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.
Their site is a good location (especially since there aren't a lot of safe zones on that side of the map, or weren't until the Vault Workshop came out), and I have to wonder if Bethesda had early plans where your joining them had deeper and longer lasting implications, but they never had time to implement it. They seem to be set up and then don't really go anywhere apart from being a source of a new skin. I expect as with most issues with Fallout, it was a matter of Bethesda biting off more than it could chew with all the stuff it wanted to do (see also, for a larger example, all the stuff that was supposed to be in the Brotherhood of Steel faction story and never ended up in the game, which is in part why Danse is such a lackluster character/companion).
I sadly don't have the patience or programming know-how to try to figure out how to do it myself.
Sadly given all the news coming out about Fallout 76 is going from bad to worse, it looks like their tendency toward bad project planning isn't going to be remedied anytime soon.
I'd gotten bored with my Dr. Vault-Tec playthrough but I need to go back and actually finish her vault at some point. When I'm in the mood for mindlessly building things I expect...
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.
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.
Turin, I really appreciate the recs, but I do not think you understand I really WANT to build my own thing. With the tools as provided in the game. Without extensive modding or other assistance. When I say, "when I am in the mood to mindlessly build things," I'm not being derisive, I mean there WILL come a day where I will actually feel an insatiable urge to turn on Fallout 4 and spend hours and hours running around walling settlements and building vault corridors, and it will make me happy. Fallout 4's settlement building, even with its flaws, gives me endless pleasure and it's part of why I have played it more than any other Fallout, even ones that have far better writing (writing-wise, my favorite game is New Vegas is hands down, and yes I know people made settlement mods for that game). I have no interest at this time in any player-home mods or auto-build mods, because I much prefer working with the box of Legos Bethesda gives me. (I might install some of the mods that turn some other sites into settlements, but that's about it.)
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.
And that literally sounds like the least fun thing I could ever do in Fallout 4.
If you enjoy it, by all means glad you're having fun. Part of the beauty of Bethesda's games is that people with very different play styles can all find something to enjoy.
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."
Jamaica Plain; for some reason I was imagining it further away from that than I remembered.
I don't think the Atom Cats Garage should be a settlement, just a useful sub-faction to interact with, and a safe zone/trading area in a section of town that otherwise largely "empty" area (the whole region there except for Jamaica Plain after you clear it is constantly full of respawning monsters, so it is indeed handy to have a power armor specialty shop nearby). And it is, but it seemed like especially with the custom skin and everything they had more intended to do with it and then just dropped it. Which I get they can't do anything. There's just room to play with there, if one had the time.
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.
I am aware. I do not think Bethesda should rely on modders to "fix" it when they bite off more than they can chew, which is often.
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.
I'm talking about far simpler f!$%ups like the fact that they had fixed bugs, and then added a new patch that added the bugs back in again (Jim Sterling rant on the issue here). Forget lore accuracy and design intent--if the game just actually WORKED it would be a massive step up.
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.
You can't mod it, because it's a multiplayer game, and you can't mod a multiplayer game because you can't ever count on all players having the same mods.
Someone might take some considerable amount of time hack it at some point to make it moddable and single player, but it's not like you can just open it in the GECK and fix it.
Anyway, my point was Bethesda's ability to project manage and plan seems to be going out the window. I hope I'm wrong, but it may be their best days are behind us. Perhaps they will learn from their mistakes.
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. :(
No problem, Turin. :) I appreciate your enthusiasm and knowledge on the mod scene.
I'm very simple in mod tastes. One that gives me incredible pleasure is just the one that adds a power conduit to the lighthouse so you can light it up after you kill the Glowing One. (That's also a settlement that could massively benefit from being able to scrap more things... but leave the lighthouse!)
I'm not even trying to follow the state of FO76.... the issues are just showing up in places I am looking. Damned shame.
Problem is if they take enough of a "whack" in the wallet, Zenimax could just shut them down and focus on other entertainment media instead. Perhaps they are making enough it doesn't matter. Which is sad.
I still dare to be hopeful about Elder Scrolls 6.
What's y'all's favorite settlement location?
No problem, Turin. :) I appreciate your enthusiasm and knowledge on the mod scene.
I'm very simple in mod tastes. One that gives me incredible pleasure is just the one that adds a power conduit to the lighthouse so you can light it up after you kill the Glowing One. (That's also a settlement that could massively benefit from being able to scrap more things... but leave the lighthouse!)
I'm not even trying to follow the state of FO76.... the issues are just showing up in places I am looking. Damned shame.
Problem is if they take enough of a "whack" in the wallet, Zenimax could just shut them down and focus on other entertainment media instead. Perhaps they are making enough it doesn't matter. Which is sad.
I still dare to be hopeful about Elder Scrolls 6.
What's y'all's favorite settlement location?
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?
Oooh, what's a good "greening" (adds vegetation) mod that doesn't devour system resources?
Huh. I'd not had that issue at Taffington. I flank each end of the road with heavy machine gun turrets and then put more machine gun turrets along the porch, and that seems to do it. Maybe it depends not just on level but on game difficulty however. Or I've just had better luck with spawns.
I almost never build missile turrets after I discovered that they seem to kill settlers with AOE explosiveness... maybe that's what you are referring to; I've never paid much attention if different grade turrets spawned in different regions though.
If I make the settlement for other people, then yes, I try to make them self-sufficient. And usually I try to produce more water than needed, as it makes for a good sales commodity (and helps a lot on survival mode).
If I'm just using the settlement for myself or a companion-hut then obviously that's different (though you need food and water for housed companions).
My most recent playthrough I didn't develop Sanctuary at all (this is the same playthrough I have never rescued the Minutemen). I did acquire it as a settlement so I could relieve it of all of its scrap, but then transferred it all to Red Rocket, which was my personal laboratory. Kept a small group of settlers there to make food and water and guard the road; it serves as a gateway to Abernathy Farm which I turned into as big a "town" as I could, including a very large hopsital/clinic where Curie serves the population (and, in my narrative head, gathers experimental data for me).
Tidings Marina is neat if you're willing to work with the existing buildings. It isn't close to a lot of stuff (although a useful launch point if you're doing a lot of exploration in that region, better than some of the other nearby sites). I like the Alley for being forced to build creatively (though if you could just scrap that friggin' shack...), and being convenient to Diamond City (I'd rather use that as my home than the one inside Diamond City).
I like the idea of making Spectacle Island a manufactory run by robots. I tried in a previous playthrough to "rebuild" the hotel and build a big restaurant and the like, but I got tired of fighting the interface on that one. Another one where the various scrap mods could come in handy (but I always worry I will scrap too much).
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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!
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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. ;)
My first try I wasted all my minigun ammo on the raiders and only had a pipe pistol left.
It didn't end well.
She's mature enough to handle the harsh language I take it? 'cause there is a lot of harsh language ...
So it's been 6 years!!
Man, what a crazy ass 6 years!!
I started playing Fallout 4 again.
After beating Elden Ring several times I cab honestly say I need a change of pace, for awhile. And Clair Obscure isn't coming out until the end of April so, why not.
Named myself Rambo (though I'm still a chick, it's 2025, every name is gender neutral now!) I'm currently level 10 and looking for the lost patrol in that military base lousy with ghouls.
At first I was all in on finding Shaun, then I found the brotherhood and now I'm slogging through ghoul intestines looking for distress beacons.
My special is pretty messed up, not sure what I was thinking here.
S 4. P 6. E 4. C 6. I 5. A 3. L 4.
Without my chef hat and welding goggles my perception is 5 and my luck is 3.
I haven't found anything legendary yet I assume that's probably luck related.
With the confirmation of the OBLIVION remaster that means the FALLOUT 3 remaster (leaked at the same time) is almost certainly coming as well, which pretty compelling. I think FO3 needs one almost more than OBLIVION.
Wow reading this thread I realized Turin asked me questions I never answered, and now I feel bad. I wonder what was going on February 2019 that I disappeared like that. I was in my old, old job. Maybe doing committee work. A year before the pandemic. 2019 was another universe, man.
Bethesda needs to stop remaking stuff (I mean, you can play Skyrim on every device known to man, including I'm pretty sure microwave ovens) and put time into making something new and good. Starfield was apparently an embarrassment; the lesson should have been focus and try not to do everything, not go back and do the same literal stuff over and over again. That goes double for Fallout; the success of the series should mean gearing up for a new game particularly designed to bring in players new to the franchise. Not retreading old s!!&. Would it be cool to see the Capital Wasteland done with a newer engine and fewer insurmountable waist-height fences and invisible walls? Absolutely. But they could return to it in a new game too.
Now yes, the rumormongers spreading this stuff say FO3 remastered is in the works--or at least Bethesda's gotten the trademarks and whatever for it. I'm just saying I'm not feeling too spiffy about the idea.
RE Oblivion, I'm also not sure if I feel sorry for the Skyblivion modders or justified in thinking they'd bitten off more than they could chew with trying to make brand new assets for freaking everything. If they'd done less custom meshing and just focused on building the world with the assets they had in the creation kit it probably would have been out years ago and they'd be getting all the accolades. Now like that, all that hard work... far fewer will be interested. I know it was always a labor of love for them, but it dampens the fanfare.
But anyway, doesn't matter with my grumping. People will buy this stuff and it's easy for them, relatively speaking, to make, so why wouldn't they make easy money? Will I check it out? I dunno. I still got 47 playthroughs of Baldur's Gate III to try out and there's always Fallout 4 waiting for me, with another settlement that needs my help (building wall after wall after wall...)