Head Hunter 0.4.1

Features:

• A rich story, delivered through a variety of quests
  
• Currently: 12 quests, encompassed by the story's first chapter
  
• Quest descriptions crafted in a narrative writing style
  
• A "Trophy" / "Spoils of War" based economy
  
• A variety of custom weapon presets
  
• Custom items (basically just one so far)
  
• A cast including existing EFT characters as well as original ones
  

This is a mod that I've been (slowly) working on since some time around SPT 3.8.1; Head Hunter is a trader that specializes in "Trophies" and "Spoils of War". From a game-play perspective, this means she buys and barters for dog tags, boss items, and other items that fall into the aforementioned archetype (like heirlooms, jewelry, some intel items, etc)(she also has a weakness for whiskey and cigarettes). She'll pay more than almost any other trader for these items, but she pays in USD and she is exceedingly discerning in what she will actually buy. I only specified a few categories of items she will buy and the rest are all individual items.

Head Hunters story is told in a narrative style; This is a departure from Tarkovs usual first person quest descriptions where the traders speak directly to the player character. This was an alteration I felt I needed to implement to tell the story I ultimately want to tell, especially when there is an expanding cast of characters, and Head Hunter will not always be present in the scene. However, the messages that are usually sent at the beginning and end of quests have not been altered stylistically, considering they're essentially diegetic messages sent directly to your character.

The story will explore the complexities of Head Hunters past, and her relationships with Tarkov and the lost souls that inhabit it. It probes the depths to which one is willing to bury their humanity to survive, and asks when surviving becomes thriving-is it too late to unearth what you smothered so deep beneath the earth?

Her stock will be sparse at first. The majority of her items are unlocked through quests and loyalty levels.

As of now Head Hunter has one custom weapon, the 6.5 Grendel AR, unlocked in her assort at the end of Chapter 1. There is also one custom quest item, see the disclaimer tab for a small note on that. More custom items and weapons are planned in the future, eventually with custom meshes and textures.

Please check out the other tabs for additional info, disclaimers, known issues, mod requirements, compatibilities, and recommendations, as well as a rough road map of future features I hope to realize.

This mod is in active development and remains in a beta state. It will likely contain errors, bugs, etc.

Just as a general rule, I recommend always backing up your profiles before installing, updating, or removing mods. Also, as a general rule, I recommend uninstalling a mod entirely before installing an updated version.

Known and Possible Issues:

1. Dog Tag Monotony: A central part of Head Hunters economy is trading for dog tags. When I started writing this mod there was really only a couple types of tags; Now there's basically 6+. When bartering for tags this can cause some oddities. I was having trouble getting her to accept specific tags, meanwhile other modders where having trouble getting their traders to barter just for all tags. Its finicky and I expect to encounter issues.
   
   
2. Ground Zero Identity Crisis: Ground Zero is now two maps. This means for quests that have zones on ground zero things can get a little schizophrenic. I doubled up the zones so they should work as intended, and they did in my testing, but a couple acquaintances of mine reported issues when there was *ahem* more than one client connected.
   
   
3. Custom Quest Item: I had no issues in my testing, but there is a new quest item that is distributed to you at the beginning of the quest "Translation Indemnification". There's no other way to acquire it as of right now. Theoretically if you were to experience a back end error or crash or something like that when its distributing, you could miss out on it leaving you unable to progress the quest and the rest of the story as a whole. If this does occur for folks I may have to alter it to be purchasable from Head Hunter or make it a standard info item instead of a quest item. Also, not a bug, but when its distributed, take note, it goes to your stash quest items and you need to move it to your in-raid quest items.
   
   
4. Not Buying Certain Items She Should: Especially with regard to boss armors; I continue to discover she won't buy certain armors because one of the ID's for a built in armor component isn't defined in her base file (even though I added the built in component parent ID, thanks BSG for the random exclusions). I've caught most of them, but if you find one that she should buy but wont, let me know. But BEFORE YOU DO make sure there's nothing IN or ATTACHED to the armor. She isn't interested in armor plates or accessories, the mags in the pouches etc. Only the part that's "unique".
   
   
5. Trader Stock Balancing: As of the initial release, Chapter 1, the story roughly aligns with LL1 and LL2; LL3 and LL4 are really not balanced at all yet. There are some really expensive weapon presets at LL4 in particular that for the sake of balance will be quest locked behind some late game quests, but as of now they're just unlocked via loyalty level. By downloading the mod now, in "early release" you forgo the right to bitch about high tier kit being too easily available from the trader. The only temporary measure I've taken is to make the transaction amount required for LL4 significantly higher than it otherwise would be (added a zero or two).
   
   
6. Trader Economy Balancing: For all loyalty levels including LL1 and LL2 balancing of barters is ongoing and a major reason I wanted to release in early access. Trading for tags, when accounting for amount, faction, and level, is not an exact science. In fact its proving to be more art than science, and I've started to go more on "feel" than the data, spread sheets, and equations I wasted hours on. I'm calling on the community to sort of aggregate what feels right. After all, some people are playing more casually and amass tons of tags, others more hardcore and only manage to snag them here and there. (but seriously, you should see the Charlie-Kelly-Mail-Room-Who's-Carol-like array of google docs and spread sheets i made up trying to produce a fool-proof dog tag value calculating equation)
   
   
7. My Writing: Its not great No really, I haven't written narrative fiction in like... 8 years?... Ergo there's going to be inevitable rewrites as I look back, hate how I wrote something, and go to change it. Its the process, and everything in the mod at launch is first or second draft. Plot structure is pretty much set, but my "prose" is going to be altered a few times, I'm sure.
   
   
8. Notice of Potential Future Betrayals: I made a point before releasing this to change the entire trade assort to MongoDB ID's. For you this means less chance of an update breaking your profile. I cannot say that I did the same for quest and zone ID's (yet). I may do this in the future, but unlike changing item ID's its not likely to break your profile. More than likely it may just reset your quest progress. I'll obviously make it known if I'm going to make this change.
   
   
9. Muzzle Shy: The muzzle device for the 6.5 Grendel AR doesn't show up in the preset editor or on the flea. If you have one you can attach it just fine, but I need to tweak it in the next update to have it actually appear on the flea and in the preset editor. A preset has been added to the handbook and flea, but the muzzle itself still doesn't show up in linked searches or individually on the flea.
   

Surefire Ways To Be Ignored:

1. "Ewww, AI art..." - Yeah, I'm broke and my talents lie elsewhere. Solution: Deal with it, or don't download the mod.
   
   
2. "Ewww, an anime adjacent art style" - See solution to point number 1. Obviously you can replace the trader image with another mod that supports that function, but you'd need to replace some of the quest images for continuity too, at that that point, well, seems like a lot of effort.
   
   
3. "Ewww, walls of text" - Learn to read you bumpkin, or don't and just ignore the story I bet you skip cut-scenes too.
   
   
4. "Ewww, why do a lot of your weapon presets have the light on the left??" - okay, how are you gonna manipulate the device without a pressure switch? Telekinesis?... Use your thumbs you ape. Okay, that's kind of a joke, but also just me being anal sometimes. Its inconsistent. Just move it to the other side. Also, get MoxoPixel's Tactical Gear Component, it has a surefire with a pressure switch so you can LARP more gooder.
   
   
5. Asking about something I already covered here. And if its because I wrote a lot; See point 3.

HARD REQUIREMENTS:

Virtual's Custom Quest Loader

Soft Requirements:

Kaeno Trader Scrolling

Recommended for Head Hunter:

Nooky's Swag + Donuts

An absolute godsend for those 'kill this many of this specific type of enemy' quests, of which Head Hunter has a few. Same goes for bosses with the SWAG configs. Beyond that, trading for dog tags means selecting a preset such as "More-PMCs" can pad your supply. Just be aware that SWAG + Donuts has its own dependencies.

Mpstark's Dynamic Maps

Perhaps more for the casual player, but being able to see objectives on your map is helpful when you don't have the wiki to fall back on for modded traders. Complex quests such as "Electric Eye" are a lot more manageable with this mod.

Mattdokn's Boss Notifier

There's going to be a lot of boss related quests in this mod, knowing who's spawning and when (Shturman and your default 15% chance on woods, looking at you), well thats a nice QoL feature. (You can achieve this in an even more casual, albeit roundabout way, with Dynamic Maps as well; you can enable map markers for bosses).

There are a lot more mods I could recommend in a general sense (my modlists tend to be pretty huge ) and I'm always happy to give recommendations, but for the sake of brevity I'll keep it to just the aforementioned mods that directly effect Head Hunter.

Mod Compatibility

If you're the dork who shot right to this section just to ask this, here's your answer:

ReAliSmm cOmPattoobilitah?!

Short Answer:

I dunno... No really, I didn't check.

Long Answer:

There's one custom weapon with its own ammo and some proprietary components included in the mod so far; It doesn't have a patch for the stats added by realism, so, as Fontaine says about modded guns, it'll probably work but it won't be balanced for Realism. On that note, if I don't make a compatibility patch and somebody else beats me to it, feel free to upload it. All Head Hunters other items are vanilla (so they should be fine) with the exception of a new quest item (I don't know if realism's trader alterations could effect this). Also, again, Head Hunters LL3 and LL4 items are particularly unbalanced at the moment and may effect your realism experience mildly.

Okay, now that I said that here, I swear to god, if you ask me about realism compatibility in the comments, I'm calling your mother.

Other Mods:

Most other mods should be compatible. Pretty much just use common sense. If it affects traders, their stock, barter offers, etc, its going to have a significant impact on the trader; Especially considering the dog tag trades are/will-be a major part of her economy.

• General balancing of economy (ongoing)
  
  
• Custom mesh and texture for the 6.5 Grendel Ammo: The mesh is made and works fine, the texture is WIP. The .300 Blackout AP's normal texture works fine, but the .300 blackout stamp on the case ruins my immersion lol. (I also need to figure out what I'm doing wrong with custom textures, but I'm too stubborn to ask the veteran modders for help on that )
  
  
• Quest building for Chapter 2 - and beyond: Story-wise I've written probably 3 more chapters worth at this point
  
  
• Branching/Side Quests?: The story is entirely linear in Chapter 1 to maintain pacing and focus, but I am tempted to try to find a way to fold in side quests and/or branching paths without compromising the storytelling and the overall arc.
  
  
• More custom items/Refine custom items (make adjustments to mastery, etc.)
  
  
• New barter Item(s): Had the idea for severed human fingers and ears just need to acquire the models and textures and get a bit better grasp on unity bundles.
  
  
• Story driven crossover quests with other mod traders: I thought this would be cool, but would require configs or checks to make sure you have both traders installed as a quest start condition. And ultimately its up to other modders to decide if this is something they'd be interested in.
  
  
• Supplemental media: I'm a freelancer/media-producer by trade and thought about making a trailer for the mod, writing some music to set the tone, maybe go beyond that depending on if there's any response.
  
  

Like I said in the description, I've been working on this mod since SPT 3.8.1, which should give you some idea of my pace. I kind of figured if I didn't put this out some time soon, I never would and I would just drop the project and let it go unfinished.

Life has been kicking the absolute shit out of me for a while now, so if you leave a comment or hit me up on discord or something and I don't reply, I promise you, you're not being ignored. That said, it helps if I don't have to look in 50 different places for comments, bug reports, etc etc etc. So to keep it simple for now: most stuff you can just leave a comment for. For anything else, you can find me on the SPT discord.

I obviously wanna know about bugs people find, but i also wanna hear peoples feelings on the economy balancing; Its all in its first iteration right now. I also want to hear if you have a cool idea for an "on brand" barter, or anything like that. So, feel free to reach out.