STARS TTW - Vanilla Version Mod

Overview:

This is a complete, top to bottom rework of the entire armor suite.

DT and DR values have been reworked and often increased, DR has been added to most armors, and power armor stats and effects are completely reworked.

This rebalance is partially intended to make armor values more consequential with mods like New Blood, BLEEDLESS, and BLEED.

Features:

1. All armors and outfits have had their stats changed, and new resistance amounts added, for things like fire, energy, rad, and electric resistance.
2. Most items have some degree of each resistance.
3. Metallic armors now almost always provide a rad resist debuff, and often an electric resistance debuff.
4. This has been done for realism, and to dethrone the metallic armors as being the best non-power armor choice for nearly all build types.
5. Unique versions of armors have often been tweaked to have more unique appeal; they aren't all linear improvements on their base versions.
6. Some are, but many have higher stats and lower health, or other such changes, to make them a more interesting armor choice, instead of a raw improvement.
7. Vanilla armor tiers and timing have been overhauled and lengthened, and greater variety of apparel has been granted to raiders, factions, and vendors. It will take longer to get higher quality armors than in vanilla. Radiation suits in particular will be much rarer.
8. Enclave members almost always have breathing masks.
9. Faction disguises have been removed.
10. They have always been buggy, problematic, and caused more issues than they're worth, even when fixed as best as they can be.
11. Leather and Metal armors can be repaired using leather items, like leather belts, baseball gloves and such, and scrap metal, respectively.
12. This has been done to allow for those armors to be easier to maintain, providing them more appeal when compared to combat armor.
13. Pre-order armors have been distributed to leveled lists.
14. Many vendors have been given guaranteed/semi-guaranteed supplies of certain items which fit their wares.
15. Friday, the raider merchant in The Pitt, will no longer have her entire stock be lootable if you kill her.
16. Vendors have a greater variety of armors, they stock much more headgear, and they often have more armors and clothing. Raider specific vendors often have a very respectable supply of raider apparel.
17. Protective headgear has had its health increased pretty much across the board, by a large amount, for usage with Armor Damage Overhaul.
18. Factions which were previously almost exclusively decked out in power armor have had their tiers reworked with combat, recon, and other fitting armors in the early stages. This will make combat with them less generic, and not nearly as gated to specific thresholds of damage/armor penetration.
19. Some vendors will have more faction money and less caps. Some vendors will just have less caps, generally those who don't have a lot of direct trade with outsiders.
20. Many vanilla armors which were missing flags which allowed for overlap of apparel which didn't make sense have been fixed. Radiation suits + breathing masks, stuff like that.
21. Recon armors grant extended stealth boy duration.

Power Armor:

1. Power armor has (optional) dynamic scaling. This effect will abide non-standard scale values, like when using the Height Randomizer. The degree of scaling can be configured.
2. Power armor effects have been overhauled.
3. Power armor now generally provides a Strength bonus to sublimate its bonus to carry weight. This has been done to debuff the change to economy flow provided by having a huge bonus carry weight in power armor.
4. All power armor also substantially reduces your stealth stat.
5. Companions who do not have the Power Armor Training perk, and aren't considered internally to have it regardless of the actual presence of the perk (Arcade, Star Paladin Cross, Christine, Veronica) will automatically unequip power armor if it is presented to them.
6. Naming conventions have been normalized. Mk ll Power Armor has been changed to be called Advanced instead.
7. Radiation resistance has been removed from the vast majority of power armors, notably excepting a small amount on the T-51 armors.
8. This has been done to make things like radiation suits and gas masks more important, especially throughout the later parts of the game.
9. T-45 and basic Enclave Power Armors are now classified as medium armor (though still also classified as power armor) to provide a small difference in appeal between them and the heavier power armors. This is a small change that mostly just affects run speed.
10. Tesla Power Armors now use their own repair list and are no longer in non-Tesla power armor repair lists. Hellfire Power Armor cannot be used to repair basic Enclave Power Armor. Similarly, T-45 can only repair with itself, and the same goes for T-51.
11. The Lonesome Road faction armors that were previously only attainable by nuking the side that you wanted the armor from have been removed from those original locations, and are instead granted upon turning in a large number of ears/dogtags to the appropriate faction.
12. Power armor now has additional bonuses and maluses, to make them more of a tradeoff, and not an automatic improvement. These factors will be explained in the message that pops up when power armor training is granted for the first time.
13. It grants +10% Unarmed and Melee Weapon damage and -50% spread penalty for moving while aiming, but, it also reduces Unarmed and Melee Weapon attack speed by 15%, reload speed with non-heavy weapons by 10% (harder to exert fine dexterity with smaller weapons), equip speed by 20%, movement speed by 5% on top of armor class run speed maluses, and running while sneaking will always incur a detection penalty, even with Silent Running. All of these apply to NPCs as well. Optional.

Perks:

1. Four armor type perks have been added.
2. Avant Apocalypse grants +2 Endurance, +1 Strength, +25 AP, and -15% Melee and Unarmed AP cost while wearing raider armors. The stat bonuses are rather strong, because raider armors are rather weak in their own right.
3. Clothes Make The Courier grants +10% XP, -50% limb damage, and +7 Barter, Speech, and Sneak while wearing clothing.
4. Happy Medium grants +40 HP and AP, -25% enemy crit. chance, and -20% AP cost with ranged weapons while wearing medium armor.
5. This does apply to medium power armors, to provide a potential for extra appeal in sticking with lower tier power armors instead of upgrading.
6. Steel Jacket grants +1 Endurance, +25% carry weight, +10% combat movement speed, and +15% Unarmed and Melee damage while wearing non-power heavy armors.
7. Avant Apocalypse and Clothes Make The Courier can display their affected items to you while in-game. If in the level-up perk menu, press right click/left trigger, or your "grab" key, or if in the perk tab in the Pip-Boy, press right click, or "grab" to be shown a prompt asking if you'd like to see the affected items. For controller users, you'll need to use whatever your "grab" control is bound to. It is bound to clicking RS by default.

Vision Mode Apparel (Pip-Vision):

1. Headgears which grant vision modes have been reworked to use Small Energy Cells to power them.
2. They work off a universal Pip-Vision charge stored in the Pip-Boy. They are turned on or off by holding the "grab" key and pressing and releasing the Pip-Boy key. To charge Pip-Vision, hold grab and then hold the Pip-Boy key for 1.25 seconds.
3. You can charge a max of 300 seconds of Pip-Vision. Different vision mode apparel will drain this charge at increased rates.

Customization:

There are a handful config options available.

Extra power armor effects can be toggled on and off. The amount of scaling it provides can be configured.

The brightness values of the vision modes can be configured. The default settings are for vanilla, and there is an alternate set for NVR users.

Requirements:

xNVSE

JIP LN

Johnny Guitar

ShowOffNVSE

Installation:

Regular installation.

This page details where each of my mods should load in relation to each other.

Sweet LO

Recommended Mods To Accompany STARS:

This is a (neutered, alternative to full STARS) part of my "Core" series, which are all designed to work in tandem and balanced for each other:

SWEEP

Sweet Consumables

SPARE

STARS

Aid Addon

New Blood

While these mods will work without each other, the use of all of them provides the intended experience.

If you would like a version of this mod that has additional armor mods as part of its package, the extensive "Full" version of STARS can be found here.

Armor Damage Overhaul is highly, highly, highly recommended. All health stats of each item in the game have been adjusted assuming that this mod is in effect. In vanilla, only your body armor can be damaged, which makes the health values of every other apparel item inconsequential. Nearly every helmet in the game has had its health increased to work better with the ADO system.

Equip Sets is highly recommended, in particular with Armor Damage Overhaul, as it allows you to establish an in-combat armor set and an out-of-combat clothing set for stat buffs, and ensure that your delicate accessories aren't constantly destroyed during combat.

New Blood is balanced with this mod in mind, and vice versa.

This mod will improve the value of armor stats with things like BLEEDLESS and BLEED as well, but I feel that both of those mods go a bit (or a lot) overboard with their body part damage multiplier and explosion damage changes, so armor values won't be as satisfying and valuable as with New Blood. However, without a mod like this to improve armor stats, BLEED and BLEEDLESS make armors feel inconsequential in improving survivability, so STARS is still recommended for users who forgo New Blood and use those mods instead.

Vanilla SWEEP is the currently released version of the sister mod to this which covers weapon balancing.

Patches:

Compatibility:

Compatible with TTW 3.4+ only. An NV only version is planned.

TTW Merchant Supply Expansion should not be used with this mod, as this performs the same functionality natively.

Unlike the majority of my other mods, compatibility is not one of my concerns at all. This is intended as a master file which controls and handles every armor present in the game. All stat changes, rebalancing of vanilla armor loot and faction disbursal, and generally all changes made, have been done with hard edits, and any other mod which performs changes with hard edits will need a manual patch.

Mods which edit NPCs, like Two Wasteland Redesigned or Brave New World, will be overwritten by STARS. To see those mods' changes, a manual patch will be needed.

I have made substantial changes to the structure of vendor and armor lists, and scripted apparel integrations which are intentioned for vanilla TTW list structure will skew and screw up the integrations here. Using such mods are not recommended without manual patching.

I created the vanilla version of this mod to have a version of it available for those who don't want to undergo the extensive installation requirements of the regular version of STARS TTW. I do not use it myself beyond the playtesting playthrough after its creation. I strongly recommend for people to create and upload their own patches or versions of this file as they desire.

Should I put ___ mod lower than STARS?

Probably not. For example, Sawyerbatty and other Sawyer variants belong above STARS, like practically everything else.

Compatible/Patched Mods:.

Mods which perform scripted changes to armor visuals should function normally.

There is a patch for Into The Deep available here.

Specifically Incompatible Mods:

Project Nevada

Enhanced Vision/any mod that alters night vision functionality in any way

TTW Armored Wasteland will be wildly out of sync with this file without a very tedious patch. I will not be making such a patch.

Questions:

NV only version?

Planned, but not ready yet.

Type body support?

Unsupported. Users are free to create their own patch.

I wish faction disguises weren't removed, now I can't do quests via disguises like I previously could.

Admittedly, that is a bit of a loss, but that functionality is bad and causes issues, and I think sidestepping the issues is better than leaving them be.

Electric resistance doesn't matter in the game.

This is made more prominent in Vanilla SWEEP to a moderate degree. Full SWEEP will make it much more important.

Why the "grab" system for vision modes and not a new hotkey?

I wanted something that would work natively on a controller without needing to use a secondary controller binding mod that allows for using new hotkeys.

Credits:

ItsMeJesusHChrist supplied the modder's resources used for this page's images and the CPI V4 modders' resources that I used to create the perk icons.

The Scummiest Of Them All provided the banner and main image.

The nightvision activation and deactivation sound from TTW is included, and it was created by Matt of the TTW team.

My modified version of the TTW NVG imod has been included here.

Support:

If you'd like to support my modding work or say thanks, feel free to donate here at Ko-Fi.