Proving Ground Retrofit Projects LWOTC
3/1/2026 Added support for swords and optional crossbows if the vektor crossbow for lwotc mod is present.
This can ultimately considered a quality of life mod that has a subtle balance impact:
This mod creates several proving ground projects that become available whenever you have spare weapons in the HQ inventory and the required techs. Right now it only handles basic weapons and armor, no vektors, autosnipers, grenade launchers or any of that. There may be some errors, It was a lot of copy pasting of a lot of values, but I think i caught all the big screw ups. Lemme know.
In short, you stick a laser rifle into the proving ground project and pay a small retrofit tax, and in a few hours it spits out a mag rifle. Any attachments you had on the donor weapon are lost, so strip loose weapons before retrofitting them.
This is expedient, but it is not a cost effective process. You’re saving a little bit on alloys and elerium but you’re paying a tax in supplies, and obviously the ‘donor’ weapon is destroyed.
In the short term it’s a very handy way to upgrade some old gear rather than sell it to the black market, but the total cost per weapon is higher despite being amortized over iterations.
Basically, you’re recycling your old guns to save some resources in exchange for time spent in the proving ground.
All costs are configurable in the INI.
Why I made this:
Often while researching a new weapon tech tier, I find myself holding off on building gear that is soon to be obsolete, since it will likely only see use in one or two missions before the next tier is done. rather than making a ‘disposable laser rifle’ while researching mag weapons, i wanted to enable a build path so that ‘old’ laser rifles weren’t just thrown away for 10 supplies on the black market or left collecting dust in the inventory as potential hand me down weapons for rookies. So instead you take the old item, throw it at engineering, and let them give you back a better item at a discount. The total cost is technically higher than just building the new gun, but the immediate cost is lower.
