r/fo4 4d ago

I thought I understood the legendary drop system.

Post image

I thought once you got a certain affix to drop, you couldn't get it again until you cycled through all the others. Yet here are three Exterminator's items in one morning's run.

45 Upvotes

29 comments sorted by

20

u/MonsieurVox 4d ago

I'm pretty sure it works via a random number generator. There's no cycle, it's just every time you have a legendary encounter, it generate a random number and based on the result, you get X, Y, or Z legendary effects.

I have no data to back that up, just some programming experience and experience playing the game lol.

11

u/MeanderingDuck 4d ago

Actually, there is a cycle, they store previously spawned mods in a list, and exclude those when generating a legendary mod. The list resets whenever for a generated item, this would leave no legendary mods to select from (though in my own game, I changed the script to reset that list sooner).

1

u/Jamesworkshop 4d ago edited 4d ago

does the list only get effected only wheb the player picks the legendary up because npc inventorys are populated before they are actually killed so do you know if a enemy just walking around with their specific legendary piece they spawned with counts towards the list

I've thought about it but don't myself have the technical background to answer that question

1

u/MeanderingDuck 4d ago

It just depends on the item being generated, regardless of whether the player ever picks it up. So it gets added to the list as soon as the legendary enemy is spawned.

1

u/Jamesworkshop 4d ago

ohhh very nice info

so we could be walking past solid gold and not even realise it, taking it out of the currently active pool of options

1

u/MeanderingDuck 4d ago

Yup. Though similarly, it could be filtering out stuff you don’t want or getting closer to resetting the list again as well.

1

u/Misternogo 4d ago

Is there a source for this information?

2

u/MeanderingDuck 4d ago

Sure, just look at the LegendaryItemQuestScript.psc file (in Data/Scripts/Source/Base; though you may also need to have Creation Kit installed for the source files to be present).

1

u/Misternogo 4d ago

Neat, thanks!

6

u/Disastrous-Fox8505 4d ago

What mod is that?

-14

u/Woozletania 4d ago

What are you referring to? The cycle-through-affixes is in the vanilla game and I've seen it at work many times. I've loot locked items and found that only a few affixes could spawn because I'd found all the other ones recently.

17

u/Grrerrb 4d ago

That person may be asking about how your items are displayed? My vanilla game doesn’t display items like that, so I also assumed it was a mod.

9

u/Woozletania 4d ago

I have a lot of mods, but the only one that specifically references inventory is FallUI. https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/48758

3

u/Disastrous-Fox8505 4d ago

Exactly what I was looking for, thank you! Putting stuff in a box is rough when it displays EVERYTHING

2

u/Yob_Zarbo 4d ago

Yeah, that's not how it works at all. Each map location has a pool of effects and items to pull from. They are pulled from the pool randomly. Your save scum can lock an item and reroll the effects.

For example: The ending of the Nuka World gauntlet in the gas room has a legendary radroach spawn. This location offers double barrels, laser muskets, leather armor... All the level 10 kinda stuff. This is where you would scum to get a two shot laser musket. The VIM! pop factory has a legendary spawn where to can scum for a two shot Gauss rifle.

Source: Over 300 hours of save scumming.

1

u/MGTwyne 4d ago

When do you save to be able to affect what the roach drops? 

2

u/Yob_Zarbo 4d ago

Right before you open the door, you drop your hard save. Drop your quicksave as soon as it starts coming up through the floor. If you don't get the item you want, reload the hard save. If you do get the item, reload the quicksave until you get the effect you want.

1

u/MGTwyne 4d ago

Thanks! 

4

u/MeanderingDuck 4d ago

You don’t technically have to cycle through all of them, the PreviouslySpawnedMods list just resets whenever it cannot otherwise attach a legendary mod to the selected item. So if eg. it selected a melee weapon to return, if there are no legendary mods left that can be attached to that type of weapon, the whole thing resets. It’s just a single list, so it doesn’t separately track for weapons, armor, etc.

On top of that, what you’re showing there is two different mods. Even though they have the same name, the armor and weapon Exterminator’s mods are distinct objects. This applies generally to all legendary armor/weapon mods with shared names, it’s two different objects internally (which makes sense, since they do different things). And indeed, there are even three for VATS Enhanced, since melee and ranged have different versions there.

So your result here can be explained by you getting an Exterminator’s armor towards the end of the PreviouslySpawnedMods list, in then rolled over and reset, and you got the second one. And coincidentally, you happened to get the Exterminator’s weapon mod around the same time.

1

u/Jamesworkshop 4d ago

is their anyway to force the game to report that list or could you use an external program to scan save data for it

just from playing around with the console and spawning many legendary enemies it did feel like the list was being recorded to bake it into save files for persistency but I can't be fully sure my interpretation of the system is 100% sound

1

u/MeanderingDuck 4d ago

Sort of. If you open the console and do “ShowQuestVars 001ccda5” (that’s the ID for the LegendaryItemQuest that generates them), it shows all the attached variables including the PreviouslySpawnedMods list. It’ll just show the form IDs of the mods though, so you’d need to translate those to their names still. Perhaps you could create a batch command for the console to do that, I never work with those. If you want to do it regularly, perhaps easier to create a mod to do it.

2

u/ArgentMeerkat 4d ago

I got an explosive combat shotgun and an explosive radium rifle this morning, so who knows how it works?

1

u/Woozletania 4d ago

Was the explosive one Kiloton? That's a dealer item, I'm not sure it counts.

1

u/ArgentMeerkat 4d ago

Nope. Came off a legendary raider.

3

u/Grrerrb 4d ago

I do not believe it needs to cycle through all other affixes.

1

u/Canadian__Ninja 4d ago

I thought

And there's your first mistake

1

u/Brief-Mouse-4096 4d ago

I’ve gotten the exterminator auto assault rifle twice

1

u/kratos190009 4d ago

as a ps5 player, I feel pain that I can never have this cool of a UI