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[B41] Video Game Consoles - Insanely Rare

That would also allow me to get rid of the 'dummy' items that show up in Item Stories.

You might try 75% Less Loot or Goodie Remover , but not sure if they work.

I checked out More Loot Settings , and it kinda works with True Music ...

In the sandbox options, in the new Loot Rarity tab, it has a "specific items multipliers" text box. As a test, I wrote "Tsarcraft.TCBoombox:20;" and sure enough, I was finding 20 times more boomboxes.

Though, manually typing in each vinyl, cd and casette in a huge music pack would be crazy. Still, it technically works. I'll have to see how the mod author did it, and maybe I can make my own spawn rate / rarity adjustment mod, (for video games consoles, true music, etc.) for the upcoming Build 42.

Junateg is right.. a True Music variant of this would be really helpful.

Any chance to do the same with True Music Mod? to lower spawn rates of cassettes and vinyls?

Ah, yeah. I did want to do something similar: you can occasionally loot the 'Candy Package' item from a gas station, which turns into Lollipop and Mint Candy when you double click on it. I suppose would be a crafting recipe, then (and speaking of game rentals... I forgor... very good idea for 1993. that takes me way back).

Now if “Item Stories” accidentally spawns a dummy item in the world, it will appear as “Video game rental box” and the player can “open” it to receive a random game (and useless empty video game rental box).

Understandably this is still some effort for what will likely break when B42 is released and introduces changes to the crafting system. We’ll probably find out more today in the Thursdoid - but I would guess that B42 will be an unstable early beta with no multiplayer support, so B41 will be around for a bit longer.

It’s up to you if you think it’s worth the effort :)

(Sorry the comments are in reverse order - I kept hitting the character limit)

Rather than getting rid of the dummy items (I think it’s a perfectly good method for dealing with the wonky loot rarity system - in fact I use a similar idea for my mods), the fastest fix is this:

1. Rename the display names of the dummy items to “Video game rental box”, and have them all use the base game VHS model.

2. Create a second item called “Video game rental box (empty)”, which also uses the base game VHS model.

3. Add a crafting recipe “Open video game rental box” that can take as input “Dummy_Console/Dummy_HandheldConsole/Dummy_Game” (or whatever their actual item names are) and will return “Video game rental box (empty)”.

4.Using the “OnCreate” line in the crafting recipe, you specify a lua function that returns any random game cartridge

@itsmars

I didn’t do a good job explaining what I meant.

“Item Stories” takes whatever is in the loot table for an entire room and will roll chances to spawn that item on the floor/on furniture.

So the dummy items that are added to the loot tables will sometimes get spawned into the room by “Item Stories”

@Spenglerian

The Project Zomboid devs never intended for us to be playing with Insanely Rare loot (in fact, the 'insanely rare' sandbox setting was added in December 2022, 11 years since 'release').

Today, the numbers being used for loot rarity are WAY too small.
In fact, they're displayed in game using scientific notation (1e-5, instead of 0.00001%). Strangely, lowering spawn rates past this point makes them spawn more frequently. I found that if I made the loot 10x MORE common (jumping from 1e-5 to 0.0001) it lowered the spawn rates. crazy.

Then I used the 'dummy' item, which is 10x more common than before, to randomize 1 of 30 games. I don't remember why I did it this way, tbh.

The original Video Game Consoles mod is going to be rewritten when build 42 comes out (SOON™), making this patch obsolete.

I'll still check out the dino mod, and the item stories mod, though. thanks for the info, btw.

@itsmars Just to further elaborate on the behavior of Item Stories, basically it has a list of rooms and checks the loot tables for containers in that list of rooms. It will then randomly pick an item from those loot tables (determined by item loot rarity) and place it somewhere within the room/on furniture tiles.

since consoleDummy, handheldConsoleDummy, and gameDummy are all placed into loot tables, that means they have a small chance of spawning into the room via the spawning logic of Item Stories. Because this mod uses Events.OnFillContainer.Add(onFillContainer) to swap out the dummy items, it can't change items placed on the ground/outside of containers by Item Stories

I implemented a version of the fix described below in an unrelated item loot mod that adds collectible dinosaurs . It works well with Item Stories and helps avoid the need for admin intervention/console commands.