Object mods: decreasing PA piece health

[NinjaHawking]

Newbie modder here. I want to create a Misc mod for power armour that has some significant benefits which are balanced by reduced health of the piece to which it is attached. I figured reducing the health would be as simple as adding a negative value to ihealth, but apparently you may only add a positive value to that. I found a thread trying to do the same for the damage resistance, but the solutions there don't really work for this case (nor for that case -- I tried them as an alternative debuff).

 

My second thought was to see if a scripted enchantment could be used to find the part's health and set a new value, but that seems extremely complicated and I honestly have no idea how to go about it.

 

My third thought is to just decrease the health of the base part by the amount I want, and apply it back to all vanilla Misc mods, including the Null mod (PA_Misc_Null). Doesn't sound like it's too bad of a kludge, except the Null mod is shared between all parts of all tiers of PA, so I would need to duplicate it a bunch of times and edit all the relevant object templates. I would also have to prevent the default Null mod from showing up in the mod slots of the pieces that will take my new Misc mod, and I'm pretty sure this would be a Bad Thing™ when using my mod with an existing save.

 

A simpler but more kludgy way is to go with the third idea but not touch the Null mod. Instead, I could add a new tier- and part-specific Misc mod with no perk/material requirements that only re-adds the missing health. This could be put in the object templates just fine so the relevant PA pieces will always spawn with that instead of the Null mod, but all PA pieces in the game that use the Null mod will then have health missing. Still pretty ugly if you ask me.

 

At this point I'm honestly very close to just giving in and finding a different debuff to apply, but the part health is the most sensible candidate and it's just one of those things that sound like they should be possible and not too difficult. Any help would be appreciated!

 

Edit: although I'm still hoping for a reply, I've gone for damage and energy resist debuffs instead. These cannot be applied directly through vaActorValues, but you can use an Enchantment. Unfortunately the game shows positive bonuses even when though the Enchantment has the Detrimental flag, but I guess that's Bethesda for ya. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edited November 30, 2020 by NinjaHawking