u/Disastrous-Ad-7035

Hey everyone, longtime player of TLD here, on and off since it first came to steam in early access. I've been thinking of stepping into the modding scene and I wanted to ask for people's experiences with it first? Mainly in terms of stability - how often do you experience crashes, save file corruptions, bugs & glitches, ect.
For the sake of simplicity, I'll restrict it to just TLDmods.net, which seems to be the main place people go for mods, and from the outside appears to be well-managed and curated.

I have a decent amount of modding experience (using, not creating) from literal thousands of hours on Skyrim, so I know what modding can do to your game if done poorly. I have a longstanding survival run that I've invested many hours into and am hesitant to start modding if people report frequent crashes and file corruptions and the like.

So what has everyone's experiences with it been like?

I'm on my 347 day run and I just noticed that my main rifle, the Curator's rifle, which I had hung up on this rack has completely vanished. It's not in my inventory, I've checked every single container here, I've moved my furniture around in safehouse customization to see if it got glitched behind something. Nothing. It's just gone.
Does anyone have any idea what happened, and if there's anything I can do about it? It was my favorite rifle because Vauhn's never spawned for me (I've checked every spot like 5 times) and I haven't found Barb's yet either. Is there any way to like, cheat myself one? Mess with the game files? I'm no programmer so I assume the answer is no... I'm just so upset that I've lost this rifle that's seen me through like 200 days, every region, all the tales, and all of Sutherland's quests, to some random glitch.