Regarding the Extra Meat Bug

[cnote261]

I encountered the bug that prevents extra meat from appearing on appropriate animal kills (e.g. dogs, radstags, mirelurks, etc.). Unable to find an explanation anywhere, I was concerned that my survival playthrough would be somewhat .. troublesome. I had never encountered this bug before so I supposed that something I had done recently caused the issue. Fortunately, an old post about the mechanics of the perk, and its non-performance, suggested the cause.

Apparently there is a variable that controls the appearance of extra meat on a kill, and its normal, un-perked value is 100; which is then set to 0 when the perk is acquired. Furthermore, the value of that variable is set to -100 on bugged saves. This suggests that, somehow, the perk is adjusted twice on a bugged save. Considering this information and my recent actions before I stopped receiving double meat, I believe the source of the problem is reading the Wasteland Survival #9 perk magazine after storing it in a magazine rack. Some light testing revealed that the bug is consistent and repeatable, and is not caused by reading the magazine from inventory or simply placing the magazine in a magazine rack.

As this game is unlikely to receive bug fixes, I am posting here to increase community awareness of an irritating bug and a simple method to avoid being inconvenienced. I am unaware of any actual solution to this bug on a survival playthrough without enabling the console, and no further testing was performed to see if other perk magazines were similarly affected.

Happy gaming.