How to mod LitR - Weapons

I've gone to a LOT of trouble with weapons integration in LitR. Honestly, if you really want a specific weapon for your playthrough, then my primary advice is to re-consider whether you really want to play LitR, because one of the primary principles I've built the list around is a rogue-like "respond to what the RNG gods give you", and having to swap up strategies due to scarcity, and not a power fantasy where you get everything you want.

So, with that caveat out of the way, here's what you need to know about weapons in LitR if you're crazy enough to want to try and patch something in.

Lunar Fallout Arsenal - https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/81133 is the patching framework I've build the weapons in LitR around. This runs on top of the balance for Lunar Fallout Overhaul, and adds new ammo types, and splits weapon classes out further, I also use it as an injection framework to make adding things easier (typically I also disable scripted injection in mods as part of patching, in favor of hard injection with the Arsenal patch- it's easier to see what I'm doing and keep track of everything, and it doesn't break the levelled lists if I end up removing it later the way scripted injection does. Having a framework allows me to use the principle of dependency inversion, which has made maintaining things way cleaner).

The first step I take when adding a new weapon to the list is design-level, I look at the distribution of weapons in Arsenal, and figure out where the new weapon fits in. Currently, all the standard distribution slots are taken, and so these days most of what I'm doing are unique replacers with a cross class ammo swap, e.g. the Metro Lolife in 6.5 coming in as a Pistol for 7.62 - this isn't a common distribution, it replaces Skippers Last Stand as a purchaseable unique. This step isn't strictly necessary- leaving the scripted injection quests will inject the mod into the world, it's just not how I typically work.

The next step, is I'll run my Lunar Patcher which is an MXPF patcher. The basic idea is that you load up LunarFalloutOverhaul.esp and the weapon in fo4edit, and it'll create a very rudimentary patch, based on the general weapons patching rules in Lunar. I then go through and manually look at the changes it makes, and fix any errors or anything I want to manually tweak. The patcher works fairly well on mods that follow vanilla weapon architecture- but unfortunately there are a LOT of weapons out there that are just insane messes under the hood, and patching these to work with Lunar often requires rebuilding the mod entirely - as evidenced by the Vanillified series of mods I've done. For weapons that I want to use the new ammo types in arsenal, I'll go ahead and make those changes manually as well. I'll also disable the scripted injector, and create my own integration with a hard coded levelled list edit (or with a Unique Replacer patch - which is a whole different blog post). While the patcher is handy, it is no substitute for understanding Lunar's weapon balance, and FO4 weapon modding in general, because it is very error prone, and it's output needs to be manually verified- this isn't a beginning modder's activity.

All of this is sort of optional, to be honest. If you just add a weapon to the list and do nothing other than install it, chances are it'll still work. It'll probably just be under-powered, and it won't fit in with the crafting changes. This kind of patching isn't a beginners activity. You really need to understand how WEAP, OMODs, and COBJs work under the hood if you want to take this kind of thing on, and be successful.