Divergent/mods/Hunter's Kit - A Butchery Engine/README_tbHuntKit.txt

trashBattery's Hunter's Kit - A Butchery Engine 
Version 1.0 - October 23rd 2024

If you are reading this, thanks :3 
Enjoy the mod! <3
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What is this mod?
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It's a rewrite of the "Monster Loot" engine already present in the game. You can feasibly sustain yourself hunting now. If you enjoy it, you can make money off it. It's not the optimal way to wealth, but it's an optional gameplay avenue now where before it was not.

Why would I want this?
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- If you think killing a 300lb pig should provide you with enough calories to eat for a day instead of 15 minutes.
- If you've ever tried using the "Hunter's Kit" and thought "Wow! This thing is a useless piece of shit!"
- You want the bonus of the "Well Dressed" achievement to actually function.
- You want Butcher's missions to actually be worth doing instead of just hoping ALife does them while you sleep on his couch.
- You want to be able to harvest the 1 bird you shot down in anger after realizing how hard they are to actually shoot.

Will this work with other mods? Does it require anything?
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- This mod is designed to work standalone, but "Mod Configuration Menu" is fully supported and advised.
- This mod is ready to go without any settings changes for most players, but settings exist for those who want them.
- Modded creatures will still work fine so long as they work in vanilla Anomaly.
- Compatibility is limited only to mods that change "mutant_loot.script". This is required to function and must not be overwritten by other mods. AFIK, nobody's been as masochistic as me yet so I don't expect you'll have many issues.
- Find a mod that conflicts and you want it to work? Let me know, I'll see what I can do!

Food, Drug and Drink Animations (FDDA)
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FDDA is awesome and you should use it, but if you use the "Mutant Loot" animations, be aware:
- FDDA's mutant loot animations will prevent the variable harvesting animation speeds from working since they all run at 1 speed.
- FDDA plays animations every time you open a corpse, even if you already opened it before.
- FDDA edits a sound file to mute the vanilla harvesting sound. I've included a configuration option to fix this.
It is advised that you use FDDA, but disable "Mutant Loot" animations for the best experience.
- MCM OPTION: (FDDA) Silent Harvesting Fix  - Use if you disabled Mutant Loot animations or you won't have any harvesting sound
- MCM OPTION: (FDDA) Duplicate harvesting SoundFX Fix - Use if you enabled Mutant Loot animations or you'll randomly get unwanted harvesting sounds.

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What does this mod specifically do?
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The Hunter's Kit item has been changed to be a backpack and a tool
- It works when not worn, but is quite heavy. If you don't wear it it'll take up significant space.
- While wearing it, the carry bonus offsets the weight and gives you similar storage to the Camping Backpack.
- The gameplay setting to require the kit to be worn is now ignored.
- The Hunter's Kit is craftable using logical items you could realistically obtain. No more random endgame materials to make one.

Mutant loot logic has been completely reworked
- Mutants now drop an amount of meat respective to their fleshy mass, not their difficulty. Fleshes are great sources of low-quality food now. Even birds have something to eat, however it won't be much.
- Mutants that drop things other than meat are unaffected by the Hunter's Kit. No increased chances to find money or porno mags just because you had some proper knives on you.
- Birds are not harvestable! They were always intended to be, but a bug in the crow_binder script was causing issues and has been fixed.

Variable harvesting animation speeds now function
- This is an unfinished, but mostly complete feature of the vanilla game. I've used existing assets to complete it.
- There are 3 harvesting speeds. Fast, Normal, Slow
- Harvesting without the backpack is Normal.
- Harvesting with the backpack is Slow, implying you are using your tools and taking time to gather more.
- Having the "Well Dressed" achievement increases harvesting speeds Without/With to Fast/Normal, respectively

Unused audio now utilized
- The game has 9 different harvesting sounds that were intended for each type of creature, but only 1 was ever implemented.
- The sounds are all generic bone/meat cutting noises so now I have the game select them at random for variance.

What about balance?
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There should be no balance issues or exploits because of these changes.
- Game is already balanced around weight. Meat is quite inefficient. Spawning more of it doesn't create an economic problem unless you're able to carry it all somehow. If you can carry it, you'd be better off carrying guns to sell anyway so this isn't going to be a problem.
- Your knife degrades once for each item you take from a carcas, so more meat means you'll want a more durable knife.
- Cooking raw meat already consumes limited resources so having more of it doesn't make survival easy, just less tedious.
- Butcher's payout for meat is still minimal compared to almost every other form of income in the game. Now it's worthwhile.
- If you actually go do Butcher's quests yourself you can make more money by harvesting the creatures.
- Random Stalkers pay good rates for meat, but you're limited by their available funds which is always low.
- Selling meat and killing monsters does not increase/decrease Favor with anyone except Butcher/Loners and only while doing Butcher's daily mission. You will gain rep at the exact same speed as before because monsters themselves have not been changed, only how much meat they drop.

BUT THE LORE??!
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Several sources in the game confirm that mutants do not have a lot of viable meat on them. I love this. The difference now is that instead of getting 0.1% of their edible body mass you're getting about 20% of it. That's still a lot of wasted meat. If you don't believe me, go look at how much a single piece of flesh meat weighs. These are not huge steaks, they're small strips even if the icon suggests otherwise. Instead of changing their mass to be larger I chose to increase the quantity you get, suggesting you're scavenging a mutated creature and not happily butchering a prize farm animal.

Technobabble
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For those interested, here's what's happened under the hood.

Vanilla loot works on a probability system that is functionally flipping coins, which gets the job done, but feels terrible in practice. This new system uses a progressive probability curve model that gets harder each time it tries to spawn an item, which results in more consistent randomness. No more harvesting 2 animals and getting 0 meat from one and 5 from the other. You're more likely to get 1-3 from each animal and sometimes some extra. This new system feels less like gambling and more like individual differences in animal size and health.

The vanilla Hunter's Kit does work, believe it or not, but it randomly duplicates items when you grab them from the UI and never tells you about them. Now that the UI can handle more than a dozen items, I have the game spawn them into the UI itself and never attempt to duplicate them. You have a higher chance to get items while in possession of the kit, but you can never get more than the max configured.

Because of these changes I decided to change the format for the mutant_loot.ltx config, but I built the system to support the original loot format so modded creatures that don't know about this mod work fine.

VANILLA FORMAT - item, quantity, chance
[boar]
hide_boar, 1, 0.16              <- 16% chance to obtain 1 hide
mutant_part_boar_leg, 4, 0.12   <- Drop 4 items, each one 12% chance
roubles, 9999, 1                <- Always drop 9999 roubles

UPDATED FORMAT - item, quantity, [optional chance]
[boar]
hide_boar, 1, 0.16              <- 16% chance to obtain 1 hide (0.16 forces use of vanilla probability. Kit doubles chance to 0.32)
mutant_part_boar_leg, 4         <- Increasingly difficult chance to get up to 4 maximum legs. (Use new curve. Kit modifies curve favorably)
roubles, 9999                   <- Increasingly difficult chance to get up to 9999ru. (Kit does not affect harvest chance of items that don't start with mutant_part_ or hide_. Chance is the same with/without the kit. Likely will get anywhere from 1000-5000 on most rolls.)

The logic for how much meat of each creature to drop was a creative design decision and not an exact science. The abridged logic is as follows:
- Find a measurable IRL analog to the creature
- Determine what percentage of that measurable creature is edible tissue (Only muscle/fat drop in game as food)
- Based on the estimated weight of the game's creature, determine its edible tissue
- Apply an arbitrary loss of 90% to all findings to account for the fact that you're in the zone carving up mutated monsters.
- Divide the item weight by the available mass
- The engine will take this rather large number and do the rest.

EXAMPLE: A Flesh (oink oink)
- Analog: "A really big pig"
- Analog's renderable tissue ratio: 72% (per some basic research into the makeup of farm pigs)
- Est. Weight of an in-game Flesh: ~113kg
- Weight of a "Flesh Meat": 0.163kg
- Useable meat (90% loss): ~8kg
- Suggested drops from a flesh: 50

Resulting config:
[Flesh]
mutant_part_flesh_meat, 50

With 50 drops you can expect ~6-10 without the Hunter's Kit and ~20-30 with the Hunter's Kit.

There is some more nuance to this decision as well which considers how difficult creatures are and how likely their mutations may be to cause more/less meat to be available, but that's well beyond the scope of this writeup. If you want your creature to fit perfectly into my mod for some reason you can message me and I can help. This is more of an art than a science, but you can also always just adjust numbers till it feels right. You won't break anything. Not like people can carry 8000 tonnes of "mutant_part_custom_monster_flesh_22" anyway so too much really isn't that bad for balance, it'll just not seem right when players harvest your creature.