Thinking about fallout 4 Modding

[HarryS123]

Salutations!

 

I was thinking about trying a modded play through on Fallout 4 to see what I can do with it mod wise, I have a history of modding ES games but would love to mod Fallout 4 also. Can anyone tell me if there is a framework similar to Skyrim in fallout? Or perhaps suggest some mods that are a "total must" for modding fallout?

 

Cheers,

[KoolHndLuke]

That's like asking what color to paint your house. You have to browse and read posts or look at the top 100 mods on Nexus and choose for yourself. Sim Settlements is cool- if you like immersion. Honestly, almost the only limit to what you can mod in these games is your knowledge and imagination, but, also how much work you want to put into it.

[Guest]

25 minutes ago, HarryS123 said:

Salutations!

 

I was thinking about trying a modded play through on Fallout 4 to see what I can do with it mod wise, I have a history of modding ES games but would love to mod Fallout 4 also. Can anyone tell me if there is a framework similar to Skyrim in fallout? Or perhaps suggest some mods that are a "total must" for modding fallout?

 

Cheers,

For sure you can mod it. And you will and enjoy it way more than vanilla.

First, because you posted on LLab, get a full naked body. CBBE is the mod used one (but not the only one.)

Then get some mods tat adds some game changes, pip boy, stats, new quests.

 

And then, if you like deep sex, get the Four play setup with a few mods that uses it.

 

Personally I never used sex mods with FO4. I stopped playing it 3 months after its release (after completing it twice.)

But I used Looksmenu and CBBE, and a few lewd paintings to decorate my own home (most of them made by myself but never published because personal.)

[Irrational]

-=Incoming Wall of Text=-

Greetings, I recently just started FO4 Modding as well with prior TES experience as well. A good question would be what do you want out of the gaming experience. For me, I divide in my load order of 210 plugins between, 

40% settlement building

20% Prettier Character visuals,

10% Armor & Weapons,

10% Textures and game visuals,

10% Combat changes

10% Patches.

I find settlement building a pretty fun experience so my current play through is a pre-war civil engineer that finds his place in the minutemen and rebuilding the commonwealth on Survival difficulty. Gun-play is mostly vanilla give and take a few changes since I didn't find the shooting mechanics terrible.

 

Here are some mods I find essential in my mod list.

Start off with the right essentials: Mod Organizer, LOOT, F4SE, and FO4Edit.

Frameworks: 

• Amazing Follower Tweaks for FO4 (Probably the most versatile Companion framework)
• Settlement Keywords Expanded (If you are looking to add a lot of settlement building options to your game)
• Armor- and- Weaponsmith Extended (For variety and options for crafting weapons and armor from scratch)
• Mod Configuration Menu: (Works like you expect)
• Looks Menu: (Made by expired who did racemenu. Allows for much tighter controls over face parts. Normally recommended with LM Compendium)
• HUD Framework: (HUD framework, what else to say?)

Settlement:

• Spring Cleaning: A settlement scrapping mod that works without error with my load order. (There are probably better variants of this mod out there.)

Gameplay

• Start me Up: (An alternate start mod)
• Full Dialogue interface: (Changes dialogue menu to something more like Skyrim than a cheap mass effect clone)
• Survival Options: (Allows tweaks to needs, travel, sleep, console control, and combat difficulty on survival mode)
• Take Cover: Adds a cover mechanic for 3rd Person play
• Third Person Aim-Down Sights: Allows 3rd Person ADS by double clicking the aim button
• See through scopes: (Not a big fan of the way mid range scopes is surrounded in black with no peripheral vision of your surroundings. This changes it to something akin to FPS games)
• Pip Pad: because carrying around a hulking Pip-boy is for losers. Who needs smartwatch when you got a smart tablet?

Beauty

• FSM Skin and Face Textures: (Pretty good since it mixes most options available.)
• Extended Facial Scuplting: (Adds more specific sliders to face sculpting. If you like Racemenu levels of control over appearance, this is a must have IMO.)

Fixes/ tools/ utilities

• Boston FPS Fix: (It doesn't matter your rig, boston downtown will mess up your perfomance like sugar to teeth. Use this to get an fps boost. Says it's not compatible with Spring Cleaning and precombines set to 0. I used spring cleaning and precombines set on and haven't ran into any issues as of yet.)
• FO4 Config Tool: A tool that allows tweaking of INI settings in a safer way.
• FO4.exe auto back-up: (I wish I knew about this sooner. The recent patch made f4se, looks menu, and mcm incompatible for a couple of days. This tool saves a back up of older executable so any creation club update wont set you back waiting for updates from mods. It's a tool that runs independently)

 

 

Disclaimers-

One of my biggest things I need to stress is be aware of texture amount in relation to how your system can handle information in terms of regular RAM. I run a i7-4770k, 980ti, 8GB DDR3 Ram on standard HDD. I will be upgrading to m.2 SSD, and 16GB DDR3 in a week or so to better handle the stress the game throws at me. From my experience Textures can play a huge issue in stability in this game. For a while I had massive microfreezing every minute which was cased by a skin texture mod (Real HD 2k Faces).  I switched to FSM and the game has been running fairly smoothly with occasional stutter on cell load. 

 

Install mods in small controllable groups. by installing in groups of 2-3 so you can quickly diagnose the issue. I thought I knew enough about modding from Skyrim to avoid mod conflicts and issues, but Fallout 4 has its own set of problems. Be prepared to do a lot of optimizing if you plan a mod heavy game.

 

It's recommended you also run your game from an SSD to cut loading (and potentially cell loading)

[HarryS123]

24 minutes ago, Irrational said:

-=Incoming Wall of Text=-

Greetings, I recently just started FO4 Modding as well with prior TES experience as well. A good question would be what do you want out of the gaming experience. For me, I divide in my load order of 210 plugins between, 

40% settlement building

20% Prettier Character visuals,

10% Armor & Weapons,

10% Textures and game visuals,

10% Combat changes

10% Patches.

I find settlement building a pretty fun experience so my current play through is a pre-war civil engineer that finds his place in the minutemen and rebuilding the commonwealth on Survival difficulty. Gun-play is mostly vanilla give and take a few changes since I didn't find the shooting mechanics terrible.

 

Here are some mods I find essential in my mod list.

Start off with the right essentials: Mod Organizer, LOOT, F4SE, and FO4Edit.

Frameworks: 

• Amazing Follower Tweaks for FO4 (Probably the most versatile Companion framework)
• Settlement Keywords Expanded (If you are looking to add a lot of settlement building options to your game)
• Armor- and- Weaponsmith Extended (For variety and options for crafting weapons and armor from scratch)
• Mod Configuration Menu: (Works like you expect)
• Looks Menu: (Made by expired who did racemenu. Allows for much tighter controls over face parts. Normally recommended with LM Compendium)
• HUD Framework: (HUD framework, what else to say?)

Settlement:

• Spring Cleaning: A settlement scrapping mod that works without error with my load order. (There are probably better variants of this mod out there.)

Gameplay

• Start me Up: (An alternate start mod)
• Full Dialogue interface: (Changes dialogue menu to something more like Skyrim than a cheap mass effect clone)
• Survival Options: (Allows tweaks to needs, travel, sleep, console control, and combat difficulty on survival mode)
• Take Cover: Adds a cover mechanic for 3rd Person play
• Third Person Aim-Down Sights: Allows 3rd Person ADS by double clicking the aim button
• See through scopes: (Not a big fan of the way mid range scopes is surrounded in black with no peripheral vision of your surroundings. This changes it to something akin to FPS games)
• Pip Pad: because carrying around a hulking Pip-boy is for losers. Who needs smartwatch when you got a smart tablet?

Beauty

• FSM Skin and Face Textures: (Pretty good since it mixes most options available.)
• Extended Facial Scuplting: (Adds more specific sliders to face sculpting. If you like Racemenu levels of control over appearance, this is a must have IMO.)

Fixes/ tools/ utilities

• Boston FPS Fix: (It doesn't matter your rig, boston downtown will mess up your perfomance like sugar to teeth. Use this to get an fps boost. Says it's not compatible with Spring Cleaning and precombines set to 0. I used spring cleaning and precombines set on and haven't ran into any issues as of yet.)
• FO4 Config Tool: A tool that allows tweaking of INI settings in a safer way.
• FO4.exe auto back-up: (I wish I knew about this sooner. The recent patch made f4se, looks menu, and mcm incompatible for a couple of days. This tool saves a back up of older executable so any creation club update wont set you back waiting for updates from mods. It's a tool that runs independently)

 

 

Disclaimers-

One of my biggest things I need to stress is be aware of texture amount in relation to how your system can handle information in terms of regular RAM. I run a i7-4770k, 980ti, 8GB DDR3 Ram on standard HDD. I will be upgrading to m.2 SSD, and 16GB DDR3 in a week or so to better handle the stress the game throws at me. From my experience Textures can play a huge issue in stability in this game. For a while I had massive microfreezing every minute which was cased by a skin texture mod (Real HD 2k Faces).  I switched to FSM and the game has been running fairly smoothly with occasional stutter on cell load. 

 

Install mods in small controllable groups. by installing in groups of 2-3 so you can quickly diagnose the issue. I thought I knew enough about modding from Skyrim to avoid mod conflicts and issues, but Fallout 4 has its own set of problems. Be prepared to do a lot of optimizing if you plan a mod heavy game.

 

It's recommended you also run your game from an SSD to cut loading (and potentially cell loading)

To quote an essay! That is a really good way of thinking about modding and personally I have never thought about it in such a way! I guess really I want a mixture of immersion and some good old nudity from time to time! 

 

Thanks for the advice!

[Irrational]

I think it's a good mindset to have an objective for your modded game. It prevents you from becoming what I call an "bloat modder" who throws on appealing mods because it looked good in a showcase video, just for it to never be used because it wasn't a mechanic that resonated with them to begin with. So far the difficult part of transitioning from Skyrim to FO4 is that you know what mods you want, but the problem lies in whether the mod exists or what name is it going by. Best of luck to you and your modded fallout.

[HarryS123]

14 hours ago, Irrational said:

I think it's a good mindset to have an objective for your modded game. It prevents you from becoming what I call an "bloat modder" who throws on appealing mods because it looked good in a showcase video, just for it to never be used because it wasn't a mechanic that resonated with them to begin with. So far the difficult part of transitioning from Skyrim to FO4 is that you know what mods you want, but the problem lies in whether the mod exists or what name is it going by. Best of luck to you and your modded fallout.

Which MO did you use for Fallout 4?

[KoolHndLuke]

People swear by MO for Skyrim and I agree. NMM works fine for FO4 in my experience.

[HarryS123]

5 hours ago, KoolHndLuke said:

People swear by MO for Skyrim and I agree. NMM works fine for FO4 in my experience.

I'm using MO2 and so far so good, but I'm trying to add Bodyslide to my launcher on MO2 but for some reason the mod folders do not exist inside FO4.

[Irrational]

Did you try running MO2 as admin?

[HarryS123]

12 minutes ago, Irrational said:

Did you try running MO2 as admin?

Well it's not like MO2 is not working as I have full access to all the mods yet when i try and set the binary location for Bodyslide I can't locate the MO folder inside the steam game folder.

[AWP3RATOR]

3 hours ago, HarryS123 said:

I'm using MO2 and so far so good, but I'm trying to add Bodyslide to my launcher on MO2 but for some reason the mod folders do not exist inside FO4.

The mod folders do not exist in an MO2 installation, inside the game folder.  This is the main difference with NMM and MO2.    You can check where your MO2 paths are set up:  Click the Settings icon off the main menu, and mouse over to the Paths tab.  This will tell you where you folders are set up.  Then when adding the binary for BodySlide, navigate to these paths, to the "Mods" folder.  From there, located CBBE, as per normal.

 

As an example, my MO2 install is on a different drive than my OS and default Steam install location:

 

 

 

My BodySlide executable is at:  E:\Games\ModOrganizerFO4\mods\BodySlide and Outfit Studio\Tools\BodySlide\BodySlide x64.exe