So I was starting a new game today and decided that I was going for decent stats on all the characters I rolled. By decent, I mean 16-18 IQ and 10 or above in everything else. Not hard to accomplish really. So I'm rolling the first one and three swipes of the spacebar my jaw hit the floor as I stared at the most beautiful set of stats I'd ever seen. IQ 18 and no other stat below 16. Wow. Immediately I hit enter and thought 'Groovy!' and, so, aptly named my character Ash after the original Evil Dead movies. I then proceeded to give him skills (brawling, climb, medic, etc.) and finished. Then I called him up in order to equip him before moving to my next character and what I saw just made me laugh until I was in tears. His starting weapon was a Chainsaw! How appropriate!

Just had to share that.

I don't usually give +s for awesomeness, but this one deserved it.

How is that possible in the first place? The starting equipment is supposed to be fixed as either a 9mm or .45 pistol, plus the standard canteen, rope, crowbar, knife, match, and hand mirror.

I've had a couple of characters start with a chainsaw. And it always comes with a lot of 9mm ammo as well. Weird but there you have it. Totally possible.

Well, you can see the stats and name of the first character above in my OP. At first I thought it might be an easter egg based on the name so I tried another character with that name and started out with a pistol, so that was a bust. Then later on I created another character, a female named Raven, with IQ 17 and 12-16 in everything else and she started with the chainsaw. So I really don't know what triggers it. Oh, and the chainsaw does not use the 9mm ammo. It just comes with it for some reason.

I do recall getting a chainsaw once 20 years ago, but I don't recall anything exact, but I think the stats were high.

Are you saying that the chainsaw replaced the pistol and that it wasn't an additional weapon?

How about what rooster number the characters were, was it always the 1st person you created or were there other characters already in your party?

I don't know how you generate characters with such good attributes... Every time I tried to create a char he wasn't perfect. I spent a bunch of time trying to get 18 IQ, but every time it is dropped out I got another attribute too low. I even began to think that InXile changed this generating mechanism to avoid "Supermen".

Also, I found one solution that recommended to sell items that default chars have in the nearest shop (at Hightpool) and generate new chars with items and sell again (yeah, that's cheating, I know ;)) I tried that being curious and this scheme doesn't work for now. :)

That's a common trick with old RPGs.

Speaking of cheating, CheatEngine (http://www.cheatengine.org/) works well with Wasteland. I've used it to do things like limiting the number of monsters per encounter to 1, and keeping my party at max health during combat. The only problem is that the memory addresses change on every run of the game, and I don't know CheatEngine well enough to build an auto-adapting cheat table (I should learn how to do that).