How should I tweak items for personal playthrough

[EverardRiddick]

Here's the gist of what I'm trying to accomplish... I really like some of the changes in JSawyer personal mod, however it's a little TOO much for my tastes and I like the flexibility Project Nevada + Extras offers in setting major stuff up (like Carry Weight formula, Action Points etc...). I would like to add my own tweaks to small items that are on a game-wide scale. I've searched, but can only find how-to's on changing a set of armor or a particular weapon's statistics already in your inventory/given through save editors or console cheats.

 

Here's a few examples of what I would like to do, and am wondering how you would best go about accomplishing it.

Take a regular stimpak, lower the base healing rate and add weight to it, and have this Stimpak replace all vanilla regular stimpaks in game (vendors, containers, random drops locations and npc drops)

1. Do I, use GECK, find the itemID and overwrite/add the values I want? (My concern here is screwing something up and now it has replaced all instances in the game world)

2. Do I, use GECK again, duplicate the item and change what I want, creating two items? (How do I get the duplicate to replace the other item in the game world in all instances?)

3. Download Jsawyers mod, extract the code he used for stimpak and save just this portion? (No idea if that's possible)

4. Some other way I haven't thought of.

 

Another example

Cherry bombs are too scarce, how would I go about increasing their "chance" to be available globally (vendors, containers, drops etc...)? Keeping things random, rather then a cheesy add to inventory or 100 or so in a fixed location. Will this involve the AddItemToLeveledList function? Admittedly, I don't understand in the GECK wiki how this function operates.

 

I want to make more changes then these two areas, and don't want to find an existing mod for each one. Looking to keep all my personal changes in one mod.

Edited December 24, 2012 by EverardRiddick

[Xaranth]

Oh man.

 

You're on the right track. For the stimpak thing, the best way to go about it would be your option 1. You don't need the FormID to find it in the GECK, you find it in the Object Window (In this case: Game Effects > Ingestible > Clutter > Health > Stimpak) and then edit the form. If you screw it up, you can always start again, even if you have to go back to the beginning.

 

If you're not too worried about compatibility, you can always add Cherry bombs to levelled lists by hand - no need to futz with scripting. Otherwise, yes, you want AddItemToLeveledList in a non-repeating quest script. You can see Millenia's recent mods for an example.

[EverardRiddick]

Oh man.

 

You're on the right track. For the stimpak thing, the best way to go about it would be your option 1. You don't need the FormID to find it in the GECK, you find it in the Object Window (In this case: Game Effects > Ingestible > Clutter > Health > Stimpak) and then edit the form. If you screw it up, you can always start again, even if you have to go back to the beginning.

 

If you're not too worried about compatibility, you can always add Cherry bombs to levelled lists by hand - no need to futz with scripting. Otherwise, yes, you want AddItemToLeveledList in a non-repeating quest script. You can see Millenia's recent mods for an example.

Alright I see this function in the GECK, need some elaboration on what might occur if I copy instead. I assign a new EditorID to Stimpak and edit it's form (just stats no list editing). Will this cause: 1. Two types of stimpaks to be randomly available in game world (virtually duplicated, but random drop wise) based on the leveled list of the base stimpak? or 2. The new edited stimpak won't be found anywhere in game, because it has to be added on it's own to leveled lists?

 

For the Cherry Bombs do you mean compatibility in terms of with other mods? I will take a look at Millenia's mods to see how the guns were implemented in the game world. Alternatively, I should be able to do the same thing with JSawyers mod and copy how he tripled Cherry Bomb occurrence, correct? Now if I were to alter already made mods should I be using FNVedit instead? There are many smaller mods that I would like to 'tweak' their crafting requirements or nerf/buff aspects.

 

Thanks for the hand so far :thumbsup:

Edited December 25, 2012 by EverardRiddick

[Xaranth]

2. The new edited stimpak won't be found anywhere in game, because it has to be added on it's own to leveled lists? <--- Is the right answer.

 

What I mean by compatibility, is that if you were to go in and modify the LVLI forms by hand, and then another mod you were using modified those same LVLI forms by hand (Which is VERY bad practice in a published mod), then one of those two mods would 'break', because one of them would be overwriting the changes the other made in the LVLI form.

 

Changing existing mods is best done with whichever tool works best for the task you want. If FNVEdit would be better for doing what you want to do, use it; if the GECK would be better, use it. :)

 

Also, terminology. A REFERENCE has an EditorID. A FORM has a FormID. The two are NOT equivalent. Example: Boone has a FormID CraigBoone, and an EditorID (Also called RefID) of CraigBooneREF. The two are different things.