[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:13, topic:10081”]Yep, you get a guaranteed drop at higher levels.
This wasn’t rebalanced for a looooong time. I changed it twice - once to roll per-part rather than once so that you can get a drop of 1 CBM and not always 0 or 2, then second time to use floats rather than ints. Neither of those was really a rebalance.
If someone has good suggestions (“rescale the survival part to be 0 to 10 rather than 0 to 3, but double its weight in roll” could be good, “make it more random” is not), preferably with examples on how would it get better, we could fix it up.[/quote]
Personally, I think the vast majority of CBMs should have to be either crafted from scavenged CBM parts (disassemble multiple scavenged Dielectric Capacitance, for instance, before you get all the bits to make a functional one) or found ready to go (dropped very rarely or found in stores/bunkers/etc).
When butchering a corpse, random roll for what bionics they have, then a semi-random roll for damage (a pulped corpse should have more damaged bionics), then a skill/stat check of some kind to scavenge the bionic.
The skills involved are probably correct, but yes, making it scale better and continue to have some level of fail chance (doing more damage to the scavenged parts, for instance) until higher level would be better. Perhaps “survival skill - CBM difficulty”? That would make some things work reliably at low levels (Power Storage, Internal Chronometer) but not others (Night Vision, Teleportation, etc).
Also, the mechanism makes it very much pass/fail, with little sense of improvement. If you start the game with 8 str/8 dex, and you have a decent butchering tool, you going to fail ALL THE TIME until you hit Survival 3, then you’re going to pass ALL THE TIME. That’s not good.
Instead of a flat “if it’s negative, you get nothing, if it’s positive, you have a 50/50 to get something”, make it more like “50 + result *25 percent chance to get something” - if you do well, you’ll more likely get it, if you do poorly, you’ll make likely get nothing, but it won’t be a simple pass/fail.
One more thought:
The description of how CBMs work makes great sense and is very convenient for use in the game… but absolutely ridiculous when it comes to scavenging an installed bionic from a corpse. All the bits that do the installing would not be in the body to get back.
If you don’t want to work out exactly how to make every kind of CBM, make a recipe (or similiar mechanism) that simple takes so many scavenged CBMs (with damaged ones counting only partial, maybe?) to get a whole one ready to install.
The “burnt out bionic” mechanism seems like stub for a system like this - as is, it’s kinda silly (and you tend to end up with LOTS of burnt out bionics - those should take several to make a working one, as they are “burnt out”, right?).
