I’ve watched quite a few videos, and I thank each and every one of the people who took the time to record it. However, I do find them…lacking…perhaps I was watching the wrong videos, perhaps they were trying to incorporate too much information into a small video due to size or time limits, or, they might even be so adept in skill that they forget that their audience is quite frequently doing the “play-pause-play-pause” and trying trying to follow basic instructions at every step. All of that is a big unknown. I do wish to mod, yes, but honestly, I just want to mod one item…a gun. I’ll even make it easy. I want to mod a shotgun to ‘act’ like the…well…lets call it a shotgun, in the old Serious Sam series. The gun was normal-sized, but the big ‘bullets’ that came out were HUGE round balls of destruction…yup, that’s what I want to make. Just a weapon mod. So…why the heck do I need to have a MAP anywhere in the process? I just need to mod a shotgun to fire custom ammo whose visual and geometric shapes can easily be set in the renamed ‘Generic this’ and ‘Test Map that’ files and the effects are…well…The sky’s’ the limit! I have enough knowledge from the numerous videos to make the weapon and ammo, however, I DO have some low level requirements to make the items, notably, the campfire and stone hatchet. Don’t judge! 
I have it set to build the Weapon and ammo both from thatch…yup…thatch… It’s MY server. :-PPPPPP
So, can anyone explain why we have to include a map when ‘cooking’ the item mod? Or a map at all since it’s just an ITEM mod? I’m altering a single item…a weapon…and ammo…for use on a local (for now) server…map should be irrelevant. Any takers?
The orange “Map” file is what tells the game to load your mod. It doesn’t need anything other than for it to point to your primalgamedata.bp. Your mod should be relatively easy. I have not looked at the shotgun but if the firing mechanism is the same as the other guns it does not have a projectile so to accomplish your goal you’ll need to reparent it to the rocket launcher and then it will have a projectile. Be sure you change the animation montages back to shotgun in the "weap_yourweap.bp. You will then need to copy the rocket projectile and link it to your new weapon and modify it how you want.
Ahhh…yeah, the shotgun not having an ammo animation miiight just be a problem. What if i made the same weapon out of the rocket launcher. Then, perhaps, there might not need to be so much re-routing in the files? Hmm?
And thank you for your response…I had a brief period that I caused a delay in responding since I had uninstalled everything related to the game, the client…everything…in order to get all the data installed onto my C: drive (SSD) in an attempt at increasing read/load speeds…however. it seems to have found and old directory on one of my aux drives and engaged it…and “repaired” the installation…disappointing after all I’d done to make a clean slate…oh well…
Oh, and about that orange MAP file…since it’s going to be included in the “build”, and I want it to be small…or empty, because i’m really only modding an item. Any suggestions on which ‘map’ I should choose by default?
Copy the three files in the GenericMod folder to your new mod folder, the three core files that are needed for any traditional mod.
Rename, and re-link the files together.
-WM