Item drops, crashes, & merchants

Oh, and for kicks I decided to mess around with the modifiers a bit. Made it so nearly all of them can be found on any type of item. During my play-test, sometimes one can find non-ranged items that boost the ranged damage of the weapon. These usually work, except for those that add elemental damage ('of burning', 'of ice' etc.) -> these don't boost it at all, but standard damage boosts ('of the sparrow' etc.) work fine. Why is that?

Maybe this is causing the crashes. I don't know.

EDIT: Almost forgot, I tried to add a modifier at some point. IIRC it was a combo of ice & fire damage unto a melee weapon. Tested it with a super drop mod, and I never saw a single item with the new modifier...

I set "drop Spellbook" to true for Krug Apprentice a few days back, yeah... that was broken.

I was able to get my Dexterity Ranger Staff and its randomly enchanted variants to drop in Ehb by copy/pasting the normal Staff template back into itself, then modifying the name and desired values of that, making a "new" template with the same pcontent.

As for crashings, that has happened every time I violated a coding convention set by GPG. These conventions have to do with stuff like Max values being greater than Min values, Sight range being greater than Com range, along with others I won't know about until I break them. Errors where my Modded content fails to appear, or appears but is broken, are mostly due to syntax in the templates I change/make. Missing a semicolon, or leaving an extra one, can cause the template not to load correctly, if at all, or cause other things to go missing. Savegame and Loading being broken (gathering exceptions) has been caused when I misspelled or incorrectly entered something, like the exact phrasing of a jat_brain parameter. There's a ton more reasons for dysfunctional mods, and my process had to slow way down, to avoid introducing more than one error at a time. Scouring templates for why things broke only to scrap it and start over wasn't fun, but I learned.

Perhaps, don't be afraid to start over if you need to, and incrementalize your changes so you don't have so many potential reasons for why it's not working?

I've already started over (more than once) with several of the templates. Each one could take an hour or more, since it has to be done slowly by hand for that exact reason - NOT fun.

Since it works fine everywhere else that makes me think it's some item(s) that drop in those areas' level ranges. There has to be a way to scan or identify which section has the error.

I broke vendors selling my items (or any weapons at all sometimes) by having the template in the wrong place, and by having the name of a different, older and unused item under item_restock. Editing base weapon templates has broken things too, if the priority of what I changed is critical to a child template. I created an entirely new base and child template for the Ranger Staves because I changed the innate enchantments of staves. Before that I'd tried just modifying base_staff and that didn't show up in Elddim or anywhere.

I think you are correct that level ranges could be part of the problem, and that would likely be in the pcontent syntax of the item. Haven't tested level ranges and such yet, let us know what you find!