Persistent and Natural Dirt V1.4

This mod aims to fix the dirt effect that Rockstar broke porting the game from PS4 to PC

TLDR:
PC version has disabled persistent dirt decals making the games “shower” function unnecessary. It did this by setting min value to 70 and a negative value for increments resulting in the player essentially never experiencing the persistent dirt decals. This mod brings them back as they were on the console versions. You can see these persistent dirt decals in the pictures I provided. Note that this is just the persistent ones and not the active dirt decals that you get when you initially fall into say mud. Those are still in the game just not shown since the mod does not touch those. It only touches the part that makes your player automatically clean again and removes it. Allowing your player to stay dirty and not groom himself to cleanliness like a cat. This does not touch the automatic cleaning flags that the game has. Like mission specific, visiting the trapper, changing outfits on your horse/wardrobe etc. These are hardcoded into the game and can not be fixed by a simple edit and would require a script that catches these instances and ignores them/tracks your dirtiness level constantly. I currently dont have time to do and I honestly dont know if I have the skills to do it as I dont know C# that well. (Currently studying IT with a focus on programming) Maybe in the future if my ADHD brain does not lose interest by that point.

PS: The dirt/blood effect does dry up after a while. Just give it time. Your character wont be looking like he just fell into the mud always. These dirt effects dry up but stay on your body. What does this mean? You just fell into mud? Mud=glossy/wet. You rode around in the sun/played the game for a bit. Mud=matte/dried up. Look at the pictures to get an idea. You also WILL have to get a bath at a hotel to get 100% clean. Swimming or being out in the rain does clean you but not to 100%. (As it should)

Longer version:
Rockstar disabled the persistent dirt decals from the console versions.

Probably because they realized that players didn’t want to clean their players 24/7 when playing the game. BUT GOD DAMN IT SOME OF US WANT TO.
So this mod brings it back. This mod keeps that realistic “active” dirt effect but also enables the secondary persistent dirt effect. This applies for all dirt in the world from my testing. Mud, blood, sliding dust etc.

But I have dirt in my game you might say. What does this mod actually do?

You ride the horsey. You fall from horsey. You get dirty. In vanilla game on pc this mod will dry up and return the player to a clean state eventually. This mod disables that and allows the player to remain dirty for ever… Or until you take a bath or restart the game. Note that riding in rain or taking a swim will clean you just not 100% This is how the game functioned on consoles and I always found it weird that it didn’t do this on PC. I found out its because Rockstar put negative values for the persistent dirt decals. This simply removes them.

I made 2 versions. Read carefully so you chose which one fits best for you and how to install.

Persistent Dirt version only allows dirt to stay that was caused by the player meaning if you fell into a mud pile or crashed with your horse, carried a dead body that bled on you etc. Only dirt that has physically touched you. The game does add a slight dirt to the player when walking around in some parts of the map. Like Rhoades for example.

Natural Dirt has all the functions of “Persistent Dirt” but it also allows dirt to naturally accumulate over time in instances. Say you walk around in Rhoades for a while dust and dirt will accumulate on your clothes and body. This sounds great in theory but the game cant differentiate between clothes and body dirt. Meaning Arthur will eventually get dirty in his face from seemingly nothing. Say you sprint around Valentine for a while back and forth on the mud road Arthur will have a slight mud effect on his face and clothes and eventually be max dirty when the increments reaches 70/70. Nevertheless I increased the values so this takes a while until it happens so it shouldn’t happen to fast and gives the sense that you are getting dirty by just running around. You can edit this to fit you better if you want it to happen faster or slower. Just open visualsettings.dat with any text editor and find the line peddirt.change.player.fadetogrubby and change the numerical value to whatever you want. Its based on seconds. So 45 seconds means it will go up by 1 increment. There are 70 increments until max dirt is reached.

I personally recommend Persistent Dirt.

Installation instructions:
Do you have a mod that edits the visualsettings.dat file? No. Then just drop into your lml folder and you are good to go

If yes then you will have to manually edit the lines in visualsettings.dat that you have from another mod. (Id appreciate if you would download the mod even if you manually edit your own visualsettings.dat file. This allows other people to find it in the future and wont be pushed back to the last page since no one downloads it)

These values are from the latest version 1.2
For Persistent Dirt:
1. Open visualsettings.dat with any text editer (notepad+)
2. Press CTRL+F and find the values you see below then change them to those values also.
peddirt.rate.player.fadetogrubby 0.0
peddirt.rate.player.min.fadetogrubby 70.0
peddirt.rate.player.max.fadetogrubby 100.0

For Natural Dirt:
1. Open visualsettings.dat with any text editer (notepad+)
2. Press CTRL+F and find the values you see below then change them to those values also.

peddirt.change.player.fadetogrubby 45.0
peddirt.rate.player.fadetogrubby 1.0
peddirt.rate.player.min.fadetogrubby 70.0
peddirt.rate.player.max.fadetogrubby 100.0

3. Save the file and play the game

4. If you dont know if the mod is working properly. Roll around in Rhoades until you are a dirty boy and then ride to valentine. If you arrive dirty its working properly.

If you want to I can make a 3rd version that automatically cleans the player slowly if you find having to wash yourself bothersome. You can do this yourself if you want to and dont want to wait. Just edit the peddirt.rate.player.fadetogrubby line to -1.0 instead (yes that is a minus sign) Now every 45 seconds the game will remove 1 increment of 80 untill it reaches 0 leaving your player clean again. But at that point id just not download the mod tbh.

BUGS:
There are instances where the game auto cleans the player, like visiting the trapper. I cant currently fix it since it will most likely require writing a script which I dont have time to search trough the database for the correct hashes and there is no guarantee the community has found the correct hashes even.

Credits:

black0cs