[WIP] Project Extend And Change Everything (PEACE)

[antistar]

I've wanted a food spoilage system in FO4 since the game's release, and the butchery system added in PEACE makes it even more important as a balancing element, since you can get a lot of meat by butchering creatures. Recently I had a flash of inspiration as to how I might handle a simple food spoilage system, so I added it in.

 

- Food Features 01

- Food Features 02

- Food Features 03

 

There's always been technical barriers to this; you can't add and track info like a "spoilage time" on individual instances of stackable items that can go into inventories/containers, frustratingly. Instead you're limited to things like periodically swapping food that happens to be in the player's inventory for Moldy Food when an arbitrary timer goes off.

There's been a couple of mods that do it that way, I think - but as far as I know they don't account for food that's not in the player's inventory; e.g. stashed in a container back at home. The script I came up with still operates on an arbitrary timer, but it does handle food in containers - at the point when the player goes to take/store that food.

So it's still pretty simplistic, but it is lightweight, and is meant to evoke those times when you open a bag of cheese or whatever and go "crap, it's mouldy!". It's not like we can tell ahead of time that something is going to spoil in exactly 45 hours, just from looking at it. ;)


I've also added some other features to support this food spoilage system. I expanded the Contraptions Food Processor into two machines: a Food Processor (or "Food Scrapper") that essentially "scraps" raw ingredients into processed intermediate ingredients and a Food Assembler (or "Food Builder") that takes those ingredients and produces packaged, preserved food. (Food that won't spoil, to be clear.)

 

(I should mention that the changes to factory machines seen here - the descriptive signs and the conveyor belt retex that adds arrows - are actually from WARS, since I'm doing a lot with factory-based crafting there.)

 

 

In that second screenshot you can see most of the processed food items I added, plus some new food items, including "preserved" versions of existing packaged food items that lacked them in vanilla:

- Processed Eggs
- Processed Cheese
- Processed Flour (Can also be made from Razorgrain at a Cooking Station.)
- Processed Fruit
- Processed Meat
- Processed Human Meat
- Processed Seafood
- Processed Sugar
- Processed Vegetables
- Fishy Sticks, standard and preserved (Old memes. Running the world.)
- Tinned Fish, standard and preserved
- Flatbread
- Cram, preserved
- Pork n' Beans, preserved
- "Pork" n' Beans, preserved
- Potato Crisps, preserved
- Yum Yum Deviled Eggs, preserved

The "processed" intermediate ingredients can all be eaten as-is, but for most of them you'd probably be better off cooking them into something first, since they'd make you sick (the meat) or thirsty (nothing like a big, powdery mouthful of flour) otherwise.

 

 

In the third shot, you can see the powered refrigerators I added. They prevent food from spoiling, and cool down drinks, changing them into their "Ice Cold" variants. They do require power and have a maximum capacity, however - so if you've butchered several deathclaws, you may need several fridges. ;)

[Simsdoc]

I wouldn't mind expanding supermutants breaking them up into smaller groups of enemies.

 

Thick hide type that's very hard to kill, bit like a deathclaw but has bad perception.

 

A hound that has a mininuke attach to it, that will charge you..

 

A smaller mutated supermutant that is roughly the same height as a hound or a bit taller that will swarm you in a pack and melee you.

[antistar]

I'm not planning to go hard on new enemy types - too much other work to do - but hey, we'll see what the future holds.

[LivingDynamo]

I was waiting for this to get done before starting a new playthrough, you think it'll be downloadable in less than a year?

[antistar]

A year feels like a pretty generous amount of time, but it's always hard to say - especially with the stuff that's been going on in my life lately.

 

PEACE is basically waiting on WARS right now, because both WARS and PEACE will need some rigorous testing (i.e. a full playthrough with them installed) before they get to the closed beta stage, and I'm not going to test them like that separately. (It would take too long and I wouldn't want to use one without the other anyway.)

 

So with WARS, the main hold-up is waiting for TweaksFramework (AmmoTweaks v2), or having to adapt AmmoTweaks v1 to work the way I want it to with WARS. That's something I've been leery of doing, because it'd be a fair bit of extra work that would likely end up being a redundant waste of time since it's mostly changes and improvements that isathar has already made in TweaksFramework, as far as I'm aware.

 

It means I'm in kind of an unfortunate and unpredictable position there; it makes it virtually impossible to give a useful ETA.

[antistar]

Lately I've mainly been busy getting WARS finished since PEACE is mostly finished, but recently I was taken by a strange mood and disappeared into a workshop, to later emerge with a minor new feature in PEACE.

The new feature menaces with spikes of... added immersion, I guess. In other words:

Earlier in development I made food recipes require wood as fuel - partially to tie into the camping systems in PEACE, but also as a general immersion thing since all the vanilla cooking stations are wood-fired.

Given all the other amazing things you can build in settlements though, it seemed weird to me that you couldn't fix up an electric stove and use that for cooking - so I changed that.

That's basically it; here's a bunch of electric stoves. They require power, but you can cook on them without needing wood as fuel.

 

- Camping 02

- Camping 03

- Food Features 04

 

 

I mentioned the camping system though, and cooking with the basic portable Camp Pot in PEACE requires wood too - but I thought it would make sense if you could also cook using a portable hotplate - without the need for wood as fuel.

So here's the Atomic Hotplate, too. It's rare-ish, expensive, requires rank 1 in both Science! and Nuclear Physicist to build yourself - and electric hotplates are relatively heavy, it turns out - but you can camp out and cook without needing wood.

 

 

Just a quick little thing; back to work on WARS now.

[steamtacular]

Only thing I'm really wanting from this mod is the power armour mods and from what I hear most people inclined to try making something similar aren't inclined to step on your toes.

Any chance of this releasing or just those power armour skins?

[antistar]

The way the new power armour mods are set up means that they wouldn't really make sense on their own, since they're part of other systems in PEACE - mainly the encumbrance overhaul.

 

Sorry, I don't want to spend all that time refactoring it all to fit in with vanilla (i.e. making something that I wouldn't like or use), when I could instead be working to get WARS and PEACE finished.

[antistar]

Another relatively minor new feature in PEACE:

 

- MREs 01

 

 

(If you're wondering what the image is referencing, it's this.)

 

I've wanted to add MREs to PEACE for a while, as a kind of aspirational/high-tier food type to carry in the field. Something that is efficient in terms of weight to nutrition, and which cannot spoil.

 

The issue was that in PEACE, I've adjusted "portion size" for food items so that nothing is worth more than 25 caps, since (if I'm understanding the system), anything more than that will go to waste if eaten as soon as you get hungry. (Having to wait until you're starving before you can eat good food without wasting it feels bad. This was a problem in New Vegas too.)

 

Treating an MRE with a realistic weight value like a single food item didn't fit in with that reduced-portion-size approach, so I'd left it on the back-burner for ages, not sure how to approach it. Recently it occurred to me though that I could treat it like a real MRE: you open it up and get a range of individually packaged food items. So here's how they work in PEACE, copied from the draft readme:

 

 

MREs ("Meal, Ready-to-Eat"):

 

MREs are packaged military rations. Here they are roughly based on real-world early US MREs from the 1980s. Each one contains a range of food items, and using it will unpack those items:

 

- MRE Main Course. One of:

--- Beef Stew

--- Cheese & Veggie Omelet

--- Pasta w/Veg in Tomato Sauce

--- Tuna with Noodles

- MRE Course - Fruit Cake

- MRE Crackers

- MRE Peanut Butter

- MRE Cocoa Beverage Powder (Use to mix with Purified Water and produce "MRE Cocoa, Prepared")

- MRE Coffee, Instant (Use to mix with Purified Water and produce "MRE Coffee, Prepared")

- Assorted Candy. (Not pictured here because I forgot. They're vanilla items, though.) One of:

--- Bubblegum

--- Gum Drops

- Water Purification Tablet x2

- Spoon, Plastic

 

MREs are lightweight (1.1 lb) and will not spoil. (Even after opening them, as their contents are sealed and shelf-stable.) Most MREs found out in the Wasteland will be damaged, however. You may find, upon opening a damaged MRE, that some of its contents are irradiated or destroyed.

 

Assuming all its contents are intact and in good condition, the contents of an MRE will provide 80 caps worth of nutrition, total.

 

MREs can be found in loot or at vendors (as can their individual contents), or manufactured in the Food Assembler factory machine. This requires Science! rank 3 - and the high number and range of ingredients required makes them a little inefficient to produce - but they are amongst the most efficient food items to carry, thanks to their low weight and longevity.

 

 

 

I also made some similar - but much simpler - changes to the Institute Food Packet:

 

 

Institute Food Packet:

 

The Institute Food Packet is now the Institute's answer to the MRE. Its packaging has always mentioned that it contains "20 enriched bars", and now this is true. Using an Institute Food Packet will now unpack it, producing:

 

- Institute Nutrition Bar x15

- Institute Nutrition Bar, Caffeine Fortified x5

 

Each Nutrition Bar provies 15 caps worth of nutrition, and weighs only 0.2 lb. To compensate, the Institute Food Packet has had its value increased from a paltry 10 caps to 240 caps, and its weight increased from 0.5 to 4.1 lb.

 

Like MREs, Institute Food Packets can be manufactured in the Food Assembler factory machine, but on top of the staggering number of ingredients required and the Science! rank 3 requirement, it is also required that you have completed the "Mankind - Redefined" quest, to gain access to the recipe.

 

[antistar]

I just made a minor addition to PEACE:

- M14 Pistol Rack 01


The M14 Pistol Rack is based on the real-world US Army M14 "Rack, Storage, Small Arms", which was designed to store M9 and M11 pistols.

That's what it does here too. You can put rifles and melee weapons in it (sort of awkwardly), but it's designed for pistols.

This has been requested before, and is something I always wanted in PEACE (and BAM) myself - but as you can see, the real thing kind of has the pistols hidden away inside a box, and the idea in the mod is to have the weapons on display. If not for that, I would have had this in the mod from the beginning. Recently though - from looking at the design of the M14 storage rack again - it occurred to me that I could just leave the side panels off.

So this one doesn't resemble the real thing quite as closely as the M12 Weapon Rack in PEACE/BAM does, but I think it's still recognisable.

Anyway; I put this together quickly recently as a kind of small Christmas present, because it's available now in the BAM update I just released.

Merry Christmas everyone. :-)