the Sim Settlements forums!

Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Back to Fallout 4 for another playthrough. Any mod recommendations to spice it up?

rhn

Active Member
Messages
162
Been away from the game for a while, but when I saw that SS2 had come out, I had to come back for another playthrough. However, in my last playthrough I ended up quitting early due to it all being the same as the gazillion previous playthroughs(despite loving SS as always). So this time I thought I would try harder to experience something new.

I was wondering if anyone could recommend some quality mods to do just that? Main quest/ending "expansions", story mods, world improvements/changes etc.?
Obviously getting SS2 and addons. Also thought of getting one of the world foliage mods to spice up the world, though I dont know how compatible they are with other mods.

PS: I am too boring/"good" to enjoy any of the raider type conversions/stories. I just do not enjoy roleplaying evil/sadistic/etc. Struggled just doing a Brotherhood playthrough :P
 
Last edited:
Ok a few minor ones

Foreville (it was recently bug fixed)

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/43979

Saxtons Cobras it’s part of a series of mods for people who are doing a “good” run.
(yes it will have you going wtf a lot if your being a good guy)you may want to grab the older ones if you haven’t already play them. It will make you go Wtf even more.


Covid-77


yes it has lots of references and yes you will get yelled at by people in real life just for bringing this mod up.

settler and companion dialog overhaul. By the Project Valkyrie Discord Server.

from the same people.

recently updated as of this month.

I
And finally
The Metro
 
  • Like
Reactions: rhn
Also may not be compatible with Sim settlements

 
  • Like
Reactions: rhn
Thank you for the replies. A few of them looks promising. A few I had already added ;)
So far I have added:
  • Outcasts and Remnants, Fusion City Rising, Project Valkyrie and Depravity.
  • 50 Ways to Die at Dr. Nicks.
  • Father Companion.
  • Settler and Companion Dialogue Overhaul.
  • Fallout Brotherhood: A storyteller Quest mod.
  • Fourville.
  • Operation Wilkes Estate.
  • Tales of the Commonwealth.
  • The Machine and Her.
Played OaR and FCR previously when they came out, though found FCR to be a bit silly. I usually use "Main Quest Choices Extended" to roleplay my way out of the horrible ending, so a lot of the options that Valkyrie and Depravity sounds awesome. So installed the entire series.
Few of the others also seems a bit silly like "50 Ways to Die at Dr. Nicks", but added them anyway as optional stuff to do down the line maybe.
Mostly curious about "Operation Wilkes Estate" and "Tales of the Commonwealth". Never played either and not a whole lot reviews of them out there. But as the rest of the list, they seem to just add a bit of optional quests/lore.
As far as I can tell, a lot of these mods add more darker/evil routes. But most seem to have other(if lesser) options, or just allow you to play parts of it through good routes. So added them for the options down the road.

Decided against any sweeping world changes for performance and compatibility reasons. Though I did get "Natural Grasses and Groundcovers" for a bit more interesting world.

I also decided to actually give Survival mode a proper try. Never did before. But "Survival Options" allowed me to re-enable/change some of the things that always put me off Survival.

Spent the last several hours troubleshooting a bug that just returned me to main menu on creating a new game. Stupid outdated patch :P But managed to get it going now, so gonna give the above mods a whirl tonight and the coming days. Any recommendations are of course still welcome ;)
 
The Bleachers: A Diamond City Story

That mod also has One of the best explanations of why they did something in a mod EVER!

Why can't I romance any of them? - Just how many NPCs you gonna romance like some Post-apocalyptic Casanova? You have any idea what Lily would do to you if she found out you were nailing every romanceable companion in the area code? You think the flies and mosquitoes got big? You should see the rad-crabs in your pants. Your PC stinks buddy, you've been out in the wasteland in the same pair of 200 year old pants (or quite possibly a thong knowing you people) for 3 months now. Never a roll of toilet paper or deodorant in sight. You ain't talking up anybody with a nose or eyes that you don't pay first. Incidentally, my mod has deodorant and toilet paper in it. Charisma bonuses. :)
Also
Where can I buy the deodorant? - You can't.
 
Last edited:
It's an old classic, but if you're trying out Survival, I'd actually recommend "NPCs Travel". The roads feel really empty once you're having to actually walk everywhere.

My SS2 Addon Pack to try to help resolve this issue is still another week off yet, IRL work hours changed on me again - maybe less, I DID just figure out how to do randomized faces at last
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Thank you for the replies. A few of them looks promising. A few I had already added ;)
So far I have added:
  • Outcasts and Remnants, Fusion City Rising, Project Valkyrie and Depravity.
  • 50 Ways to Die at Dr. Nicks.
  • Father Companion.
  • Settler and Companion Dialogue Overhaul.
  • Fallout Brotherhood: A storyteller Quest mod.
  • Fourville.
  • Operation Wilkes Estate.
  • Tales of the Commonwealth.
  • The Machine and Her.
Played OaR and FCR previously when they came out, though found FCR to be a bit silly. I usually use "Main Quest Choices Extended" to roleplay my way out of the horrible ending, so a lot of the options that Valkyrie and Depravity sounds awesome. So installed the entire series.
Few of the others also seems a bit silly like "50 Ways to Die at Dr. Nicks", but added them anyway as optional stuff to do down the line maybe.
Mostly curious about "Operation Wilkes Estate" and "Tales of the Commonwealth". Never played either and not a whole lot reviews of them out there. But as the rest of the list, they seem to just add a bit of optional quests/lore.
As far as I can tell, a lot of these mods add more darker/evil routes. But most seem to have other(if lesser) options, or just allow you to play parts of it through good routes. So added them for the options down the road.

Decided against any sweeping world changes for performance and compatibility reasons. Though I did get "Natural Grasses and Groundcovers" for a bit more interesting world.

I also decided to actually give Survival mode a proper try. Never did before. But "Survival Options" allowed me to re-enable/change some of the things that always put me off Survival.

Spent the last several hours troubleshooting a bug that just returned me to main menu on creating a new game. Stupid outdated patch :P But managed to get it going now, so gonna give the above mods a whirl tonight and the coming days. Any recommendations are of course still welcome ;)
:blush
I am always in for more, but ss2 adds a lot.
If I were you I would maybe widdle that list down a bit?
The below I feel are the safest and don't overlap "get in the way." SS2 may just add 5-10 hours of content but it takes me about 30 hours to finish it if I "play the game" in conjunction with the SS2 Chapter One. The Bleachers is outstanding.
I would leave some of the others out as Concord is so central to the SS2 story and if you somehow get a conflict or sum-such then your run will be much shorter.
"NPCs Travel - The Bleachers --- Settler and Companion Dialogue Overhaul" is my humble suggestion to keep, at least until you are back into the swing of things.
:friends
 
The Bleachers: A Diamond City Story

Cool, will have a look at it.

It's an old classic, but if you're trying out Survival, I'd actually recommend "NPCs Travel". The roads feel really empty once you're having to actually walk everywhere.

My SS2 Addon Pack to try to help resolve this issue is still another week off yet, IRL work hours changed on me again - maybe less, I DID just figure out how to do randomized faces at last
Already installed NPCs Travel. And I also installed Pack Attack, which can be configged to send out patrols too. Waiting to activate that setting until I see how many NPCs Travel spawn. But I did also reenable fast travel with Survival Options, but trying to use it only sparingly ;)
Will be looking forward to your, and other future addons for SS2.

:blush
I am always in for more, but ss2 adds a lot.
If I were you I would maybe widdle that list down a bit?
The below I feel are the safest and don't overlap "get in the way." SS2 may just add 5-10 hours of content but it takes me about 30 hours to finish it if I "play the game" in conjunction with the SS2 Chapter One. The Bleachers is outstanding.
I would leave some of the others out as Concord is so central to the SS2 story and if you somehow get a conflict or sum-such then your run will be much shorter.
"NPCs Travel - The Bleachers --- Settler and Companion Dialogue Overhaul" is my humble suggestion to keep, at least until you are back into the swing of things.
:friends
I tend to do really long playthroughs doing everything, rather than short ones trying different select things out. So I kinda like there to be something new and fresh to do down the line.
Already through the first quests for Depravity, SS2 and vanilla Minuteman in Concord. Only slight "bug" that I discovered, was that Depravity's spawned Gunners killed most of the raiders there. First SS2 quest there worked flawlessly. /shrug
 
Glad to see Fourville getting some love. It's got one of my favorite add-ons to the game in a mod yet: ghouls, and occasionally containers, can have "Vault-Tec Resident Passwords." In Boston, there's a Vault-Tec Resident Property Storage building, with rooms dedicated to each of the area vaults (including 4, the setting of the mod). And each one has a series of terminal-locked safes. I'm pretty sure the passwords are randomly placed. I've used TCL to get them all (the safes aren't containers, they're just walls and doors) and there's nothing earth-shattering or game-changing in any of them, it's just nice bonuses to get when you have a few of the passwords and you happen to be in the neighborhood. Oh, Fourville does add a whole new set of Bobbleheads, raising the SPECIAL cap to a natural 12, and adding a bunch of new perks in. I can't remember what they do, but they're about as balanced as the existing Bobblehead perks.

That said, the mod has problems I hope get fixed. Some quests give you absolutely no direction whatsoever, and at times the mod appears to stall out, being incomplete. There is an 'ending' to Fourville, but at some point the mod just stops pushing you in any direction, encouraging you to kind of just walk away. It's very anticlimactic. I've only gotten one of its two endings (that I'm aware of), and though I saw it coming a mile off (no, really, they name drop Dr. Braun all over the place, which should tell you how it ends if you played Fallout 3), it was still impressive to see it play out. And it's only an option, you have another choice entirely. Also, despite knowing the twist, the actual execution of the twist and the explanation of it (read the terminal... you'll know the one) is so well done, it's hard not to love the mod.

Oh, one other thing. If you have the Creation Club content with the virtual workshops, disable it before doing Mike's quests. He's the weapons vendor. He will always send you to one of the deserted islands. Tested it four times, each time he sent me to one of them. It's hard coded in the mod. Though I imagine if you don't have that Creation Club content, it will pick another location (kind of like how if you've cleared Corvega, the quest where the Tenpines settlers send you there, will send you elsewhere). So, disable that Creation before starting Fourville, and once you're done with Mike's radiant quests, at any time after he's offered his actual quest, you can enable the Creation. Unless you want to be forced to build the virtual reality pod, and go sell a cache of weapons to another weapons vendor in virtual reality because that totally makes sense. Not to mention the fact that you'll spend 5–10 minutes hiking through the simulation to get to the farthest island where the transaction takes place. Major facepalm.

All that being said, I do appreciate Fourville and I think it's one of the best quest mods on the Nexus right now, along with The Machine and Her and the entire Thuggyverse or whatever you call the family of mods by Thuggysmurf and co. (Depravity, Fusion City Rising, Project Valkyrie, and others). Actually, those mods are hot garbage, but they're well-made and fun hot garbage mods, thank you very much... in the same way Saints Row IV was hot garbage (it was actually loads of fun). Not to be confused with the dumpster fire that is Fallout 76.

I was wondering if anyone could recommend some quality mods to [experience something new in Fallout 4]?
Nameplates - Floating Healthbars has changed my playthrough in a few ways. Since it draws the health bars pretty far out, it helps sight enemies better, but I wouldn't call it cheating. And I think the health bars disappear if the enemy goes entirely behind cover (like a full wall). Still pretty helpful in a fight to show you just how effective your weapons are.

Traits and More Perks was mentioned in a post I made about how I make the game more fun, and I'll repeat it here. I take the trait Memento Mori, which gives me double XP, but makes me also take double damage and nerfs healing items. Even on maxed Medic with the Medicine Bobblehead, Stimpaks don't quite get as useful as in vanilla. So I'm forced to spec out my armor, take ranks in Toughness (generally all of them), in order to not get one-shotted all over the place. And I still get one-shotted. But, I learn quick! I also take Unto the Breach, which makes my AP regen twice as fast (I almost always have full AP), but weapons damage me 25% more (which stacks with the previous trait) and I also move 15% faster. It makes the game harder in a way that is a little frustrating and not easily counteracted with perks. (I play on Normal, by the way.)

Creative Perks is a mod that changes most of the perks and most of the companion perks in the game. Almost all of the useless ones are now somewhat useful, including VANS (it adds move speed, IIRC). The changes are too numerous to list, but I like how there are a few that depend on SPECIALs from other trees, for example a perk that gives you X per Perception or Y per Luck may or may not be in those trees, rewarding focus on different SPECIAL trees. I've never maxed Endurance before, but the END 10 perk gives you more experience as long as you aren't using chems. I'm not actually using Creative Perks at present, because I'm trying one called Hot Diggity, which does a similar thing. It was positively reviewed by JuiceHead, so I'm giving it a shot. I'll link it here, but I'm not endorsing it quite yet. (Due to lack of experience with it. On the surface it looks fine.)
 
So far I am really loving the mod combos. Depravity and SS2 really helps tie the regions and the vanilla quests together. Level 21 and barely even left the north-west quadrant of the map. Love how the quests sets you up to pick up vanilla quests on the way and ties them together in story/lore. Starting to move slowly into the north of Boston, but still haven't even been to DC. It even made me explore areas that I hardly ever visit since it is not on the routes for vanilla stuff, really making for a fresh experience. And lot of funny and new encounters on the roads.
Still nothing even resembling compatibility issues. "It just works"
 
I swear I'd heard somewhere that "Pack Attack" didn't play nice with Simsettlements, is that not the case? Or was it more of a "just too many scripts firing at once for some machines" kind of deal? Kinda want to try that one myself.
 
I swear I'd heard somewhere that "Pack Attack" didn't play nice with Simsettlements, is that not the case? Or was it more of a "just too many scripts firing at once for some machines" kind of deal? Kinda want to try that one myself.
It was extensively tested for SS1 and does work but is extremely script heavy.

I have been running it with SS2 and haven't picked up any issues yet.
 
My recommendation is buffout 4 it requires a nasa level degree in mods but once you have it setup and working the game will be 100% more stable then without it less crashes and if it does crash it will give you a report of why it crashed so you can catch mod conflicts.

also if you plan to use 3Dnpc or tales from the commonwealth don’t use any other mods that change the Boston area or the concord area as this mod changes some stuff and needs custom precombine and previs patches to work with any other mods altering the same areas. Other then that I also support the 1st guys suggestion of minmen squads it will save you so much hair pulling and time wasting in the long run Plus it’s super light weight.
 
My recommendation is buffout 4 it requires a nasa level degree in mods but once you have it setup and working the game will be 100% more stable then without it less crashes and if it does crash it will give you a report of why it crashed so you can catch mod conflicts.

also if you plan to use 3Dnpc or tales from the commonwealth don’t use any other mods that change the Boston area or the concord area as this mod changes some stuff and needs custom precombine and previs patches to work with any other mods altering the same areas. Other then that I also support the 1st guys suggestion of minmen squads it will save you so much hair pulling and time wasting in the long run Plus it’s super light weight.
I removed most patches and stick to Fo4FPS Fix and it's Tales addon. Solved all of my precombined issues and I run all of Thuggyverse as well.
 
I’m a fan of 3dnpc tftc and also a huge bti fan I just couldn’t get them to work together even with fo4fifps and all it’s patches so it’s either 1 or the other but bean town interior adds so much to the base game just the exploration aspect for me is the best. I hate that so many places are static models so mods adding interior explore able spaces is nice.
tales from the commonwealth adds a few as well but it mostly adds life to an otherwise dead portions of the map. I’m really hoping the patches for the two mods get reworked at some point so easy city downs area isn’t a mess.
 
Tales of the Commonwealth and SS2 have a few overlaps. It can be minor, like that courser you have to find as part of SS2 that I found dead at the feet of the albino ragstad hunter (I was at a lost as I was scouting outside of the camp, ready for a confrontation), and it can be visual conflicts at the Harbormaster Hotel, an area where both SS2 and TotC have a quest.

On a side note, @XxA1xX, I was able to restore Easy City Downs when using TotC, its visual patch and Boston FPS Fix by doing "Copy as override into.." on 3DNPC_FO4-Patch.esp after applying the conflict filter to make a custom patch.

That being said, I'll be dropping Tales of the Commonwealth for my next playthrough. SS2 has a lot of content. I'm tempted to add smaller quest mods like the ones from Zorkaz (Frozen Valley, The Marshland and Sombre Mountain), which are labelled as mostly standalone.
 
Last edited:
That being said, I'll be dropping Tales of the Commonwealth for my next playthrough. SS2 has a lot of content.
I just wish it were accessible. My standard build out of 111 comes with CHA 6, but I've never pulled any of the unique NPCs in SS2 that aren't part of the first chapter of the main story. Granted, I haven't put as many hours into a single SS2 playthrough as many others... I've started over a bunch of times. Maybe the current run will be "the" one.

With Tales/Commonwealth, all you have to do to experience the content is to go out and find it. With SS2, there are requirements you have to meet. Or there's the Ron avenue, but the one time I finished the first chapter of the main story, he kept telling me there were no settlers to recruit. That was a few patches ago, though.
 
Top