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About this mod
Implements a working gameplay system so that the Strength and Skill requirements that weapons list finally do something for ALL of them. Allows you to use any weapon, but the dynamic requirement penalties might make using them not so straightforward as before.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
Weapon Requirements System
I'm going to lay it straight: if your character has 10 Strength and 100 in every weapon skill (and never drops from there), this mod will literally do nothing for you. And achieving that very thing is a sign that this mod is, after something like 3 years since I first sketched it, finally working exactly as I wanted it to.
Recommended though not required:
Fallout New Vegas introduced a tiny change over the FO3 framework, with all weapons listing Strength and Skill requirement values in their pipboy view. But what was never very clear was... what exactly do these requirements do?
A few bright minds have pondered this transcendental question, and over the decades, the consensus reached has shed some light onto this mysterious feature. To sum up:
- Strength and Skill requirements in firearms will increase your weapon sway.
- The Strength requirement in thrown weapons affects their throwing distance.
... What. The. Hell. What about LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE? Why does a loading screen say that not meeting the requirements affects your attack speed in melee when this is patently false? What do skill requirements do for grenades and other explosives? Shouldn't it be dangerous to play with those if you have no idea how to handle them?
Basically, another half baked mechanic left by Obsidian, which nobody cared much about. FNV was never about the gunplay after all, but I've... seldom... let that stop me.
This mod is a humongous marvel of scripting to make weapon requirements do something when you don't meet them. So that going straight for the best weapons and ordinance may have another layer of complexity behind it. It has been very hard to make, and even harder to test. What I mean is that at the end of the day I went with my choices about what requirements do on each type of weapon, and for what I've offered in customization, there's some limitations in what you can choose. I hope you find it interesting enough at least. Or not. I tried my best.
So I'll try to explain what I've done, categorized by weapon type:
Firearms
By fierarms I mean anything that shoots out of a barrel, launcher, anything with a ranged attack you don't shoot with your own hands.
As explained above, requirements on firearms did something in the vanilla game. Kinda. Their effect was so subtle as to be effectively unnoticeable, and even them had a bug in their implementation. If you're interested: the strength and skill requirement introduce a malus to your spread, but they both use the same game setting, in spite of there being two available for strength and skill. Plus, they get "double dipped" by your weapon skill, such that the malus by skill was reduced by skill... quadratically? The formula looks like this:
player sway = skill bonus * ( malus by strength req + malus by skill req + other malus ) * perk bonus
My implementation moves the malus from strength and skill requirements so that they are not ameliorated by skill (or rather not twice in the case of skill reqs). That way the formula makes a little more sense and requirements have a more noticeable effect on sway:
new player sway = ( malus by strength req + malus by skill req + skill bonus * other malus ) * perk bonus
Plus, for a little variety, the skill requirement can now also affect your reload speed, to better represent your handling of the weapon. The penalty is floored at 33% speed, but with default settings even a 100 skill point difference will only lower it by 50%
IMPORTANT: of the mods that add a dynamic crosshair on screen, the only one available right now that does so in a correct fashion is Just Dynamic Crosshair by Yvileapsis. Other older crosshair mods will simply fail to work with non-vanilla perk modifiers, or with anything really...
Melee Weapons
These are anything you use to whack someone, without throwing it.
The Strength requirement now causes a drop in attack speed like the loading screen says, floored at 33% like reload speed, but only for non-automatic weapons. That is, not Rippers, Chainsaws, or Thermic Lances. This is because those weapons are not really affected by attack speed modifiers: only their wind up and down animations are, but once they are hacking away they have their own separate fire rate. Instead, not meeting the automatic weapons' Strength requirement will cause a drop in their damage, with default settings approaching 50% when lacking 9 points (though in vanilla, the Thermic Lance only requires 7). Your screen will also shake randomly while you try to hack away with them.
Not meeting the Skill requirement causes a similar drop in damage for both types of weapons, so automatics can get their damage double dipped by skill and strength failures.
Thrown Weapons
Things to whack people at a distance + Grenades. Two kinda dissimilar weapons, grouped here because of my idiosyncrasies...
As explained above, the Strength requirement did kinda affect throwing weapons, but not grenades, and it did so in a buggy fashion. I recommend this other mod to take care of the Strength part. Here I only deal with Skill requirements.
For grenades, not meeting the Skill requirement can cause them to fail to detonate. A dud if you will, due to mishandling the safety pin or whatever. I thought about them exploding prematurely, but in my view their mechanism is supposed to prevent that from happening.
With one exception. Molotov-cocktail like explosives that explode on impact instead of having a fuse timer will have a chance of exploding in your face. In the vanilla game there are none due to a bug when using them for exploding pants, but if you don't care about (and avoid) that bug, this mod makes Fire Bombs from HH work like that.
For the rest of the thrown weapons, a missed Skill check causes you to botch the throw. Your thrown spear or axe will fall at your feet. How very inconvenient.
This feature should work fine with most "grenade hotkey" mods. A special case is B42 Quickthrow, which this mod acknowledges directly to account for its special throwing system, since items thrown with it are not exactly considered to be originating from the player. The patching I've done should work right from what I've seen, but let me know if you encounter anything weird since I don't really play the game with that mod.
Mines and Charges
This is where things get really interesting. You will blow up if you're not careful, that is, meet the requirements of these things.
When laying mines, two things can happen if you don't meet the Skill requirement. The mine may not be set up correctly, and fail to detonate when it is triggered, becoming destroyed instead. Or, it can go live right after you drop it due to your incompetence, in which case good luck deactivating it before it detonates.
Detonator charges like C-4 may inconspicuously become a dud when planted, that gets harmlessly destroyed when you try to trigger them by remote. My Detonator Overhaul mod is compatible with this feature, so it can also affect any other explosive weapons you've set up to work with a Detonator in that mod.
When trying to disarm a mine, not meeting the Strength requirement will simply make it impossible to do so. This one is all or nothing. Mines in general have a very low Strength requirement, but if your character is a total wimp and tries to navigate a Satchel Charge field, you may have a very bad time.
Not meeting the Skill requirement may cause what you'd expect, the mine exploding right in your face. Better to read up on those Patriot's Cookbook magazines if you don't want to end up toast.
There we are, that was a lot of info. This mod has an optional MCM menu for you to fine tune the above to your liking. I've also added optional tutorials in game summarizing what the requirements can do, they will appear only once the first time you equip each weapon type if you don't meet its Strength or Skill requirements.
I've worked really hard on this thing, and tested it as well as I could. But I'm just one man, so by all means, do your best to break it.
Or don't. At the end of the day, the world kept spinning just fine without this existing.
Enjoy.