geala

That's a good question where hopefully others with more experience will say something. I never used these tools. I check mods with FO4Edit wether they conflict or overwrite and if necessary combine them with my personal .esp files. Depending on the mods you use that might not always be possible or the best solution. I have a relatively small mod list of about 200 mods which I can control without LOOT or merge tools (at least I think so ... ).

That is quite difficult to explain abstractly, without having FO4Edit open and seeing the files. You should watch for tutorials, on Youtube maybe. I myself are a bloody amateur with xEdit (called FO4Edit for the Fallout 4 version) or modding as a whole. If I can manage it, anybody can. It's so much easier than dealing with the vanilla Creation KIt, it's incredible. Important to know is that there is a cascade of interdependent files which distribute items to the actors in the game. Fundamentally items, here weapons, are bundled in leveled lists which at the lowest levels contain the single weapon which appears on the NPC. The actors are listed under "Non Player Actors" (also the player char btw). You can see what weapons or clothes lists an actor has attributed. Weapons are a bit easier to understand than clothes because you only have leveled lists and not outfits as intermediate level. There are several levels of leveled lists. You have to detect the leveled lists you need because there are a lot used in the game with different purposes. You see the huge number under the "Leveled List" topic in FO4Edit. Thankfully for weapons it's quite easy, at least in most cases. Normally weapons for groups used in the game are described by LLI lists (while for example LLD lists normally contain loot of dead NPCs). The LLI lists contain LL lists which at the end contain the weapon (btw you can also put LLI lists into a LLI list). You can simply define the percentage of weapons used by a group (for example raiders with automatic weapons) by adding or removing LL lists from the LLI list. You can also give half of the NPCs in the game a minigun and the other half a fatman if you like.

Is that so? I use about 200 mods and I know that's not that much compared to modlists of other players. Maybe I'm just lucky with the composition of my mods. But I usually can ignore AE and AWKCR, it sits there in the background. If a mod has a version without AE/AWKCR dependency, I normally use that, mostly simply because I want them all bundled in the Chem workbench and not spread over "dozens" of special AE stations. A lot of my edits overwrite AE/AWKCR edits, without problems. So they are a big framework, but not a demanding one. I use them because some of my favorite mods need them. And it's just nice that they remove the dumb/unneccessary slot occupations of many vanilla outfits. You also can have ballistic fibre for any garment (not that important for me because my armor has already big numbers, f.e. combat armor chest piece is 800 armor, and that's not peak armor). Mainly AE/AWKCR spare me a lot of editing I had to do without them anyway.

Currently I use only one custom weapon mod, an anti-materiel rifle (AX50), cause otherwise the vanilla weapons cover any kind of wepons. But also in ealier times, when I had installed several custom weapons, I never used quest injection. It does take control from you. Instead I made LL lists in FO4Edit if not offered by the mod, and changed the appropiate LLI lists with it. I have custom LLI lists quite different from vanilla for any group in the game. Better and different weapons spawn quite early, usually at lvl 5. That is all quite easy in FO4Edit. There is a simple way to deal with the percentage of spawned weapons. If you want gunners with automatics with 66% combat rifles and 33% handmade rifles, you put in 2 combat rifles LL and 1 handmade rifle LL into the gunners auto LLI list.

As said it depends on the mods you want to use. You should also ask yourself what the NG gifts you as PC player. As someone without a widescreen but just a 3840 x 2160 I don't see any gain from the NG. What are the advantages of having next-gen installed? Maybe I will think about switching if a next-gen exclusive mod comes out so ingenious and great that I absolutely want to use it? A story about old mods and frameworks: One mod I like is for example Clothing of the Commonwealth by Crimsonrider, a 2017 mod. It was Armorsmitth Extended and AWKCR dependend. Constantly trying to optimise my FO4 of course I read also about the problems with these frameworks. Once I started a new concoction of mods without them. Then began a phase of sudden not reproducible CTDs out of the blue, after years of a stable FO4. I tried for months to find the reasons, using all available methods which seemed reasonable to me, but I did not connect the problems to some of the mods which promise to work without AE and AWKCR. It was unthinkable seemingly, quite dumb indeed. I stopped playing FO4 and looked elsewhere. Then a year later when I again felt the urge to play FO4, I suddenly remembered AE and AWKCR, the reasons for ctds I had removed for a more stable ensemble of mods. I installed the old frameworks and the old original mods for them again, and the ctds were gone. Since then I have about one or two ctds in a year (with about 200 mods, some heavy scripts and all 4K textures) instead of every hour like in my "optimised" FO4.

I think it were best to edit the NPCs in the Non Player Actors folder and assign non-melee weapons leveled lists to the appropiate melee NPCs. You should also change their combat behavior. You could instead try to simply remove the melee weapons from the melee weapons lists and insert ranged weapons instead. Which would be a lot easier and less work. I'm not sure wether some actors have reserve melee weapons attached however.

I tried all mods (lockable trunks, doors etc.) which allegedly keep settlers from taking stuff out of the workbench but I always had bad luck. The only reliable method for me was placing an inaccessable chest. Beware that settlers can spawn in locked rooms and places, so don't use locks. I build a single scaffold (also nice for turrets) with a chest on it, high enough that you cannot access the chest from all directions. If I want to put in/ take out stuff I enter building menu and fetch a ladder I placed far enough away. No lost items since 4 years.

I play mostly what you call "very little to do after the final act". I have more than 2k hours in the game and never ever ended the main story or a main faction story, I usually ignore them. If you need something after the big questlines, you could use mods which greatly widen the possibilities for playing. For example the "Outcast and Remnants" quest mods (I'm not the biggest fan of the mod style, but they are massive and greatly done and many like them). Currently I have some mods like Point Lookout and Fourville installed, however the normal gameplay, to build settlements and get enough stuff and good weapons, takes enough of my time. Another example, I never managed to visit the South of the Sea mod's locations but I'm always planing to do it. It's not boring that way. BTW patrol mods and additional enemy spawn mods are as mandatory for me as loot overhauls, to make the game a big of a survival game. That's all personal taste of course. I'd be really bored by playing a big main story twice for example, I'm not bored when cleaning some locations for the xth time.

I have a very special question. Anybody knows a mod which has armor/clothes for Enhanced Vanilla Body and uses a longer torso than normal, including the underwear area, but without the legs? I use Crimsonrider's fantastic "Clothing of the Commonwealth" mod and I want to make some jeans to be worn down on the hips, so to say, by lowering the pants with Outfit Studio. The problem is that the usual torso stops at about the upper end of the underwear. When moving the jeans down to the hips some gaps appear. Currently I use the full body instead of upper torso and feet for low riding pants, but the legs clip through the jeans with some movements.

The Skyrim experience was annoying. For some reasons at one time I updated the game (what a fault) and did not play since this "improvement", mostly because some mods I see as essential for me weren't updated. Good to know that I have to keep Steam offline all the time in the next months/years to save my FO4 from a similar fate ...

Sadly I don't know such a mod. For some forms of gameplay it could be really useful, f.e. modded scenarios and/or if you don't do the Minutemen quests or the main quest in general (I never ended the main quest btw despite more than 2,000 hours played). Currently I made the Commonwelth even more primitive as it is and ignore the Minutemen quest while focusing on two settlements for which my char (not the sole survivor) does mercenary work. A problem with disabled settlements may come from the strange settler quest popping up from times to open a different settlement for inhabitants (as if the settlers would care about distant stuff ...).

I get the criticism about the bugs of The Fen's Sheriff Department. While I never had crashes using it, I had the map desaster which makes using the pipboy for orienting hardly possble. I installed a map mod and the problems were gone. Not sure wether that's a permanent solution, but try it. I don't get the problems with the "girl power". It's a (parallel) world 200+ years in the future and from all we see there is no fundamental difference between men and women in FO4. It is also, probably unconsciously, a big fault to think that women necessarily have to be inferior in a violent world, that's based on biased perceptions of history and society. A Somali pirate crew is from a society with the habit of suppressing several people (among them women) for thousands of years in an unbroken cultural row, it's not at all a good example for what would happen in a world in a different culture after a big bang, with several ruptures in culture. And as it is as easy for a women to fill a person with bullets as it is for a man, there is also no "muscle power" related arguing possible why women have to be the underdogs of society. I'd wish for a more balanced composition of the department's personal, but I can live with how it is. What made me deinstall the mod is the big role power armor plays in it. I have made me a more primitive and tribal Commonwealth, I don't like power armor and I don't want power armor around that much. That's personal taste, not the fault of the mod. Anybody should try it, it's great.

Automatic reload for me is one of the most annoying features of FO4. It should at least be absent in Survival mode. Managing ammo is an important aspect of combat and taking it away is just bad. I would even vote for a system where you have to manually repeat weapons which you had to ... repeat manually in real world, like the hunting rifle. Plus a system of jams, mostly for semi-automatics and automatics, as balance, and because jams are not so seldom in an environment of dust, dirt and decay (I use a mod for this but I'm not sure wether it works or not). Pipe weapons should be affected the most by jams, of course

Why is your char naked? You need a story for it, my opinion. :cool: My current C. is primitive, very few guns, mostly melee or crossbows. A lot is kind of tribals, also from clothing, so is my char. He's not naked but adjusts to the heat. :happy:

I use BLD https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/3815 since long and I consider it a mandatory mod. I changed it in parts due to personal taste but could absolutely use it in original state. It overhauls at the core not only weapon damage but also the health of the NPCs (and player), because damage changes alone don't solve the FO4 combat problems. I also use PANPC https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/30140, to make the NPCs a bit more intelligent in fighting.