Can Wild Razorgrain be Harvested?

[OldFatGuy]

I've got thousands of hours into this game, have found what "looks like" wild razorgrain (meaning it looks like a regular razorgrain plant but is growing in the middle of nowhere like wild muttfruit and wild corn etc.) but can't harvest them. I've never... to this day in 2023, been able to harvest them. I have sometimes spent lots of time next to such plants trying to change my angle and direction facing the plants... but no option to harvest them appears. So I'm assuming it's a bug but thought I'd ask to be sure so I can check this off my list of unanswered questions after so long playing this game.

Another such unanswered question involves armor (not PA). I would like to post two made up examples and ask which is "best" or if there even is an answer as to what is "best." For the thousands of hours I've played I've always assumed the "best" option is the one I will list second. Would love to hear others views.
Option 1) 5 pieces (chest, 2 legs, 2 arms) add up to a ballistic DR of 120 and an energy DR of 90.
Option 2) 5 pieces add up to a ballistic DR of 80 and energy DR of 60. In addition, chest piece reduces damage from humans by 15%, left arm reduces damage from super mutants by 15%, right arm reduces damage from bugs and mirelurks by 15%, left leg reduces damage from animals by 15%, and right leg reduces damage from robots by 15%.

I've always assumed that option 2 provides far better protection. Was that assumption right?

[OldFatGuy]

I guess one thing to understand would be whether those 15% reductions apply to all incoming damage or only strikes that hit that particular piece of armor. If a left arm piece with the bonus for super mutants for example blocks 15% in incoming damage period, then I feel confident in my assumption that the second option above is best. However, if a left arm piece with that bonus only blocks 15% of damage received on the left arm... then I guess I feel pretty confident that the first option above would be best.

ADDED IN EDIT: Oh yeah, I'm asking "in general" since I get that in the example in the OP option 1 would be better against ghouls since none of those bonuses was the one for ghouls. But, "in general" I was thinking that option 2 above was best since it provides what I assumed was better protection against almost all enemies... just not all.

[Zekiran]

There is a mod allowing wild food to be of use, but unless you're in survival mode I don't think it's useful otherwise? I don't bother with it since I grow normal razorgrain aplenty.

as for 2 "whatever looks coolest" >-> not helpful, from someone who never uses power armor and is absolutely not going to look at numbers to figure out what's ideal. this game doesn't really reward min/maxing all that well. Overall damage resistance or reduction is generally better than specific-encounter pieces, imo, because you are going to be encountering dozens of different enemy types and won't want to be switching out between your wanderings.

[Iron Knights]

I think I have mods that bypass both restrictions, ok maybe the second is not entirely a mod on armor. But I seem to be able to pickup any wild plants. I think you get the Ballistic & Weave for armor through quests at R.R.. As for my current total DR, it's around 700+/700+/100/10 for physical/energy/radiation/poison without P.A.. Not on Ghoulish perk.

[The Inept European]

Wild Razorgrain is extremely rare. It is not harvestable in vanilla. I wrote a mod that fixed most bugs with wild plants - most notably that Razorgrain does not count as food in vanilla Survival. I was not able to fix the problem with Wild Razorgrain. The necessary images for harvesting are missing, so the game crashes if you enable the option to harvest it, and harvest it.

In turn this makes it impossible to craft some of the herbal remedies, since at least one of them requires Wild Razorgrain. They really didn't test that properly, or think it through. The Herbals are almost useless, and then they make one of them depend on one of the rarest ingredients in the game? That would be bad design even if harvesting Wild Razorgrain worked, and the Herbal you made from it was a wonder blend that healed everything.

From memory (of my CK investigation) there are about 4 plants in the whole game, in about 2 locations.

[The Inept European]

But thanks you have prompted me to maybe try again to get that aspect fixed. I think if I swapped in the image/animation files from harvesting normal Razorgrain I might be able to get that to work. Maybe even colour it differently.

[The Inept European]

Originally posted by Zekiran:

unless you're in survival mode I don't think it's useful otherwise?

It would be of extremely limited use as food even in Survival mode, as it's so rare.

The main use is to make one of the Herbal remedies.

[The Inept European]

OP the technical answer is that the interaction option to Harvest the object has been disabled for Wild Razorgrain. It's possible that was added as a bug fix by Bethesda to prevent crashes, and they never got around to fixing the underlying bug (missing animation).

[The Inept European]

As far as I'm aware the Wild Razorgrain ingredient object (not the plant) does not exist in any levelled lists, so unless there is some statically placed somewhere, it is literally unobtainable.

[The Inept European]

The design problem with the herbal remedies is they are just not cost effective. Not even to craft, let alone to buy. Because you have to take them in advance, even to get their very marginal effect. And you have to know in advance what disease you need to protect against, which is nearly impossible since disease type is almost totally random. Even if herbal remedies were literally free it would hardly be worth carrying them because of their weight. Given that you would need to take a cocktail of nearly all types of herbal remedy before sleeping, or before consuming a risky substance, or before (or *immediately* after) getting bitten/scratched.

It works out cheaper to buy antibiotics with the same money, and the antibiotics are far lighter and only have to be used after you know you have a disease.

It's actually more effective to sell the crafting ingredients to buy antiobiotics (or a doctor cure) than it is to craft herbal remedies.

[The Inept European]

The simplest way for a mod to fix the herbals is just make them cheaper so they are cost effective. Probably should be about 1/20th the cost of antibiotics to be cost effective.

Another simple fix would be to make all herbals equally effective against all diseases. That would bring the cost effective price up to maybe 1/5th of antibotics, still lower than where they are now. That mod could possibly be done with just a keyword fix - I would have to check. If it requires altering the Survival scripts that's a no go for me, as I only bother making mods that will work on consoles.

You could also (alternatively) fix the recipes. If the herbals are going to remain specific to diseases, then allow a wider variety of recipes - basically let you make pretty much any herbal with any of the set of ingredients.

Without any such mods, the best use of herbals is to sell them. IF you have no antibiotics and no doctor access, IF you just had a risk exposure, IF you are in a vulnerable situation like combat or wilderness exploration where you don't want a disease, it might be worth tossing back one of every herbal you have with you just before you sleep. But even then it's not worth the carry weight to bring herbals with you. Better just to sell them (and their ingredients) and save the money for doctor bills or antibiotics.

[The Inept European]

Another problem with the herbals is they reinforce the common but totally false idea that specific behaviours or situations predict specific diseases. This is totally false, and I don't think the Survival game system ever even tried to go in that direction. It's all about a risk pool that then triggers a totally random disease. Literally the only thing in the whole game system that is disease-specific is the herbal remedies.

[The Inept European]

Going back to the wild foods - it's pretty clear the original design intent was simple - no wild foods would be edible as food, they would have 'chem' and ingredient uses only. Normal foods would have 'chem' usefulness, but only if the character was fully fed.

Somehow this got broken, either by junior devs who did not understand the (very badly named) keywords involved, or possibly as a reaction to playtesters whining that Survival was too hard. If it is the latter, a buff, they still messed up the coding of the buff, badly.

A simple solution and one that is taken by some mods is just to make all plants edible. That is not a bad solution. My mod to make wild plants inedible (and Razorgrain edible, which it is not in vanilla Survival) got stuck in the UFO4P queue for years, for the valid reason that some Survival players have become so dependent on eating wild plants that they would consider it an introduced bug if UFO4P fixed the actual bug. So in a way the most acceptable route to getting consistent behaviour (rather than the current inconsistent behaviour) is just to make all wild plants act as food.

[The Inept European]

On your other question I agree with your logic and agree option 2 is the better "general purpose" outfit

[bacca400-stm]

I believe all wild food contains radiation so I don't normally use it, but I also believe I grabbed some wild razorgrain once, along with wild corn and wild mutfruit. And I don't think you can cook just the wild plants but maybe you can use them in a recipe with something else?

[The Inept European]

Originally posted by bacca400-stm:

I believe all wild food contains radiation so I don't normally use it, but I also believe I grabbed some wild razorgrain once, along with wild corn and wild mutfruit. And I don't think you can cook just the wild plants but maybe you can use them in a recipe with something else?

None of the wild plants can be used in food recipes, only for crafting other stuff.

Yes all wild food has rads - all growing plants and animals in fact (apart from prewar types), at least until you cook it. Razorgrain is only worth growing in small amounts in Survival because you can cook it into Noodle Cup which has no rads, but only if you have spare dirty water which is the limiting factor.

Some recipe mods let you use wild variants instead of domesticated and vice versa, and purified water for dirty water (since, stupidly, purified water is vastly more abundant than dirty water).

What the Survival game really lacks IMO is a way to make rad-free disease-free food from cooking just domesticated crops (maybe in combination), rather than needing to add meat, which van only be hunted. Vegetable soup is the only option and that also iirc requires dirty water, which is scarce.