Place rare items manually

Special items such as recipes/schematics/books/weapons/armor/horsegear will no longer spawn repeatedly inside containers due to bad luck/randomness. Instead, you can only find them in specific locations (containers/stores/quest rewards).

What it changes: In the vanilla game, whether a specific container/chest had a specific legendary unique sword or just a fire poker or some crap was usually low to your level and/or chance, since the items that appeared were randomly picked from a generic list. Those lists of random results used over and over again can lead to players getting multiple copies of the same legendary and so-called unique swords, often in the most boring places.

How it changes: This mod removes entries for rare/special items from those random result loot lists, so that you can only find special items like legendary swords, recipes, etc. in the container if the container has taken the item from one of the non-random only lists (meaning the item may have been placed in that container by the developer) rather than one of the random result lists. To prevent issues with empty containers, these loot entries are replaced with a few coins (set with a lower priority than the rest of the entries in those loot lists).

Over 99% of the special items in the randomly distributed loot list may have been discovered as crafting loot for containers, merchandise, craftable items, quest rewards, and more.

A very small number of items that only exist in randomized loot lists require some arbitrary relocation/changes, like this:

Recipe dye gray

Recipe Dye Turquoise

Recipe Dye Brown

Recipe Dye Green

recipe dye blue

Recipe Dye Orange

Recipe dye pink

recipe dye yellow

Recipe Dye Black

recipe dye white

Recipe dye red

Recipe Dye Purple

^Added to Dye Merchant, Port Beauclair, Toussaint.

Light Armor 01r

Light Armor 02r

Light Armor 03r

Light Armor 04r

Light Armor 06r

Light Armor 7r

Light Armor 08r

Light Armor 09r

Chinese League 01r

Chinese League 02r

Chinese League 03r

Medium Armor 04r

Medium Armor 05r

Medium Armor 07r

Medium Armor 10r

Medium Armor 11r

Heavy Armor 01r

Heavy Armor 02r

Heavy Armor 03r

Heavy Armor 04r

Heavy Armor 05r

Boots 012

Boots 022

Boots 032

^Relic/artifact version of normal armor, added Yoana, Velan's Raven Perch. For those interested in smoother project progression, the optional mod "Yoana Shop Delayed" allows it to start providing shop services (related tasks) later in the game.

Beast Volume 2

Cursed monster size 2

Draconides Volume 2

Insect biomass 2

Necrophage 2nd

Relic monster size 2

Ghost Volume 2

Ogres vol 2

lore_tyromancy

lore_nilfgaardian_transport_orders

lore_unfinished_war_annals

^ Added to book merchant Marcus TK Hodgson, Hierarch Square, Novigrad.

Saddle 1v3

^Slightly better than Starter's Saddle, added to Griffin Merchant, Woesong Bridge, White Orchard.

lore_yennefer_journals

^ Since the list's drawing minimum is set to 1 (bug?), it may never show the non-random unique 2-item part of the loot list, increase it to 2.

A random stealth item marked NoShow, NoDrop ("Armor Maintenance" in loot list "_unique_books_other") has been removed because it had a higher priority and overwrote placeholder coins, potentially causing some containers to be empty when they shouldn't.

Install:

Simply extract the contents to The Witcher 3 - Wild Hunt\Mods folder. If you have other modules, run script merge to merge the files.

uninstall:

If you merged the files before, cancel the merge. Delete the unzipped folder.

Changed files:

\ gameplay \ items \ def_loot_containers.xml

\ gameplay \ items \ def_loot_shops.xml

\ gameplay \ items_plus \ def_loot_containers.xml

\ gameplay \ items_plus \ def_loot_shops.xml

\ dlc \ bob \ data \ gameplay \ items \ def_loot_containers.xml

\ dlc \ bob \ data \ gameplay \ items_plus \ def_loot_containers.xml

Optional Mod: Yoana Shop Delay is meant to be used with the main mod so that Yoana only starts offering her shop services later in the game (when she starts offering crafting …