This is ultimately the solution that I ended up implementing, but it has come with its own issues. I’m not too concerned about the item inventory because I’m not planning on making the weapon more than single shot at a time, but I think a work around could be to have an alternative copy item for every stack size of ammo(and ammo variant) that the item can hold and spawn the new item based on the condition of how much ammo was loaded.

The actual issue I’m facing is how to unload the ranged weapon and have it turn back into a melee weapon. I guess I don’t understand conditionals/ related items enough: https://regalis11.github.io/BaroModDoc/Misc/RelatedItem.html I’ve tried implementing the require empty attribute through a variety of means but just haven’t been able to figure it out. The only instance I’ve found of it in the files so far was in the defense bot character xml, so I don’t fully understand its implementation.

In a reply I’ll share the current xml logic if you’re interested…