So I've been making a modified weapon based on the laser rifle. I've been messing around with making projectiles and explosions but it seems somehow I've messed with an non obvious setting which cancels out any damage.

The weapon stats read that it does in fact do damage but in game it does no damage, it doesn't even cause hostility. All the effects look fine. I have damage set on the weapon item as well as the explosion item linked to the projectile just to try to get it to do damage again but still no cigar.

The last thing I altered was making an explosion effect based off of the displacement glove fx, which I believe is just an up scaled gauss rifle FX.

So I'm asking for advice on narrowing down what setting might have caused this. I finally like the way it looks and this random no damage thing happens

Hopefully this is enough info.

For anyone interested turns out the hit scan setting on the projectile can lead to zero damage. There can be significant visual difference too.

No idea what this hit scan thing even means besides ruining my weapon

"Hit scan" on projectiles defines how the projectile "really" exists in the world. If a projectile is marked to be hit scan, it will not create an actual physics object/projectile in the world outside of VATS. It will simply calculate spread from the weapon node and run a ray cast out to its maximum range. In VATS, it will still use the projectile model, speed, gravity, etc. If a weapon is not marked as hit scan, it will always create a projectile in the world. On some low end systems, this can be "bad", especially when using high RoF weapons, since you and other NPCs might be generating dozens of projectiles per second.