Completely integrates Arsenal Overhaul 3's content in Call of The Zone. Two options for random stashes: 100% and 50% filled.
!! IMPORTANT NOTICE !!
New game required.
!! END OF NOTICE !!
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V3.1 UPDATE - does NOT require a new game installed over v3.0; does NOT affect currently active missions.
Adds AO3 content to mission objectives and rewards. Mission givers will now ask for AO3 items and will also give them as rewards.
Everything I took out from random stashes, I added to reward stashes. However, reward stashes seem to always be a double stash: first the game adds random stash items, then it adds the reward stash items. So it works out really nicely with my previous stash patch: the game does not waste its budget on either the first batch of items nor the second. It's essentially as efficient as random gets.
This is a huge improvement to the game as far as mission variety goes. At first I was afraid it would be too hard to obtain certain weapons missions may ask for, but then I discovered that a secondary mission may be offered to help you obtain those weapons. It's really neat!
One note though, I'm not sure if there are limits on values missions will ask for and reward. Some of the AO3 items I put in the rewards lists are ridiculously expensive. Before I start tweaking, I want to get a better feel for how the current addon values impact gameplay. This will take time.
I considered making you all wait for me to test this for myself first, but after one evening of gameplay I decided I was having way too much fun to not share this with the community.
Enjoy!
PS - a note on addon conflicts. This will conflict with anything that touches quest rewards. This includes the item and artefact overhaul addons. These will most probably be integrated at some later stage, but I can't say when.
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V3.0 RELEASE - requires new game!
A comment for AO3 reminded me that my work on AO3 loot was not yet completed. I hadn't really touched random stashes yet. I have touched them now.
Short summary of the changes:
Two options for stashes: 100% filled and 50% filled. If you pick the 100% option, ALL stashes will be filled on game start. You will NOT find empty stashes. 50% stashes filled is CoTZ default setting.
I have massively reduced the number of items the game can put into stashes, and by doing that improved the quality of the stashes significantly. You will not find shotgun ammo, masks, scopes, sights, multitools, veles detectors or artifacts in stashes anymore. You will find random other ammo, food, drugs (excluding hercules and psyblock, for balance reasons) weapons, armor, KNIVES, etc.
My changes do not affect reward stashes, yet. The good news is that I'm able to tailor reward stashes specifically, which is what I'm working on now. The bad news is that reward stashes will still contain many pistols and various expensive ammo until I'm done making rewards feel rewarding. There will be an update to this addon soon, though.
A note on how the game fills stashes. Every region, or map, has a stash budget. The game buys items off a list out of this budget and puts these items in the stashes. Before, nearly everything could theoretically be found in stashes. I say theoretically, because it meant a lot of stashes were filled with such treasures as buckshot, multi-tools and face-masks.
Alright, so what can you expect to find now in stashes? I won't tell. I will give you some more examples of stuff you will not find in stashes and my reasoning for taking them out. Most of them I think are dead obvious.
(Almost) every weapon I put in NPC loadouts is NOT put in stashes. You don't want to find cheap AKs in a stash, you want to find something cool. Only expensive weapons are put in stashes. I think there's maybe three pistols you can find in stashes now? There were like 20, before. You will never find a shotgun in a stash either.
Artifacts are NOT put in stashes. You see, if the game puts one expensive artifact into a stash, that means all the other stashes in the region will be shit. If you ever found a Bubble or other expensive artifact in a stash, that's why almost every other stash in that region would have contained shotgun ammo and multitools. The game ran out of budget and went all ghetto on your stashes.
Multitools are NOT put in stashes, by the way. Neither are the Veles and Svarog detectors.
I also took out all the special ammo (like AP ammo, Magnum sniper ammo and Batteries) also to save on stash costs and the shotgun ammo because who in their right mind would stash shotgun ammo. The stuff's everywhere.
So now, after all that, this is what my inventory looked like after looting every stash I know of in Rostok, at 100% filled:
![ss mahzra 01 14 22 00 47 11 l05]()
Same thing but at 50%:
![ss mahzra 01 14 22 23 21 51 l05]()
I love how the timing on the screenshots worked out to have Petrenko be all disappointed about the 50% haul.
For both runs I started out with only a faction patch, by the way. Even the knives came out of stashes. And yeah, this is not very exciting, but that was kind of the point. Random stashes aren't very exciting. Stuff from random stashes cuts down on expenses, it doesn't net you much profit, unless you get a jackpot stash. And those are still in there, as a matter of fact, STATISTICALLY they should come up more often and contain something you maybe would not save up to purchase. Like, I wouldn't buy a minigun, but I wouldn't mind owning a minigun either. That's as true in game as it is in real life.
Also. I forgot to take a screenshot of a vanilla run of this, but after quite a few tests I consistently got around the same RU value of total items if I sold them, and half that at 50%. It's just that now you get a larger variety of more appropriate items that you're more likely to keep.
As always, feedback would be very much appreciated, particularly on this. Balancing this sort of stuff takes a while to get right, so I need as many people as possible to start opening up loot crates.
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V2.1 UPDATE
Kinda forgot all about the loadout changes I made as well. I took inspiration from the Less Good AO3 Guns addon, which gave everybody 8 guns that sucked. I thought that was a step in the right direction and took away the 7 best of those 8 guns.
Nice guns are fairly rare now. As are VOG grenades and that other type of shooty splody nady thing.
V2.0 UPDATE
I added AO3 ammo to the loot lists of every type of breakable container and had them limited by community and level. So in short, it should make some sort of sense that you find the ammo where you found it. The quality and quantity goes up as you go north, NATO places have more NATO ammo, neutrals have a bit of everything, and so on.
This addon was made for my own slightly masochistic tastes, though. You can find pretty much any type of ammo out in the Zone now, but you'll never find much of it.
As an observation: that first crate I smashed that contained some 7.62x39 (I think? the white boxes, the bigger AK rounds) was effing magical. It makes so much difference FOR MY IMMERSION to have the ammo actually out there in the world. Who woulda thunk it.
Happy scrounging!
v1 Description:
This patch brings the AO3 loot back down to CotZ levels. In practice that means I cut back the loot dropped by dead dudes by at least 50%.
AO3 was kinda crazy, within days my profession changed from scavenger to arms dealer because enemies just carried around boxes of ammo. So now you're back to scrounging for ammo and carrying 5 different pistols to be able to use the few rounds you managed to salvage. That, or do odd jobs or hunt artifacts. As I think the good doctor intended CotZ to be played. Enjoy!
Unpack the archive into your game folder to install. It shouldn't have to overwrite anything. To uninstall, remove death_generic.itx from gamedata/configs/misc.
Will there be any conflicts from games that utilize the Item Overhaul add-on?
Just that items not specifically added to the exclusion list will still spawn in stashes. Depending on their value, that may impact the stash balance, but I don't think the addon adds many (if any? I still have to have a closer look at it) expensive items, so it's probably fine.
Your artefact addon though, that is an entirely different story.
Do the Item Overhaul addon items pop out of crates and breadboxes as well, by the way? I ask because depending on how that was implemented, it may override my drops from those.
EDIT: now that I'm working on quest requirements and rewards, there will probably some conflicts. I was planning on integrating the Item Overhaul addon at some point anyway, just because that means more variety in STUFF, so I'll make a compatibility patch when I get to that stage. Until then, players will have to choose one or the other.
... I'd go for the minigun over sheets of paper, personally.
EDIT again:
can't stop giggling at the idea of some random NPC offering a minigun if you'd go get these sheets of paper that have some sentimental value to him
So uh, I have never played the mod (yet). but Im just about to start playing it. Does this mod work as is or do I have to download arsenal overhaul 3 from somewhere first?
Yeah, you need AO3 v0.7, it's on here as well. You probably also want AO3 Aligned and Centered. First install AO3, then AO3 Aligned and Centered, and then this.
AO3 adds the weapons to the game, but doesn't integrate them very well and many of the sights and scopes are off-center.
AO3 Aligned and Centered fixes the sights and scopes and offers a choice between zoomed and unzoomed ironsights. It also improves weapon handling. It's pretty much mandatory.
The AO3 content integrator adds the AO3 weapons, attachments and ammo to crates and boxes, missions, stashes, etc. It doesn't include any content of its own, really.
I just found a scoped gauss rifle in a random stash. Immediately yanked that scope off and replaced it with a reflex sight, because who needs a scope on a one-shot kill bodyshot cannon, but the point is that I can confirm jackpot stashes are very rare but definitely still a thing.
Unfortunately that also means I forgot to remove one version of the gauss rifle from the random stashes. The gauss rifle isn't supposed to be in random stashes. I'll remove it next update.
Let me know of any other stuff you've found in random stashes that you feel shouldn't have been there!
Does the 100% filled stashes not break the stash generation? When I tried that out just testing stuff myself (changing the 2 to a 1 in that calculation) it stopped stashes from generating from the coc_treasure_manager.create_random_stash() function, and i figure it's because the stash table is completely filled.
Might not be a problem if you have the stash chance from quests set low or to 0 but i copied over the lootmoney script and was pulling my hair out trying to find out why it wasn't generating stashes, it was legit just changing that 2 to a 1 that did it
At 100% the game fills random stashes at start, stashes are also generated from quests and PDAs and if the player has the Rag and Bones achievement and that EFT tweak, from corpses. As far as I can tell, it works fine. I'll do some testing with just that calculation on a vanilla game though, because I've only ever used that tweak as part of a very modded setup. Like, maybe I broke it and something else I'm not aware of fixed it so it looks fine to me but could unexpectedly break.
Thank you for the heads up.
I finally see what you mean. We are both correct, in this instance. Filling all stashes at the start of the game means that until the player loots one, additional stashes cannot be generated. This is the part where you are correct. But once stashes are freed up, they will be generated by the usual means, which is the part where I am correct.
I should leave some room for initial mission stashes to be generated, like fill max 90% stashes at the start or something.
EDIT: Oooh, just under a year after that report. Smoooooth.
I don't know if it's because of my fiddling with files (haven't touched loudouts to be clear) but some stalkers have no weapons at all, I think I've only seen singular bandits like this and 3 monolithians in the tunnel in Jupiter on the northwest, south from the crashed drone.
It's kinda realistic that not everyone would be able to afford even a pistol, especially bandits, so I'm wondering if that was intentional or no, but it's also quite silly watching them run around with arms tied to their hips or even worse when they try to sneak up on somebody and realise they don't have a weapon when it's too late (happened today).
I don't know if the game rolls dice on each weapon mentioned in loadouts until it chooses one or if it rolls once and with bad luck a stalker might spawn empty handed. That's why I'm asking.
This is an unintentional feature that I intentionally left in, so I'm not sure if I should qualify it as a bug. I think you're half right on the dice rolls, it's probably a combination of that and a finite equipment budget.
Whatever the technical reason, in my mind those poor bastards got mugged. This is what a victim of muggery looks like. I know. Sad.
:'(
Don't mug, people. It's just mean!
Hi Mahzra, how can I reduce the number/value of guns/outfits spawn in a reward stash? There is atleast one very high tier gun in every reward stash, I want to progress slowly, not some rookie with 7.62×51 caliber rifle in his hands. Also selling them is just ton-of-money-early-game, very uncool and annoying.
Perhaps I should edit treasure-blacklist file??
Hey hey, the treasure blacklist is for random stashes. To reduce the chances of high reward stashes, have a look at the files in the gamedata/configs/drx folder, specifically drx_ql_items_ files for rifles and outfits. You could also just take out those types of items completely by commenting out items_outfits_list and items_rifles_list in the drx_ql_config.ltx file, below [reward_item_sections].
Thank you 🙏