I got annoyed with the fact that I could “un-boil” a piece of leather armor, or somehow peel the paint off of metal armor, and then still have both the original armor and the fancy mod that it was carrying, but when it came to weapons, I had to go scrounging for parts just to unscrew the silencer off of a pistol (which you can usually do with bare hands and no tools IRL), or to take the scope off of a lowly pipe pistol (seriously? There’s just a screw holding it on…)
This mod removes ALL of that – if you’re pulling upgrade parts off of a weapon, then you’re free to do so without cost, you just have to downgrade the part to whatever “standard” mod that fits in that mod slot.
Part of the reason I made this mod is so that I can “break down” all the weapons we loot – we’re sitting at the machining bench in the gas station, which in-lore is specifically made for re-tooling the parts for atomic cars… I figure if it can handle atomic cars, then it’s probably got all the teensy screwdrivers and pliers that would be needed to take apart a 10mm pistol or an assault rifle, and I shouldn’t need a handful of spare steel bits to do it. I’m all for needing spare adhesive and springs to upgrade a gun, but for stripping it down to bits, there’s literally no call for it.
If I were personally sitting at a “repair bench” with a half-dozen pipe pistols and rifles that I was breaking down into parts to make one good high-end gun (the good scope from the one I just found, the calibrated receiver from this one I got from that raider up at Olivia, the silencer from the one I picked up off of a vendor, and the good grip that’s on my old one) I’m damn sure not going to take them all apart, put the good bits onto my new gun, and then re-build all of them with what’s left – I’ll build my new fancy gun, and then I’ll put all the useful spare bits in a box labeled “Pipe Pistol parts”, and then what’s left will get melted down into “steel” for building settlements and such… if it’s a couple Gatlings that I’m working with, then I’d likely build the new one, and put any scraps back together as best I can and vendor the bloody thing or give it to Strong to shoot mole rats with when he’s bored – regardless, I can’t think of a reason I’d ever actually want the second one, especially considering the weight.
With fairly limited exceptions, there’s not much reason for us to carry more than 2 of any particular weapon “type”, especially later in the game – we’ll build a specific weapon for a specific purpose, and everything else goes into the scrap heap or gets sold.
ToDo: There’s been some requests for a more “realistic” version of the mod, which only lets you remove add-on type mods (silencers, scopes, etc) for free, so I’ll work on that over the next few days, time allowing. I’ve also missed a few weapons that I hadn’t found yet while playing, but I’m going to give myself one of everything with the console and see if I can’t fill out any holes.
Note 1: Because there’s no crafting items used in the downgrade, you no longer gain XP for downgrading – I was hoping that would happen, and lucked out that it did.
Note 2: I haven’t found all the weapons in the game yet, so I’ve likely missed a downgrade or two – If you find one, just leave a comment and I’ll try to add it in later.
Note 3: I used FalloutSnip (the new fork of TESVSnip for FO4) to create the initial mod file, and then TESVSnip to make my changes (FO4Snip is still kinda crashy) – I know people are twitchy about savegame corruption from TESSnip mods, however seeing as we don’t have anything else yet, it’s likely that most FO4 mods will be made with TESVSnip or FO4Snip until the GECK and/or FO4Edit are released. All that being said, I don’t think there’s anything in this mod that would affect your save files – I didn’t alter any FormID’s, item names, or even actually change anything at all – all I did was delete the recipe requirements for the “Standard” recipes.
