DevBlog 5.4.1 - Weapons Crafting

Crafting in vanilla FO4 typically boils down to mindlessly picking up every material, and mindlessly crafting whatever upgrade has the best stats in a boring menu interface. Degrade and salvage v1 was my first pass at a system that required the player to engage a with loot for crafting, instead of just mindlessly grabbing everything. You had to find specific components to upgrade your weapons. It worked well for the design goals, but maintaining it was a headache. It requried a lot of custom configuration to add a new weapon. Despite trying to automate things, it ended up requiring a LOT of manual work. And for anyone other than me trying to run it was impossible. Degrade and Salvage v2 makes the script much more user friendly. There are only three config files, and they're simple to understand. When the script detects something new, it adds a default value to the config that's easy to tweak, rather than crashing. Someone wanting to add stuff to the list could use it without too much trouble, as could someone running it on their own modlist. This is the starting point of "why the big change".

One of the ideas that I wanted to work on at the same time, was a harder split between pre-war and pipe weapons. As I wrote in the last dev-blog, treating them seperately allows me to include a few more pipe-style weapons in the list, without them just being pointless reskins. More meaningful player choice is a good thing. As of 5.4, all the non-heavy ammo types have both a pre-war, and a pipe/handmade weapon available as common drops. Pipe weapons might be ugly, but they're superior when it comes to customization. They deal 20% less damage, but that's equalled out by requiring 1 less rank of gun nut to craft recievers.

Feeding into that split, are the differences in Barrels and Grips/stocks crafting. I had originally intended that the barrel and grip of a pre-war weapon not be craftable. But that ended up being confusing, and not feeling great. So, where I've ended up is that for Pre-war weapons barrels have restricted crafting options as compared to pipe guns. You can modify the existing barrel, but you can't just replace it completely. For example, you can go from a long barrel to a short barrel (because that makes sense, you just saw the end off), and then from a short barrel to a short ported barrel (drill a few holes), but you're not able to completely replace the barrel, e.g. going from short to long (growing like Pinochio's nose?), nor can you swap the barrel type for pre-war laser weapons (it's considered part of the weapon body). It gives decent options, in the context of modifying the existing barrel (instead crafting an entirely new barrel from scrap tomato cans).

Blacksmith

Armorer was a very powerful defensive perk, especially with LBPAC in the mix adding it as a req for repairing power armor. It was almost a required perk for most builds. Blacksmith, on the other hand, is pointless for 99% of players (arguably 100%). So in an effort to mix things up a bit, I moved PA crafting from armorer to blacksmith. FO4 is an RPG-Shooter, but Bethesda has a bad habit of losing focus, and the result is that you have a game that has a lot of shallow side systems, at least compared to a game where those mechanics are central (stealth, melee combat, survival mode, chem crafting... the list goes on). For now, I've decided to just set melee weapon crafting to default disabled (however it can be re-enabled with the new MCM - big shout out to EndlessFiends from the Discord for setting that up for me). Vanilla melee crafting has zero customization, it's just simple damage buffs, so you're not really missing anything that isn't already present in the loot system. I may revisit this in the future, or possibly just merge melee crafting into Gun Nut, but for now melee is just too shallow a system in FO4 to really be worth worrying about, and I'd rather focus my energies on the core LitR survival RPG-shooter experience. If you don't like it, use the MCM.

Armor

Armor is another area that could use some additional depth. I'd kind of like a LBPAC style overhaul for it (LBAC?). I'd also like to extend the pre/post war splits here, and give players a reason to use raider/leather/metal occasionally, instead of having it be always categorically worse than combat armor. Maybe something for a future update, but no promises. For now, I'd like to take a break from working on crafting changes for a while. For now, material crafting is disabled (configurable in MCM).

For anyone interested in the game design aspect of crafting, I suggest checking out this video, it aligns with a lot of my thinking on the issue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np9IGvSAgIM