Weighted loot and drop tables, done properly: rarity tiers, conditional drops, nested tables, pity timers and deterministic seeding - data-driven and Blueprint-first.

THE PROBLEM

Every RPG, looter-shooter, roguelike and survival game needs weighted loot tables, and Unreal ships no first-class framework for them. So the same ad-hoc DataTable-plus-RandRange system gets rebuilt every project - usually without rarity tiers, without conditional drops, without nested tables, without a guaranteed-drop pity timer, and without a seed you can reproduce. It works until a designer asks why the boss dropped nothing forty times in a row, and nobody can replay the roll to find out.

WHAT LOOTFORGE IS

A clean UDataAsset table format, a subsystem that rolls against it, and a Blueprint function library that needs no target and no C++. It decides what drops. It deliberately does not decide what an item is or how it is granted, so it drops into any inventory system and any genre without asking you to adopt one.

KEY FEATURES

• Weighted entries - per-entry weight, rarity tier and a min/max quantity range.

• Rarity tiers - Common through Legendary, and any result set can be filtered by minimum rarity.

• Conditional drops - gate an entry behind a Gameplay Tag query matched against the roll context, so a drop can depend on the biome, the difficulty or the quest state.

• Nested tables - an entry can roll another table, depth-guarded against cycles.

• Pity timers - guarantee a minimum rarity after a configurable dry streak. The forty-empty-rolls complaint stops being possible.

• Deterministic seeding - the same seed gives the same drop, which is what makes replays, automated tests and server authority workable.

• Designer preview - normalised per-entry drop chances, so a table can be balanced by reading it instead of by rolling it a thousand times.

• Blueprint-first - data assets, one subsystem and a function library. No C++ required at any point.

• Guardrails - zero-weight entries, recursion caps and quantity clamps are handled rather than crashed on. Automation tests (LootForge.*) ship with the plugin.

WHAT IT IS NOT

Not an inventory system, not an item database and not an economy simulator. It rolls tables and hands you the result; everything downstream stays yours. It is also not replicated - rolls are seed-reproducible instead, which is the more useful property for a server that has to agree with a client.

TECHNICAL

• Unreal Engine 5.8, one runtime C++ module, full source included.

• Depends on the engine GameplayTags module only. No third-party libraries.

• Built and verified on Win64, Development and Shipping.

• Number of Blueprints: 0 (code plugin, with example data assets in the documentation). Network replicated: no.

• Documentation: https://wiki.teufel-engineering.com/en/LootForge/documentation