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I don't see what the big issue is. From what I can gather the cumulative effect *might* reach a boiling point with this title. With several major titles in rapid succession being half-cooked, single-entity exclusivity for 6 months to a year and a series of WTF'ery across the aforementioned major titles game consumers might finally reach the point of "enough is enough!". Dollars will ultimately tell the tale.
Steam/Valve has yet to pick up the gauntlet they've been wuss-slapped with by Epic. One hopes that GoG and Steam take solid note of Epic's significantly reduced cut (12% compared to Steam's 30%). One also hopes that they don't also emulate Epic's atrocious attitude towards their customers in the process.
What about Trail of Cthulhu? Ever tried one of those adventures? Are they good? I was having a look at the Book of Unremitting Horror and it was... horrifying. Never heard of it until your post. I'll meander over and take a look.
Call of Cthulhu has a vast body of generally excellent "adventures" from which to draw upon. Many of their best scenarios can be played in one or two sessions. For anyone new to the BRP/CoC mechanics the introductory "adventures" do the job just fine. Now, for a CoC-inspired Pathfinder campaign ... I'd probably go with one of The Mountains of Madness (if you can find it), Horror on the Orient Express (for Steampunk) or Masks of Nyarlathotep. Horror on the Orient Express was overhauled to the current CoC rules set during its Kickstarter and came with several "flashback" scenes to use with their "pre-modern variants". Edit: part of what makes Call of Cthulhu sessions so terrifying even for hardened Pathfinder/3e veterans is that many of the 'standard' monsters do not play by the typical FRPG rules. Zombies are excellent bullet sponges - head shots do the job, otherwise damage requires dismemberment and/or incineration, using one example. Other entities are nearly indifferent to automatic weapons fire while a flamethrower works just fine. If you're adapting CoC material to your game my suggestion is to leave as many of these defenses intact as possible. As far as top horror scenario goes ... well, there's a side scene in Horror on the Orient Express when things go south for the player characters, they go south quickly. This scene features a hidden timer that doesn't start without occupying at least one character and a horde of utterly lethal monsters (provided they pull off their maneuvers) has had more than one cocky player's dice bags quaking in fear.
After a surprising number of hours ... I'm done. ALL OF IT, just in time for my best friend's bachelor party this weekend and wedding in about a month from now. Yay! Creation Club content:
Modded quest additions:
Nutshell: Did the mopping up of all of the side quests, including using a mod to nab all of the settlements. Built said settlements to something acceptable (self-sufficient with artillery as appropriate to the build zone). Did Goodneighbor, got Kent Connolly out from under Sinjin's "attentions", did the Silver Shroud bit for a little while. Went to Far Harbor ... I have mixed feelings about this place. I went with my character slowly losing her mind, becoming "the Daughter of Atom" slowly but surely. Unfortunately for the Commonwealth and Acadian CoA they are all heretics. In her mind the true Children of Atom are ... kittehs. So the Children entered paradise via nuclear Division. DiMA took his overdue dirt nap and the scrubs of Far Harbor got their happy places. Returned, went to Park/Vault 114, dug out Nick, did the main quest until it came time to hit up Parsons Asylum and free Valkyrie in the process. Of all of the companions, including those added by the above mods, she is hands down my favorite. I actually like her, mental problems and all. In the end I managed to get all of the factions to get along, more or less, excepting the Institute. Being freed from Vault 111 as a lab rat cemented that her son was truly lost to her 60 years prior to emerging from Vault 111. The reactor of the Institute's main lair beneath the ruins of CIT featured an unusual metallurgy, laced with substances that emitted a peculiar pattern of theta radiation. Over the following week everyone in the Commonwealth and Nuka-World became zombies, except Our Heroine, Valkyrie and Dogmeat. Those that didn't become zombies were eaten by those that did. After 'euthanizing' countless hordes of the hungry almost-dead Mary Sue V. is 311th level. Wearing the "Black Devil" with Valkyrie kitted out in the Hellfire suit they wander into the cinematic sunset. Dogmeat sadly was devoured by a pack of chameleon uber-deathclaws. Little survives in the Commonwealth of 2290...
Captain Marvel 2 as a 2+ hour telling of her inevitably victorious battles in space ... I agree, slather on the handwavium, say she won - while leaving room for finer grained detail down the line if required - and let's see her lay waste to some scumbags. A whole lot of scumbags.
CCP (best known for EvE Online) sat on that IP for years. It's good to see Paradox is doing something with it.
They have ample, recent, Chinese-sourced materials to draw upon for this character. One example that comes to mind is Ip Man. Yes, the founder of Wing Chun. Tutor of Bruce Lee as arguably the best-known of his numerous students. Throw in a dash of Taoist folklore and general badassery and they're cooking with some serious gas.
" Bad way to go. "
Interesting twists in Nuka-World: I went with my usual "massacre the scumbags" here. It is more than a little infuriating that you have to commit at least 1 act of murder to wipe them out, with the 'murder' count under the Crimes part of one Stats tab in your Pip-Boy easily going much higher during the game if one is not extraordinarily careful. This time, finally, I've (so far) been able to stick to one (1) murder for a playthrough. Porter Gage, so far as I can determine, has to be murdered to complete the "good" playthrough for Nuka-World. The Hubologists present the largest divergence during playthroughs that I've personally encountered in Nuka-World. The first few times one rescues their recruiter, gets them to the UFO, plug in 3 fusion cores and *voila*, instant access given a vast supply of caps and radiation protection/curatives a massive boost to INT for several days. My last playthrough I plugged in 4 fusion cores, resulting in the Hubologists' becoming jelly and a half-dozen murders added to my tab. This time their recruiter got himself dismembered by radscorpions long before I got within firing range with anything non-explosive. Encountering the Hubologists later they opened fire on me without provocation. At least this time they weren't murders. I will miss that +32 INT boost though ... The Classic 10mm and Tunnel Snakes make a return in a short-n-sweet side quest in the subway station just SW of Hangman's Alley. 7 outfits, 3 generic "Classic" 10mm's and a unique 10mm are now in my inventory. I can have a 'gang of 7' sporting some pretty bad-ass looking Tunnel Snakes swag. It matches up well with patrolman glasses and a cowboy hat.
How's this one going for you, Greylurker? They just updated the game again, including updates to some of the Creation Club content in addition to adding a promising new home-workshop.
Another important question...Did goose survived the snap? Flerken appear to be capable of (messy) inter-dimensional travel, in addition to Spoiler: Another interesting tidbit is that they are capable of laying as many as 117 eggs (further elaboration on how they reproduce was not quickly found).
internalized transplanar storage and horrifying tentacles that can snatch grown humanoids within them to become Sarlacc kibble. MY guess is that flerken are extremely long-lived creatures able to sense certain kinds of disturbances of the 'super' or 'para' variety in much the same way that IRL some critters are aware of a coming storm. Perhaps Goose 'shifts' to safety moments before the Snappening...
I fully expect Goose will be in Endgame. And some explanation will be given eventually for where he's been since Captain Marvel.The first time we see Ant-Man, he will come riding in on Goose. Goose is the driver. ;)
Must have Flerkins hoovering up people as fast as they can to save them** spoiler omitted **** spoiler omitted ** continued speculation: I don't think that will be the case largely due to Dr. Strange (MCU) somewhat subtly reinforcing earlier indicators. In there items are imbued with power/magic too great for people to sustain, no small amount of which are likely to have been directly imbued with the green Time Stone. Thinking that this same principle applies to everything similarly imbued via the work of the individual Infinity Stones. Scarlet Witch's powers do not share any aesthetics in common with Vision's yellow 'third eye' stone. I think she is sure to continue beyond Avengers: End Game. Vision I still suspect received his dirt nap in no small part due to 'his' stone being plonked into his noggin. Not even Thanos implanted the stones into himself. He wore all of them on his left hand, true, in a custom-made gauntlet that served not only to focus their power while simultaneously shielding himself from at least a certain amount of backlash or feedback.
Oh hoh, this looks very very shiny ladies and gentlecritters: F4 New Vegas. One hopes that they'll work with the other team working on Fallout 3 rebuilt via Fallout 4's engine to re-create the awesomeness of a Tale of Two Wastelands. I'd prefer a Tale of Three Wastelands - from Commonwealth to Capitol to the Mojave myself. Takes no more than a year or two to deal with the first, a few months for the second and take your sweet Sasparilla-swillin' time in the new and improved Mojave. Also, the things we do for an ice-cold Nuka-Cola in that scorching heat. Rawr!
Farkin' Kris Kringle on a cracker. My system really can't handle elaborate settlements as I've found out once more the hard way after 12 days and an absurd number of hours. I suspect that this is why I stopped playing FO4 the first time around in early 2016. So the eighty-millionth reboot with an eye towards simply completing the entirety of the main game w/ DLCs (all six of them) plus the four main quest mods that interconnect with them. Vaults 81 and 88 remain optional as the concept of attempting to hand-build Vault 88 seems likely to induce seizures in my rig. I'll be cutting out all non-Creation Club content - mostly due to the onerousness of manually chopping it out without borking the rest of the game - excepting the relatively small number of mods that I have been enjoying these past several months. Sadly this does put the axe to the modded player homes I've become quite fond of. Quite a few of them. If your rig can handle the nearly 200 plug-in roster I was attempting to run you'll have an AWESOME game. Mine will be acceptable. Starting over after 2,696 hours played ... ugh. 103 mods with 136 plugins (35 of which are not optional thanks to Creation Club content). Half or less of the previous load stress ... let's see if this does the trick for once.
Well, if you like, they could have ruined another awesome X-Men story in addition to the Phoenix Saga... No? Ruining one story is enough? "Move along. Move along. These are not the stories you are looking for."
Alamo started up "Taco Tuesdays" aimed at the Tuesdays after initial release. $8 tickets plus, y'know, tacos, for Captain Marvel is something I'm trying to talk Missus Turin into going to see this coming Tuesday.
Pretty sure no one wants to read the daily trivium unless I read otherwise. I'll pick back up where I left off (heading to Goodneighbor) in a week or two.
Day 1 - northern side of Misty Lake cleared as far east as the mirelurk nests, as far west as the odd tangle of shrubbery in the far NW part of the map, as far south as the root cellar. Grabbed prototype sentry bot control tape, hot rod magazine, flamer fuel, valuable junk, the fat man and mini-nuke from the robot junkyard. Spent the night in the SH root cellar. Day 2 - swept around Sanctuary Hills to the northernmost outskirts of Concord while deliberately avoiding both the truck stop and NOT prompting via proximity the Raiders in Concord to start pew-pew'ing Preston. Packled the skeeters slurping on the brahmin, back up to the bridge into SH before crossing in front of it heading west. Snagged drifter outfit and the stuff in the duffle bag. Packle the bugs and Raiders along the way while continuing to gather loot and plants up to and around the ranger cabin. Spent the night in the trailer on the outer edge of the Abernathe's property. Day 3 - swept the remainder of the NW area down to the radioactive junkyard around the shoreline, cleared out Wicked Shipping, the hilltop encounter (Raiders this time) then across the bridge (a Mr. Gutsy is enforcing a curfew at the burned out tractor-trailer) to clear out, claim and spend the night at Sunshine Tidings Co-op. Bonus scumbags at the junk shack on stilts on the SW side. Got the Hester Electronics location from Goodfeels' maintenance routine before shutting him down. Hopefully he'll stay put, although I suspect the bug that disables him upon claiming the workshop will eat him.
Be careful of those additional entry/egress points. Settlers and invaders have a spectacularly difficult time pathing in/through Vault 88 when there is more than one entrance opened up to the outside/above ground. To the point that you'll spend inordinate amounts of time tracking the turds down in the bowels of the place ... Just a thought.
I finally have to admit defeat after attempting to tweak things for the past week. My PC cannot handle the city plans for Sim Settlements. They're simply too big graphically speaking for my system to process properly. I wouldn't recommend using the city plans on a PS4 at all. I'll start over as the hours spent ripping out the dozen or so existing settlement plans would be a frustrating use of playing time. Until I get caught up to where this leaves off more or less. Having toed the waters for Fusion City and Outcasts and Remnants I've found that you have to have attained certain progress points either in the main quest or with the Railroad to unlock them. On the upside they look to be in the range of 'really good' to 'awesome' even from what I could see of them.
Pet peeve: the game counts as "murders" dispatching Nisha, Gage and the five idiot hubologists who did NOT provide clear instructions that the fourth power core would prove fatal. *le sigh*
Implemented a "Kill XP" mod at 45th level which reduces XP earned to 1% of normal. Back of napkin math says if I'm ~25% of the way to 54th level that it would equate to normal progression of 292nd level. FO4 at much above the 60th-75th level range gets stupid as far as the scumbags' and critters' health pools. I feel that the sweet spot as far as scumbags/critters are concerned is 45th-60th level. I'm maybe a third of the way through Nuka-World's content putting me very very close to hitting 46th level. Had I not 'killed' my xp gain, I'd already be 105th level with every probability of hitting 110th by the time I clean the entire complex out.
She's mature enough to handle the harsh language I take it? 'cause there is a lot of harsh language ...
My daughter, who goes by Crookshanks on the boards, has started playing Fallout 4, she's still learning but she successfully gunned down the Deathclaw with her minigun her first try, so good for her! Nicely done, Crookshanks! On my first try the deathclaw ate my face, power armor and all. ;)
Preliminary testing of Boston Natural Surroundings (BNS) is promising. I chose the "green" option plus the optional overhauls of Diamond City and Nuka-World. Far Harbor is included in each of the three main 'packages' the mod author has created. The environment looks like a happy medium between post-atomic war regrowth and Fallout's "preservative effect". There is a lot more green and quite a few more assorted shrubberies, trees and so forth in the western part of the Commonwealth. So far I've not noticed any performance impacts. If anything it breathes some new life into the game with the extra foliage. The "old familiar" places are sometimes significantly changed, altering sight lines and so on. All in all it makes the game more interesting and certainly a lot "easier on the eyes" purely from an environmental perspective.
Neat stuff: syringer legendary (poisoner's) dropped via the ubiquitous almighty legendary glowing radroaches. The mod I'm using for perks adds in an effective poison syringe. Result: a syringer actually worth using. Bonus points for recon scope sniping mayhem and VATS making using it effective. Poison obviously doesn't work on everything ... but it works on more things than I was aware of. Wasted a deathclaw with one dart. Beautiful man, just, beautiful.
I'd consider this mod fairly seriously for changing weather by season in your game: Fallout 4 Seasons Project. From the look of it you manually enable one season at a time, leaving/setting the other 3 seasons as disabled mods in your mod manager. It appears to have been designed to work this way. It is a very old mod that predates the Creation Kit but it is relatively recently supported, updated this past October with the mod's custodian replying and updating as recently as December 2018. The mod that looks like it is being kept up with that makes the game environment pretty is Boston Natural Surroundings. This mod is quite actively updated, most recently in the 3rd week of January 2019 or thereabouts. Edit: I'm just starting a new playthrough, so plugging in BNS shouldn't be a big deal. I'll let you know what I think of it over the next few days.
DQ, what kind of vegetation mod are you looking for - there are a fair number of them. Are you looking for just making the grasses, shrubs etc green instead of permanently brown, or ?
I've got to hang up the convenience factor of Sim Settlements: Conqueror. It has been too buggy for words, which is a damned shame. It also means starting over which is uncharacteristic of the Sim Settlements mods which can otherwise be readily installed / uninstalled with little or no problems. So, after 2,308 hours according to Steam it is time for ... a clean break in this journal. Bastiches.
I'd not looked into "greening" mods at all largely due to system strain considerations. Logically one could infer - such as post-evacuation Chernobyl in our timeline - that the flora would be rampant. So much so that very little in the way of structures would have survived. This leads me to infer that something about Fallout's atomic weapons have a "preservative" effect which also imparts pseudo-immortality to super-mutants, ghouls, zombies and who knows what else. The tricky part is not killing your system in the process. I've been more concerned about not choking my PC to death in Boston. Disabling the HD graphics pack among others (including custom.ini settings as recommended by the Sim Settlements folks) has helped alleviate the suffering quite a bit for me. Missile turrets ... is a point I'd rather forgotten as I generally only deploy them on high-altitude platforms that are 3+ stories above ground level. Explosive AoE damage is nasty business (especially with the explosives mods I have running - damn near blew myself into chunky salsa in Hubris Comics very recently thanks to getting sloppy with fragmentation grenades)! What I've found is that any scrapping mods you look at are to be examined very closely. Anything that touches the game's precombined meshes - which you will see noted in comments PDQ - is a HUGE no-no. You're better off artificially expanding the settlement build limit. There are a few "cleaner smoother" settlement mods out there that you might want to examine for personal use. Egret Tours Marina has promise with its size and large amounts of water for purification. Its location is why I don't bother with it too much when manually building as Somerville Place is my go-to of the vanilla settlements for exploration forays into the Glowing Sea, Vault 95 and that general vicinity south and west of Gunner Plaza. As a water farm, however, Egret Tours is difficult to beat. If memory serves it wasn't too difficult to get up and running as compared to the settlements that require significant vertical integration such as Hangman's Alley, Jamaica Plains and Murkwater. Gods above and below I hate Murkwater. Now, if there was a ferry option from Egret to Somerville ... There is a "boat home short quest mod" of sorts that provides a rather immersive option for Survival enthusiasts that connects the waterside settlements, including at least one point in Far Harbor if not more, as a fast travel option. This would almost be worth it if I was playing on Survival. Although I'd also consider the jeep mod in conjunction with or as a replacement for it. Either the jeep or the motorcycle-as-fast-travel mod, especially if one is going with a Captain America modded game (which I am seriously looking into as they got the shield to work based on the power fist which looks pretty awesome). Add in a few select weapon mods for that WW2 / early Cold War vibe and it's starting to cook with some gas.
Elder Scrolls 6 unfortunately is running on the same Gamebryo/Creation Engine that everything else is ... As far as favorite settlement locations ... it depends. I'll answer from the perspective of manual settlement construction (whether or not one incorporates the build-your-own goodies from the Sim Settlements mods). Of the 29 Commonwealth settlements I've found that Sunshine Tidings, Starlight Drive-In, Hangman's Alley, Somerville Place, Jamaica Plain, Spectacle Island, the Castle, Nordhagen Beach, County Crossing, Kingsport Lighthouse, Greentop Nursery and Covenant are overall the most useful for how I play the game. They're close to enough stuff to do the job all game long. Spectacle Island is generally a completely optional settlement - if you want the other 28 settlements, save it for when you pal up to the Railroad. The RR should want Spectacle Island as a safehouse if the other settlements are all claimed. Spectacle Island can be a right PITA to scrap and build because of its terrain and fixtures/buildings that you're stuck with. The sheer size of the build zone and its not inconsequential supply line / settler travel issues are not minor.
Taffington is plagued by skeeters - or was the last time I tried building there. It didn't have a sufficient vertical height allowance to permit even a small missile tower to keep those accursed bugs from nomming on everyone and everything. Especially at higher character levels the missile turrets are the only thing that can swat them down fast enough to save more people than the bugs will slurp. IIRC that region doesn't spawn Mk VII HMG turrets (the explosive ones) - or if it can it's exceedingly rare - which are the only non-powered turrets capable of swiftly dispatching all of the nasties that fly at the higher character levels. The game assumes very early development of Sanctuary Hills and the Red Rocket Truck Stop. I prefer to save them for much later in the game once the other settlements are generating copious amounts of salvage that one's supply lines will bring to the quietest region of the Commonwealth. Regarding Kingsport Lighthouse ... you should be able to walk a few conduits up the side of the thing. It's no substitute for a properly working lighthouse beacon, so if a mod takes care of that AWESOME! I do like Kingsport as a location. I use the Coastal Cottage as a "Kingsport Lighthouse Annex" when building manually. Whatever Kingsport falls short on the Cottage can probably take up the slack. I take it you make - in terms of water and food - each settlement self-sufficient at a minimum?
You make a number of wonderful points, DQ. :) I threw a few ideas out there for consideration is all. Bethesda seems to have become an unpleasant combination of arrogant and complacent. De-bugging should IMO always be an in-house activity regardless of studio/developer. I must have missed quite a bit on the state of FO76. It's gotten worse from the sound of things ... egads, that takes some doing. It is possible that Bethesda will learn ... but the only way they'll learn in the near term is if they get whacked in the wallet. Hard. :(
It finally dawned on me as to what is arguably my biggest pet peeve about Fallout 4's "Survival" mode. Which is to say that it removes the locational compass indicators. The player's character is a pre-War inhabitant. They should have a pretty good idea of most of the landmarks in pre-Bomb Boston. Most of the locations didn't move. Almost all of them were repurposed. What Survival does is greatly shrink down the distance at which one becomes aware of the locations. This makes sense for about a fourth of the locations in the Commonwealth. Most of them should be on your map out of the vault. Auto-magically learning were almost all of the things are requiring a perk is ... silly. There is at least one mod that makes this information immersively acquired via finding one of a few maps in-game at locations of your choosing upon installing the mod. I didn't grab the mod since I'm using the Commonwealth Express Courier Stations mod which I believe has the functional equivalent of said map incorporated into it, hopefully piecemeal across all eight stations. My character should know where most of the locations are (especially the ones that are pre-Bomb). Especially the attorney, whom have notoriously excellent memories as a general rule of thumb. The combat vet's memory isn't any slouch either - if anything, they should have kept the bad guy indicator or this indicator should be acquired at Awareness 2. Add in the bolted-on feel of the Survival mechanics in general ... makes me use other mods to simulate some elements of a survival game (Wasteland Wound Care) and some personal discipline during game play (maintain a running average of 7 hours's sleep per day to keep up that Well-Rested XP bonus perk) and I get 'close enough'. "It just works." :P
Well ... you could nab the Sim Settlements 3-in-1 which includes Rise of the Commonwealth which is what has what they call 'city plans'. There is at least one pre-done plan for Vault 88. Build the planner's desk, assign a minion to the desk and the vault's plan will literally build itself. At first it's a tear-down and basic build. Over time you contribute junk (for the plan's upgrades), spare food and water (because they're not always smart about keeping their food and water up to spec) and crappy armor & weapons (improving settlement defense rating) to the place. This is in addition to supplying armor and weaponry to your settlers directly via trading. It takes a fair bit of in-game time and quite a bit of junk to upgrade, especially on the larger city plans. I like using this approach especially for the larger or more onerous settlements simply because it lets me decide how complex I want the SS system to be and I use it to give the few companions I don't return to their actual homes something VERY productive to do. After my first playthrough I came to the decision to *always* return certain companions to their homes. Strong is someone that my characters would shoot in the face were it possible. Valentine and Piper have several reasons each to stay in Diamond City. Hancock should always return to Goodneighbor - he is after all their Mayor, not some vault dweller's sidekick. Until the later elements of his story Danse gets returned either to the police station in Cambridge (pre-Kellogg) or to the Prydwyn (post-Kellogg). This leaves Cait, Curie, Deacon and Macready as the feasibly 'free and clear' vanilla companions. Macready - once you get what he needs - should honestly either disappear from the game altogether (get the meds to his son and split to get away from the Gunners nagging his tail) or bring his son to the safest settlement you have (Sanctuary). Codsworth and Dogmeat are ... Codsworth and Dogmeat. Useful at whichever place you call home. Fast Travel is Your Friend. Ada is awesome, but I have specific plans for her every playthrough. Gage is another Raider scumbag - he dies last after his visions of Raider glory go down in flames. I think that the settlement that is very close to the Atom Cats whose name I cannot remember at this moment was at least part of the reason the Atom Cats were left to languish. "Meh, there's that place right there, it just works." The BoS had a lot of 'cut content' that, to my current understanding, is addressed in Project Valkyrie and probably other mods as well. The game comes with all of this cut content - including the voice files - that wasn't implemented. Modders have stepped in to fix this neglect. If my understanding is accurate with the few promising mods out there that are up-to-date, we can spare the Commonwealth from the glorified brigands that the vanilla BoS is under Maxson's leadership. I ponied up hard-earned monies to pre-order FO76 and played for one day (release day) after the few hours of "B.E.T.A." that shelling out 60 bucks got me. I have several issues with that game, mostly lore-based. There shouldn't be any elements involving either the Brotherhood of Steel nor Super-mutants. The game's supposed principle is Reclamation. We don't reclaim a thing. Nothing is built that has any permanence ... which rather defeats the nominal primary principle of the game itself which is reclaiming Appalachia from the monsters. They're whining about bobby pins .. um, well, since this is a multi-player game, get rid of the hacking and lockpicking mini-games and the attendant bobby pins. You have the perks required ... or you don't. Frankly I'm hoping that they retool it for a proper reclaiming and exploration playthrough. Most likely that won't happen either ever, or only on a modded game.
I'm 50-60 hours into this new playthrough and so far everything seems stable and fun. About 75% of this time has been spent building Spectacle Island. List o' Mods in no particular order:
UFO4P and the other mods mentioned above. 10mm SMG - I'm not a fan of the bukly Colt N99 10mm pistol so this gives me something to use 10mm ammo with. Colt M1911A1 of Freedom - sadly the unique is in the Museum of Freedom which means I won't find it until I'm down to the latter third of this game in all likelihood. HCP FO4 Armor n Clothing Retextures AIO (All-in-One) - this really livens up the armor, clothes and outfits in the game. Atom Girl Outfit and Atom Girl fishnet weave option - I tend to like this outfit on the off chance I ever get around to figuring out how to make my character 'take' a unique body file and adapt her armor/outfits/etc to that 'set'. The nuka-bear backpack tickles my fancy. The eye candy aspect in 3rd-person is ... a bonus. :P Chinese Stealth Suit and CSS Weave w/ Fixes adds a unique Chinese stealth suit to the game aboard the Yangtze. MUCH better than the lame one on the Creation Club. Intended to be a tertiary armor set in this playthrough. Basement Living and Basement Living Picket Fences Patch - the combination provides 2 'basements' (tiny player homes that attach to an owned settlement and connect to that settlement's workbench stores for crafting) per issue of Picket Fences you acquire in-game. In this playthrough these will give me small personal spaces within which to sleep, bathe, poo, craft and store stuff in about 1/4 of the total number of settlements. Battery Generator adds a 1 power output fuse box at a mats cost equal to what you should get from scrapping the improvised batteries found adjacent to many 'wasteland' crafting stations. Better Explosives for making things go BOOM. This can include yourself. Better Homing Beacons fixes the Yangtze's tac-nuke missiles so that they're much more useful. Better Junk Fences and Better Shack Bridges are nice bits of settlement construction improvements. I'll need them for the massive project that Spectacle Island will become. Better Gold Bars for the bling. Gold bars weigh almost 25 pounds and have 400 units of gold scrap built into them. Adds a nasty fight in the particular bank where the gold bars, coins, skulls and miscellaneous neat goodies can be found in Boston. It's a shame that this isn't compatible with another metal bars mod though, as the latter ruined this mod's lovely gold textures and detail work for its bars. Boston FPS Fix AIO - so far, so good. It's definitely been helping as far as I can tell. CBBE and Bodyslide as they are required for the previously mentioned quest mods. VIS-G Item Sorting and copious compatibility patch-mods, including Creation Club content patches. Campsite Simple Wasteland Camping, for those must-stay-out-in-the-field trips. This mod's kits can handle a dog and one companion in terms of tent and bedding capacities. Caravan Shotgun - the classic over-under double-barreled shotgun. The Widow - unique double-barreled shotgun found on the perimeter of Concord. In some ways the late acquisition during this playthrough will probably work out well as this unique weapon packs a Hell of a wallop. I use flechette rounds in it for maximum carnage. Commonwealth Buff-et adds a lot of neat goodies to the culinary facets of the game, including at least 2 new booze-themed crafting stations (a bar and a cocktail table) plus a gaggle of neat new recipes. Commonwealth Express Courier Stations provide player homes across the main map that will permit me to extend how long I can play without having to acquire any settlements asides from Spectacle Island. Creative Perks retools the perks in a KISS manner that is better suited to a no-Power-Armor playthrough. The mod's author is a fan of Survival which makes some of the revisions of little or no value to me. Nonetheless this is my favorite perk overhaul mod. Custom SPECIAL lets you pick from I think 4 different 'pools' of starting SPECIAL ranging from all-1's to all-10's. There are 2 or 3 settings in between. Female Vats Smack-talk and Flirty Commonwealth (set to a female PC) for a bit more talking for the not-insignificant amount of time Valkyrie will be spending in the company of ... no one. Graf's Assaultron Armor provides one of the more aesthetically appealing piecemeal armor mods in the game that aren't slooty or ... well, stupid-looking (like much of the vanilla armor is). Acquisition is via assaultron corpses, so it'll take a dozen or so assaultron 'victims' to provide a full set of armor for 1 person. Grenade Expansion Pack 2 is effectively an AIO provider of many things grenade, as previously mentioned much earlier in this thread, including remote-detonation kaboom, an M-79 grenade launcher and of course .. throwing knives! Have a Beer and Smokeable Cigars Cigarettes etc. Her world was nuked, her hubby murdered and her only child kidnapped. She's damned good and well going to have 1 or 2 smokes a day and an ice cold beer now and then, dammit. I get to watch her do it. Survival games get an autosave option that doesn't involve a gross sleeping bag or disgusting gore-soaked mattress in an alley or worse. Immortal Cats because reason. LAER adds an electro-rifle to the game with an option to be able to build robots and turrets of same. I've elected to not add them to the level looting lists. Lever-Action Rifle Customization for teh prettez. LC-1 Laser Carbine adds a non-toaster laser to the Institute's arsenal. It is not a replacer per se, especially early on. Lasers Have No Recoil Immersive Scrapping and Insignificant Object Remover Locksmith so I can keep my stuff secured. M1 Garand - shouldn't be on the scumbags' level loot lists. I'll have to make one or find one of the uniques. Might be found now and then as a boss' weapon. Portable Folding Chair - sadly the author never got around to figuring out how to make it into both a chair and a melee weapon as far as I am aware. Cambridge Bungalow Player Home - provides the obvious in an area where there aren't any other player homes to operate out of. Remove Ugly Flat Trash and Remove Generic Posters - further overall FPS improvements. Combined with several other mods and disabling the HD textures pack my FPS seems to have finally become tolerable in the busiest parts of Boston. See-Through Scopes in combination with Custom Optics is one of those subtle pairings that works really well together. No more black scope 'stuff'. Satellite Color World Map Combo - it uses a colorized satellite map of the Commonwealth, has FO4 guide markers on it and plays just fine with the Clear Black (screen) and Streamlined Pip-boy mods I use. Also adjusted the map's border to reflect what you actually go out into in-game. Add in using a console command of fov 90 90 and one is good to go. Simple Bird Remover and Simply Water for those bits of further FPS improvement. T4H Four Horsemen Skull Helms adds more neat bits to Raiders and might come into play for my character later if events push her into psychosis. The Fridge (Wireless) is a good replacer for Creative Clutter if the only thing you are wanting is a gorram fridge to chill your beer and soda-pop in. Traits and More Perks adds in (a) optional traits a la FO3 and FO:NV; and (b) perks you have to both qualify for and have specific materials to craft at a chem station. Turret Stands to Turrets puts those awesome Coventry turret stands into your turrets sub-menu at your settlements. WM Heavy Machinegun adds a Browning M2 HMG to the game. M60 LMG adds the M-60 LMG plus turret option to the game. Glock 86 Plasma Pistol is (sadly) not a replacer / not available in a replacer format. I'm mostly interested in acquiring the unique plasma weapons. One of them is quite silly but could prove ... amusing. Wanderer's Trench Coat is my primary armor for the first third+ of the game. Wasteland Wound Care drastically cuts down on the mounds o' stimpaks one can end up with during the game. You can now find all kinds of questionable pharmaceuticals in the wastelands. Bandages are more often your methods of post-combat health and limb damage recovery. Wooden Prefabs Extended adds a few more options to the prefabricated buildings - mostly by building them on stilts so you can have them not overrun by the Commonwealth's persistent shrubbery. We Are the Minutemen and Militarized Minutemen are cooperative mods that make the Minutemen not suck eggs, hopefully. FO4 War Tags I *hope* is LBPAC compatible. This mod offers some serious bad-assery in tailoring one's power armor appearances. Just because I won't be *using* power armor - unless something gives me no actual alternative - doesn't mean I don't want to make the unique suits I expect to collect look AWESOME. No Power Armor Strength Cap should, simply put, have power armor act as a +10 Strength boost instead of the fixed 11 Str derpiness. RPG-7 with weapon replacer mod to replace, including known uniques, all missile launchers with RPG-7's, including custom animations etc. Sim Settlements 3-in-1; Mega Year 1 AIO; Wasteland Ventures AIO; Ruined Homes and Gardens; Industrial City; Homestead; Industrial City Dispatcher Radio; IDEK's Logistics Station; MJC's AIO pack; Workshop Framework and Sim Settlements: Conqueror. This combination, despite Conqueror's very early development state, should result in all but 8 or so of the 34 settlements being independent communities all by themselves, including ALL of the Far Harbor settlements. Spectacle Island didn't have an option to build it as independent which is fine for my plans for making said island into a robot-run howitzer hotel plus a bonus basement hacienda. Specifically excluded settlements are the Castle, Sanctuary Hills, Red Rocket Truck Stop, Coventry, Vault 88, Boston Airport, the Nuka-World Red Rocket and by manual removal Egret Tours Marina. Sim Settlements to date has never attempted to modify nor fielded a city plan for Home Plate. ETM had to be so removed as the Conqueror settlers would murder Phyllis Daily and hand the marina over to you by ... telegram, I guess. It takes hours for Conqueror to pre-build this many settlements in advance. You will want to make sure your system can keep the game running in 'idle' without logging you out (which Steam seems to like to do to me ... assuming that it is Steam and not the game itself doing it). As an aside the "industrial" Sim Settlement's stuff sprinkles scads of little goodies throughout the game. One of these are more than 50 beer recipes for your breweries. You can go into your minion's shops etc and poke around. There is another one that lets you build an Archimedes system as I understand it. And more is potentially out there in the world ... ;) Last but not least are this playthrough's quartet of content expansion/quest mods: Fusion City, Outcasts and Remnants, HotC and Project Valkyrie. So far Spectacle Island is coming along well, although I have to deal with Automatron to crew the howitzers. For now it has a barebones basement for me, a functioning mirelurk repulsion system and the beginnings of the infrastructure required for two batteries of howitzers. Well, to be clear, "barebones basement" has all necessary non-PA crafting, a bath tub, toilet and sink, a bed and a proper fridge. "Infrastructure" has been thorough. All howitzers are emplaced within fighting pits, two tall towers provide the intended basis for line-of-sight howitzer fire direction, six watch towers provide guard stations, a mixture of M-60 LMG, missile and Mk VII vanilla HMG turrets provide passive defense and the primary occupied area is completely enclosed with a gate facing the original generator-shipwreck. A back-up power fuse-box is attached to the anti-mirelurk emitter. The landing dock that is the default fast travel point has five more HMG turrets on Coventry platforms covering it. The aforementioned generator-shipwreck runs a string of streetlights and searchlights plus another quintet of HMG turrets stand guard there. A quonset hut sits atop a large warehouse-concrete foundation as the intended location wherein my primary robotics crafting station is meant to be located. Once I complete Automatron ADA will reside at Spectacle Island overseeing the robotic company that will operate all of the howitzers and guard towers.
Looks like a good mod. I'm not one for extra player homes, but I'm glad someone did SOMETHING at least with the location, if not the characters. :) Homes and settlements are different critters. Most homes are just a bolt-hole to grab some sleep, maybe cook some food and otherwise use as a base of operations in the home's vicinity. Some homes are full-kit wonders that you'll wonder how you could possibly build a settlement to come anywhere close. I did look further and much to my surprise there aren't many mods dealing with the Atom Cats beyond either making it another settlement or otherwise fixing up the place a little bit. Edit: there are 1 or 2 'alternate start' options theoretically available. Both of them are quite old, one pre-dates the Creation Kit.
A viable supplement to basing out of settlements are player homes. The Creation Club has at least 3 - of those three, only the Chester Condo is lore-based safe from external threats as far as I am aware. The other two are good to loot-n-scoot and serve as 'safe houses' for a quick night's rest. Of the mod-based ones there are quite a few. The ones I've used and would recommend are Commonwealth Express Courier Stations and the 'Better Homes and Bunkers' series (which ones to use depends upon your specific plans regarding their attached settlements). There are at least three player homes available via mods in Goodneighbor. Several address Home Plate - have fun sorting through them all! A mod I've only seen on Beth.net adds five player homes throughout the Commonwealth - it's well done and they use locations I don't believe anyone else does ... but I've not looked at it in two full months (see previous mentions of these homes). They're pretty well done and often chock full of nice loot. A downside to most player homes is that Survival difficulty has a nasty habit of not considering their beds 'clean'. Prepare your medicines accordingly. I find this particularly annoying as most such beds shouldn't be considered vermin-infested ... but they are, for whatever asinine reason. Not one Survival-oriented mod I'm aware of has come up with a 'delousing treatment' or the like to spritz the beds with so as to flag them accordingly. Basement Living adds 10 repurposed interior cells that most players will recognize upon entry. This mod's unique approach is that one builds their access doors in an existing controlled settlement. The intended use is to craft yourself an access door to a small player home in a vanilla settlement to hole up in during radstorms and the like. I would use this mod to add yourself a bolthole in the smaller or more out-of-the-way settlements for safely stashing yourself and some of your stuff.
Greylurker, a mod just for your current playthrough is Commonwealth Buff-et - forward to about 6 m. 30 sec. on the video - and note that it includes the ability to craft food items that satiate your Dark Craving (blood sausage, other items too I'm sure).
Just found this, DQ. ;)
Settlements are - as we all know - a massive time-sink. There are 34 'vanilla' settlements in a full-DLC game as I recall. It can take many hours to build each one, sometimes 100+ depending on how detailed and persnickety one is about how everything fits together. Fortunately there are solutions available via mods that attempt to address this black hole of a time sink that is the FO4 settlement system. In order of prior consideration: 1. Transfer Settlement Blueprints is the precursor to #2 (below). The concept is that someone builds a settlement then uses the mod to upload it into one of the TSB's 50 blueprint slots. One then shares it as a blueprint mod. When one acquires a settlement for which you have acquired a blueprint, you fire up TSB and apply the blueprint. The upload/deployment phase can take a long time depending on the settlement's object count. A huge place like Vault 88 I've seen blueprints with object counts of >3k and one I think has a 10k object count. The tricky part with TSB is that many of the blueprints break pre-combined meshes which is a HUGE no-no. There was one set of 34 that didn't do so which I was seriously eyeballing. Until I got to the F4SE requirement. I've downloaded it as it is required for a few things ... but to be blunt I'm leery about it since the last update was more than a year ago the last I looked. 2. Sim Settlements and its many expansions, specifically Rise of the Commonwealth and the new Conqueror mods. RotC features "city plans" - the same basic concept as TSB - that you assign a leader to manage for you while you kill things and take their stuff. There is at least one city plan for each settlement - usually 3+, often 5+, sometimes more - except Home Plate. In a nutshell this series of mods lets you eliminate varying quantities of playing time with building settlements. You can assign plots manually and build each settlement one 'lot' at a time if you so desire, plus build whatever else you like without using a city plan, or go hands-off and let the city plan and your minions do all of the work. Conqueror is brand new, but in a nutshell it's aimed at expanding a Raider-style playthrough. I like it for being able to pre-determine which of the non-Quest settlements already exist in-game, how well-developed they are, which city plan is used ... in short, it offers great promise. 3. Architect, currently a part of Horizon. It is in what I would consider to be a mid-Alpha state ... use it if you feel like it, but I'd rather not have this much minutiae to deal with.
As far as what mods I've found to be consistently remaining in my mods list: #1 is UFO4P (Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch) is a must-have, no exceptions. It fixes things that otherwise force you to reload or use console commands to deal with, which is super-annoying. Even after 3 years they've yet to catch all of the bugs, but they're steadily chipping away at them in their free time. #2 is Cheat Terminal. If nothing else this mod will get you unstuck, pull your companion to you when they get stuck and other useful tricks so that you can play on Survival and still be able to fix the stupid that even 3 years of UFO4P have yet to fix / may not be able to fix. For this capability alone I cannot recommend this mod enough. One of its many features that I always use is a cheat that cuts the lockpicking mini-game down to "if you have the perk and a bobby-pin, you bypass the lock". I have come to loathe the lockpicking and hacking mini-games in Fallout 4 - and having earned Lockpicking and Hacking to the max, bobbleheads and magazines for both plus companion perks pertaining to same a half-dozen-plus times over ... screw that. After 2100+ hours I want my game time to be more productive. #3 is DEF UI and its accompanying inventory tagging system, including options for the three popular such mods: VIS_G, Bhaal's and Horizon. Asides from Quest mods that can't be bothered to tag their own stuff so as to minimize inventory clutter this is pretty much a backbone mod for a bunch of other mods. #4 is AWKCR (Armor and Weapons Keywords Community Resource) is another backbone mod that anchors lots of other mods into a common reference framework built around the game engine's many keywords. This hasn't been updated since its 3.2 incarnation on Beth.Net IIRC - on the Nexus it's at or beyond version 8. #5 is Easy Hacking. As mentioned under Cheat Terminal above this is solely because I've more than earned the 'right' to bypass the Hacking mini-game down to a few seconds of precious in-game time. #6 is Everyone's War which makes either gender of your character a combat veteran. It's a small thing but it matters, especially given that the 'lore' for Fallout indicates that the ongoing 'hot war' with Communist China has been raging for a decade or more with casualties on both sides in the millions. I could elaborate on this at length, but who wants to read that? ;) #7 is D.E.C.A.Y., a recent addition I've come to value as it transforms the ambulatory leather sacks that are the vanilla feral ghouls into much more aesthetically appealing critters with missing bits, mold and more. Optional add-ons include removing their 'evasive dance' nonsense and reducing their loot. #8 is a pair of mods: Anyone Can Fill a Bottle! and Fast Filling Bottles. Lets me accumulate vast amounts of purified water without having to play on Survival to do it - and to do so quickly. #9 is the Extended Lore Project which adds notes and holotapes that help flesh out the backstories in the game quite a bit. #10 is Fort Strong - no BS which opens up the location to exploration and acquisition of the goodies without having to play nice with the BoS. I'll almost certainly enter this place long before I even go to Goodneighbor or Cambridge so this is a must-have mod for my playthrough. #11 is a pair of mods by GKX: Log Walls and Sandbag Fortifications that do what they say they do: add pointy-topped wood palisades and sandbag-based walls, trenches, firing pits and more to your settlement options. #12 is another pair of mods: Simple Artillery and 155mm Howitzers. The vanilla mortars burn an unnecessary amount of framerate/processing power for the animations that you won't see more than once or twice in all likelihood. In trade you get artillery that can cover the entire map of the Commonwealth. As I've stated before the howitzers are going onto Spectacle Island, crewed by robots, fortified inside of sandbag-based firing pits. With no food/water production and no requirements for beds/food/water for these robots that islet should remain unmolested by Raiders et al for the entire game. #13 is This is My Bed. Lets you build beds that don't count towards your settlement's bed count and thus aren't contaminated by filthy settlers. #14 is yet another pair of mods: Streamlined Pip-boy and Clean Black Pip-boy. The first one makes the pip-boy much smaller in 3rd person view while the second makes the screen crisp and easy to read. Compatible with most pip-boy skins unless you want to use a Pip-pad or another mod that alters the default pip-boy meshes. #15 is No respawing super-mutants. The in-game lore over and over again is that various agencies abduct people and transform them into super-mutants for whatever idiotic reason before unleashing them on the unsuspecting wastelands. In Fallout 4 the Institute is culpable for having done so but that program was wrecked by Virgil on his way out the door. The logical extension of this is that there are a finite number of super-mutants in the Commonwealth. This mod applies this logic. Once you kill 'em all off, there should be either no more whatsoever or very, very few of them via random encounters. #16 is Craftable SPECIAL books which does two things. First it removes the cap from reading You're SPECIAL! books improving your base SPECIAL 1 point without limit. Secondly is that it adds something worthwhile to acquiring the gobs of burned books and burned textbooks scattered throughout the game that respawn 2 or 3 times per in-game month. Every stack of 100 of either (not both - each has their own recipe) lets you make another such book. It usually takes me 2-3 months in-game to accumulate enough of these to make me a happy Sole Survivor. #17 is Brawl Bug Fix which fixes a bug that neither Bethesda nor the UFO4P team have ever addressed. Which is to say that on the rare occasions one gets into a brawl in FO4 (unlike Skyrim which has lots of brawls) that the game engine doesn't take anything you have that uses 'spells' to function and suddenly makes the brawl a lethal engagement, which is all sorts of bad. #18 is Barefoot Footstep 1.2. #19 is CWSS Redux v2 which adds indoor plumbing. Since the post-Bomb survivors have managed to keep fusion reactors, energy weapons and power armor more-or-less working how come not a soul has figured out something comparatively simple such as plumbing?! This used to drive me nuts until I came across this mod. Finally one can take hot showers and use the loo. #20 is Creative Clutter which I acquire for the simple purpose of building functioning refrigerators for much the same reason as #19. How come the only fridge in the entire Commonwealth is Buddy ... it makes no sense. Now I can build a variety of fridges in my settlements and not have to deal with super-slow not-essential Buddy. Buddy you need for its integrated micro-brewery, not for its fridge. Creative Clutter adds a lot of goodies. Many of them will chew through your settlement limits faster than you can blink, so be careful with that. #21 is Generator Fusebox - More Realistic Version which adds four different fuse-box generators to meet your electricity generating needs without cluttering your settlements with noisy-as-Hell generators. These little babies let me decentralize my power grids, freeing up triangle counts for more useful stuff such as turrets, howitzers and crafting stations. #22 is TNR Shoulder Lamp which adds the shoulder lights from Aliens to the game. Gunners somewhat often will wear them in addition to being able to craft them. Be aware that this does not play well with weapon-mounted lights in my experience, so choose one or the other. For non-Horizon games is #23: Lore-Based Power Armor Changes (LBPAC). This finally addresses my biggest pet peeve about Fallout 4: the overwhelmingly early proliferation of power armor. Starting as obscenely early as level 28 in vanilla you can start seeing randomly-spawned bits of X-01 - by level 60 entire suits, just randomly sitting on some frame which doesn't make sense for an environment that's been salvaged continuously for more than 2 centuries. #24 is also a new acquisition Raider Overhaul which breathes much-needed depth into the Raiders of the Commonwealth. I do not believe that it affects the Nuka-World Raiders. Now the Raiders are scumbags again. There is a patch for this to work with Horizon for those who like it. #25 is Kill XP which features several different capabilities. I use it for one thing and one thing only: to "kill" XP acquisition past a certain level. It doesn't actually zero out xp awards, but it does cut it down to I think 1% of normal. This lets me keep the game somewhat balanced so that every mook isn't the top-shelf critter for their species taken to Eleventy-Stupid like it gets in vanilla when you attain 100th+ level.
Results of preliminary testing with Horizon and a series of compatible mods are in. Steam says I've played 2,170 hours as of the time of this post. *If* Survival difficulty and adding more minutiae to Fallout 4 are what you want, Horizon and its compatible mods will thoroughly scratch that itch. I do believe that Horizon is a much-needed improvement to FO4's Survival difficulty. There is a compatible mod that overhauls power armor to a degree I find acceptable. Said modifications are configured at mod installation, making the availability and abundance of power armor for your playthrough entirely at your discretion. If you want expanded personal narratives I suggest using "Quest" mods to further enrich your experience. There is a 'trilogy' of such mods I've yet to play but am itching to try: Fusion City Rising, Outcasts and Remnants and Project Valkyrie. From the mod description Project Valkyrie seems to offer the possibility of a legitimate 'happy ending' for the Commonwealth under your character's leadership, or varying permutations thereof. To my knowledge no quest mods have been balanced around Horizon which will almost certainly make them much more difficult due to the massive health most foes will have compared to your character. Two other quest mods that are enjoyable and add to the sillier side of Fallout in their play are Tina's Cookiepocalypse and 50 Ways to Die at Dr. Nick's. The latter is well done with minimal errors that I could detect - the ones I did were in the voice work which isn't surprising given that seems to be my thing in games. I like the concept of 'Survival' elements in Fallout. What I don't like is when the game is not engineered with such elements incorporated from the ground up. They still feel bolted on to me, including using Horizon, although this does improve upon this style of gameplay.
Just started test-driving a Horizon-modded playthrough. So far it is quite promising. Things change right out of the fridge: you don't get a pistol until just before getting onto the elevator to the surface ... and you've at-best acquired all of 30 rounds for it instead of the usual 100-120 rounds. Yep, you've had to smoosh every single giant radioactive cockroach with your feet and baton. Eeewwww.
Tasty tasty farmers ... I've been rebuilding my mod list to take a crack at Horizon. Horizon retools the perks, re-introduces skills and weapon conditions, uses an END-based health pool, combat overhaul, settlement overhaul, crafting and stuff is massively overhauled, power armor overhauled, inventory sorting, how one deals with injuries and limb damage ... you name it Horizon has put its own spin on it. Factor in specifically-for-Horizon compatibility patches to some very cool mods - one of which is a massive overhaul of the vanilla Raiders - and this is looking quite promising. Another one further expands on Horizon's overhaul to implement LBPAC-style "rarities" to power armor. There are gobs of weapon mods of course, but most of them add real-world weapons to a setting that shouldn't have them. Anything up to the 1950's or ~1960-ish would make sense ... afterwards, not so much unless it is a Fallout-specific weapon whether pre-Bomb or after-Bomb.
Greylurker, you wouldn't happen to be using any Survival-based mods such as Horizon would you?No, just regular Survival mode plus some of the Creation Workshop stuff. Oddly I've never gone deep into Mods. I think the only time I really have is with Masters of Orion, which really did make the game much better so honestly I have no reason not to go into them You might want to. FROST seems to be overly harsh. Horizon is a complete game overhaul aimed squarely at being played on Survival.
So far I've invested about 900 hours in-game plus about another 100 hours out-of-game sorting through and testing various mods with this play-through in mind. I'm almost done with this process as there are nearly 23,000 mods for FO4 in English on the Nexus although most of them are quite old. Tried and finished 3 quest mods (which don't provide any replay value to me, although both 50 Ways to Die at Dr Nick's and Tina's Cookiepocalypse were fun to play ... once). At this point it is boiling down to QoL, aesthetics and armor / weaponry. The Commonwealth of the 23rd century shouldn't be festooned with an overabundance of high-tech weaponry - LBPAC has already addressed my concerns regarding the vanilla overabundance of power armor at an implausibly early state. I am currently considering a series of "replacer" mods to swap out most of the high-tech weapons in the game. Of specific note is a mod that introduces the LCR-1 Laser Carbine as the Institute's weapon of choice. Other than the BoS, this makes a great deal of sense as no other group besides the Children of Atom would reasonably have access to large numbers of energy weapons. Since FO4 is generally US-centric it is going to be interesting to cobble together replacement options for non-pipe weaponry. I'll be attempting to sort that mess out, most likely using WW2-era weaponry with an intent to focus on U.S.-sourced arms exclusively, if possible,among the available and supported weapons mods. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out "tomorrow" (read: later today given that it is 3 a.m. my time as I type this).
Greylurker, you wouldn't happen to be using any Survival-based mods such as Horizon would you?
Super-nice useful mods for those extra touches of immersion: Survivor's Journal. Lets you keep a journal in-game on your Pip-boy or at any terminal. Better Homes and Bunkers, player homes accessed via ownership of the corresponding settlement's workshop - all of them have 'junk compactors' that make scrapping your mounds of junk fast and painless: (a) Starlight Drive-In - converts the storage room on the rear of the screen into a player home. Cozy, but it's not as cramped as a trailer home is. Can house the player, a dog of choice and one companion at any given time, although I don't recommend it for long-term habitation. (b) Eden Meadows Cinema (Far Harbor) - as with the Starlight Drive-In from what I read. (c) Coastal Cottage - my favorite so far of all of the player homes. Accomodations for the player and up to 2 dogs and 4 companions. 3 power armor stations. A robot workbench. Barber chair in the restroom. Medical wing with autodoc and surgery chair. A small hydroponics garden with a bit of corn, mutfruit, glowing fungus and melons. A lounge and full kitchen with chilling fridge, cook station, nuka-mixer and of course fresh water. Commissary terminals (basically a 2k cap limited vendor). Shared storage amongst all 10 or 12 of the crafting stations. Elevator to the surface complete with music (it's a long ride). Fast travel to and from if desired and difficulty permits. 7 or 8 armor mannequins, a cryolator trophy case and a decent number of display racks for weapons, magazines, bobbleheads, robot models et al. This home's back story is hilarious and worth the read. So far this is by far my favorite player home in terms of usefulness, post-atomic luxuriousness and so forth. I plan to store the unique Hellfire and 'Black Devil' power armors here plus one more suit, ideally a unique suit, probably an Atom Cats Tesla T-60 of some sort. Not that I'm using them, but I'll have them all in one spot. (d) Oberland Station - adds a railroad-themed interior cell to the previous plywood door on the control tower. Should be moderately comfortable for player plus minion plus dog. I'd be very careful using this one with any Sim Settlement City Plan or Transferred Settlement Blueprint that covers up this door. (e) The Slog - an abandoned diner adjacent to the Slog is converted into a player home. (f) Somerville Place - a trailer just outside of the vanilla build zone. If my previous experiences with diner-sized player homes are any indication, (e) and (f) will feature decent comfort and storage with power armor and a dog house on the outside with interlinked storage connecting all of its workbenches to the settlements' own workbench. In addition the same author added 8 Commonwealth Courier Express waystations in as no-frills player homes. The ones I've seen so far are tiny, functional places safe from radstorms and rampaging monsters. Most have little more than that. Each of them is unique and they're all given a nifty backstory tying them into the Commonwealth. Quest mods - several of these are noteworthy, but the one I just wrapped up today/yesterday was "50 Ways to Die at Dr. Nick's". This mod is hilariously entertaining. Night-kin with their own soundtrack. Generally on-point voice work - I only noticed 2 or 3 glitches with splicing in the Player's voiced responses. Well done! This quest series does not pull any punches. You WILL die, probably a lot (got me 7 times in total). The enemies are superlatively nasty. Two HUGE fights - one at Libertalia, the other at Dunwich Borers, both of which feature (when you win) REALLY BIG MUSHROOM CLOUDS. I wonder what state the locations are in after having been so thoroughly nuked? The end reward is a weapon that is apparently randomly tailored to your character: some characters get power fists, some get ranged weapons, I got a seriously upgraded syringer using unique ammunition with a steep crafting cost - and it cannot use normal syringer ammo. The effects I have yet to test out - but given that Dr. Nick states that whomever gets shot with one of these darts explodes and that it is best not to be too close to them when they do gives me a big grin. The player home awarded at the end of the Dr. Nick series of quests is very, very nice without being pre-War. Alfred the snarky Handy Butler, your own female assaultron weapon merchant, a horny attack mutt and your very own Mr. Gutsy-voiced chef (a synth-chef with Mr Gutsy AI perhaps?) rounds out your permanent staff. Entry is by elevators into or out of either the "clinic" or the Anti-Communist night-kin occupied tenament ... so you're probably really safe here. The big bonuses are that the windowed roof (a) doesn't let in rain; and (b) reflects exterior weather plus all of the top-shelf amenities, including a power armor station. The big downsides are (a) that the environmental music track doesn't stop; and (b) the staff doesn't shut their pie holes. I looted the place and split, although I should go back for the cool Hugh Hefner "tactical bathrobes" before I forget about them. The features of the home are awesome: a hot tub, showers and urinals, copious safe storage, all of the normal workstations and a way to share junk across all of your settlements instead of using SKK50's quantum storage mod. (If you're going pro-Institute I recommend this latter mod as it fits with their "teleport at-will" abilities.) Sim Settlements JUST TODAY released Sim Settlements: Conqueror. Initial release is tied into the Raiders stuff from Nuka-World. In other words, activate as many of the settlements as you can at game launch, earn your stripes to become OverBoss ... and go Raider on the Commonwealth. Eventually they'll improve the mod so that you can have Vassal settlements producing food and water for your Outposts that have your combat power. Over time they plan to add the ability to claim these puppies for a particular faction: Minutemen, BoS, RR and several others I've forgotten. What caught my attention, however, is that it should grant the ability to pre-determine how many of the settlements in the game are settled, which city plan they used, population and how developed they are. This is geared towards a new game start but the developers have stated that it shouldn't be too difficult mid-playthrough, especially in a game like mine where I've only grabbed a few places and not done much with them. I'm pretty sure the quest-locked locations won't be an option (Coventry, the Castle, Home Plate and Bunker Hill at least, perhaps also excluding Sanctuary Hills) but the rest or almost all of the rest of them should be 'on the menu'. This means I should probably disable the other bunkers with the exception of the Coastal Cottage. Spectacle Island will become my robot-occupied-and-controlled artillery base (I'm using howitzers, not those crappy mortars) in due time. This probably/hopefully leaves 30 or so settlements that I won't have to build, only bringing them into the fold under the banner of a united Commonwealth to repel/exterminate Raiders, Gunners and hungry brigands in T-60 power armor that underestimate my artillery. Notes to self:
The Silver Thompson is a custom piece by way of transferring Spray-n-Pray's legendary Explosive mod to it and fitting it with an ice-ball receiver that uses unique ammunition. i.e., it fires exploding ice balls, 100-round quick-load drums worth of them. I made 5,000 rounds and have already burned through about 800 of those. For grenades I use Snowballs (reskinned Cryo-grenades in effects - you actually throw a snowball in-game). I'm hoping to score a Cryogenic armor mod to swap out the Silver Shroud's Assassin's armor mod. Reason? I'm using Creative Perks and without thinking I acquired Night Person 1 which gives a "Cold Touch" (freezing effect) to one's unarmed and gun bash attacks. I'm figuring - thanks to DeathQuaker giving me the inspiration - that my Sole Survivor acquired pseudo "ice powers" manifesting in lobbing Snowballs, Cryogenic armor on All of the Armor and two weapons that shoot icy death. The second one is a mod that reskins plasma weapons into cryo weapons, with a legendary receiver that provides it with infinite ammunition. It's in the same hidey hole as "Limitless Potential". Before donning the mantle of the Silver Shroud I was using a mod that features the ACR Advanced Combat Rifle. This is a *highly* customizable long-arm that can be chambered in several different calibers (I used .38 and 10mm) and tracks your kills with it specifically. As you waste more bad guys and critters, 3 different beneficial add-ons and a substantial variety of paint schemes are unlocked. One of the pew-pew options was to have the weapon shoot snowballs ... so I did keeping in theme with the "cold touch" thing this poor character has going on. I have to admit that it is tempting to see if Cryogenic armor mods (legendaries) can be applied to power armor ...
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