Yesterday and today I just focused on doing the art assets. Once that SPID is in place, these will appear randomly in the world and I want to have a good variety - including some that are plot relevant. The mod maxes out at 80 items (at least, before it needs more xEdit work) so that's my target and I'm now about 3/4 of the way there, with 57 covers created. Here's a little taste of what we're going to include.

 

 

At this point, the assets for the plot-related scavenger hunt quest are all created, along with several B-Plot tie-ins, such as more information about the power suits and about Valery Gray. The canonical magazines also all have pretty good representation, so I don't have any particular focus areas that I need to address. Of the remaining 23 covers, at least 9 are reserved for the two black and white "hand drawn" magazines (Jerky Vendor and Wasteland Survival Guide) to give them better representation, but for the rest? I guess we'll see what jumps out at me as a good fit for the layout and dimensions of the different covers.

One of the big to-dos this week is to get the leveled lists for Red's Rangers and for the Minutemen up and running. Each faction will require a slightly different technical approach. For Red's Rangers, we started by cloning the generic raider armor lists and pulling out their underarmor records. Then, we added the Red vault suits and accessories to the Red's Rangers outfit.

 

 

This is very much a "phase 1" edit. My initial attempt to add color variety to randomly spawned pubic hair was running into issues, so I've held off on screwing around with any palette swaps until I have a better technical understanding of how this works. The complex object template functions are something unique to FO4 that isn't in Skyrim, and so its proving to be a bit of a learning experience for me. For that reason, Red's people will have normal colored armor initially (combined with the custom vault suit, though), and I'll want to loop back and do more extensive edits in the future.

 

 

Not withstanding the whole hair color mismatch issue - for whatever reason the default color is a coppery red, which is a fairly raid hair color in the game - the actors seem to be generating right. There may be a specific problem with male actors who receive medium or heavy armor, but that's a technical issue I'll worry about later. For now this has at least taken most of the work out of getting the Rangers going and it helps establish some ground rules for the Minutemen.

 

I'm using Militarized Minutemen, so it has a fairly complex leveled list structure that allows it to support a number of different 'character class' types that share a lot of accessories and other bits in common.

 

 

Basically, we want to keep our touch on these guys as light as possible, except for these goals:

 

• Underarmor type items should consistently be replaced with TheKite's Minuteman underlayer, which is basically just a belt, tall boots, and a cravat. 
  • She exception is medics, who have medic Vault Suits as their underarmor.
• When armor won't clip with it, the actor should wear the overcoat from TheKit's outfit.
• Medics need to replace the default gloves/scarf options with vault suit gloves and a neural collar.

 

After some analysis, we can narrow exactly what we need to edit down to the following lists:

 

• The main uniform list
• Certain character class lists that need overcoats or other accessories
• On late consideration (and remembering some odd results I saw during preliminary testing) I also swapped out the mod's default gloves for vault suit cloves, and also added a neural collar as an option on the scarf list

 

 

One thing I'm seeing right away is that the armored varieties never have chest pieces. I believe that's because MilMin has a plate carrier on the uniform mesh. So let's go back and edit the armor leveled lists to also include a chest piece. After that, the main change we'll need to make is to incorporate the Minutemen colored armor pieces, which will be a "phase 2" part of the project to go alongside the templates for Red's Rangers armor and for random pubic hair. 

 

 

Looking a bit better. I clearly still need to do some work on these guys, but we're moving in the right direction. This spawn test revealed a few classes with minor errors in their setups, but once I correct those we should be good enough for in-game use at the current stage of the story. Of course, as the Minutemen develop we'll need to give them a better, more consistently look. Towards the end of this exercise, I decided to make one final change - I went into the armor lists and created a split where if the arm parts were missing, the actor would have the overcoat. This should give a much more consistent look to the actors; I also inverted the chances for each type so the coats will be seen most of the time common. Leg parts and chest pieces should for the most part be OK, I think, but let's see how it looks.

 

 

That's looking much more consistent now. It hasn't gone unnoticed that there aren't any women spawnign in these groups, so at some point I do need to make sure that some mod hasn't made the spawns all-male, but I think that might actually just be a side effect of the leveled LVLN form ID I was using. Either way, I think we can definitely say we've accomplished 'stage one" success. 

 

Of course, as I type this I do notice that some of these actors have morphing issues, so that also is going to require some more research (is the MilMin scarf causing the issue? If so, it's an easy fix of pulling it off the leveled list). Still, we're making progress. 

After some time away for a business trip, I'm back at work on preparing for book 4. Most of the work today went into continued renovations for the Museum of Freedom. My goal is to have the floors, ceilings, and stairs in the main hall and the north wing full renovated, and maybe also do some work on the walls - though that'll depend on how cooperative they are. In the course of my various off screen activities I've recruited a couple new settlers, and they've been put to work on logistics, manning a security desk in the entryway, and doing paperwork in the office (which I've only just started to clean up). 

 

At the same time, I've been doing some work in xEdit to address some of the issues with procedurally generated NPCs in and around Concord. I haven't encountered one to use as a test case yet, but going forward these actors should be following the dress code - residents will be in Vault 111 uniform and visitors will be undressed. I still have a bunch of work to do in this regard; not only do I need to implement similar customization for Minutemen and Red's Raiders NPCs, but I need to put in some default OMOD combinations for the pubic hair meshes so that when they randomly appear they will not always be default black. I've got some time to work on that, however.

 

Removing the trash from the Museum of Freedom will only get me so far, because there's a lot of "baked in" damage on the floors, ceilings and walls. Fortunately, there are two things working for us here:

 

• The bulk of the interior is built with standard-sized structure elements, so they line up with player-buildable clean/undamaged pieces
• While the old interior parts don't snap to player buildable ones, we can extract the positional data from the console and use that the place the first piece, after which everything snaps to that piece

 

The only downside is that just like the parts not snapping, the navmesh isn't connecting either, so I'm going to have to do all the floors and stairs, at a minimum, and that'll be time consuming. Here you can see a first look at the process. I'm starting with the mural room because this is where I'm going to set up the main conference room. 

 

 

Fun fact, the vanilla interior surfaces are a combined floor and ceiling... but not like you're used to seeing in the workshop menu, where it's a floor that has a ceiling on the bottom of it (the "upper floor" pieces). Instead, it's a floor with a ceiling over it. That means that until I do the 3rd floor above the future conference room, it'll have a transparent ceiling - even though there's a fully functional floor in the room above. This shouldn't be a problem except for maybe some mild inconvenience doing the ceiling on the 3rd floor (but even then it'll just require some math work in the console to figure out the proper Z coordinates).

 

 

The other thing I'm working on today is learning how to make custom magazines in the game. Thanks to Editable Comics, I dodged the time sink of creating templates, but there's still definitely some work involved. I'm still on the fence about how this compares with making custom assets like this for Skyrim. In SSE for a case like this I'd just be editing the nif file's texture mapping directly. In FO4, all these comics use a single reference nif and then use material swaps to change the textures. It results in a more efficient file size outcome since you aren't duplicating the same nif over and over again, but I kind of feel like SSE texture set records could accomplish this the same as FO4 does, without needing the external BGSM files. BGSMs do offer more flexibility for other applications, but for custom magazines I'm not really using them.

 

Hmm, what's this on the floor?

 

 

Red Tourette is going to love this...

 

But in any event, today was just a small update. I'll be away for the next few days, so stay tuned for more updates next weekend!

I've mentioned a few times in the past that one of the issues at Concord is a problematic X-Marker from NPCs Travel, which was causing hostile NPCs to spawn in the middle of the green zone after sleep or fast travel. This problem has somewhat subsided after we've fought off these intruders and burned the bodies, resulting in them not respawning, but it continues to be an occasional nuissance, so we'll move that X-Marker to outside the green zone. This will also serve as a good dry run for similar activities that I'll need to do for mod-added settlement sites like Bedford Station, once they're cleared and put under Minuteman control.

 

First things first, I went into xEdit, found one of the hostile NPCs that was spawning in Concord, and analyzed their movement package. Review of the waypoints revealed the Concord X-Marker, which I copied to a patch file.

 

 

Next, I loaded up the patch in the Creation Kit, where you can see the X Marker below.

 

 

Now, let's find a new place to put this marker. Hostiles near Concord is OK, but because of the way the engine abstracts events during time lapses we don't want the marker here, since it can cause hostiles to warp to right on top of it and be inside the wall when normal gameplay resumes. Let's move it a few streets over so it isn't in the green zone anymore. We may need to move it in the future if we expand the perimeter again, but that's fine.

 

Here you can see the new location.

 

 

This CK work accrued some dirty records, so we're going to go back into xEdit and clean up the patch. As you can see below, we picked up two wild edits and we need to delete those from the patch.

 

 

And as you can see below, when we go into the console and type player.moveto 260c4e8c, we end up at the new location. We shouldn't have any more in-city hostile spawns at Concord. Haha, just kidding! I started to get NPC pathing crashes after I moved that marker, so I need to do more analysis to try and find out where the problem is occurring  But it's a start at least!

 

 

Before we move on from Concord, let's take a moment to move some of the streetside plots indoors. There are several buildings in the expanded green zone with place for interior plots, after all. Without making any radical changes, we have 3 buildings with interiors available.

 

 

There's already a bedroom in the final building, but I'm probably going to move it and turn that building into a commercial space. In fact, if it'll fit I'm going to move that bedroom into the small building with only an upstairs part since the upper floor just just the right size. Also, damn, I need to change the theme of this bedroom. The author of the mod with this bedroom really should have clearly disclosed that it was a BoS faction skin. I hate changing higher level plots (except when converting to a different type) because they drop back to level 1, but this one is so in your face with the branding, it'd disrupt my immersion every time I saw it.

 

 

Now let's move that little 1x1 shop we saw in yesterday's preview off the street and into the building near the new entrance. First though, we'll install some lighting in that building since its dark in there almost all the time (just on account of shadows and whatnot).

 

 

Yikes! That ceiling texture is hideous! Fortunately I won't be looking at it much (I also went on to change the lights a little, but you get the idea). Samara's 1x1 was a general store, and started by just going duplicating that and reassigning her (then removed her old shop). I also put in a recreation plot next to her new shop, but it won't build until the next in-game day because of resource constraints. Eventually, I changed the general store to a bar, because it was a better fit for the location.

 

Finally, let's clean up that three-story building and decide what we're going to do with it. At a minimum, I want to move the residential shack next to Publick Occurences off the street and into the building. I'll probably also queue up another recreational plot as well. Beyond that... I'm still undecided. I can't afford to tear down the level 3 organics shed yet, and I want to keep the two outdoor vehicle-themed plots. So that building probably won't be fully exploited yet.

 

 

I know from past playthroughs that navmesh and pathfinding can be challenging for anything built on the 4th floor (requires the user to add stairs, too) and the balcony can be tricky so I'm going to leave those alone. I'm going to put a residential plot on one of the intermediate and also put a recreational plot on the ground floor. Since the ground floor is full of trashed bookshelves, I'll install a library if I can fit it right. After fiddling with the options a bit, I kept finding myself unhappy with the results, so I installed From Sanctuary to Concord and switched out several building plots. I used that mod to move around several existing plots and replace them with more appropriate ones, and the end results looked better.

 

 

A final check of the settlement stats didn't reveal any further problems (other than a small electricity shortfall which I'm not going to mess with yet). So let's move on to our other goal for today; testing a foundation type I've never used before, along with getting "tech settlements" installed. While I want to use the assets from that mod, it has a lot of dirty edits so I first spent some time in xEdit cleaning it up. That's actually kind of a rare experience for me, as in general Fallout 4 authors seem to be much better at mod hygiene than their Skyrim counterparts. And it became a more involved process than I expected for this particular mod, because it contained a large number of 'hidden ITMs' and also wild overrides of vanilla records that didn't appear as conflicts. After some effort though, the plugin was clean enough to use, and so I hopped back in game. 

 

First things first, we need to go and clean out College Square, which is going to be the site of this settlement.

 

Incidentally, one thing I need to keep in the back of my mind is that I need to start building advanced agriculture plots. I need to get five of them to level 3 in order to build high-tech ag plots, which I'll need for both the Brotherhood and the Institute eventually (and Vault 88, for interior plots). We'll take one step in that direction by stopping by Graygarden and replacing its hand-placed outdoor farm with an advanced farm. Because advanced farms have a SPECIAL floor (need at least 5 Endurance to work on it), I had to create a special robot to fulfil that requirement. Meet Pickertron GG-01:

 

 

The new farm is up and running, but now we also need more water supply, so we'll also put in a municipal plot for that purpose. Annoyingly, while we've unlocked advanced water plants, I don't currently have a 2x2 outdoor plot of that type available, so we'll go with a basic one instead. Still, it should meet our needs. And in line with my goal of testing more foundation types, you can see the decobase square foundation in use here.

 

 

With that diversion finished, we can finally move on to Cambridge. The clearing process was a bit of an anticlimax, as the enemies in play were almost all just basic feral ghouls - looks like the tough ones had got pulled into the fight at the police station and, since this is a settlement zone, didn't respawn quickly. But check this out - while I was clearing away debris, a BOS patrol walked through the site! Makes me feel like I chose correctly in targeting this zone for the first BOS settlement.

 

 

So a few data points, good and bad, became evident right away.

 

• The stilts on the Brotherhood of Steel foundation aren't long enough to create a walkable area underneath the plot. However, they give enough clearance to put things like small supply containers or even turrets underneath.
• A concrete staircase attached to the foundation will allow a settler to path up to the top of the foundation.
• The steel huts from tech settlements are slightly bigger than the BOS Foundation, but it has a textured bottom so it still works fine

 

 

I wasn't able to find any specific deficiencies during this dry run, and so far it looks like the BOS foundations are working. I do still need to monitor the full range of NPC behavior on the finished houses, but currently the two field scribes I have at this outpost are managing OK. This is currently a 2-person, 2-food, 2-water settlement that can't sustain more people, and won't until I can build high tech farms, so its just a tiny blip on the map for the moment. By the time we return however, it should be something more substantial.

 

While I'm here, I also wanted to briefly test an outfit I built in bodyslide. Let's see if it works correctly.

 

 

Just Brotherhood of Steel doing Brotherhood of Steel things. Nothing to worry about.

While Charley was out fighting Kellogg, Jake oversaw an expansion of the security perimeter in Concord. This opens up the road parallel to main street for buildings, which offers a bunch of advantages. While Concord is already at its current population cap, new interiors let us move some facilities off the street and allow for future growth when the cap increases. Additionally, the exterior gates now display instructions for visitors, echoing the sign described in Chapter 28.

 

We're not quite done with Concord yet, as I need to make some edits to the position of some X-Markers from NPCs Travel along with possibly some costume tweaks. Those edits aren't "must have" changes, however, and may get sidelined compared to other goals.