Sandbox Restored

Sandbox Restored — Weapon & Combat Rebalance for Halo: Campaign Evolved

Retunes Campaign Evolved's weapon sandbox toward how these weapons actually played in Halo 3, Reach, and Infinite — and repairs a number of values that appear to have shipped wrong.

Every change is data-only. No executables are modified, no files are replaced. The mod is a single patch container that overrides tag values; deleting three files restores the game exactly.

New in v1. 2

• []Rebuilt for the CU4 game update — tag layouts shifted, so the mod is re-derived against them.[/]

  []Enemies now hit at full stock strength. The previous 30% enemy-damage reduction has been removed: playtesting favoured full lethality, and it keeps your allied Marines fighting at full strength too. Individually overtuned hits (the Hunter's fuel rod) are still corrected.[/]

  []Needle Rifle damage type corrected from bullet to needle, matching the Needler.[/]

  []Two downloads now: the full mod, and a standalone camo-only package for players who want just the active-camouflage fix. (The old standard/light/vanilla lethality variants are gone — they only differed by the damage reduction that's now removed.)[/]

  Why this exists

  Campaign Evolved ships the original Blam tag data, and a lot of it is either flat, unfinished, or inconsistent with how the same weapon behaved in every prior Halo. The Assault Rifle deals identical damage at 2 metres and 120. The Hunter's fuel rod does more damage in one hit than the player has health. Brutes are tougher than their own Chieftains.

  This mod fixes those, and tunes the rest of the sandbox to match series precedent.

  What changes

  Precision & automatic weapons

  • []Assault Rifle: Three fixes, all anchored to Reach's MA37 — the same 32-round rifle. Damage falloff added: 9. 5 up close decaying to 5. 834, Reach's exact figure, across the game's own 0–40wu band. Bloom recovery 0. 24s → 0. 50s — the AR's spread reset more than twice as fast as Reach's, so bursts always restarted from its 0. 30° floor, the lowest in the game, and it stayed pinpoint at any range. Rate of fire 12 → 10 rounds/sec, also Reach's figure.[/]

    []Battle Rifle: Damage falloff added (12 → 7). Shipped flat.[/]

    []SMG: Falloff added (11 → 4. 5). Bloom corrected — it shipped 5× worse than the AR's.[/]

    []Magnum: 23 → 32. Restores the pistol as a genuine mid-range option.[/]

    []DMR / Sniper: Left alone — flat damage is correct for these.[/]

    []Shotgun: Damage and range bands retuned; it took 4–6 shots to drop a Brute.[/]

    []Spike Rifle: Bloom set to Reach's 1. 0°–2. 0°. It shipped unusually tight for a Brute weapon.[/]

    []Plasma Rifle (Elite): Bloom was 0. 5°–1. 25°; its entire spread range sat below where Reach's even begins (1. 3°–3. 5°). Restored to Reach's values, so it is no longer the most accurate automatic in the game.[/]

    []Plasma Rifle (Brute): The red-bolt variant already shipped as a distinct weapon — faster, hotter, harder hitting, shorter ranged and less accurate than the Elite's. Widening the Elite's spread left the Brute's tighter by comparison, which inverted that. Its bloom goes to 1. 5°–4. 0° (still wider than the Elite's, as intended), rate of fire 10–12 → 11–14, and heat per round 0. 13 → 0. 16 so it overheats sooner. Halo 2 and 3 precedent, not a Reach value — Reach has no Brute plasma rifle.[/]

    Needler family

    • []Needler: supercombine at 7 shards; shard velocity raised.[/]

      []Needle Rifle: Bloom recovery 0. 6s → 0. 9s, Reach's value — same issue as the Assault Rifle, smaller margin. Shard damage 18 → 10: it shipped dealing three times Reach's per-shard damage while keeping the same 3-shard supercombine, so it chipped like a DMR and supercombined like a Needle Rifle. Shards are chip damage again; the supercombine is the payoff. The 3-shard threshold is stock and unchanged — that is the series-correct value. Damage type also corrected from bullet to needle, matching the Needler.[/]

      Heavy weapons & explosives

      []Rocket, Fuel Rod, Grenade Launcher, Spartan Laser, Scorpion, Gauss, Concussion Rifle: projectile velocities raised toward Infinite-era feel; blast radii, edge damage, and knockback brought in line with each other.[/]

      []Frag grenade: radius and edge damage corrected.[/]

      []Gravity Hammer: had a 0.. 0 blast radius and orphaned effect tags — repaired.[/]

      []Several explosives shipped with zero edge damage, making near-misses do literally nothing. Given proper falloff floors.[/]