Fallout 4: My Mods

By Shamus Posted Sunday Nov 22, 2015

Filed under: Video Games 140 comments

Like all Bethesda games, Fallout 4 is something I’ll play for 1,000 hours and complain about for 2,000. It’s deeply flawed but wonderful. Annoying but unique. Brilliant but stupid. The game is only about two weeks old at this point, but I’ve already begun applying mods and I doubt I’ll play the vanilla version ever again.

So let’s talk about the mods I’m running…

1. Faster Terminal Displays

Sometimes a door is locked. Sometimes to open the door you need to use a computer terminal. When you do, it’s always a multi-step process. First there’s the hacking minigame. Fine. Then you get to the “main menu”, which is often a list with only a single item in it: “Security controls”. Pointless, but fine. Then there’s another menu with only two items in it: “Door controls” and “back”. That’s really annoying, particularly when coupled with the fact that the mouse cursor is a few pixels off-center and you’re likely to accidentally hit “back”. Then the last menu will also have one option: “Open Doors”.

So the only menu option you want – indeed, the only option available – is pointlessly nested three levels deep. And every time you select something, it does a little animated scrolling. And once you’ve selected “unlock doors”, it pauses for a flow-breaking five or six seconds. I think it’s supposed to be selling how clunky and slow these terminals are. Fine, but this last step takes forever. And even if the computer is that slow for some reason, there’s nothing preventing my character from simply walking away.

It turns a two-second task into a twenty-second chore, and its amazing how grating this gets after a dozen or so terminals. I wouldn’t mind so much if the menus were filled in with some sort of worldbuilding-style dummy options, but in the vast majority of cases, they aren’t.

This mod simply makes everything go faster. You still have to go three levels deep, but at least the interface is snappy instead of slow.

2. Darker Nights

Also, darker nights make radiation storms so much more spectacular.
Also, darker nights make radiation storms so much more spectacular.

In the base game, nights are so bright that you have to check you pip-boy to tell if it’s night, or overcast. This mod makes night look like some sort of darkness-based event was taking place, as you do when the sun isn’t in the sky.

Note that this also makes sneaking easier. I’m okay with that, since sneaking is basically useless for your first 13 levels or so. Even with high agility and stealth-style armor, you make so much noise that your approach will literally rouse potential victims from sleep.

Of course, this makes things even more broken in the late-game. Once you get past the knee of the power curve – somewhere around level 20 or so(?) – you’ll basically be invisible all the time at night.

Still, I love it. It makes my base feel like a warm beacon of civilization in a dark and unforgiving wasteland.

This mod goes really well with…

3. Pip Boy Shadows

You can tell we're early in the game because I have less than a dozen sets of power armor.
You can tell we're early in the game because I have less than a dozen sets of power armor.

This isn’t so much a “mod” as “change a single variable in one of the config files to enable a feature that was already available in the base game”. Having said that, I can see why Bethesda left this option off. The Pip-Boy light comes from the device on your wrist, as it should. But this makes for some glitchy behavior. As you move around, your wrist will often brush close to surfaces and push the light source into the wall, which will make the shadows go crazy. At certain arm angles there will be odd lines in the shadows. Sometimes trivially small objects will get close to the light source and cast massive shadowsIn real life, if you hold a bobby pin in front of a lightbulb, the bobby pin won’t cast much of a shadow at all because the light bulb is larger than the pin. But in videogames light sources come from a single infinitely-small point in space.. Even when the behavior is correct in a technical sense, it feels confusing and glitchy.

But if I wasn’t willing to put up with glitches then I wouldn’t be playing Fallout 4, and I’d rather have the shadows.

4. Classic level up sound

When you gain a level, the game sounds like the original Fallout. Oh man. After years of conditioning, that sound feels so good.

5. All trees have leaves

BUT WHAT DO THEY EAT? Oh. I guess they live on the large mammals that feed on the small mammals that feed on the local plant-life, which exists now. Okay.
BUT WHAT DO THEY EAT? Oh. I guess they live on the large mammals that feed on the small mammals that feed on the local plant-life, which exists now. Okay.

“Heresy!” you cry out. “Fallout is about a desert wasteland!”

Yeah. About that.

Fallout 1 took place in the actual California desert. And even then, the game showed that people dug wells, irrigated, and grew crops. But then Bethesda had no idea how to capture the insanity and dark humor of the wasteland, so they copied all of the most superficial elements: Supermutants, radscorpions, Brotherhood of Steel, brown landscape. Fine. But then they moved the setting to the east coast, where none of those elements really made sense.

The “Brown landscape” one drives me crazy, because after 200 years of no plants, the world is dead. DEAD. EVERYTHING. IS. DEAD.

I think it works much better if we do a “Last of Us” style thing where nature simply reclaims civilization, one tree root at a time.

6. Remove level requirements

Ugh. It wouldn’t be a Bethesda game if the leveling system didn’t have a single, inexplicable and glaring flaw that dragged the entire experience down. Here it’s the level requirements for skills. You can’t upgrade (say) gun smithing until (say) level 7, then the next level becomes available at level 13, the next at 18, the next at 25, and so on.

This greatly homogenizes character builds. Anyone with an agility of 3 can become a stealth master, but everyone must wait until level 25 to max it outThese levels are all guesses. I don’t remember or care about the original thresholds.. Ideally, the related SPECIAL attribute should be subtracted from the level requirement. So maybe max-level gun-smithingCalled “gun nut” in the game. has a base requirement of level 25. With an intelligence of 1 you could get it at level 24, and with an intelligence of 10 you could get it at level 15.

This mod simply strips out all of the level limits. You can decide for yourself when you get things. It makes the game overall easier because some of the late-game abilities are really powerful, but I suppose you can counter this by turning up the difficulty.

Mod wishlist

I’m still waiting for a few things:

1. Upgrade-able harness armor.

In the game, you get five pieces of armor: Your limbs and your chest. These bits of armor can go over some items of clothing: The vault suit, the military fatigues, long underwear, raider harness, and a few others. I don’t know what the developers called them, but I think of these items as “harness” style clothing, since they act as a framework for the armor bits.

Other items of clothing will replace your armor. So, if you want to wear a biker outfit, you have to give up (say) your chest armor, and a business suit will replace all of your armor pieces. Fine. But for the existing harness items, only the vault suit can be upgraded.

Right now, if you put any points into armor crafting it instantly makes the vault suit so much better than the other options. I’d love to have the various harness items be upgrade-able.

2. Survival mode.

I’m looking forward to the survival mods where you have to eat and sleep, and where radiation is a pervasive hazard instead of an occasional nuisance. I spent most of my hours with Skyrim playing mods like this with fast travel turned off. It really does make the world feel scary huge. When you return to base it feels like the end of a long journey instead of a quick errand to wipe out a raider gang on the other side of the map.

I don’t expect to see anything like this soon. Mods like this take some time to develop.

3. More weather and a generally more hostile environment.

The radiation storms are a good start, although they’re so rare and so weak that they’re more about setting a mood than creating danger. There’s a mod out there now to have them give off more intense radiation, but I haven’t tried it yet. What I’d really like is more variety: Dust storms, radiation storms, more thunderstorms, maybe some windy days.

4. An interface overhaul.

Right now bartering is a massive pain in the ass. At the vary least, the default game should either not show equipped items in the barter window, or it should group them all at the top of the list. As it is, I think they’re… alphabetized? Like, why? This, coupled with the jumbo font, means you can’t see very meny items at once. So you start spamming the “sell item” button, but then the list shifts up or down unit and suddenly you’ve given your armor to the shopkeeper. Then you have to jump over to their window, find your precious item, and give it back to yourself. Then after the transaction you have to remember to open up the inventory and re-equip the item.

For extra fun: You can sell clothing you’re wearing, even if you’re wearing it underneath power armor. But if you accidentally remove an item during bartering, you can’t re-equip it while wearing power armor.

My goodness Bethesda. You people are monsters. Literally worse than Supermutants.

So have you played with modding? What are your favorites?

 

Footnotes:

[1] In real life, if you hold a bobby pin in front of a lightbulb, the bobby pin won’t cast much of a shadow at all because the light bulb is larger than the pin. But in videogames light sources come from a single infinitely-small point in space.

[2] These levels are all guesses. I don’t remember or care about the original thresholds.

[3] Called “gun nut” in the game.



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140 thoughts on “Fallout 4: My Mods

  1. Da Mage says:

    Thanks for the mod list, i think i’ll probably install everything you mentioned except for the perk requirements (doesn’t bother me that much).

    I actually don’t like the pip-boy light and normally carry around a mining helmet when I need to light a place up. The lamp on that does a much better job at lighting the thing you are actually looking at.

    In terms of modding though, until Bethesda release the modding tool, much of what you are asking for will not be possible as it’s stuff locked away in the binary game data. It took 3 months for Skyrim to get it’s tools which nearly crippled the community, I hope they learnt their lesson from that,

    1. Humanoid says:

      Moreso than the actual level restrictions, it’s annoying to have to select a perk before knowing whether you qualify level-wise to take it. I mean, there’s an obvious visual indicator if you don’t have enough in a SPECIAL stat to take a perk, so why isn’t there one when you’re too low level to select one?

      Also really annoying how it scrolls off the page. I couldn’t have imagined any interface that could make Skyrim’s perk selection look intuitive, but frankly this is even less usable. They seem inordinately proud of that chart to the extent there’s even a physical copy of it in boxed copies of the game, but ugh, it’s so busy it’s hard to read any text overlaid on it. And yeah, the Pipboy in general feels less usable here than in previous games, for a good while I had no idea that there were more inventory categories than the three that it displays at a time.

      1. SlothfulCobra says:

        3 and New Vegas just greyed out everything you couldn’t take, why wouldn’t they do that?

        1. Humanoid says:

          Because every perk has multiple ranks you can take in it, so it’s greyed out* if you can’t take any ranks in it, but once you’ve put just a single point in it, it’s permanently lit up, even if you’re not eligible for the next rank. Have to mouse over it to see what level is required to take that next rank.

          * Not literally greyed out, what they do is replace the Vault-boy image representing the perk with a hollow outline of it if you don’t have high enough stats to take the perk.

        2. Michael says:

          If you have no points in a perk, it appears greyed out on your menu. If you don’t have the attribute requirements for it, then it will appear as a dotted outline. Hovering over it with the mouse will bring up a text window for it. This can range from being pretty legible, to barely, depending on how you’ve configured the HUD color.

          Each time you put a point into a perk, it changes the icon to an animated, full-color version. It’s a little annoying because hovering over them will result in some sound associated with the perk, and these tend to be annoying.

          When you have a point to spend, perks you’ve already started taking points in will flash an additional star next to the one(s) you already have. If you don’t qualify for the next tier of that perk because you’re too low level, or there is no higher tier, then no star will appear.

          When you have no points to spend, no stars will flash. You’ll simply see the perks you have, with a star point you’ve spent. You don’t need to click on anything until you’ve picked a perk, you can also use alt and ctl to cycle through the tiers of a perk, so you can see what prior or future tiers provide.

          The system isn’t good, but it’s not nearly as terrible as Humanoid is saying. There’s one major caveat: I haven’t used the companion ap. All of the little interface touches could go completely to hell there, I don’t know. And it’s possible Humanoid is talking about that, and not the actual in game interface.

      2. Ringwraith says:

        Default on PC to show next/previous rank of a perk is alt/ctrl.
        It will then tick up through them and show the level requirement for them as well as the benefits of each rank.

        Not great, but I’ve been playing MGSV with a keyboard and that has no mouse support whatsoever, so maybe I’m adjusted to dreadful UIs quite well by this point.

    2. Writiosity says:

      Considering the construction kit isn’t being released until Q1 next year… I don’t think they have learned, no.

  2. Parkhorse says:

    Without too many spoilers, the vault suit is not the best “harness armor.” The army fatigues and the baseball uniform both handily beat it. Why? Because after a few quests with the right people you get the option to add ballistic weave to most clothing that was not already upgradeable. Ballistic Weave V, requiring Armorer IV, add 110 damage resist and energy resist. Each Armorer level has a Ballistic Weave level. You can also add this to certain hats, like the bowler, some of the fedoras, and the newsboy cap, and it stacks. Right now, with my Armorer III and Ballistic Weave IV, my armored army fatigues and armored newsboy cap are giving me a combined 180 damage and energy resist (and +1 Str, Agi, and Cha), before I add combat armor on top of them.

    Granted, you do not get the vault suit’s radiation resistance options, but I just carry a spare hazmat suit for when I need rad resistance.

    1. Decius says:

      Are the ‘right people’ the ones that demand “We’ll help you research that thing you got that we’ve been trying to get but can’t, but you HAVE to outright give it to us?” Because that’s the first group of people I outright killed for being stupid.

    2. Humanoid says:

      I got out of the vault suit immediately and dumped it because it seemed weird that someone seriously miffed at Vault-tec would continue to wear their “uniform”. Happy to hear I’m not penalised for the decision.

    3. Poobles says:

      It bothers me that such a useful upgrade is hidden behind a couple of quests for a faction you may not be interested in dealing with at all. But yeah, there are a few outfits you can upgrade and still wear full armor on top and I did spot a mod to allow you to put armor on top of all outfits but it does have some clipping issues.

  3. Artur CalDazar says:

    I don’t normally mod a game so soon after starting playing it, but I’m using a full dialogue display mod that gives the full line you speak in place of “Sarcastic” or “hate newspaper”, but it keeps them in the same spot so it will work with a controller and I can still gauge the tone of the statement.

    Going to jump on those visual mods you’ve listed aside from the perk one, that seems way too broken.

    1. Humanoid says:

      Wish the full dialogue display still included the tone indicator, like “[Sarcastic] Sure, I’ll get right on that,” because it’s still tripped me up once or twice.

      1. Artur CalDazar says:

        Yeah thats why I use the lite version. Sometimes the option on the left isn’t sarcastic, but the others never are.

    2. Wide And Nerdy â„¢ says:

      The thing I love about this, aside from having control of what I say is that it restores one of the things I always enjoyed about the traditional interface: reading and comparing the options, reading the funny lines even if I wasn’t going to choose them.

      Sometimes those lines add context to a discussion too. Polygon pointed out a good example in their article about this mod. There’s the scene at the beginning where the spouse suggests going to the park for the day. In isolation, you really have no reason to refuse. But the full dialog mod reveals what the dialog behind one of those choices is which shows that today is the final game of the World Series.

      That kind of changes the scenario doesn’t it? Isn’t this information I should need to know to roleplay my character properly? I mean I’d choose to go to the park in real life but maybe my character is a big baseball fan (especially if he’s a typical male Bostonian, as I believe Mumbles pointed out). It could lead to something poignantly bittersweet where my last memory of my spouse is having an argument with her or disappointing her. My character could find himself regretting that this was the last conversation they had before the sirens went off.

  4. James says:

    There is also a mod i’ve been meaning to use once i can be bothered to break into the ini and enable the modding that seams to be disabled from some reason atm,

    It replaces the gun sounds with more realistic supersonic snaps on all the normal guns.

    1. Incunabulum says:

      Add this line to falloutPrefs.ini

      [Launcher]
      bEnableFileSelection=1

      And change this in fallout.ini

      sResourceDataDirsFinal=STRINGS\

      to this

      sResourceDataDirsFinal=STRINGS\, TEXTURES\, MUSIC\, SOUND\, INTERFACE\, MESHES\, PROGRAMS\, MATERIALS\, LODSETTINGS\, VIS\, MISC\, SCRIPTS\, SHADERSFX\, VIDEO\

      And you’re set.

      The in-game load order manager is accessd by clicking on the right side of the right eye of the power armor helmet in the launcher.

      http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1920/?

      1. James says:

        wait really its in the eye not in a menu selection place, that is remarkably stupid

        1. Von Krieger says:

          My guess is it’s not on the menu proper because the official modding tools haven’t been released yet.

  5. Will says:

    Your first mistake with the terminals was using the mouse. It only makes any sense at all during the hacking minigame, since for some inane reason they decided that the cursor keys should move through characters rather than potential passwords. Otherwise, use the cursor keys to move through menu options, enter to toggle, and tab to back out.

    Your second mistake with the terminals was not discovering that pressing “enter” while it’s printing immediately finishes the printout and presents you with the fully-rendered screen ready for input. To be fair, there’s absolutely *zero* indication of this functionality, but it makes the terminals totally usable completely vanilla.

    1. Rory Porteous says:

      The reason the cursor moves through characters rather than the potential passwords is that brackets can be selected to remove dud passwords and reset your tries.

      1. Michael says:

        For example, if you get a line of garbage like )([@)_}*]%, you can select both ([@) and [@)_}*] to provoke a response. As a really nice change, the game no longer eats one of your tries if you accidentally pick a random character in the garbage. Also, unlike Fallout 3 and New Vegas, it will no longer throw up an error on the terminal if you attempt to use a negate code when there’s no eligible passwords left. Instead it won’t let you select more negate codes if you whittle the options down to a single password.

    2. Daemian Lucifer says:

      You can also use E instead of enter(works everywhere in the game) and WASD instead of the cursor keys(works only in some places in the game).

      HOWEVER,there is one huge problem with using enter/E to skip the printout:If there are just few options available,its quite easy to just select the first instead of speeding up the printout,thus going somewhere you didnt want(rereading that first log,over and over and over and over again).

      1. Humanoid says:

        It’s irritating how the message column on the right while hacking is so verbose that your previous guesses scroll off the top of the screen pretty quickly, I think it can only display your previous three guesses at a time.

        Also finding that sometimes, notably during character creation, the commands at the bottom are weirdly unclickable, forcing me to hit the hotkey instead. I think it was either the “accept” text being clickable and the “back” one being not, or vice-versa.

      2. Michael says:

        E and Enter aren’t interchangeable on the character editor (at both the Barber and surgeon). Which results in a really weird disconnect, where you’ll press E, and end up going back to your character’s hair. It’s the only place (I can think of) in the game where the interface behaves like that.

    3. chiefnewo says:

      Of course if it’s a short menu that’s when you keep accidentally pushing ‘E’ (or Enter) just that half-second too late and select the option you just backed out of.

      As for my mods, I’m only using a few so far:
      Easy Lockpicking and Easy Hacking; These basically let you skip the lockpicking and hacking minigames by making it so that the initial position for locks is the correct one and in terminals only the correct password is displayed. You still need the perks to unlock higher level locks/terminals but don’t have to play mastermind for the six billionth time.

      The other mod I’m using is more armor slots (can’t remember proper name). It solves the problem Shamus has with not being able to put armor over certain outfits by enabling armor over all outfits. You can get some clipping issues but this way I can have an outfit I like plus actual protection. The Courser outfit looks pretty cool with a combat armor torso too.

  6. Raygereio says:

    A small PSA: It’s smart to avoid using modded plugins at this point.
    Replacer mods (for textures, sounds, etc) are perfectly harmless.

    In short the problem is that because the GECK 2.0 hasn’t been released yet, people are using third party tools to create plugins. However, at this point the modding community has no real idea what Bethesda has changed in their file format.
    So the tools can produce errors when saving the plugin (generally referred to in the modding community as corruption). Playing with these corrupted plugins can cause errors from CTDs to the game starting to look funky and making you think your GPU is overheating and can permanently screw over your save file.

    Also, even after the GECK 2.0 has been released it can still be a good idea to be careful. People are using xSnip again, despite that tool having caused the exact same problem in the early days of Skyrim modding. If you see that anywhere in the mod’s description, or see the modder admitted to having used it: Run for the hills.

    1. Alan says:

      What is xSnip, and what’s the problem with it? My Google-fu is failing to find anything that appearing to be modding related by that name.

      1. Raygereio says:

        TESVSnip, Fallout4Snip.
        In the same way, TES4Edit, FO3Edit, FNVEdit & TES5Edit are often referred to as xEdit.
        Fallout4Snip is a fork of TESVSnip and both are made by the same creator. TESVSnip is based of TESSnip which was made for Oblivion by someone else and doesn’t have the corruption issue.

        The problem with it is exactly what I said: The tool produces errors within the plugin it saves. Which in turn causes problems when you play the game with those plugins, likely save destroying ones.
        Sadly back in 2012 when this problem blew up with Skyrim, the creator of TESVSnip refused to acknowledge that his tool had problems and there was some minor e-drama over it. It it seems like we’ll be getting a repeat of that nonsense for FO4.
        I’ve already spotted one mod created with Fallout4Snip that had people complaining of corruption-like symptoms and again the creator of Fallout4Snip is denying his tool has problem.

        1. Alan says:

          Merci!

          Waiting a year or two to acquire Fallout/Elder Scrolls games means I’m completely out of touch with much of the drama. :-)

  7. Slothfulcobra says:

    Fallout New Vegas had trees with leaves all around, especially around Jacobstown.

    Of course, Bethesda’s canon is that there are no more trees except for Harold, which I suppose would explain why most postwar structures are made of tetanus-filled junk metal instead of wood like what normal people have used for millennia, but there’s still all these husks of trees lying around, which doesn’t make any sense at all. Dead plants don’t stick around for 200 years.

    1. While I think Fallout 4 does a better job at having a “living” wasteland (there are areas with stuff growing, along with farms and so on), I’m okay with it being more desert-y. The current thinking is that a nuclear war would cause large-scale climate effects, so it adds to the “this used to be our world” feeling to see the cracked dirt and pavement.

      There’s also nothing wrong with having your vegetation more low to the ground. If you have radiation storms all the time, I could see the terrain looking more like Corpus Cristi (low, gnarled trees, grasses, etc.) that survive hurricanes vs. large, standing oaks.

      That said, the radiation storms make me wish they’d experimented with mutated plants a bit as enemies. A super-mutant Treebeard would’ve been interesting.

    2. krellen says:

      Of course, Bethesda's canon is that there are no more trees except for Harold

      Which is ridiculous, because Shamus’s point stands: the planet’s environment is currently keyed perfectly to be home to trees, and all life on the planet depends on that (and trees auto-regulate climate as well, tuning things back to conditions preferable to them). Before we started chopping them all down, this was the trees’ planet, and the collapse of our society would either lead to their resurgence, or a complete change of all biomes on Earth (and thus likely an extinction event as bad as the Oxygen Catastrophe.) If the latter had happened, someone would have mentioned it.

    3. Actually, prior to the evolution of a certain fungus that could eat cellulose, dead trees DID stick around for hundreds of years. IIRC this is why there’s all those fossil fuels. It’s basically tree peat nothing could eat.

      There are more forested acres NOW than there were a hundred years ago, btw.

      One possible doomsday scenario that actually could account for the tree situation is that atmospheric CO2 is near-catastrophically low. The nuclear apocalypse would have killed most of the animal life on the land, but sea creatures (like, say, mirelurks) still draw down CO2 to form their calcium carbonate shells. CO2 production also tends to drop during periods of increased glaciation/lower temperatures. If the atmospheric CO2 level ever hits around 150 ppm, there won’t be enough food to support most plant life. The trees would basically starve to death.

      This would also explain why human civilization has not recovered–growing plants to feed people is now an epic struggle that requires supplementing CO2. There just isn’t enough food to support anything but a small population, and you can’t re-start a big civilization off a tiny population that is mostly concerned with getting enough food to eat day-to-day.

      1. Decius says:

        If there isn’t enough CO2 to create enough plant life to support humans, what does Deathclaw food eat?

        1. Deathclaw food eats feral ghouls, who apparently live off radiation?

          1. Decius says:

            Oh, good point that feral ghouls don’t need any sustenance at all, and can survive even though they’ve been locked in the same room since before the war.

            1. This doesn’t change in Fallout 4. At least they’re not retconning that. They’re going with it. Apparently, they don’t need air, either (or at least, not much).

              I would say Rutskarn will call at least once instance of this “fridge horror.” :)

              Anyway, I think ghouls in general are pretty well handled in Fallout 4, and have become a bit more interesting. They and other (usually) low-level mobs are now more of a challenge as they can swarm or even summon more minions to help them. Ghouls do the “play dead” trick, which can be assumed to be an energy conservation/predator camouflage thing, but handily you can still target them in VATS. On the down side, all those “dead” ghouls can be revived if a Glowing One decides to unleash a radiation pulse. I think I’ve seen ones that were completely inanimate when I arrived as well as ghouls I’ve killed get back up when they get a dose of radiation.

              As for the whole immortality thing, it’s a handy plot device, most of the time. Without the ghouls retaining their pre-war memories, it’d just be holotapes and computers telling us about where that pesky key is, what the code to the door is, or where to find the secret cache of pristine swag.

      2. krellen says:

        There are more forested acres NOW than there were a hundred years ago, btw.

        Okay, but compared to a thousand years ago? Ten thousand? One hundred thousand?

        Europe was, at one point, basically a giant forest.

        1. Uh, not 10k-100k years ago it wasn’t. Realize that the last glacial maximum–when a large percentage of Europe was COVERED IN ICE MILES THICK, was 22,000 years ago. Conditions in Europe 10k years ago were more likely to be tundra or steppe-like than “giant forest”.

          During the last glacial maximum, CO2 levels are estimated to have dropped to 180 ppm, barely enough to support plant life.

          So, yes, it’s quite probable that there is SIGNIFICANTLY more forested acreage NOW than 10k years ago.

          1. MichaelGC says:

            Not to argue – I feel able to claim it’s been pretty frosty this week where I am; beyond that I’m not willing to personally speculate! – but there are scientists who would say that you’re both right.

            There indeed seems to be plenty of evidence of Europe chilling right out 22,000 years ago, but then at (say) 13,000 or 7,000 years ago we were in full or partial Moon of Endor mode. Here is quite a detailed potential timeline, for e.g:

            http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercEUROPE.html

        2. Ambitious Sloth says:

          You’re right, just not about the timing. Europe could have been mostly forest at one point or another, but there hasn’t been the chance for that in recent human history. The Carboniferous Period (about 300 million years ago) was probably the point where there were the most trees. As most of our coal was formed by the plants of that time.

          About two and a half million years ago the last Ice Age started. An Ice Age’s intensity waxes and wanes but each time it does grow the plant life dies off. The most recent waxing was about 22,000 years ago and the most recent waning was about 12,000 years ago. Which is as close as it gets to human history. Even though the last waxing was 200,000 years ago which is about when we started to show up in Africa, which means it wouldn’t really have much of an effect on our personal history then. The climate though only changed very slowly afterwards.

          Outside of Ice Ages though forests were routinely destroyed by wild fires and other natural events. They would grow back slowly, ever keeping the world in that equilibrium that helps stave of global extinctions.

          1. I’ve read one speculation that a major reason for these here-again-gone-again ice ages is due to Antarctica being plonk at the south pole the way it is–it acts as a giant roadblock to ocean circulation that would otherwise normalize temperatures across the planet a lot more.

            1. Wide And Nerdy â„¢ says:

              You are just chock full of interesting information about this stuff. Really, I’m enjoying your posts on this subject.

      3. Wide And Nerdy â„¢ says:

        I’m glad I looked this up because my info was a bit off but trees do not account for most of the oxygen in our atmosphere (though they account for more than I’d remembered reading previously). 70 percent comes from algae and other stuff like that. But trees eat a lot of CO2 so not only would our oxygen be thin, our CO2 would be a lot heavier.

        Then again, Earth’s population has been reduced dramatically. Maybe that would balance it out?

        1. Most atmospheric CO2 comes from volcanoes and outgassing of the oceans (which increases when average temps are higher–CO2 levels generally rise as temps do, not the other way around).

          If there was something along the lines of a “nuclear winter”, with temps dropping (slightly) and substantial dust in the air preventing warming of the oceans, coupled with a period of low vulcanology, CO2 levels could (theoretically) drop dangerously low.

          Look up the “Year without a summer” (1816) which was believed to be caused by a volcanic eruption for comparison.

  8. modus0 says:

    Regarding #2: I hate darker nights mods. I’ve tried them in several Bethesda games starting with Oblivion, and always ditched them rather quickly.

    Yes, the default is too bright, but I would rather it be too bright and be able to see away from external light sources, than feel like I either need to Wait until sunrise, or go find an un-owned bed and sleep. Mainly because the player-carried lights just don’t illuminate very far away, and also serve to hinder my attempts to stealth.

    Maybe if the game had some sort of night-vision goggles, it wouldn’t be so bad, but for some reason Bethesda apparently hasn’t realised that it might be a useful thing that a military force would have and use. Power armor should definitely have it, at least as a mod option, if not default.

    And I want an interface mod that alters item names so that a highly modified gun doesn’t have a name longer than the number of characters the game will display in a list. Or maybe prevents the game from adding so many damn prefixes to item names.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Arent there perks that give you night vision?

      1. There is a perk AND you can find or make night vision scopes for your weapons. I think there are also food items that can give it to you temporarily.

        I’ve liked darker nights in games ever since I played Gothic. The night in that game was genuinely terrifying, and I loved having a reason to wrap up my adventuring and head home for some sleep before heading out bright and early the next morning. I don’t think I ever bothered to sleep with my Fallout 4 character. It was jarring.

        1. Wide And Nerdy â„¢ says:

          Yeah but the night vision perk requires you to walk around in a perpetual crouch and I don’t see how a scope is practical for this sort of thing (but then I could never get the hang of scopes, not that I’ve had the patience to try very hard with them, especially when Bethesda games aren’t hard enough to make sniping worth it beyond the first ten levels.)

      2. modus0 says:

        1: The perk only adds night vision while sneaking, which makes traveling between locations slow.

        2: Scopes are very situational, and I don’t think it would be a wise idea to try walking through the Commonwealth at night with one eye closed and the other glued to a view narrowing scope. But that’s just me.

        I’m actually hoping the modding tools make it somewhat easy to create weapon and armor (and Power armor) mods in, so that I (or someone else if they get it done first) can add a power armor helmet mod that replaces the headlamp with night vision.

        1. Supahewok says:

          “Scopes are very situational, and I don't think it would be a wise idea to try walking through the Commonwealth at night with one eye closed and the other glued to a view narrowing scope. But that's just me.”

          What about a night-vision monocle?

    2. Andy_Panthro says:

      I tried a “darker nights” mod in New Vegas, which worked really well until I got a night-vision perk or goggles or something. Then it just broke, and day became like normal night, and night became nearly pitch black. I had to keep the night-vision enabled almost all the time just to see. Removing the mod wasn’t enough to fix, had to reinstall. Don’t know quite what went wrong.

    3. Incunabulum says:

      Its a difference in playstyle. Some people want to feel like they’re living in a real world – complete with reasons to stop running around, fix a meal, get some shut-eye – others figure that they do enough of the IRL so anything that stops them from running around is stopping them from *playing*.

      Which is why Bethesda’s games are like this – they are looking for *mainstream* success (and getting it) and the vast majority of players are in the latter camp.

      Its why radiation is nothing more than a token inconvenience, you don’t need food, radstorms are for ambience, ammo and weapons are available by the bucketload, and nothing ever jams or breaks.

      1. And the building stuff is largely cosmetic.

      2. Radiation’s effects are not as insignificant as they were in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. In F4, radiation eats away at your maximum hit point total. It might not seem like much, but I’ve been in fights were having cured my rads would’ve saved me a re-load of the last saved game.

      3. modus0 says:

        I know some people like it, just like some people like the added challenges of things like New Vegas Hardcore, or Frostfall; I don’t. Especially when it doesn’t feel like the change is truly realistic.

        One example is item degradation in most games, particularly the Bethesda games before Skyrim (and excepting Fallout 4 Power Armor), because it doesn’t feel to me that the items last nearly as long as they should before breaking completely (9mm piston in NV can fire about 745 rounds before breaking).

        Though, the fact that people can add mods to increase the challenge is almost certainly (and possibly primarily) why The Elder Scrolls series and Fallout 3/NV/4 are so popular: one can take the base game, and use mods to craft it into a more personalized experience catering to their wants.

        1. Supahewok says:

          “9mm piston in NV can fire about 745 rounds before breaking”

          That’s actually fairly plausible. Most people don’t go out and shoot dozens of people per day, even in the military. Just step back a moment and think: how long would it REALLY take you to fire that many rounds? The couple of times I’ve been out on a range, I’ve gone through about 18 shots on a revolver per target. Definitely less than a hundred rounds in an hour. Maybe even less than fifty.

          And any responsible gun owners clean their guns after every time they use them, and should be doing some maintenance about every month or two if they don’t use them. If they don’t, something will break fairly soon as residue and dirt build up.

          Now granted, the game doesn’t give you an option to maintain your weapons except through actually repairing them, which is dumb and wrong. But in the absence of maintenance, it isn’t unbelievable that your firearm will be trash after a few hundred shots and being exposed to the elements.

    4. Humanoid says:

      The larger problem for me is that the day-night cycle is just too danged short. I rest, wake up, walk around town talking to some people, and suddenly it’s already dusk. I’d love darker nights if it wasn’t so easy to accidentally get caught out in the middle of nowhere when night falls.

      Hell, I’d almost be willing to say it’d be better if games like this mapped ingame time to actual time on a one-to-one basis. After all, if you’re waiting for a certain time of day for a scripted event or whatever, the wait function is right there.

      1. It was possible to modify this in Skyrim just using the game console, but it tended to have odd effects on some things.

        Yeah, it’s the same command in Fallout 4 as it was in Skyrim. You just hit the grave (`) key and type set timescale to X, where X is the ratio you want. 20 is the default (that means that 1 minute RL = 20 minutes in game). I found that 10 in Skyrim was pretty cool.

        1. Michael says:

          IIRC, messing with Timescale in Fallout 4 results in some seriously strange issues with NPCs.

      2. James says:

        the problem then is, settlements are too small and too close to eachother, in F3 you could run from DC to Bethesda, Maryland in like 10 RL minuets, with a rapid timescale this makes sense ingame but if it was 1 to 1 it’d be silly.

        1. Humanoid says:

          On the other hand it means a scripted conversation can go for hours. Few times already I’ve thought “oh hey I have a couple hours before I have to go to quest trigger X”, so I go into town, talk to someone, and before I know it I’ve missed the timeframe and have to wait to the next day. Either way it’s a massive compromise, and probably the smarter thing to do is to not put two really far away places on the same map. After all, the Pitt DLC didn’t add Pittsburgh to the main FO3 map I think? (I only played FO3 for about 10 hours before quitting)

          Besides, as a non-American, I have no idea where DC is in relation to Maryland, so for all I know they really are 10 minutes walk away from each other. :P

          1. Supahewok says:

            DC is a semi-independent municipality located on the border of Virginia and Maryland. So technically, depending on where you start, a trip to Maryland can take all of 10 seconds.

            No idea about Bethesda MD. I’ve never actually even been in that state.

    5. Von Krieger says:

      http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/425/?

      This one reduces the font size when the name gets too big rather than cut it off.

  9. Daemian Lucifer says:

    The biggest question about fallout 4 is:Once you get cannibalism,can you go back to the vault to eat your popsicle husband?If not,that should definitely be the next mod to be made.

    1. andy says:

      When I go back now, his body’s not an interactable object, so I can’t gnaw on him :(

      I’ll have to see if you can eat him when you first get out of the pod, if you add the perks via console command…

      1. Von Krieger says:

        Meat’s ruined from freezer burn.

  10. Rack says:

    Aside from the dialog mod I’ve also added something to make the lockpicking and hacking games trivially easy. Because I am so sick of those by now.

  11. James says:

    May I also suggest the Full Dialogue Interface mod so you can actually see what your saying. I’m with you on the tree part, their would be at least minor foliage. I actually ran with it once doing an Exodus (in the fallout universe) game in Canada that’s now I giant thick irradiated forest with its own dangers.

    1. poiumty says:

      YEEEEES. Why isn’t everyone talking about this? The full dialogue option interface is the one mod I’m running with. It’s one of those that you install and instantly realize you can never go back. Turns all those dumb “Sarcastic” and “More information!” prompts into things my character actually says so I can figure out what dumb shit he’s saying before he says it!

      I like mod #1 and #5 (actual 5, not 6-in-disguise 5). I might get the first, but it feels like green leaves everywhere is so dissonant with the world that the devs wanted to create that, realism or not, I’ll have to leave it as it is.

      Yeah, a wasteland full of dead trees in anything but fall/winter doesn’t make sense. But neither does you still finding old pre-war, forgotten, valuable stuff everywhere, LITERALLY TEN GENERATIONS after the war. I mean, humans are lazy, but they’re not THAT lazy.
      So I just pretend it’s like 50 years after the war instead. Keeps me from losing my mind.

      As for mods I’m waiting for, I, too, want a complete interface overhaul. Yes, yes, pip-boy, huehue. Remember how in the first 2 Fallouts the pip-boy was an actual interface for the actual freakin’ GAME? Emphasizing ease of use over dumb gimmicks like “woo I can move my hand around and it moves with me amagahd”? Well, Pepperidge Farms remembers and so do I.

      Aside from that, well, a complete rework of the game balance so there’s more scarcity without necessarily having to do even more hardcore scrounging would be nice, I’d like the power armor from Fallout Tactics (unless it’s in here in which case AW YISS) and I’d like at least a shot at some New Vegas-like changes like ammo that weighs something, human bodily needs, stuff like that. But I’d also like them done to my liking which is hard unless I make them myself, so…

      1. Ringwraith says:

        Although that change to fully display dialogue has some flaws.
        Sometimes it removes important game information (like cap prices) or actually makes the tone a bit more vague (weirdly). Also sometimes removes the punchlines from dialogue, or at least shaves off the emotive impact a bit. Some notable overacting you can do elsewhere is a lot funnier if you are picking it blind.
        It is better in most situations though.
        The fact ‘sarcastic’ has no notifier if it’s a sly remark or a personal insult is just ridiculous.

      2. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The only reason the stuff in the ruins, rubble, or even lived-in houses of games like this is obvious to you and you alone is because you are an adventurer!

        You may think your true power lies in combat prowess, the commanding of forces that bend the laws of nature to your will, or your skill in using rare and arcane weapons. You would be wrong. The mark of a true adventurer is the ability to find treasure where others only see trash. Your ancestors were garage salers, dumpster divers, and bargain bin botherers.

        This is your legacy, for you are an adventurer! Now go out and scrounge for glory!

        1. Humanoid says:

          If only the player character was voiced with an Atlantic accent. If we donate enough to Rutskarn’s Patreon, do you think we could get him to make a full voice-replacement mod? :D

          Stretch goals for dolphin-lover voice, Councillor Udina voice, Twi’lek voice, etc.

        2. poiumty says:

          What about all the ammo and weapons? And, like, pre-war computers with pre-war locked safes? Don’t tell me no one ever learned lockpicking before me. And don’t tell me I’m the Wasteland’s only adventurer either.

          1. Humanoid says:

            Everyone else rationally assumes that all those computer terminals have been dead for hundreds of years, obviously.

            1. modus0 says:

              Even though many (functioning) terminals have recently been used by Raiders to record information?

              1. Very, very few raiders are willing to put any points into Science/Hacking. Those that do get some terminals up and running, using them to keep their own safes locked.

  12. Trees with leaves looks amazing. All the dead trees really bothered me, too. They make no sense. It’s been 200 years. Assuming the radiation killed all the termites and fungi that ought to disintegrate tree corpses, the soil should be so dead and poisonous that farming should be impossible. If you can farm, the forest should be alive.

    What would be REALLY cool would be if the game did leaves/no leaves/falling leaves based on the time of year. You come out of the vault in October IIRC, so actually everything being brown wouldn’t be that much of a stretch, but it should come back in the spring.

    This is Boston, after all. There should be snow in the winter. That would make for an AWESOME mod, but probably also be really difficult to do.

    1. Raygereio says:

      The Skyrim gamejam video actually featured seasonal foliage. So in theory it’s doable in the engine. But off course all we saw in that video was a 6 second clip of it, so we don’t know how buggy and – more importantly – how resource intensive it was.

      1. Incunabulum says:

        Stuff like this is sooooo frustrating with Bethesda. They have all these good ideas and then tend to toss them with each new game.

        1. Raygereio says:

          Games are made with a finite budget, have a deadline and have limitations that are outside the developer’s control (meaning the hardware the game has to run on).
          All developers – not just Bethesda – at some point have been forced to cut features that would have been really cool to have in the game.

          If Bethesda could have included stuff like seasonal foliage, I know they would have. But like I said: Just because they had a few seconds worth of footage of it, doesn’t mean that feature was in a playable state. Or could have been made playable with the resources they had and within the hardware limitations they had to work with.

    2. Decius says:

      The blizzard as a random event would be too programmer-intensive to be worthwhile. A blizzard as a scripted event could be worthwhile, but would require an absurd amount of effort to do right.

  13. Greg says:

    The 3 mods I have installed are a different list altogether, though they also make the game easier. Classic VATS because I prefer the pause, Craftable Ammunitions because it makes no sense you can’t make your own ammo, and No Movement Fusion Core Drain from the Configurable Power Armor Fusion Core Drain mod. I tried installing No Perk Level Requirements but it crashed my game – maybe I’ll try again as I see they’ve released a newer version.

  14. cold_blowfish says:

    I do hope we get a mod quickly that displays the base value of armor and weapons. How am I supposed to compare armor/weapon A with B if one is hardened [armor] and the other is boiled [armor]?

    1. Decius says:

      There are only a handful of armor types; Leather, Metal, Combat, Synth.

      1. Ringwraith says:

        Although there are improved versions of base types, so you can get ‘sturdy leather’ or ‘sturdy metal’ too, which can also have the material upgrade mods applied (‘heavy boiled lightweight leather armour’ does start sound a bit silly).

          1. Michael says:

            Pretty sure that’s not supposed to happen. The game’s pretty good about culling descriptors down. You still end up with some unwieldy names, and it can be impossible to tell from the active looting interface if you’re looking at a compensated hardened combat shotgun or pipe rifle, but that’s a mess.

            1. Nope, it happens all the time. You have to look somewhere other than the name to tell what something is if it’s heavily modded.

              That’s another reason why “rename” is so freakin’ handy.

              The rename function also solves another problem:

              “Hey, have I assigned you to a task, random settler?”
              “Let’s trade.”
              “Ah, I see I gave you a pipe pistol called ‘Corn Peasant.’ Carry on with your mundane existence.”

              1. Matt says:

                That’s a crazy good idea. Thank you! :)

              2. Michael says:

                Sonova… O.O

                Why didn’t I ever think of doing something like that?

                1. Zekecool says:

                  I use hats. Hatz for peasants, helmets for guardians, suits for traders.

  15. Incunabulum says:

    Good nes, good news.

    1. Upgrade-able harness armor.

    http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/745/?

    3. More weather and a generally more hostile environment.

    http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/829/?

    And can you believe the F4 Script extend is already out?

    http://f4se.silverlock.org/

    And then check out these.

    Dialogue interface overhaul – see what your character will say and be able to use the number keys instead of arrows to select responses.

    http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1235/?

    More stuff to build in the settlements

    http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1145/?
    http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1478/?

    And a way to fix gaps in junk fences

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC4sVjFkwNw

    1. Incunabulum says:

      And ‘Touch of Green” for those who are wondering why the grass is all dead too.

      http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/377/?

  16. Flailmorpho says:

    could we get a link list to all of these mods?

  17. Incunabulum says:

    Its getting so bad that I can’t even play the game anymore.

    I keep popping back to Nexus, seeing a neat new mod, stopping the game to install, repeat.

    Ooooh! Piece of candy!

    Ooooh! Piece of candy!

    Ooooh! Piece of candy!

    Ooooh! Piece of candy!

    And now there’s a mod to remove skylights indoors. Gonna have to check that one out.

  18. Sean Hagen says:

    So those mods sound interesting. However, I’m really too lazy to try and search for them and wonder if I found the one you’re using, or one that sounds similar but does something very different.

    Would it be possible to update your post with links to the mods?

  19. rofltehcat says:

    Some very nice mod suggestions in here. I’ll definitely add a few more mods next time I play. Currently I’m just using expanded radio mods.

    What I kinda want to see is an “AI companion power armor” mod… I was kinda thinking of the “cybernetics brain” companion from Fallout 2, just that it is put inside a power armor frame (ready for you to hop into).
    (the armor probably shouldn’t take damage or deplete too much energy while you’re not inside to prevent the AI from messing it all up)

    I find my current companions to be rather bland and this way at least I’d have a power armor on hand if I actually get to a spot I want to use it. An AI companion could hardly be any worse than the current bunch (of which Dogmeat is the most charismatic by far).

    1. Von Krieger says:

      Progessing to a certain point with the Brotherhood storyline allows you to command companions (and settlers) to wear powered armor. They do not consume charge from fusion cores whilst doing this.

  20. ehlijen says:

    Call me a monster, but I’d like the old ‘dialogue freezes both sides in place’ system of Fallout 3 back.

    It’s hard enough to talk to a travelling merchant without them running away from you after the opening line exchange, but I was literally murdered by a pack brahmin when it shoved me into a hole in the bridge we were on while I was waiting for the stupid ‘now that you’ve clicked barter, let me convince you to barter with me’ line of the merchant to finish.
    I didn’t see it coming thanks to the narrow FOV and died from the fall (had been hurt, was looking to buy food for healing).

    I’m generally not in favour of NPCs being able to push the player out of the way.

    Other than that, more performance increasing mods for low powered systems, please. I don’t care about shadows, texture quality, sight distance and whatnot. I just want a double digit framerate. The vertibird flight to the Prydwen took me thirty minutes :(

    1. Humanoid says:

      The new system allows for some pretty cool dialogue almost-setpieces, but yeah, it’s a bit frustrating at times. I related this story somewhere else already, but there’s a confrontation at a bar early on in the game where you’re a third party in a standoff. You enter the bar, they start talking, meanwhile I saunter over to the couch and take a seat, and get to chime in lines while seated casually, arm draped over the back. I thought it was a wonderful bit of emergent cinematic gameplay.

      All too predictably though, something in the script made the AI move a bit, and it broke off the conversation, and I had to stand up and restart it, repeating several lines to get it to complete successfully. Ruined a really cool moment.

  21. Flailmorpho says:

    How exactly does one get these mods to work, I changed the ini files and now that causes the game to crash to desktop whenever you try to load into the game.

    1. Incunabulum says:

      If you changed the .ini’s as per my example near the top of the comments then that should have no other effect on the game.

      What mods have you installed?

  22. Nick Pitino says:

    “BUT WHAT DO THEY EAT? Oh. I guess they live on the large mammals that feed on the small mammals that feed on the local plant-life, which exists now. Okay”

    So…

    Eating cats and dogs?

    Wow, the apocalypse really does suck.

    1. poiumty says:

      Feels like the devs were so burned by that question that they decided to one-up it with the whole settlement thing.

      “What do they eat, eh? Well, you see, they eat WHATEVER *YOU* PLANT FOR THEM!”

      There’s also some farms and stuff in Diamond City, so clearly eating was on their mind when they designed that one. Still doesn’t explain Goodneighbor tho…

      1. djw says:

        They mug farmers in goodneighbor.

      2. Humanoid says:

        Yeah, I got into the city and noticed, hey cool, they have farms. Then I noticed the farmer standing amidst all the crops, attempting to take a step forward, failing, turning 90 degrees, attempting to take a step, failing, stuck in an infinite loop of turning to the side every three seconds. Ahh, Bethesda.

      3. Fists says:

        With a number of settlements around that already (before you show and reform the Boston economy with your communist ways) produce a large amount of food for their population I believe the idea is that the traders buy their excess and sell them to the larger populations like goodneighbor and diamond city. Goodneighbor bring in caps to buy food by being mercs, housing wanderers and vagrants and producing chems.

  23. INH5 says:

    Personally, I’m also really tired of virtually every post-apocalyptic story being set in a desert wasteland for no real reason. This is probably because most of them are inspired by Mad Max, but few people seem to notice that the reason that the Mad Max movies take place in a desert is because they take place in the Australian outback. Most other post-apocalyptic stories are not, and a decent amount are explicitly set in parts of the world that aren’t deserts in real life, yet the default presentation is still an endless desert wasteland, even when that makes no sense.

    Occasionally there is a handwave about nuclear war leading to worldwide desertification, but the conditions around Chernobyl demonstrate that no, actually radioactive fallout does not do that.

    1. Incunabulum says:

      Well

      1. Deserts are fucking cool (uh, you know what I mean).

      2. Deserts don’t drive your hardware requirements through the roof to render.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Deserts are boring.Also,deserts present the biggest problem of WHAT DO THEY EAT? that can much more easier be answered with forests and such.

    2. krellen says:

      I think part of the calculus in setting Fallout (and Wasteland) in the US Southwest is because it is the part of the country that most resembles the Outback (and wanting to be like Mad Max was definitely part of the calculus).

      If Bethesda wanted to keep with the trend, they could just keep finding places with similar climate, instead of breaking ecology to make it look the same.

      (Or, novel of novels, they could actually do something new and interesting, but who are we kidding?)

      1. INH5 says:

        If Bethesda wanted to keep with the trend, they could just keep finding places with similar climate, instead of breaking ecology to make it look the same.

        I was going to say that Bethesda clearly wants to keep the “iconic” elements of Fallout such as the Brotherhood of Steel and the general 1950s American retro-future aesthetic, and there aren’t that many deserts in the continental US. But then I checked Wikipedia and actually it turns out that there are a number of desert and semi-arid regions in the American Northwest and Midwest. Even the American Southwestern deserts extend over a huge part of the country, from California to Western Texas, so that should still leave plenty of room.

        So I agree that Bethesda doesn’t have any excuses here.

        1. James says:

          Imagine if they set it in New Mexico, or even changed brown desert for white desert and went to Canada, then we would get to see Post-War culture from a country that was forcible Annexed

      2. Daemian Lucifer says:

        So what you are saying is that they should make fallout in the mojave?That will never happen.

      3. djw says:

        Well, these are the people who brought us Morrowind, so we know that they are capable of some pretty novel settings.

      4. Incunabulum says:

        I think the majority of the reason Fallout was set in the SW is that is where the original devs lived and worked and knew best.

        Its much the same reason the *Bethesda* team moved the game to the East Coast (along with it being easier to hand-wave continuity violations and ret-cons with ‘other side of the country’) – they know that area best.

        1. INH5 says:

          The original Fallout devs were based in Beverly Hills, so while setting it in California was likely due to creator provincialism, setting it in the California desert specifically was probably a deliberate aesthetic choice. The Los Angeles area (and the Southern California coast in general) would be quite a bit less green if all the lawn sprinklers stopped working, but most of it is not by any reasonable definition a desert.

          You’re probably right about Bethesda, but Obsidian is based in Orange County, so New Vegas demonstrates that geographic distance is not an insurmountable obstacle to setting a video game somewhere.

      5. Michael says:

        Interestingly, Fallout Tactics starts in the outskirts of Chicago and works it’s way out west into Colorado. (The final mission is an assault on NORAD.) The game is technically non-canon, but it does get more environmental variety than any other game in the franchise.

    3. Lachlan the Mad says:

      Actually, Mad Max isn’t a post-apocalyptic setting. It’s just a normal Wednesday in the Outback.

      1. 4ier says:

        For you, it was just a normal Wednesday.
        But for me, it was Tuesday.

      2. Michael says:

        It’s honestly possible to watch the original film without realizing the setting is post-apocalyptic. There’s even an interpretation that the apocalypse is happening in the background during the first film.

        1. ehlijen says:

          The first movie wasn’t post apocalyptic. It was actually meant to be a dramatisation of aussie outback car and biker culture.

          Only the second movie made it post apocalyptic, and that resonated with international audiences a lot more.

          1. Da Mage says:

            Which I think is really cool. People outside Australia really don’t get just how barren the landscape gets after just a few hours drive inland. There are areas in the US (such as the Mojave) that are similar to the outback, but they are nowhere near the same scale.

            And if you travel these outback places, you’ll see old car wrecks abandoned on the side of the road (there is an entire industry for clearing them). Buildings and sheds made completely from rusting corrugated iron, just like you’d see in a Fallout game. Going for a drive across the outback parts of Australia requires people to be prepared, extra fuel, food, water etc. There is no mobile coverage and very little traffic if something goes wrong. Quite frankly, Australia is just as large as the US, but most of it’s inland is inhospitable.

            And yes, at least for the parts I have seen. Everything is brown. Brown grass, red dirt, brown trees. I am not a fan of travelling anywhere inland.

            1. Dev Null says:

              Australia is roughly the size of the continental US. The difference is, the middle of the US is only a _cultural_ desert, not a real one.

              1. Von Krieger says:

                Am Iowan, can confirm.

    4. Humanoid says:

      Ironically, most of Wasteland 2’s art shows lush vegetation overrunning deserted cities. And this is a game set in a desert.

      1. Most of the parts still set in Arizona are desert-like. It doesn’t greensplode until you get to Cali.

        Sadly I lost interest about then.

        1. Humanoid says:

          Yep, meant to say the box art, concept art, the title screen, and other promotional material. Guess they wanted to sell something a bit prettier than a barren desert.

  24. Fists says:

    I would love to be able to tell my mooks to run back to a settlement and ditch armour/weapons/junk, delegate the boring stuff rather than suffering a couple of loading screens to get everything back to base and then get back into the fun stuff.

    Also, with the harness armour system I would like to be able to assemble outfits so I can group a set of armour together for giving to settlers and companions rather than sifting through inventories trying to make sure you’ve got one of each slot. Either that or change the default naming of armour so it starts with the basics (Arm, Right) then adds modifiers as suffixes so you can actually compare pieces that go in the same slot with the alphabetical sort. Or just add a sort by slot/type function.

    And maybe a junk/favourite tagging system like bordelands 2 for selling/transferring gear.

    1. Humanoid says:

      a.k.a. SWTOR’s one good feature.

  25. Azrac says:

    Regarding your wishlist: “1. Upgrade-able harness armor.”
    I don’t know if you are aware about the existence of ballistic weave in the game but it does what I think you are asking for. So there already is better clothes than the vault suit that work together with armor pieces.
    http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Ballistic_weave

  26. Daphne B says:

    I miss being able to have one non-human companion and one human companion. Basically I heart Dogmeat *so much* that I will never know if any other companions are worth having. If there was a mod for that, I would definitely consider it.

  27. The Unforgiven says:

    What I want to know is this: Is there a mod that removes the dust from the screen of the pipboy? The dust around the edges make it almost impossible to see a lot of the important information I care about, especially when it comes to items. In real life, cleaning the screen would take less than 10 seconds but beyond the quick wipe the character gives it when he or she finds it, there is no way that I have found of making the edges of the pipboy unobscured.

  28. Wide And Nerdy â„¢ says:

    So we have these clunky slow text based terminal interfaces that are underdesigned and poorly optimized. But we’re supposed to buy the idea that synths are people, or even that Codsworth can be a versatile and adaptable sapient robot.

    I’m comfortable with the choices I made. Institute all the way.

  29. Irridium says:

    I really like this this mod which displays what you’re character will actually say instead of a one/two-word summary that is sometimes misleading. Doesn’t help you figure out the tone you’re character will say it in, but it certainly helps a lot.

  30. Dev Null says:

    Is there a Fallout 4 mod that fixes the ridiculous user interface on a PC? Let’s see, which interface am I in? Do I exit this one with tab? Or ESC? Or clicking a mouse? Or was it something else this time, I forget?

    And the town-building interface: to do anything, you need one button on one side of the keyboard, one button on the other side of the keyboard, and the mouse, simultaneously. Whose idea was _that_, pray tell? It’s obvious that they’d never used one, but had they at least been _shown_ a PC first?

  31. RTBones says:

    I am only just now downloading the game from Steam. For at least my first play through, I intend to not use mods.

    Having said that, I find it 1) cool 2) hilarious, and 3) a little bit scary that a game which has been out not quite a month has 1) mods at all, and 2) this MANY mods.

    Was the modding scene this active with F3 and F:NV when they launched?

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