Removing zombie drops via mod

I’ve been deleting the standard zombie drops from the json for a long time now, since I find it more balanced (doesn’t remove the risk/reward of raiding hardware stores with wander spawns on) and realistic (zoms stop carrying brick kilns around) and I recently tried to move it to a mod to save myself time redoing it every time there’s an update. It doesn’t seem to work. Is there any way to simply override a monster_drops entry from a mod?

Take a look at the zombie speed mod for an example of a script that sets a property on every monster whose species is zombie. You should be able to set their drops in a similar fashion.

cant you just replace the itemgroup woth whatever you do want?

I was hoping to do it with json but I might have better luck using a script like Malkeus says.

json doesn’t seem to be workng, I’ve tried replacing the “default_zombie_items” and “default_zombie_death_drops” (with and without setting edit type to modify) but the zoms still spawn with random tools just like before. When I edit the item groups directly in the games json files it works perfectly, I was just hoping to save myself the hassle of doing that every update.