Change the spawn point for shelters to be the basement of the shelter, with a single nearly-discharged flickering light (glowstick with 10 charges, lightstrip nearly empty, maybe a dead generator, etc- so long as it is basically useless). Randomize empty food wrappers or the like surrounding your character ranging from zero to about four. Empty bags, maybe an aluminum can, some paper wrappers. Junk.
Create new styles of shelters to match. Different arrangements, bombed-out shelter surrounded by craters.
Allow people to start in community centers they took refuge in or small churches (not cathedrals).
Simple, but time consuming:
Pack all the guns into a mod called complexguns. Extract a select series of guns (real or not) from that mod that have very distinct differences and fall into each category of weaponry, and pack that into simpleguns. That way you can turn guns off entirely if you feel like going through a bullet-less apocalypse for whatever reason; or if you are brain dead (like I am) and can’t really wrap your head around what makes another gun better if there’s only minor differences.
The guns I’d really like to target for the complexguns pack are those that are not “special”/futuristic weaponry and aren’t hand-crafted which use specialty ammunition. It’s really pointless and nobody will pick them up because ammo is a pain to craft and they aren’t powerful enough to be useful. Pistols are mostly guilty of this, but there are some uzis.
The exception should be starting profession: I can definitely understand giving a profession a ‘worse’ gun as part of a lower point cost.
