Harder Gear Looting

Introduction

In vanilla there seem to be two mechanics aimed at restricting the player's ability to acquire gear from enemies - biocoding and the death acidifier. Both of these fall short:

• Biocoding is only applied to weapons on raids and not even that frequently.
• The death acidifier is only triggered on death, so there is nothing stopping you from stripping downed pawns with an acidifier. Given that a psychic shock lance has market value 550 silver, has two charges, and is guaranteed to down the target, you can get a Marine Armor set at the cost of about 275 silver.

This mod aims to address these issues by making biocoding much more prevalent and buffing the Death Acidifier mechanic.

Details

First off, the mod adds 2 new items: “A Biocode Reformatter?” I hear you say. “I thought this mod was supposed to make getting gear harder, not easier.” Well, I've added it because I'm a good soul and I want you to still have the possibility of getting high end gear from enemies. You'll need the reformatter because the mod introduces these additional changes:

• By default, all spacer tech and up weapons and armors on generated pawns are biocoded 100% of the time. The mod options allow you to lower the percentage, add the same biocoding mechanic to industrial weapons, and exclude specific factions from this.
• By default, all Empire and Ancients (and Deserters if you have VFE: Deserters) pawns come with an Acidifier implant. This implant can be removed with a surgical operation, which is very difficult to perform. It has a high chance of killing the patient and destroying their gear in the process. If successful, it still has a high chance of killing the patient, but allows stripping them before the Acidifier activates. The mod options allow you to modify the difficulty of the operation and control which factions get Acidifiers.

All this combined means that, as opposed to vanilla, where to get the power armor of a pawn, you have to:

1. Down them without killing them
2. Strip them

With this mod, you have to:

1. Down them without killing them
2. Capture them
3. Successfully operate to either remove the acidifier so you can strip them or at least strip them during the operation, killing them in the process
4. Acquire and use a Biocode Reformatter

Settings

Biocoding Here you can toggle the whole biocoding mechanic, toggle specific factions, and adjust the chances of biocoding industrial weapons, spacer weapons and spacer armor. Acidifier Here you can toggle the whole mechanic off, toggle specific factions, and adjust the difficulty of the "remove acidifier" operation and add a death on down chance for pawns with an Acidifier. Any factions added by mods will appear in the settings. By default biocoding will be enabled and the Acidifier disabled. Bear in mind that all of these are on top of the vanilla mechanics. For example, with the default industrial weapon biocoding chance set to 0%, you'll still see biocoded industrial weapons as per the vanilla chances. If you disable the Acidifier for the Empire, the Empire pawns will still have the vanilla Death Acidifier.

Compatibility

This mod works by patching a postfix to the PawnGenerator.GeneratePawn method to apply biocoding and add the acidifier, so it should be fairly compatible. The factions are loaded dynamically, so it should work with modded factions. I've tested it in isolation, with the Vanilla Expanded Factions mods and with Combat Extended. If you encounter any incompatibilities and bugs, please let me know! It's my first mod, so don't be surprised either.