is there a way to increase bandit spawns?

also a script to clear all loot? I find stuffing cans into corpses to be way too time consuming and immersion-breaking.

I don't know how to do that. The spawn rates seem reasonable to me though. It used to be they were spawning far too quickly in the earlier versions.

Loot cycling is how you get it done. I have a console command written that does it now, but before that, I did the following: Lure a zed to the building you are looting and kill it. Your new buddy -- let's call him Lenny -- is going to be the receptacle for all the junk you want to cycle. Pick everything up and deposit it on Lenny's corpse. Lenny will hold the junk a while until he despawns. This way, you don't leave unsightly piles of junk all over the map. With the loot spawns clear, more things will spawn the next time you are nearby.

Nowadays, I use a console command to wipe everything. Get stra_debug2.pbo and put it in the @DayZ folder wherever your ArmA2 OA application lives. This console is quite handy and makes for a fun learning tool as well. Once you have the console working put something like this in an exec line:

{deleteVehicle _x} forEach nearestObjects [position player,["WeaponHolder","WeaponHolderBase"],20];

This deletes loot on the ground for 20 meters from the center of the building you are nearest to. If you want to mark the building as having never been looted, you can execute the following:

nearestBuilding player setVariable["looted",0,true];

This last line you will find particularly useful if you change the time the wrong way or have some other bug that breaks the loot spawns. Use the scripts to grind an area, or don't, your game, play it your way. I find that it gets pretty close to killing immersion, but not quite. It's possible to be more sophisticated about which loot to delete, but I have never really needed it. Hope this helps!

Found this in a blog post on one of the early versions of the mod, if it still works I'll probably use it. I'm not particularly worried about cheating because I understand how the DayZ loot spawn system works and I'd use it in a very similar fashion, no loot grinding, I wouldn't even reset until I'd cleared a different town first.