How to Make Ammo Less Rare in LitR

This is the first in a series of articles giving subscibers a peek under the hood, and helping them to modify their LitR installation. As per rule 11 of both the wabbajack and LitR discord servers, modding LitR isn't officially supported, nor does being a Patreon Supporter grant you any benefits in support (as per Wabbajack's Terms of Service), however this series of articles is designed to give you the knowledge to safely tweak a few things that I've seen as common requests.

Weapons in LitR deal a lot more damage than Vanilla. This is part of the core balance of the list. Yes, some enemies are still very spongy, but the average raider goes down with a single headshot. The catch with doing this though, is that if you remove bullet sponges, you then have to deal with excess bullets, because otherwise you end up giving the player a TON of free resources and break the game economy faster (because all that excess ammo can be used as currency). On top of this, LitR uses ammo scarcity as a mechanism to encourage the player to swap weapons. In vanilla FO4, you can grab a single primary weapon and use it the entire game. Restricted ammo forces the player to make choices, do you use your best weapon for a mission, or do you go with something else? Which ammo should you bring? This is WHY ammo in LitR is scarce.

With all that being said, if you still want to tweak it Ammo Rarity in LitR is controlled primarily by 2 mods. Lunar fallout overhaul is the primary one mod that controls ammo rarity, it does so in it's changes to ammo levelled lists. On top of that Lunar Fallout Arsenal adds a couple of additional tweaks, making more generous ammo drops level gated, as well as adding a few new ammo types. Lunar Fallout Overhaul does have a Softcore patch available on it's nexus page, and while this will increase the ammo quantity, it will also conflict with Arsenal, and require a conflict resolution patch. It will also not take into account the added ammo types from Arsenal, which you will need to manually tweak.

The second primary mod that touches ammo rarity (and the one that's WAY easier to modify), is Remove Ammo from Dropped Guns, https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/64426. Normally in vanilla when you pick up a dropped gun, you get whatever ammo was left in the clip. This is kinda of a hidden ammo source, because most players don't go around picking up every single gun that is dropped. You can either disable this mod (which will mean that you won't get any extra ammo unless you go around picking up every gun), or you can install the main file (the modlist uses the True Ammo Remover optional by default), which will move the ammo drops from the gun into the NPC so you will see them in the NPCs loot. If you do this, you need to make sure that you pick a version with F4SE 0.6.23 (Fallout 4 runtime 1.10.163)- I recommend 1.05, but you can probably check the changelog for differences between the versions if you're curious.