I've been mucking around in GECK, mostly because I can't find a grenade/mine mod that does a good improvement to the basic grenades and mines without adding anything. (Grenade Realism comes close, but not quite.) I want something more dangerous then the defaults, especially frag mines which are still too weak in the Grenade Realism mod.

So, design notes. You'll need GECK (Garden of Eden Creation Kit) installed. Fire it up, then choose "File, Data" and pick *only* the Fallout3.esm file (ESM - as in master, not ESP - as in plug-in).

All of the grenades and mines in the basic game are in the "Object Window", under "Items / Weapon / Weapons", look for "1handGrenadeThrow" and "1handMineDrop". They key attributes are in the right-hand side of that list (or you can right-click and edit the record to get more options):

Object Effect (empty or EMP for EMP weapons)
Attack Damage (DATA - Base Damage)
Min. Spread (DNAM)
Spread (DNAM)
Limb Dmg Mult (DNAM)
Critical Damage (CRDT)
Crit % Mult (CRDT)
Base VATS to-Hit Chance
Action Points

Here are the default Fallout3.esm values for grenades and mines under "Items / Weapon / Weapons":

Weapon	Effect	Dmg	Min Sp	Spread	Limb D	Crit	%Mult	VATS	Act Pts
Frag Grenade		1	0.00	5.00	1.00	0	1.00	50	24
Nuka-Grenade		1	0.00	5.00	1.00	0	1.00	50	24
Plasma Grenade		1	1.00	2.00	1.00	0	1.00	50	24
Pulse Grenade	EMP	1	1.00	2.00	1.00	0	1.00	50	24
Frag Mine		1	1.00	1.00	1.00	0	1.00	5	35
Bottlecap Mine		1	1.00	1.00	1.00	0	1.00	5	35
Plasma Mine		1	1.00	1.00	1.00	0	1.00	5	35
Pulse Mine	EMP	1	1.00	1.00	1.00	0	1.00	5	35

For other variables, you have to dig into the "Game Settings" (Gameplay, Settings menu). In this dialog, you will find a bunch of variables that can be changed. See Mine Settings and Grenade Settings at the GECK wiki.

fMinesBlinkFast (0.10)

fMinesBlinkSlow (0.25)

fMinesBlinkMax (2.00)

fMinesDelayMin (0.20) - Minimum delay in seconds, before a mine which has detected an actor will detonate.

fMineExteriorRadiusMult (1.60) - How close actors need to be to active mines in order for them to detonate, this is a multiplier. The "normal" range is based on the "Proximity" value for the mine in projectile form. See "Special Effects / Projectile" objects for information about the proximity value.

fCombatGrenadeBounceTimeMin (0.50) - My guess is that grenades will bounce around for a minimum of 0.5 seconds.

fCombatGrenadeBounceTimeMax (5.00) - Max bounce time for grenades?

fGrenadeFriction (5.00) - How sticky grenades are to the terrain.

The baby carriage traps basically are identical to Frag Mines in scripting. Look for "TrapBabyCarriage" under "World Objects / Activator / Traps" and check out "Edit Destruction Data". There you will see that it calls "MineFragExplosion" (under "Special Effects / Explosion") in order to do its dirty work.

Summary so far:

- "Items / Weapon / Weapons" controls things like base damage, crit % multipler, VATS points.

- "Special Effects / Projectile" is where mine proximity is set and there's also a timer variable there.

- "Special Effects / Explosion" has variables like force, damage, radius and "IS" radius. It can also create a radiation source that dissipates. Actor knock-down can also be set here to always, by formula, or never.

- There are also a handful of variables in the "Game / Settings" menu.

Goals:

- The baby carriage should be more powerful then it is now.

- Mines should be deadly, with a bigger area of effect.

- Grenades should be less powerful then mines, but more deadly then they are in vanilla.

Adjusting Baby Carriage Traps:

So, let's start playing. First off, since the baby carriage model has (3) frag mines inside it, we should setup a second "MineFragExplosion" special effect in order to give a much bigger bang. We'll reload the "Fallout3.esm" file in order to make sure that we don't have any pending edits yet. To create a new explosion special effect, we go into "Special Effects / Explosion", right-click on "MineFragExplosion" and choose "Edit".

We'll call our new SFX "MineFragExplosionBaby"; along with a name of "Frag Explosion 2X". To start, we'll leave the force at 185, but increase the damage to 180 and increase the radius to 256. Click "OK" to save and say "Yes" when it asks whether you want to create a new form (ID). That will create a copy of the object rather then replacing the existing one, if we had left the "ID" field alone then we would have ended up replacing the existing object.

Now we'll go change the destruction data for the baby carriage trap. In the "Object Window" go to "World Objects / Activator / Traps" and right-click the "TrapBabyCarriage" object and choose "Edit". Click on "Edit Destruction Data", choose the "Health %" line with "15" and edit that line. Change the "Explosion" attribute from "MineFragExplosion" to "MineFragExplosionBaby". Click OK on all three open dialogs until you get back to the list of objects. You will see that there is a "*" in the "Count" column.

Click the "Save" button and give the plug-in a name. I'm going to call mine "DeadlierExplosiveTraps". GECK will automatically add it to the load list. But if you use FOMM, you'll need to enable it before launching Fallout.



Now for some testing. By default, the baby carriage only does 29 points of damage to a character with about 25 DR at point-blank range. Which is extremely weak. The default settings for "MineFragExplosion" is Force (185.00), Damage (100.00), Radius (192.00) and IS Radius (768.00).

With the damage increased to 180.00 and the radius at 256.00, we see damage numbers of around 113 at point blank to 78-87 at max disarm range. I also started seeing crippling injuries to the head/arm. The head always got crippled but the arm only got hit once.

So let's go big on the numbers with 300.00 damage and a 384.00 radius and we'll bump the IS radius up to 1024.00. That ends up doing about 200 damage at max disarm range and always cripples both arms.

If we take the radius up to a full 512.00, but leave damage at 300.00, we end up with something closer to what I want. But it's not quite there yet. So let's bump the damage up to a full 500. That is extremely deadly at close range, but only does about 200 damage with 25DR if you are half a dozen meters away.

Some comparison numbers from other explosion SFX:

- BusNukeExplosion, Force 120.00, Damage 200.00, Radius 1200.00, IS Radius 5632.00
- FatManNukeExplosion, Force 550.00, Damage 1600.00, Radius 800.00, IS Radius 4290.00
- FusionCarBatteryExplosion, Force 450.00, Damage 50.00 Radius 594.00, IS Radius 2420.00

For the final settings, I'm going with Force 185, Damage 600, Radius 800 and IS Radius of 1200. If you manage to trip a baby carriage, and immediately turn and crouch-walk away from it, you can just get out of its blast radius by the time it goes off. But if you stand there and gawk, you're going to take a lot of damage.

Adjusting Frag Mines:

Given the above settings, we can take a swing at adjusting frag mines as well. The basic frag mine explosion FX (MineFragExplosion) is Force 185, Damage 100, Radius 192 and IS Radius 768. Preliminary numbers to make it hurt will be Damage 400 and Radius 600, with the IS Radius bumped up to 1024.

In addition, we're also changing values in WeapMineFrag. We'll set critical damage to 50 and the Crit % Mult to 3.00 (3x), along with 3x increased limb damage.

What this means in the real world is that you had better stand up and run away from a frag mine, not just crouch-walk away from it if you trigger it. If you run, you can barely get out of the blast range and will take a tiny amount of damage.

Frag Grenades and Nuka-Grenades:

The default for a frag grenade (GrenadeFragExplosion) is Force 185, Damage 100, Radius 450 and IS Radius of 770. For the Nuka-grenade; Force 6, Damage 500, Radius 450, IS Radius 768.

Frag grenades are currently pretty weak, but with decent radius. So bumping them up to 200 damage is a good first step.

We're also going to make some adjustments so that grenades explode on impact if thrown. That gets changed in "Items / Weapon / Weapons". Change "No Dismember/Explode" for the "On Hit" attribute to "Explode".

References:

Deadly Mines (2008) - Affected only frag mines and frag grenades.

Grenade Realism (2010) - Changes frag grenades frag mines and bottlecap mines. This is the mod that got me started on this project.

Explosives- dont play with them (2009) - Makes too many changes for my tastes, such as making the mine fuses shorter.

Deadlier Explosive Traps - The released version of my mod.