Packing Heat

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About

While selling scrap guns piecemeal is legal in most regions, selling bulk weapons at scale in major cities is illegal! As long as you can avoid detection, you can make a tidy profit by cleaning and repacking those bloody weapons into shiny new bulk crates. Sell them to the Trade Authority or anyone who will buy contraband. Packing Heat adds new crafting, decor and collectibles themed around smuggling and arms dealing. The research and recipe requirements add new motivation to scavenge, mine and invest in skills such as research methods, commerce. Packing Weapons into Contraband Crates - New research trees unlocked via Weapon Engineering and weapon skills provide access to 7 new workbenches with custom visual design, and a custom workbench sound effect. - Combine weapon parts with diverse crafting ingredients to repackage new bulk weapon crates and increase profits. - Bulk weapon crates are contraband, sell them where you typically sell contraband for a greater profit than selling the guns alone. - Research unlocks higher quality crate recipes that sell for greater profit at the cost of more complex resources and skills. - Commerce, Research Methods and other skills are not touched by this mod, but they are now more impactful due to their influence on your profit. Arms Dealer Decorations and Collectibles - Research for Arms Dealer Decor is available from the start. More than 40+ pieces including military and “gun dealer” inspired furniture and props, as well as functional gun lockers with snap points so you can see your weapons in the lockers. From mundane crates and bins, to ridiculous gun thrones and rifle statues. - Collect miniature “Desk Guns” throughout vanilla dungeons. Once found these are unlocked to build at your outpost or ship. Unlike vanilla collectibles, only the minis you haven’t found yet will spawn, no repeats. Only need to find them once each during a universe. Weapon and armor recycling - Scavenging rank 1 unlocks research for the Equipment Recycler. Use this station to recover resources from weapons and armor when you need resources more than credits. Regular and legendary weapons both return different sets of resources biased towards what is useful for weapons and armor modification, including rare resources and a chance for x-tech per effect up to a max of 3. Gameplay Options - If you don’t have any time, or like to cheat, I’ve provided options! Not everyone wants to roleplay; I get it! - Research requirements: Allows you to disable all required research and simply build everything. - Collection requirements: Allows you to build all Desk Guns and collectibles without having to collect them. - Balance Research Methods: Allows you to disable my balancing of the Research Methods skill if you want very high profits. If disabled, you’ll get significantly higher profits due to reduced crafting costs on crates. Works via a separate “counter-perk” so I don’t touch the vanilla skill. Load Order Consideration and Tech Notes - Load order neutral, all new records. Cleaned in xedit and went out of my way to avoid touching vanilla records and avoiding any conflicts. - Safe for mid-save installation - I never recommend uninstalling any mod mid-save (except UI mods), same goes for this one. It adds new items, scripts and things so likely not safe to uninstall until unity or new game. - Pointer handle allocation is extremely minimal at 993 references at the time of writing this. - There is about a 40% chance in any dungeon POI for a collectible to spawn and the locations are randomized replacements of fancy desk objects such as globes, geodes and other things. Mod added dungeons are supported as long as they use LocTypeDungeon keyword. Getting Started - Taking Weapon Engineering rank 1 will allow access to Weapon Packing Basics under Weaponry research. That provides the packing station, initial benches and leads to more. This is the path to profit through weapon-based contraband. - Take Scavenging rank 1 will allow access to Equipment Recycling under Outpost research. This leads to the recycler which can provide weapon and armor modding resources. Legendary equipment will provide rarer resources, including chances for x-tech. - Arms Dealer Decor 1 is immediately available without any condition under Outpost research. This way for decor! - Desk Gun collectibles are found in many dungeons, on desks, shelves and similar places. These are fairly rare, and hard to see because they are tiny and do not highlight in the scanner. Once you find one, that model is unlocked to build in decor. Gameplay Notes and Suggestions - Complimentary mod play: This mod is designed to be played independently on the vanilla game or with mods. Players may enjoy playing this alongside mods that increase challenge around smuggling so that it feels more impactful. Smuggling is more fun with risk involved! You might also consider mods that increase vendor credits even further as selling high value crates will drain a vendors bank account quickly. - Weapon crates require significantly more space than typical contraband so increasing your shielded cargo will be more important. Remember that the vanilla game determines your cargo scan evasion chance partially based on the ratio of contraband weight to total shielded cargo capacity. - Weapon parts are processed at 1 part to 100cr in weapon value. - Weapon crates within the same tier have differing values that relate to the distribution of weapons in the game. Rifles are found FAR more than any other weapon, but I wanted the player to be able to make melee and other crates are roughly the same frequency. So it takes less weapons in total to make some crates than others. - Benches disassemble weapons into “parts” based on credit value of the weapons, this ensures a predictable exchange so that we can ensure profit via crafting crates with fixed prices. 100 credit value processes to 1 weapon part. Each tier of crates increases your final profit by a small percentage from 10% up to 25%. Research Methods and Commerce can also be really handy to increase your profits even further by reducing your need for parts, or increases your final sell prices overall. - Crafting costs for Packing Heat crates are dynamically adjusted when you rank up Research Methods. I provide a counter-balancing increase in crafting cost to reduce the impact of Research Methods. In a vanilla game, RM will now provide 5, 10, 20 and 30 percent discounts on crafting cost for Packing Heat crates. I’ve done this without touching the vanilla skill at all so it shouldn’t affect any other mod, and it will not affect vanilla recipes. Known Issues or Caveats to be aware of - Gun lockers: work like vanilla weapon containers ( they are made of containers). Once full, some of them can be a little goofy where you need to point at on the container to access the full container interface rather than grabbing a single item. See the screenshots for what all each locker can hold. - Vanilla weapon rack bugs: In the vanilla game, weapons on some weapon racks may turn sideways, and very very rarely a weapon rack will “eat” your items and they’ll be gone. My containers work identical to vanilla containers so they could have the same issues. One tester was able to reproduce an issue that happens with vanilla containers where if you edit your ship habs with the containers displaying, they may temporarily stop displaying until you remove the items and put them back in. I don’t recommend moving displays around a lot when full of items, and just like in vanilla its probably a good idea to empty your displays if you intend to majorly edit your ship habs. It isn’t necessary but can help avoid vanilla glitches. There is no known solution to those issues in vanilla or mod added display containers, so we just have to work around the best we can. - Smuggling in Starfield is more for roleplay as you can always sell contraband at the Den or Red Mile, and there are ways in vanilla to bypass contraband scans completely even where they are scanned. This mod doesn’t try to address those factors as I wanted to ensure general compatibility with overhauls. I recommend using other mods in combination if you want to increase the challenge of smuggling. Roadmap: - The mod will need some tuning and tweaks, probably for the recycler outputs and adding some more depth to that, as well as the crate weights, values, and resources required, etc. - I will be adding some more decor and a variety of interactive objects. - I plan to experiment with adding smuggling missions, particularly to sell crates to neon gangs, spacers and other criminals. Ideally with potential trouble and interruptions. Will also see if I can find some ways to make smuggling more challenging than the vanilla game. I may implement some of this as a separate mod to increase compatibility and keep things modular. Will see! Shoutout to testers, creators and others who helped an extraordinary amount! Mod creation is a very collaborative effort and we all help each other constantly. These are some authors, players and communities that have been crazy supportive, helping me with my thousands of questions. - Aevi - Laylowmoe - Grapeheart - Vanguard4life - Rbt/s1nderion - DownfallNemesis - MissO - HolonautWorkshop - TankGirl - Korodic - TheTennessee - Gamerroundup206 - Tons of random folks on DarkStarHQ, Starfield Modding and the official VC discord. All amazingly supportive communities for mod authors! - If I missed anyone, please let me know! I collaborate with so many people that I can’t keep track haha. SUPPORT: - I'm on Discord as Cyberpsyche, you can DM me or find me in the Bethesda Game Studios discord. - I'm on Nexus at https://www.nexusmods.com/profile/CyberPsycheMods - This mod is also on Nexus, you can comment or report issues there.