I actually waited for the survival patch to land before I started playing Fallout 4. It is actually very good!
Cool. Well, in that case I may not need anything. I don’t really care about graphical tweaks on a first playthrough, I guess the only necessary things would be unofficial patches of fixes for really egregious UI issues.
Horizon. But it’s… big. That said, it made the game a lot more fun for me. YMMV though, it’s basically a complete overhaul that focuses more on the survival and settlement aspects of the game.
It sounds like it might be worth trying survival vanilla first but thanks, this looks like exactly the kind of thing I was looking for!
I’d try vanilla survival first like Kristi suggested. It’s the first Bethesda game that I legitimately enjoyed (and actually finished) completely unmodded. That said, if you can find some unofficial patches that fix bugs they’re probably worth using.
It’s not a major gameplay overhaul, but definitely get the mod that let’s you see the full text of your dialogue options.
I have been playing this over my christmass break. I have tried some new play styles I had never tried before. Namely, I am into heavy drug use in the game, which is something I never used before in any fallout game. Now I have a drug fueled Axe wielding manaic, and another druggie rifle mean build. In the latter build, I almost never use vats at all, I just use Jet, or PsycoJet to dance around the enemies and pump them full of lead. Its a lot of fun.
I did get a mod that lets me grow wild plants, namely in my case HubFlower. Now my settlers are just cranking out the pre-requisites for making all the drugs I want. Now if I could find some of those brahman sellers, so I could stop buying all this fertilizer.
I got the Skyrim Enhanced edition for Xbox One and have been playing the the Hearthfire DLC. You can see where Bethsoft was going with the construction piece they improved for Fallout 4. They took the crafting of a whole floor/walls/roof and modularized it with individual walls/doors/roofs needing resources and then put in a placement feature. I’m really looking forward to what Bethesda does next with the construction. It would be so cool to build up settlements in the next ES game.
Unfortunately, I’m likely to skip the next Elder Scrolls for exactly the same reasons. I hated the construction stuff in F4 and I expect they will double-down on their GaaS strategy. No thanks to all of it.
I didn’t care for the construction stuff in either game, although in Fallout 4 you kinda felt like you had to do it. My daughter plays the heck out of Skyrim basically because she loves the world building stuff.
I actually liked the settlement building in FO4, though the vanilla version feels like something that was tacked on at the last minute. The Sim Settlements mods are great for taking the tediousness out of building them and injecting some personality into your settlements.
Settlement building in F4 was awesome, but they scaled it too much. They needed like 1-3 settlements you could build or maybe even just 1. That way it’s way more important, it’s focused, and raids all take place in one or a couple of areas. They actually overdelivered on settlements. I hope they can focus the base construction.
It would have been wicked cool if they could have done as you say, given you maybe one main base to micromanage, and then have you set up templates (maybe new, cool templates could be looted, even!) for other bases, including various levels of automatic defenses/defenders, ones good enough to not need you to teleport all over creation all the time to defend little crap boxes everywhere.
Just in case anyone’s not aware of it, there’s a mod for that. Works in Fallout VR as well (last I checked anyway.)
I don’t remember how and if it actually influences the defence auto resolve formulas though.
I liked to have lots of settlements, and then run caravans between them, which would act almost like reconnaissance-in-force teams, fighting and blowing up anything they contacted. Some of my funnest moments came during unexpected firefights in the Northeast, specifically between Greentop Nursery, the Slog, Finch Farm, and County Crossing.
Yeah, I’ve fiddled with mods, but nothing is quite as good as built-in, designed from the ground up as part of the game stuff IMO. Of course, lacking the latter, mods will do!
Here are my recommendations, mostly QoL. Tried to use names that are searchable on Nexus but let me know if you need any links.
- Unofficial F4 Patch
- Armor and Weapons Community Resource
- Armorsmith
- DLC levelled list integration
- Extended Dialogue Interface / Full Dialogue Interface
- Faster Terminal Display
- Mod Configuration Window
- See through Scopes
- Better Settlement Warnings
If you’re going to try survival mode, you may also want something to re-enable manual saves, as well as the Game Configuration Menu to adjust grenade spam once you get tired of molotov cocktails.
You can completely ignore construction stuff. You can even just roll on to the main quest …. now ignoring modifications probably not as good.
Vin: Survival mode? No fast travel. Man up!
What’s this about limited saving, though? Might have to mod around that - Bethesda games are way too buggy not to be able to save anywhere you want.
If I ever pulled my hair out more than crashing in survival mode I will never know. It is SO unfair! So agreed, but put some limit on it because that is part of the game. I still recall spending over an hour in some raider dump and crashing and screaming so hard a neighbor came over to check on me.
So yeah some kinda --maybe an autosave mode mod. Makes me want to sue Bethesda thinking about now that you mention it…