Firstly, does the game internally keep track of the spawn rate of weapons/attachments at all? The reason I ask is that with around 400hrs on a new character and with the game essentially 100% completed there are still some items that have never spawned while others have spawned excessively. It’d be good to get an idea of actual in-game spawn rates for a balance review.
In my case, these items have never spawned:
4C AG5 Extended Mag
5C Machine Gun Compensator
5C Moller Extended Mag
The Full-Mode Vision Modules didn’t appear until I was over lvl 70 or something.
I have all weapon DLCs and I’ve noticed that those items spawn vastly more than the base game’s ever do. This isn’t my primary character/world, but in this playthrough I’ve destroyed approx. 1000 Tanks and 500 Harvesters and often get the same DLC items. I encountered the same issues on my original playthrough as well.
Save the game manually. Turn off all weapon DLCs. A lot of the attachment maybe found on other things besides tanks and harvesters. Just turning off the DLCs will greatly increase the spawn rate of base game stuff.
P.S. Just checked it out and found that it removes all DLC weapons/attachments from all inventories in the world - even on other characters that aren’t in play (i.e. mule characters). After re-enabling the DLCs they all reappear in the Plundra, however all augmentations are lost. It seems that hasn’t been accounted for in the game’s coding. Good thing I backed-up my saves.
True, but other than maybe getting lucky from a weapon crate or large ammo crate, it seems the items I’m missing only appear on these units:
You can increase the number of dice rolls you get the more machines you check in the same battles that the heavy weights are in. There are areas on the map these machines are known to be at, visit those areas often.
That’s been the plan so far, for sure. I’ve been jumping around from one location to the next for a while, but the disabling of the DLCs has certainly helped isolate the drops. I just had to brunt the cost of losing the augs for the time being (especially on my beautiful PM-71).
Sad part is you can’t load your save file back for the lost mods because you also lose what you have gained now.
It would be nice if the mods could be removed and then recycled back to the same resources used to craft them… but that is not the Gen Z way.
You also lose all of the exp weapons/attachments that are not level 3 that you might have found when you disable the DLCs. No matter which way you go, it is more grinding, main point of playing the game.
Another idea is to check out the containers that you find during a ‘hard’ Base Assault. You can find 4C attachmants in them quite frequently, but you also can find even 5C attachments. And check every nook and cranny up North, esp. in the Marshlands. The Command Bunker can be a gold mine.
Full Vision Modules seem to be loot of Military Machines or higher. I just recently found one in a Military Hunter, but I am pretty sure that even Seekers can drop them.
I am also pretty sure that there is no need to deactivate the DLCs. DLC-weapons seem to drop in addtion to the base game loot. I already had a Tank dropping a 5C-Vanilla weapon and one or even two 4/5C DLC-weapons additionally, but this is extremely rare. DLC-weapons just seem to have a higher drop-chance (probably because people otherwise would complain about spending money on them and then not being able to find them). And you really don’t want to hear the story of my first 5C Sjöquist …
Not all rivals drop both a DLC and a base game weapon/attachment at the same time, most are one or the other, same goes for ammo. No DLCs, you get almost 100% drop of a base game weapon/attachment off machine that drop them.
Here is a hint for beginners, learn where you find a type of ammo and off of what. Then repeat the where for the what after an area reset. May not be in the same loot boxes, same machines, but the loot will be the same type and the same amounts. For some, finding 7.62 or 5.56 ammo is very rare, for most they hunt where they know they can find it and off what and is very common.
Apply that to searching for weapons and attachments too.
This seems to work on PC anyway and may sound odd.
There is a trick but I don’t know if it only works on guns or if it will work on magazines and other things too?
You need someone in co-op who lends you the weapon you never found. Then you return it. After that you will soon find the weapon yourself.
We don’t know why but it has worked for us for several years, for example I can’t find a certain 5C rifle and my friend a 5C LMG but we find all lower versions of it, so we borrow and after that it rarely takes more than an hour or two before you find your first. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This after we gave up on the natural way after many many hours of searching to get one ourselves and wanted to try the missing weapon.
Don’t know how many hours per my 4 characters but I’m very close to 2k in total now, like this week or next close, and we’ve done this more than a couple of times successfully.
I’ll try it with a friend. If I remember correctly, he is still missing some weapons. I am already over 2k hours and found every weapon and attachment ‘the natural way’, but I just recently found yet another Police Uniform (black/brown) and I am still wondering if there are also Police Uniform pants (never found any). The game just likes to surprise us …
Anyway, you certainly don’t need to destroy Rivals to find DLC-Weapons. Even regular Hunters will drop some of them. And for ammo it seems to help to carry the according weapon in your inventory. I was for some time carrying a KVM 89 with an AG5 and barely found 7,62 ammo, but lots of 5,56 mm. Then I grabbed my AG4 and suddenly I was finding significantly more 7,62 ammo than before (which would make sense mechanics-wise).
But in the end everything seems to be pure RNG. Two weeks ago, the game gave me one 5C PVG-magazine every second day. For the Experimental Sledgehammer, I had to kill something like 20 Reapers. The Experimental Meusser dropped with my first Vulture ever. Sometimes even a simple FNIX Tank will drop three weapons, but most of the time they will drop ammo and junk. And I actually like it that way.
with the getting all police outfits, what I did was long ago, made a Rival Apocalypse Harvester, not destroying the Harvester, and just let him teleport Apocalypse Hunters down, destroy, calling more hunters, rinsing repeat, fast travel away, back, again, teleports more, destroy, etc, etc, etc
Yeah, that’s absolutely the best way to farm all of the uniforms and Resistance apparel. I was just really surprised to find yet another variant of it, because the game did not drop anything new for a really long time. And now I am wondering if there is also a firefighter uniform …
getting Apocalypse Machines are hard to come by on the Main Island, , Himfall Island has them but don’t give out Police Clothes, it’s another clothing item
Everything is RNG but is limited to what items you can collect where. You can’t expect to down a rival tank in the same area and collect all the exp weapons off of it. But you can go to areas known to have LMGs/SMGs and so on and have very high chances of collecting LMGs and SMGs in those areas. And it is repeatable. Depends on the number of items in the RNG pool of the area you are hunting in.
Those that have been playing before you could craft ammo, had to know where to go to collect ammo to keep using their weapons of choice. Those high ammo yield areas haven’t changed. Put two and two together and you can find the weapons that use that ammo. And just like different areas increase with different class machines, so do the weapon class.
EDIT: To get the best loot from an area, let it completely reset, loot boxes near a safe house can be looted again, is a clue it has reset.
FIY I did eventually get each of those missing items. At this point I’m unsure whether or not it was because I disabled the weapon DLCs or because it was becoming statistically unlikely NOT to drop the items after such a long time of grinding.
I noticed that the drop rate of weapons/attachments in the base game (with DLCs disabled) was quite low, approximately the same as with weapon DLCs enabled. With them enabled, machines frequently drop multiple weapons/attachments from various DLCs (sometimes upward of 4-6!), which might indicate that each DLC has its own dice roll on top of the base game items. Unless a dev chimes in to confirm, that’s my best guess at least.
In the end I grinded from a variety of sources:
Target machines classes from their respective spawn locations (Harvesters and Tanks - FNIX and Apoc - primarily Himfjall Island and hard base defence missions)
Target rival machine classes (Harvesters and Tanks, LVL4 primarily)
Daily and weekly challenge rewards
The weekly mission rewards
Base assault hatches (LVL3 primarily)
Large green ammo crates, large orange utility crates, small utility boxes (look like ammo boxes with different logo) and tool boxes from high value regions (Marshlands, North Coast and Himfjall Island)
There might be other avenues, but I think that covers the bulk of it. Would still be good to have some kind of in-game tally, though, for balancing and whatnot.
Yeah, it took until my 9th or 10th Reaper to get the Exp. Sledgehammer, yet the Vulture dropped the Exp. Meusser in all but 1 out of 10 times! Go figure.
My theory is that where you hunt will produce different weapons, attachments and ammo. As you buy weapon DLCs it adds to locations where those new weapons can be found. Example of this is before the first US weapon pack, you would not find any pistols around the air base, after the US weapon pack, it is very common to find level 5 N9 in the area off hunters and it is not rival hunters.
Everyone that plays should know in just a few hours that hunters have steel and runners have lead. But the location of these two machines will produce distinct types of ammo also, as well as other loot. Just like a lot of players know where to get first aid kits and what level machines will have what level of kits. Does everyone know where to get SMG and LMG (EDIT) AMMO off of hunters and runners? Try hunting those same areas for the SMG and LMG weapons and attachments.
Not every machine of the same type in an area will have the same loot but the type of loot they RNG is limited to the area. Also, the type of ammo a machine has will determine what type of attachments and weapons are in the area as well as the level.
It may take a number of visits to the same area to prove this theory but for me, it has been repeatable more than once. And only after an area has reset completely.
I’ll try it with a friend. If I remember correctly, he is still missing some weapons. I am already over 2k hours and found every weapon and attachment ‘the natural way’, but I just recently found yet another Police Uniform (black/brown) and I am still wondering if there are also Police Uniform pants (never found any). The game just likes to surprise us …
, Himfall Island has them but don’t give out Police Clothes, it’s another clothing item