I agree about the “danger” of using them. I made a few mods to change up how (some) explosives feel/work with plans to make them all more dangerous, but I didn’t end up doing them all (maybe someday I’ll upload more of them)
Reasoning: I feel the game explosives are almost too easy to use. They easily hurt/kill zeds but generally they lose no danger “to you” unless you make a mistake and step on a mine or throw a grenade too close to yourself. I also feel explosives should be a “higher skill weapon” or “tool” vs standard weapons. Like, if you’re going to craft and make explosives, you need to be really careful and can’t toss them around like water balloons.
anyway, I found that upping explosive block damage (a lot) and radius (a bit) and the “how far you can throw/launch” them (big booms = harder to throw far and/or launch) while also increasing “entity damage radius” to be a few more blocks than block damage made them feel really dangerous to use, and even though I could craft a ton of them if I wanted, suddenly the increased danger of using them made me want to only have a few on hand, and only used in very special situations, because if you were sloppy with them, you died.
additionally, the (very much) increased block damage meant if you wants to use them for horde nights (or just clearing POIs) you ran a real danger of destroying your base or the poi (and maybe your traps/kill corridors/generators/etc) and all the ground around it (big holes).
anyway, I played around with every explosive in the game and felt that actually making them more powerful (and scaling up ingredients as much as made sense) seemed to work better than needing them.
ita very pleasant to take out a big chunk of a POi with a rocket launcher, or by shooting barrels from far away... and to be really careful to not accidentally shoot one
however, since people are jerks/trolls I have heard that stuff like this will only work on non public servers, due to the massive block damage, which is why I believe TFP makes them not do much block damage by default, and probably PvP/multiplayer is why they work the way they do with damage, etc. and also “so everyone can use them” as mentioned above.
also: really high block damage and radius usually results in severe game lag. I maintain a “holy hand grenade” mod that had like 30+ block radius and leaves a hole so large you can see it like a star shaped crack in the earth if you fly over it. But I had to tone it down as people were legit complaining about the lag. I think it’s 20-23? Blocks radius now, which has some lag still but is somewhat useable.