Weapon/Tool magazines extremely rare

[Fluffy]

I'm skill specced into strength and intelligence to boost my harvesting, salvaging, sledgehammers, and shotguns. However, I've found extremely few magazines for these items even though my seeds and food magazines are maxed before day 30. I just unlocked iron harvesting tools level 5 on day 29, wrench level 5 on the same day. I still am stuck at iron sledgehammer level 1 and double barrel shotgun level 1. I've been looting magazines from houses/businesses, always getting magazine bundles from my quest rewards daily, and looting ever air drop every 3 days. Am I doing something wrong (aside from not traveling far enough for crack a book store) or am I just very unlucky?

[Xandor]

Are you putting skill points into Miner 69er to get more tool magazine and into the weapon type you want to drop?

I have unlocked Iron 5 at day 7 with 3 points into Miner 69er. You can look on the skills on the last tab (where you see each rank in harvesting tools etc) what skills you need to put points into to get more magazine drops.

[Fluffy]

Originally posted by Xandor:

Are you putting skill points into Miner 69er to get more tool magazine and into the weapon type you want to drop?

For sure! I've got 4 levels in Miner 69er and 3 levels in sledgehammers and shotguns each! I want these to be my primary weapons, but I'm finding very few weapon magazines for any weapons so I feel that my combat capabilities are significantly disadvantaged due to a serious lack of weapon progression.

[Xandor]

Weird, as you can see I got the same progress on harvesting tools as you by day 7 compared to you at day 29 and I have 1 less point in Miner 69er.

Maybe you are not looting book piles, bookshelves, mailboxes and postboxes but I assume you are looting them...
I have only looted normal buildings, not crack a book.

I am looting everything and then dropping the thrash items and salvaging.
I am on wrench lvl 3 (not put any point into getting salvaging magazines).

Only thing I can think is that we play at different speed/difficulty. I am currently on just default difficulty and I unlocked tier 4 quests on day 6 (done a lot of quests as fast I could with a lot of rushing into houses).
If you are on higher difficulty you have to take it slower and if you focus on building a base then you are doing less looting.

[mr_bman]

What else do you have points in to? For example if you have points into advanced engineering that comes with three magazines that will start showing up in loot. I think it's three - may have changed. But the point is you can hog up the loot table and it'll water down the selections so it makes what magazines you want harder to get to pop up. Make your shotguns the top amount of points you have in to it and don't have any points into other things that have magazines that'll show up. Use the forgetting elixir if you can.
Sometimes it'll be stingy and then all of the sudden you start seeing what you want. It'll do that sometimes.

[Fluffy]

I'm playing on standard speed but easy difficulty since I'm playing solo. Of course I'm fully looting/salvaging every house/car I come across and am looting book piles, bookshelves, mailboxes, etc. I'd be surprised if the game difficulty being set to scavenger instead of adventurer would make that much of a difference on the types/amount of magazines found.

I loot one or two houses every day, or one business since they're typically a bit larger than a house. I don't go out at night, but that's still a lot of looting/salvaging to do, as well as one quest a day for extra magazines. I guess I'm just extremely unlucky as my base is well built and not getting any real modifications at this point. I've also turned off blood moons in my game so I don't have to worry about anything except wandering hordes or screamer hordes.

[mr_bman]

It's like adding sides on dice - each time you add a point into something new you're adding another side to the die which decreases the odds of that one side from showing up when you roll the dice.

[mr_bman]

If you're very strict about it you can dump all your points into grease monkey and have a motorcycle by day 8 - for example.

[Fluffy]

Originally posted by mr_bman:

What else do you have points in to? For example if you have points into advanced engineering that comes with three magazines that will start showing up in loot. I think it's three - may have changed. But the point is you can hog up the loot table and it'll water down the selections so it makes what magazines you want harder to get to pop up. Make your shotguns the top amount of points you have in to it and don't have any points into other things that have magazines that'll show up. Use the forgetting elixir if you can.

I've only got one point in advanced engineering so I'd be surprised if that was flooding my loot table. I'm getting a ton of magazines everywhere, but it's an extremely wide spread across all skills with an extremely minor bump to my preferred skills that are supposed to bump magazines. Aside from cooking and seeds which are both maxed, every other skill has a minimum of 10 with my preferred and specced skills having 15-25. A few are higher, like 30+, but those are not things I'm specced into, like armor, medicine, etc.