat to have combat apply a "Nerves" effect to you, after combat ends. Gives you a bit of the shakes (applicable as a small reduction to combat skills), and you could temporarily solve it by making some of the chems "calm" you back down. So there'd be a reason to shoot up/drink after combat, and a higher chance of getting addicted. And making addictions harder to cure would be realistic and more "savage" as well.

I liked the idea you had of making dud shells, and it could be implemented in a slightly annoying and simple way. Just make a new Misc item called "Dud Rounds", "Wet Rounds", and so on, and add it to the ammo lists. Just generic names, and they're useless items. Maybe have a slight value so you could sell them (maybe someone would clean them out and make good rounds with them).


I'm excited for what you come up with next, really.

Hey thanks!

Unfortunaley chems never really felt like a big deal in vanilla Fallout 3, I had been thinking of ways to make them more useful (like mentats could let you try a locked terminal or jammed lock one more time, or have Jet increase AP recharge rate instead of total amount) but I have run into a lot of problems trying to get the scripting to work. But the idea a PTS after combat is interesting, but I'm not sure exactly how it could be done.

Where I've gone with dud rounds is to have your normal 10mm ammo and then something like Rusted 10mm ammo. You could use the rusted if you want but it may not work for you. I've been looking into ways to run a check on each bullet, and of course I'd have to add some way of clearing the bad round from the weapon. Honestly dud rounds may or may not happen, I'll keep playing with it but I'm not promising anything at this point.

Why not just force a reload? If you need to reload when you have a Super Mutant Overlord in your face, even though you may still have a full magazine, it would certainly be a disadvantage in combat. Frankly I don't see the point in having separate bad ammo. Most people simply won't use it. It would just end up being more junk you come across in containers, and there's already plenty of that.

A forced reload is exactly what I was leaning towards. My ideal method was to make the gun jam and you'd have to hit the "clear weapon" button like in Wasteland, but that would require brand new animations. And like you say most people wouldn't want to use questionable ammo, but only if there is good ammo laying around.

Kinda sorta what I'm looking at there is to change the default amount of ammo found in a box from 12 rounds to 1 round and then have a script run on pickup that generates 11 random numbers to decide how many of the remaining rounds you even get, and/or how servicable they are. From my own real world experience the only time I see a full box of ammo is almost always at the store, otherwise the "full" boxes around my house contain all the leftover rounds from the other boxes and I've just consolidated them. (which usually means they are not even all the same type, and rarely whats written on the box)

Update time.

I'm having 1 minor and 1 major issue with the options menu, other than that the next Unfound Loot could be released today. The minor issue is that the menu sometimes brings up the wrong options screen, that is you may hit the button for Melee Weapon Options and it brings up the menu for Gun Options. Hitting the back button and selecting Melee again seems to fix it. The major issue is that sometimes the menu exits without hitting the Exit button. Right now all menus have the Back button so that you have to go back to the main menu to exit, if you exit via the Exit button all is fine and dandy but if the menu exits of its' own accord then the menu stops working altogether and won't open back up when selected. I've not found a workaround for this yet (other than saving each time I want to use the menu and reloading if it happens) and I'm not even sure what is causing it. I've been unable to recreate it at will, it seems to be random. Hopefully I can get something figured out so that I can release this soon.

I printed off my menu script and went through it with a bunch of different colored highlighters and I found several errors. I still haven’t found out why the Menu would exit on its own, but I’ve added a line of code to reset the startup conditions so if it does kick you out you’ll be able to get back into it and keep making changes. Bottom line is that after a few more code tweaks Unfound Loot should be ready for use. I was planning to go through every bit of it this weekend to polish it up a bit, but I just found out that I have to work this weekend. :sadvaultboy: So my options at this point are to fix a few glaring errors, slap some paint over a few minor ones and release this with the promise to come back and fix any errors you may find in a few weeks; or to make you all wait 2 more weeks for me to have the time to look everything over myself. Being a cowboy, my inclination is to put this out the moment I finish typing up the Readme. After all it’s not like this will be the last thing I ever put out; I have much more in store for the future of Savage Wasteland. But I realize that there are some folks who only want to download high quality mods that have been put together with great care and that have been thoroughly tested, though if you are one of these people I must warn you that I am not, I frequently make major last minute changes on a whim and I’ve made lots of stuff entirely on impulse. (I still use the coffee table I made because I got mad at seeing the price tag on the one I really wanted) So unless there are any major objections I’ll be putting out an update within the next 48 hours.

So other than the menu, what changes will there be in the next version? I'm not sure if simply having a menu option for everything is enough for me to go for it, I might just wait until the next one comes out. That's the one that will include the weapon components right? That's what I really want from the mod now. Where you planning on tackling the general clutter in the game as well? It would be great if everything in the game had a random element, though I can understand how much work that would involve. And any more thoughts on how you want to tackle the skill books and Bobbleheads?

I feel that taking a look at the menu would give everyone an idea of how this version will work. So here is a glimpse of it. From the main menu will be the following options: Ammo, Drink, Explosives, Food, Guns, Meds, Melee and Exit. If you choose Ammo, Drink, Explosives, Food or Meds the message says something like “For this item each point of Luck gives X% chance of finding this item” and your options are: +0.5, -0.5, Turn Off and Back. If the message says that each point of Luck gives 2.5% then hitting +0.5 will change it to 3.0%, hitting -0.5 will take it down to 2.0%. You can go as high as 10% or as low as 0%, having it at 0% means that no hand placed items of this type will ever spawn in the game. If you use the Turn Off button then the items will always be there regardless of what your luck is, this is for those who only want certain items made more rare but not all of them. For Guns and Melee the options will be Rarity, Health and Back. Rarity give the same X% verbage and has the same +/-0.5 buttons; Health gives you the option to detemine how the health of weapons is dertemined when they do appear. Those options are: Game Design, Weapon Skill, Repair Skill and Chance and each of those can be set to None, Minor Factor, Contributing Factor or Major Factor.

In order to give all the weapon components and junk item the Unfound Loot treatment I'll have to go through each non-owned cell in the game and find the items set to initially enabled and then replace them all. Although I do have a few ideas that might make this process a bit less tediuos, plus I'll have some extra tools like FO3Edit to help move things along. Then of course I'll have to redesign the menu a bit to get all those things added in there. If you are happy with the current version then by all means keep using it, I'll leave it out on the Nexus under old versions anyway, but if you want to try out the new version it'll be there. It's still very similar to the last version but easier to adjust rarity levels and it includes the weapon health component.

I've already gone through all the scripts and adjusted them to where I want them to be so that's not a big incentive for me. What about owned items, does it make any changes to those? You mentioned you were going to revert those to default sometime, does that happen in the upcoming version? That might be worth using it for.



Yes, I realize it's a daunting task. I'm impressed that you've done as much as you have already. The components I feel should be done in order to complete the mod however, though I would fully understand if you skipped the clutter. It would be nice if it was done though.

Oh yeah! I forgot about that!

Yes all the owned items are reverted back to always being there, so your free to steal and suffer the consequences.

Also Books and Bobbleheads will be coming in a future version, I haven't decided wich yet. Hopefully the menu system will help to assuage any fears about how customizable this can be, within reason of course. (Nothing like "From the stimpak menu choose which cell in the game you want affected and then it brings up a list of all the stimpaks in that cell for you to choose which you want to be more rare" :wacko: ) But if anyone has any suggestions for things to add to it, nothing is off the table. (like maybe an option for having item rarity affected by Player Level, the more you level up the harder it gets to find Ammo )

Hmm, Perception level might be an interesting addition as well. It would represent your ability to observe your surroundings more effectively. Or less as the case may be. As for the skill books, I'm kind of leaning towards having the chance of not finding all of them in the game. I think I'd prefer that over having known, predictable locations.

I agree about not finding all the books. For those that don't like it, maybe you could make a simple addon ESP that adds a small chance for vendors to sell some.

I had actually considered using Perception early on, but I felt that Luck was too underappreciated in vanilla Fallout. But I could do something similar to hw I have weapon health and allow the player to set how much importance they want on the different factors that could be used; Luck, Perception, Number of like items currently in inventory…



Now there’s an idea! I remember in Fallout 1 the one shop in The Hub that had an infinite supply of each skill book, but they were wildly expensive.

I was originally thinking of a way to keep track of the number of times the Unfound Bobblehead script ran to adjust the odds of finding that particular Bobblehead the next time around, but what if…

Hypothetical:
You show up in Megaton, Lucas Simms gives you his Welcome Speech and you head over to Craterside Suppy. You look at Moira’s inventory and see that she has your favorite Bobblehead for sale. “Ha-Ha Score!! Wait… 12,000 caps?!!?! Well VATS that!! I know where that Bobblehead is, I’ll just pop on over and grab it for free. “ But when you get there you find a big empty space where the Bobblehead should be. So you go slinking back to Craterside to see how much you can get for everything in your currently in your inventory and you notice that the price has jumped up to 15K. Guess who’s not getting that Bobble head for a while. Fast forward a few skill levels and you are now wealthy enough to buy just about anything you could want - if you were lucky, then in the course of your travels you passed near a picnic area and you decided to get a closer look and you found a Bobblehead just sitting on the picnic table; otherwise each of those locations you visited where a Bobblehead could have been has pushed the price up to over 50K but buying it is still dependant on the chance that a merchant has it stocked.

All this talk is making me nervous. I think you're over-complicating things now. How about just finishing up the new versions of unfound loot and getting them out of the door first?

I definitely don't like that idea. Those type of items should be found, not bought. Besides 12,000 caps for a stupid little statue that bobs it's head? What possible logic could justify having them cost that much? Skill books maybe, there'd probably be some sort of use for instructional books for the general population of the Wasteland, but not Bobbleheads. Though if you were to allow skill books to be sold, you should have a cap on how many of each the player can get so you couldn't exceed the current number of 25 per skill.

Fear not Nessh, most of my posts are made from a machine that does not have and will never have the GECK on it. When I cant mod I think of new stuff to try.



These are no ordinary bobbleheads that you buy and put on display only to wonder why you didn't spend that money on some thing useful. These are Bobleheads that make you smarter, stronger and luckier just by picking them up!

But I do see your point.

Well it seems that everything worked right as soon as I made my few changes. I would like to give the Savage Wasteland menu item it's own unique icon but that can wait a bit. So I went ahead and put the new Unfound Loot out on the Nexus. The Configuration menu is called and is in your Aid section of the pipboy. If you find any issues let me know, from actual bugs to typos in the message windows to something that just doesn't seem to be working right.

Enjoy!

Cool, I'll be sure to check it out. I've been thinking more about the skill books and I'm starting to like the idea of having vendors sell them, as well as the random placement. Not the Bobbleheads though, only random placement for those. And I don't think the skill books should be absurdly expensive, only rare. Th BoS will pay 100 caps for a Pre-War Book, that sounds like a good starting price to me. If you make a leveled list of all the books, then add that to another vendor list, then they should be fairly hard to come by.

Thanks for the new version!

I just had a look at your new version, nicely done. The menu system is a good addition, though I'm not sure yet how well the rest of it actually works. You don't have a Pip-Boy icon for it though.

Thanks! Aside from the weapons the scripting is exactly the same as it was before, so there should be no issues on that front, but you should notice that the stuff you can steal is there again. The icon is one of those things on my todo list, as soon as I can figure out A) how to make one and 2) what it should look like. It actually did'nt occur to me until about 2 days ago that I really needed an icon. Although I thought I put some vanilla icon in there as a placeholder?

Sure why not? It's not something that people are going to look at alot, so you don't really need to go out of your way to make one. The one for the Gunslinger perk should be appropriate enough.