INTRODUCTION

Hey, I was an expert gameplay designer working on Cyberpunk 2077 and its expansion pack. This mod was waiting on my drive for over half a year, until now, when I finally found the time and felt like submitting it to nexus.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a sci-fi game, but that didn't stop the majority of gun designs from following how the real guns work. Most of the guns have visible bullet caliber markings and you can see different bullets inside the magazines, in animations of pulling the slide or inside the ejection port. This mod is my pet subject and an exercise I keep repeating in different games from time to time since my Fallout 4's attempt.


TLDR, changes:

• Rebalanced all gun damage values to be proportional to real life bullet muzzle energy.
• Buffed melee weapons' damage, so they keep up with the guns.
• Blunt melee weapons now have stronger hit reactions and can pop enemy head's off.
• "Going the Distance" Reflex perk's functionality has been integrated into "Slaughterhouse" Reflex master perk.
• "Going the Distance" perk functionality has been changed into unlocking infinite comboing of light attacks for all melee weapons.
• Equalized player and NPC damage numbers (mostly resulted with damage increase, keep in mind that the game also applies damage scaling).
• Adjusted rate of fire of few weapons that were too far outside of their category ranges (smg, rifle, auto pistols, etc.).
• Adjusted burst rate of fire to consistent with new rate of fire values.
• Adjusted magazine capacities to be reasonably following magazine model size vs the bullet caliber size.
• All guns follow consistent armor penetration rules based on the bullet calibers they use.
• Halved shotgun spread values (against the game fantasy that shotguns become unreliable above 10m range).
• Increased shotgun effective range from 10m to 15m.
• Made enemy shotgun damage simulate number of pellets that hit the player with distance, based on weapon effective range (vanilla game divides weapon damage by number of pellets). This allows shotgun to deal its full weapon damage (an increase by up to 2.85x below 9m compared to vanilla game).
• Fixed an issue from vanilla game where full-auto shotguns didn't use full-auto shooting patterns but regular shotgun ones. Affects Pozhar and Crusher.
• Decreased tech weapon's charge time to 0.5sec.
• Increased smart weapon target acquisition range by 50%.
• Delayed the recoil of burst weapons until after all bullets in the burst are shot to fix burst accuracy.
• Normalized headshot damage to be 2.5x of the body shot value on all guns (majority of headshot heavy weapons received big base damage buffs).
• Added weight categories with mobility debuffs.
• Switched places of Like a Feather perk (Body 9 requirements) that reduces weapon weight mobility debuffs with Skullcracker perk (Body 15 requirement).
• Adjusted weapon price multipliers to reflect original game design for manufacturer qualities.
• Changed the "BROKEN" prefix and broken weapon description to "LOCKED" and explained it with a biometric lock that disables the weapon as per original design idea.
• Melee weapons won't drop as broken anymore to support the biometric lock explanation.
• Added point-blank shooting pattern where NPCs below 10m from target shoot in full auto without delays between volleys. Vanilla close range, medium range and long range shooting patters were pushed to farther distances. (First shot has always zero delay regardless of distance in vanilla game, so nothing has changed there - there are mods that claim they remove this initial delay while there aren't any, at least not in the weapon stats and shooting AI actions).
  

There's a lot of number crunching in the mod. If you're interested what are the exact numbers, check mod's pictures.


What does the mod do?
With and without the mod, Cyberpunk allows you to dominate the battlefield without a single bullet fired by the enemies. With and without the mod you can run builds that stealth headshot kill majority of enemies in the game. With mod installed only power pistols and a couple of power revolvers receive a damage per shot reduction, while only one weapon (Metel) out of 136 in the game ends up with damage per second reduction. Majority of weapons receive a boost that affects both the player and enemies making the combat deadlier.

What this mod doesn't do?
This mod will affect game's difficulty with some places becoming more difficult, other easier. This mod's focus, however, is not difficulty and its purpose is not pushing for any kind of hardcore experience. It focuses on consistency, immersion and power fantasy.

Optional files
Gunsensical Trigger Modes
This file uses Trigger Mode Control mod as a framework and requirement to enable switching between fire modes for:

• Ajax - full auto/semi auto
• Crusher - full auto/semi auto
• Kyubi - full auto/semi auto
• Yukimura - full auto/burst
• Masamune - full auto/burst
• Shingen - full auto/burst
• Dian - full auto/burst
  

The single file that mod is contains covers many other weapons, but changes to them are commented out. The reasons for other weapons to be excluded are either:

• the weapon has a very strong recoil animation that doesn't fit a semi auto fire mod and looks glitchy
• the weapon already has two fire modes and one of them is tech charging
• the weapon has no visible fire mod selection mechanism on the model
  

You can remove # symbols in the file and restore commented out weapons yourself if you want.

Enemy Damage Scaling - Very Hard to Hard
The game scales enemy damage depending on player's level. Enemy weapon damage (which in vanilla is different than player's weapon damage) is used as a base and then this base is multiplied by different bonuses. For example, enemies also roll for weapon quality and have a damage multiplier depending on that. They also have an additional multiplier, which Enemy Damage Scaling file changes. This scaling is not linear, it's a curve and there's a different curve for different difficulties. Hard difficulty scaling is closest to player's bonuses from character progression, like bonuses from perks, cyberware, items, etc. Closest, doesn't mean exact, it's all an approximation. So in short, in general enemy damage on hard difficulty is more or less similar to what player can achieve. This mod changes very hard difficulty damage scaling curve to hard difficulty curve. Everything else, like enemy behavior changes, accuracy, health, armor, etc. remains the same.

Recommendations (if you care about shorter time to kill)
It is subjective what you want to get from the game, but if you're expecting lower tier mostly human flesh and blood characters to die quickly, while heavily chromed cyborgized enemies pose more challenge, to achieve this, this mod pairs nicely and is meant to be played with Weapon Damage Scaling Rebalance and Enemy Rarity Fixes mods. Gunsensical itself establishes damage proportions between weapons - ie. how strong a rifle X using such bullets is compared to a pistol Y using other bullets, but it doesn't increase the damage of everything across the board.

Compatibility
Anything that changes parameters of weapons, "Like a Feather", "Skullcracker", "Going the Distance" and "Slaughterhouse" perks in tweak will obviously collide. Everything else should be fine. Added an optional patch for Melee Attack Fixes and Enhacements.

Mods that go well along this one

• Enemy Rarity Fixes main and optional file
• Enemy Aggro Improvements
• corrected Weapon Damage Scaling Rebalance
• Futuristic Silencers Overhaul (with Ashura and Chao add-on)
  Regarding the missing required mod: there's only a single reference to required mod in the only yaml file present in Futuristic Silencers Overhaul. It's at the top of the file and mentions a perk. You can safely remove it. The mod will work with and without it. There are issues with item descriptions but stat-wise, as far as I know it works fine. Check the IMAGES if you'd like to see how to modify the file.