Honest Hearts Workbench Crate Luck

Honest Hearts Workbench Crate Luck

This mod forces the Honest Hearts workbench crates to obey the player character's Luck.

v1. 1: The crate which has a small chance of holding the only bottle of Nuka-Cola Quantum in the game will now also obey the player character's Luck.  (Lonesome Road is required.)

Do you recall how Luck plays a very tangible mechanical factor in winning at casinos?  Did you ever wonder why this didn't work with the far more important workbench crates?  This is the mod which finally fixes that.

Some background: Every major New Vegas DLC offers at least a dozen extra skill books.  Honest Hearts is no exception -- it offers a whopping sixteen.  But for whatever reason, it was decided that all 16 books would be subject to a random number generator, rather than being a guaranteed reward for owning the DLC.  The books are hidden in four "storage crates" that are found throughout Zion Valley, but they will only appear if the random number generator says they will; the storage crates generate random loot, and the skill books are a very small part of that random loot pool.

The Wiki calculates that you have a less than 10% chance of seeing a single book from any given crate, let alone the four that have a chance to appear each time a crate is opened for the first time.  This means that the most likely outcome from the entire DLC is that you won't see a single book.  Meanwhile, if you visit a casino with high Luck, you will consistently beat the odds at every game.

This is so patently unfair that the traditional approach of many players is to "save scum" -- reload saves over and over -- until they get at least one or two books from each crate.  This can be accomplished by reloading just outside the locations where the crates appear.  It is a tedious process, not to mention immersion-breaking, and players traditionally stop trying after getting just two books from a crate, due to the extreme unlikelihood of seeing more than that.

Here are the odds, as quoted from the Wiki:

• []84. 64%: No skill books.

  []9. 79%: One skill book.

  []7. 92%: Two skill books.

  []0. 16%: Four skill books.

  As you can see, the appearance of even a single skill book requires some uncommon Luck (if we're talking about a guaranteed roll). <