Since making the mod Better Beacons, I have had a lot of people sending me pm’s and friend requests asking how to modify the crates themselves so I decided to make a guide based on my limited knowledge of how they work.
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”
First of all, I’m going to assume that you have a general knowledge of the ADK and at least know how to setup the ADK to make a mod so I won’t be going into that.
This guide will explain how to modify the contents only. No other supply drop “adjustments” are covered.
I have heard there is a way to edit the crates using the graphs but I still don’t really understand the graphs so we won’t be getting into graphs either.
There are Supply Crate and lootitemset blueprints associated with editing the crates. From my experience I have come to the conclusion that the whole lootitemsets format is kinda broken. They don’t seem to be that random. Ever notice how white and green crates seem to have nice random selections most of the time but the rest are well, awfully repetitive? That’s because the white and greens don’t use the lootitemsets, nor will this guide… Lootitemsets are also the reason you find a level25 water jar blueprint in a level60 crate.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get started!
We’ll go over the main settings first then create an item set and add some items to it.
Open the ADK and in the content browser’s search bar type: supply. It should pull up something like this:
You can either make copies or children of the crate blueprints you plan to edit depending on personal preference and put them into your mods folder.
I will leave the debate of children vs copies for another topic and let you decide how you want to do it.
The relevant supplycrate and caveloot blueprints are:
SupplyCrate_Level03
SupplyCrate_Level15
SupplyCrate_Level25
SupplyCrate_Level35
SupplyCrate_Level55
SupplyCrate_Level60
SupplyCrate_Level03_Double
SupplyCrate_Level15_Double
SupplyCrate_Level25_Double
SupplyCrate_Level35_Double
SupplyCrate_Level55_Double
SupplyCrate_Level60_Double
New Sorched Earth Beacons and Cave Drops: Thanks to Kogadins
SupplyCrate_Cave_QualityTier1_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Cave_QualityTier2_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Cave_QualityTier3_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Level03_Double_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Level03_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Level15_Double_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Level15_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Level30_Double_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Level30_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Level45_Double_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Level45_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Level55_Double_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Level55_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Level70_Double_ScorchedEarth
SupplyCrate_Level70_ScorchedEarth
The difference between regular and “double” crates will be explained a little later.
SupplyCrate_Cave_QualityTier1
SupplyCrate_Cave_QualityTier2
SupplyCrate_Cave_QualityTier3
SupplyCrate_Cave_QualityTier4
Now that you have the crate blueprints copied lets go ahead and open up SupplyCrate_Level15 so we can take a look at the settings. Will look something like this:
Some of the settings are pretty self explanatory.
MIN/MAX item sets: determines how many of the sets in the item sets section appear in the crate. “Doubles” have the Min & Max item sets both set to 2 instead of 1 so you always get 2 sets. In game, doubles have the ball of light around the crate you can see for miles the whole time it is descending. (“Doubles” have now been explained as promised earlier :))
MIN/MAX Quality Multiplier: affects the overall quality of the items selected in the crate. You can also assign each individual item it’s own quality in it’s set. (more on that later)
Others are not.
I am not sure what “Num Item Sets Power” or “Above One Extra Quality Multiplier” do, I’m guessing it maybe has to do with the difficultyoffset? But I really have no clue.
An item “set” allows you to make multiple items in a set such as a small shack or a gun set. For instance, if you wanted a rifle & pistol + bullets for both to come as a set, you can do it. (we’ll use this as an example when creating an item set later)
Go ahead and open “Item Sets” then click item 0 and you’ll see this:
So, for the wood shack you’ll notice it has 6 elements under item entries. Each entry is for the specific part of the wood shack. The MIN/MAX Quantity determines how many of the item entries will be pulled when the crate decided to use item set 0 for the drop. This gives you at least 6 items in that drop, possibly more depending on the quantity specified for each item entry. In the case of the wood shack, you get a floor, roof, doorway, door and 3 walls + a blueprint for a wood shack part = 6 items.
Click item entry 3 and you’ll see this:
Notice the MIN/MAX quantities are at 3. That gives you the 3 walls. Set them both to 7 and you’ll get enough for a 2 story building whenever item set 0 is picked by the crate. Leave the MIN at 3 and change the MAX to 7 and you’ll get 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 walls randomly. This applies to everything, ammo, resources etc.
For the blueprint entry, this is how it they did it:
You would add the items you want the blueprints to be and set the quantity for this section. (I’m 99% sure that when you set the max to anything more than 1 when you have multiple items in the same entry you can get 2 of the same item even though there are multiple different items for it to choose from) Be sure to click the force blueprint option.
You may have noticed a couple other settings in the item set. “Items random without replacement” & “Set weight”
Items random without replacement: makes it so it will only choose each item entry 1 time to reach the MAX quantity of 6 which gives you the complete shack + a blueprint. If that was not checked, you would still get the max quantity of 6 but it could be any combination of 6. IE: you could theoretically end up with 6 roofs instead of a complete shack.
Set weights: We’ll let Sench explain that - Set weights explained by Sench "Each item group and loot set (and possibly individual items) have “weight” entries, but they are relative odds as opposed to absolute chance. If you have two sets both with a weight of 1 and the crate can only have 1 loot set, it means either has a 50% chance of appearing. However, if the crate is set to always give you 2 sets, that doesn’t mean you’ll see both sets: there is a good (50%) chance that you’ll see 2 instances of the same set.
The same logic applies on item entries and items. "
More on Set weights by Sench “1.0 weights doesn’t mean 100% chance, it is compared to all other entry weights and then picked at random (for example, 3 entries with 1, 2 and 0.3 weight means a chance of approximately 30%, 60% and 10% respectively). You could set the weight of a specific entry to 10000 (like fibers are for sickle) to make it drop almost always, but that would also mean other entries will almost never drop. And if you set the weight of a whole “set” that high, then other sets will never appear instead.”
Thank you Sench!
When I made the first version of Better Beacons I knew nothing of weights so did not change any of them. When you create a new item set it defaults to a weight of 1 so most, if not all my sets had a weight of 1. For the most part it was random but some items definitely would appear more often than others. In the latest version I set the items I noticed to be most common to .3 weight but now it seems that other items appear more often so pretty much whatever you set them to, it’s still going to be a roll of the dice as to what you get.
So we’ll go ahead and still use the above pic to go a little into the quality settings for each individual item even though walls don’t get quality. This is also pretty self explanatory, determines the minimum and maximum quality of the item in that entry. This where the MIN/MAX Quality Multiplier comes into play. This is the number the multiplier will multiply. The item quality I’m pretty sure is also affected by your difficultyoffset. For more detailed information on item quality, please see this informative post also from Sench: [Tutorial] Understanding Item Quality]([Tutorial] Understanding Item Quality - ARK: Survival Evolved - Unreal Engine Forums)
Now the easy part, creating an item set and adding stuff! We’ll go ahead and add the Rifle/Pistol + ammo combo to a green crate as mentioned before as an example.
Click the + sign next to “elements” in the item sets section of the crate you want to add your modifications to.
Name the set then click the + sign next to elements under the item section of the newly created set 4 times.
Will look like this
Open Item entry 0 and click the + sign next to elements, click the dropdown that says “none” and when it pops up, type in “gun” and select it
Set your quantity to min 1 max 1 (unless you want more than 1 pistol)
Set the quality to whatever range you want.(I used 0 min 10 max for this example. Default is 0 min 1 max)
Uncheck force blueprint (unless you only want it to be a blueprint)
Set a number (lower # = less chance) for the blueprint chance (set to 0 if you never want it to be a blueprint)
Now open item entry 1, name it, add the bullets the same way you added the pistol in the last step and then set your minimum and maximum quantity. Set the amounts to what you want. I used 15 min 30 max for the example.
Quality settings do not affect ammo so no changes are needed there.
Be sure to uncheck BP override or you’ll end up with a bunch of BP’s for bullets. Set chance to be blueprint to 0 also for the same reason.
Go ahead and set your rifle of choice and ammo in item entry 2 and 3 the same way as the the pistol and bullets and your first item set is almost done!
Above is where you decide how many of the items in the entries are used: “Min & Max Num Items”. So if you want all 4 items - rifle, pistol and both types of bullets, set the min and max to 4. You can do any combination such as min 1, max 4. In that scenario sometimes you may only find a pistol or maybe one type of ammo and at other times you’ll find all 4 items or any combination in between. If the 1 item picked happens to be bullets, it will be a random number between the min and max you set for the bullets themselves. IE: 1 stack of 20 bullets. Be sure to check “Items random without replacement” or you could end up with 4 rifles.
Now it’s on to the PrimalGameData_BP for your mod.
Open it up and set your mod’s name and description
Now scroll down or use ctrl+ f to find “Remap Supply Crates” (it’s between remap NPC’s and remap resources)and add an entry. (You will need an entry for every crate BP you modify)
In the “From Class” box select the crate you are overriding. (in this example it’s SupplyCrate_Level15)
Change the “To Class” to your modified one. The easiest way to do this is highlight your supplycrate bp in the content browser and click the little arrow <-
Or you can browse for it the same way you added the weapons and bullets.
You’re almost done! Save the modified files, cook it and upload to steam.
Now you’re done!
NOTE:
With level 25 through 60 crates there are no actual item sets in the crates themselves by default. They use the lootitemsets. They are ok if you want to have the same items in different levels of crates without modifying each individual crate to have that item but kinda suck otherwise.
I’d recommend clearing the lootitemset references from the level 25-60 supply crates
Change this
To this
Now just add the sets and items you want into each level’s crate as you see fit the same way you added the rifle, pistol and bullets.
Hope this helps.
Please remember as I mentioned in the very first sentence, “this guide is based on my LIMITED knowledge of how the crates work”. If I have explained something wrong or you know a better way to do it, please let me know in a nice way! 
“Knowing is half the battle!”
LOL!
P0k Out!
