Talk:Fallout 4 junk items

Page split

The items found at Fallout 4 miscellaneous items#Materials all sort under junk too. In addition several quest items do, not sure what to do about them. Since we have other items that sort under misc like notes and keys on their own page, there wont be much left on the misc. item page, not necessarily a bad thing. Anyway, I think it was a good idea to mark junk items at their infobox. --Alfwyn (talk) 16:17, January 23, 2016 (UTC)

I was actually considering giving materials their own page as well, though that's slightly bothersome, since there's only one value associated with the 'type' key in the infobox and so the header for those items would have to direct here or there, but not both. It might be best just to put them here. I hadn't decided yet. I had intended to do the page split later, when I had all of the items re-typed, but the redirect to the existing misc page that I was using here had confused a few people. I thought it best just to get the list moved here asap and tidy up loose ends later. Any further feedback is welcome. Aiken Drum (talk) 16:47, January 23, 2016 (UTC)

I moved the "Materials" to the junk page, since that's how they're categorized in the inventory tab. The quest items issue is further complexified by the fact that (some?) items which would normally be categorized as "junk" are actually categorized as "misc" until they lose their 'quest item' status, for example HalluciGen gas canister during the quest Hazardous Material. In these instances, it may be appropriate to include them in both Fallout 4 miscellaneous items#Quest_items and Fallout 4 junk items#Junk_items. I've yet to come across a undroppable quest item which wasn't classified as "misc". Anyone seen a counter-example? Aya42 (talk) 20:56, January 23, 2016 (UTC)

Listing of locations

It concerns other items too, but junk items in particular. Often specific locations are described for items, that can be found in abundance. Those lists are either incomplete, or really huge and not very useful. I'm not sure it needs hard rules, but I think, if there are more than 10 locations, listing all isn't practicable. Instead places where many can be found, and general rules like "common loot on raiders" will probably work better. I'm not sure about stating numbers of static locations, they can be quite painlessly produced from game data, but are inherently imprecise (care has to be taken not to count stuff in inaccessible cells, and some might be not really reachable for other reasons); but it is a useful ballpark number for estimating just how common an item is. --Alfwyn (talk) 00:53, January 29, 2016 (UTC)

I had similar thoughts after seeing some of the recent changes to the Aluminum page. I can't imagine many people could be bothered to clear the super mutants from Faneuil Hall just to get one TV dinner tray. Was planning at some point to scan through all the REFR records to get a rough idea of which items were suitably 'rare' enough to warrant inclusion as 'notable loot', and at the same time, generate a list of which cells contain the most instances of a particular item. Numbers could be included, but where generated from the game data, they ought to be tagged as requiring confirmation with a {{verify}} tag or somesuch. Aya42 (talk) 16:23, January 29, 2016 (UTC)

Not sure about the verify part - who will verify it? We use game data all the time when filling in NPC values, without verifying it in all cases (do most of the SPECIAL stats have any impact on gameplay at all? - but I digress). Generally game data methods need enough manual verifications until we are confident they are correct in the other cases. I think for item numbers it would just need some indication that they can be off a bit (clipping issues, unreachable part of cell, ...). --Alfwyn (talk) 16:48, January 29, 2016 (UTC)

Fair enough. That was really just a thought to address your concerns about the reliability of the numbers. For the rarer items, like Vault 111 jumpsuit, or HalluciGen gas canister, I could probably verify those manually before adding them in. With regards to the junk items, I'd probably hack together something which scans through the cells for junk items, works out what components they break down into, then build something akin to a "top ten locations to scavenge if you're looking for component X". It's more likely people are just looking for a large quantity of, say, Aluminum than specifically looking for TV dinner trays. Besides, given that there are likely to be thousands of base objects, I'm not sure how practical it would be to do 'top tens' for every item. Aya42 (talk) 17:52, January 29, 2016 (UTC)

(←)  Done a quick 'n dirty table of the most common MISC item refs. Just wanted to check you get the same figures. Aya42 (talk) 18:34, January 31, 2016 (UTC)

I checked a handful and got exact the same number of placed references. Fine tuning (I haven't done) would be to weed out stuff in inaccessible cells and perhaps conditionally enabled ones (disabled flag set or XESP enable parent field). A very useful overview, no sense in trying to document all beer bottles or coffee cup locations. --Alfwyn (talk) 18:54, January 31, 2016 (UTC)

Cheers. I also didn't bother with checking whether the refs were enabled or not. The code to subdivide the counts by cell is already in place - shouldn't be too hard to add a list of inaccessible cell IDs to exclude from the counts. Also, haven't checked if they're in the "persistent" or "temporary" child groups, but I'm not sure if it matters or not. Still need to work out a good way to output the data in a useful format. Might just chuck it all into a MySQL database. Not sure yet. Aya42 (talk) 19:10, January 31, 2016 (UTC)