IneptEuropean

Hey. I'm on it. Useful to read this extra context here. I am slightly unclear though if you want a patch or a port?

Fair enough then - possible, but a huge amount of work.

(i.e open beta)

Those Royal Armouries videos are great. Do you also watch Forgotten Weapons? Much more gun-nerdy but often fascinating stuff. Any chance you could just release an as-is beta of your mod(s)?

All factions (except the Institute) nuke the Institute, and it's stupid for all of them, all of whom would benefit from taking it over. Even the BoS could then selectively destroy what they consider too dangerous and become "custodians" of the rest. Since you have to comprehensively defeat Institute forces before you can nuke it, nuking it is always pointless vandalism. However this much of a change to the main story is beyond what a mod can do. Some mods avoid the ending but none can change it. I don't think a working Institute controlled by another faction is a technical possibility.

What would be a lot simpler, and probably not too far from your basic concept, would be to have Lead Belly increase resistance to disease from all sources, not just dirty water. Most (not all) sources are ingested anyway. There are global variables that you could set in the different ranks of Lead Belly. These affect the disease pool's ceiling and floor, and how much it drops by over time.

The other problem is you nerf the game again by turning every raider etc into a mountain of loot, particularly if you get the drop on them or one-shot them. Stupid as it may be, the existing system where they can keep firing until they're dead, and then drop a small amount of ammo, is probably the most balanced.

The problem is that the AI has no concept of ammo management so it will never use ammo intelligently no matter how much you give NPCs. Unless you also change the AI packages, giving them anything less than the vanilla infinite ammo is just going to nerf them as enemies.

Maybe you have not yet met the Fog Crawlers yet, OP? "Mainlander like you don't stand no chance against the 'Crawlers."

Hi - anyone know what this value does? It ranges from 0, 2, 6, 8 just from a quick look. I was investigating it to see if it was responsible for the 6x reported DMG on energy weapons when you are in a Vertibird. I don't think it is (changing the value has no effect on reported DMG) but I would still like to understand what this value does do. TIA

Also check the Wikia page on Lead Belly, there is some useful information I put there a while ago.

Yeah thinking about it you are probably going to have to hack the script. I can't off the top of my head think how you are going to do it with just keywords and MGEFs. The way Lead Belly is implemented IIRC is that there is a conditional added to each consumable that reduces the rads of the consumable based on the rank of Lead Belly. Maybe one thing you could do is use this same conditional to reduce the disease risk pool by (up to) the same amount as dirty water increases it? That would handle the increase in disease risk pool but it would not handle the instant disease risk check (roll) that is triggered by high risk events of which (iirc) dirty water is one. It would be wrong to have Lead Belly actually net-lower your disease risk pool. So that's hard to solve other than by removing/altering the keyword or hacking the script. Hazy but iirc there is an event timer (5 game minutes?) on the 'immediate' disease check so maybe you could have your conditional on the consumable item also attempt to kill the timer event before it triggers

Here's my Steam thread on disease https://steamcommunity.com/app/377160/discussions/0/1639787494957824281/ I summarised most of the results in to the Fandom wiki page on Survival.

Interesting Disease risk is handled in HC_Manager based on keywords that attach to consumables. It would be cool if Lead Belly could progressively downgrade those risks. Because in Survival, disease is a much bigger threat than a few rads. Brute force approach, you could hack that script. Also brute force, you could remove or replace the keywords, conditional (how?) on the rank of Lead Belly. Also note there's a 4th rank of Lead Belly from Far Harbor, and some bugs / undocumented features you should be aware of, so check the Wiki. As an added complication although the disease keywords are added to food and drink, I'm not sure how the game handles drinking dirty water directly from the environment as opposed to from consuming an inventory item. Does it pop a dirty water item into your inventory (would explain why you can go over-encumbered while drinking from a pump)? Idk I have an old (big) thread on Steam about this, I will try to link it here. It may help all though it doesn't directly answer your question.