Gruffydd

Since you listed it top of the list, I assume you're committed to a karma system, but I would encourage you to consider a faction reputation system instead, as what is good or bad can be very subjective. For example, in FO4, killing a nonviolent synth would be considered bad by the Institute and Railroad, good by the Brotherhood of Steel, and neutral-ish by most other factions. Killing a bunch of hostiles (generally karma neutral in prior games) and then taking their stuff (generally karma negative in prior games) would be entirely subjective based on who you raided and who you're talking to. And so on.

Bethesda does not "hold the rights" to our assets and clearly state so in the Bethesda.net ToS and the Creation Kit EULA. What legal stuff we will have to sign in regards to the Creation Club, no one is likely sure yet. If it was defined as work-for-hire, then Bethesda would be the copyright holder on whatever mod was made for them under that contract. Not sure if it would be considered work-for-hire or not. Depends on how they handle the pitch and contract process.

You can do that now. If you really like someone's work, toss them a Donation. The author will probably be quite pleasantly surprised, given how few people use that button....

Work-for-hire mods. Bleah. No thanks. Unless they can pay more on an hourly basis than what my actual job pays, no way am I giving them my free time and hard work in exchange for a pittance so that they can rake in sales.

The quote is "nuke it from orbit". The Marines wanted to run away and deal with the Aliens from the relative safety of space. It's the only way to be sure.

Karma is too arbitrary. Perfect example from a prior game: Also annoying was when you go in and slaughter your way through your opponents, killing everything that moves. Then, once you're the only living thing left in the compound, you pick up some loot. Killing everyone was okay, but that loot was stolen! (From whom? You killed all the owners already.) Bad karma for you! Absolutely ridiculous. Much more useful would be a faction reputation system, basically tracked like companion affinity, where some things make the faction like you more and some things make the faction like you less. That way, rather than a single action being arbitrarily "good" or "bad", it would result in a "good" or "bad" reaction from the different factions depending on what they like, potentially increasing your rep with some factions while decreasing your rep with others. This would be especially cool if there were companions who would only join you if faction affinity was high enough or low enough, if there were dialogue choices only available at certain faction affinity levels, etc. As an example, killing an escaped non-hostile synth would probably give some negative affinity for the Institute (they'd have liked to get the synth back), a lot of negative affinity for the Railroad, some positive affinity from the Brotherhood of Steel, and no change for the Minutemen, Gunners, Nuka-World Raiders, non-feral Ghouls, Atom Cats, or whatever else might be a faction.

I'm confused. Isn't this what the Mechanist DLC does? Or is this something different that's being requested?

Lots of Chinese on the West Coast back then too, as many had immigrated during the gold rush. An interesting twist might be to have the PC be a descendant of those west coast Chinese (those who survived the internment camps, at any rate), who is living there when the Dragons come sailing in, and is given the choice of joining the invaders who share his/her ethnic heritage, or defending the land he/she calls home. Or buggering off and letting them fight it out, but that's kind of missing out on the point of the mod if the player chooses that. Since the San Francisco area has already been explored in-game, a good alternate area if you're looking at the west coast (which would make sense seeing as that's where you get to first if you sail from China) might by the area around Humboldt Bay, where Eureka is located. Eureka is a Victorian seaport that eventually became a major logging area, but fell on hard times when most of the logging jobs dried up. It's not a major metropolitan area, is separated from other areas by miles upon miles of forest, has no significant industry (other than marijuana growing), and is sitting on a natural harbor, which makes it a good choice for a Dragon force that is trying to land, establish a base, and then​ start its campaign, rather than trying to sail up to a fortified area and start blasting. It's also small enough that you wouldn't have to do as much infrastructure work, and the buildings could pretty much all be done from existing assets. It also has a history with the Chinese, having enacted local legislation forbidding Chinese from living there in the 1880s. It wasn't until the 1950s, when most people had forgotten about it, that Chinese people moved back in and have stayed since, but for a while it was illegal for them to be there. The area also has a history with Native American tribes, with a number of them in the surrounding areas, and a dark spot in its history when a tribe living near Eureka was massacred. There's even an old fort overlooking the bay, where General Grant was once stationed during the earlier part of his military career.

... or if you ask for and receive permission from the copyright holder. Not that I see Marvel and DC giving permission.

It worked fine for me. I've got him wandering around in my primary settlement, telling bad jokes and keeping my beverages icy cold....

Should work with most mods, but there's always the possibility of conflict. Create a clean save, then install it and your other mods, open FO4Edit, and look for conflicts. Even if there are conflicts, you may be able to make a patch to resolve them. Alternately, Snappy has a nice selection of building parts that can do most of what SnB did. I'm in the process of switching out my buildings from SnB to Snappy because much as I like SnB, much of it (especially the wood bits) doesn't blend very well with the vanilla game world.

Interesting ideas. I wasn't clear on some of the points though. The PC is selected by the AI (which oddly has an English acronym) from a poor family to be trained, yes? But the surface is heavily irradiated, you said. Is there some kind of longevity program? Pseudo-ghouling of some sort? Something mystic? Something else? If not, where did the PC's poor family come from? Or does this take place shortly after the War, with the Dragons having been basically a separate, concurrent civilization with the pre-war Chinese? What would the American Dream part entail? Some type of cross-Pacific invasion of the NCR? Or of whatever early post-war faction rules there? Oceanic invasions are challenging (look at D-Day). How would such an invasion be successful yet not have the power to reclaim something closer to home (Japan? South Pacific islands? Nepal?)? It seems like a faction powerful enough to successfully invade America should be able to successfully invade something in Asia, and I have trouble seeing China's last hope giving up on China entirely. The concepts are interesting, but too much of it seems a bit odd to me....

No, it was touched on, but not clearly. Being able to customize/toggle "some aspects" does not equate to being able to pick and choose from the modules. For example, I have little interest in customizing/crafting ammo, and got burned out years ago on having to deal with item condition. I would have little to no interest in using those parts of the overall mod. I am, however, quite interested in whatever faction work comes along. So, if the customization allows me to "turn off" phase 1 (ammo), but keep phase x (factions), that would be great for me. But if the customization is only a few aspects of how​ the ammo customization works without the ability to skip it entirely, that's not so useful for me. Others may have the opposite tastes. They're very much into the ammo overhaul, but don't care about factions, or settlements, or whatever. Or, they may be interested in all of it except the ammo overhaul because they already have an ammo mod they really like that would conflict. So, my question wasn't will we be able to use the toggles and customization within the phases. What I was really asking was if the overall mod would be modular, allowing the user to exclude some phases entirely, while keeping the rest of the overall mod, or if the phases will be interlinked to the extent that you can customize some settings and toggle some things, but won't be able to exclude the phases you're not interested in. Sorry if I wasn't clear about what I was asking.

Just as a note, incorporating Sim Settlements as a mandatory part of any overhaul will turn off a large chunk of people who enjoy building their settlements. I strongly recommend against forcing the Sim option in any overhaul, instead recommending that nothing be put in to conflict with it, thus letting the individual user decide to use it or not.

Since you're planning on making it one piece at a time instead of all at once, will this be modular, allowing the user to install only the overhauls that match their vision of what FO4 "should" be, or will this be all-or-nothing?

Sim Settlement only "fixes" things for people who want to Sim City their settlements instead of building them themselves. It doesn't address the OP's issues.

That was a year ago. As far as I can tell (and I spend a lot of my in-game time going to different settlements) this is long fixed.

There are already mods that add those. I like Old World Plaids, which adds beds plus a bunch of other furniture, but there are at least a few other mods that add larger beds as well.

Most walls are set up for you to be able to put a roof or second-story floor on top of them. The spacing is set up to accommodate this, but it also means that you usually can't stack walls, because it would mess up the spacing. Of course, many settlement builders (myself included) promptly wanted to be able to build some rooms that go up more than one floor, especially with how a number of important vanilla items (level 3 shops or a number of generators, for example) didn't fit in a 1-floor room. There are mods out there that have variants of some walls available with an extra bit at the top, allowing you to space them out correctly. I'm pretty sure Homemaker is one of those, at least for some wall types.

Why not Miami? Whole world was affected. Looking forward to Cascadia too.

Only if you have a mod that doesn't take up much space against the cap. Put up something with a bunch of custom textures, and watch the complaints start. "Your mod's too big. Can you make it smaller?" No. No I can't, because textures. Lower size = lower quality, and I'm not making my work look crappy just so it takes less space. One jackass even put a comment that blared "WARNING: EXTREME MOD". This is why I stopped updating at BethNet. I got tired of people griping at me about the size of the mod, and demands to make it smaller. So yes, post something small and you'll get a good response. Post something big, and instead of "thanks for sharing" you'll get complaints.

Right? I wouldn't travel with someone like that either, but it's kind of moot in FO4, imo, because we can't be all that evil (or at least the game doesn't have any way to express it). It would be more interesting in a game like FO3 or NV where there is a clear, evil choice you can execute and if you want to do a playthrough as the bad guy you might want to have someone along who either supports you or doesn't care as much as say, Piper or Danse who would lose their minds if you were a slaver in FO3 or followed the legion in NV. That's pretty much why the only companions I don't have are Strong and Gage. They're too dissimilar from how I am playing my character. I think the reason I often have Cait along instead of others who aren't as grumpy when I am at all nice to someone is the others all seem to be doing okay. Especially with how I've set up my settlements, where I've RP'd that Piper has a fancy new office/press, Curie runs a clinic, Nick has a new office for his investigator business, etc. Cait, on the other hand, still seems adrift. Other than putting her on guard duty or picking mutfruit, what is there for her? By hauling her around with me, I'm RPing that I'm showing her there is​ another way, that she doesn't have to be so broken anymore. Of course, in the actual functionality of the game, none of that is going on. Alas. For those who even the current system of having to consider what the companions like or dislike is too much, though, or who want to go full-on dark side, they can always craft their own robot companions who truly don't care what they do.

There are a number of mods that have parts for various structures that have windows. Try Homemaker, Snappy Housekit, or some of Ethreon's mods like Bob's Iguana Diner.

No one's arguing that a follower shouldn't have a more complex story, motivations or express them better in game. But there is a very big difference between an actual Raider and someone who just doesn't care what you do. Neutral does not equal evil. One could argue that the Institute is as evil as Raiders for wiping out the BOS, or the Railroad is evil for killing synths that don't agree with them and the BOS, etc. Good to evil is a spectrum, not two ends with no middle. I wasn't talking about neutrals, I was talking about any follower who would like or love such activities. One for the "players who want to kill and muder most things," as the OP put it. Some of the followers already in the game are effectively neutral. They love or like certain anti-social activities (some more than others), and only dislike, not hate, others. They're balanced between the light and the dark. Neutral. Others, not so much. There's definitely a leaning toward good aligned followers, with such as Preston, Codsworth, Nick, Curie, and Piper, for example, all being mostly good aligned, and not an appropriate choice for a would-be scourge of the Commonwealth. But other followers, like Hancock, Cait, and MacCready, endorse a range of anti-social activities. X6-88 doesn't care about murder or theft, and only dislikes drug use. Strong is outright psycho, even reacting favorably to cannibalism. And of course Dogmeat always loves you, but he really doesn't count. Dislike is easy to counter. Just do some stuff the person likes, and you're good to go. I often have Cait along. My character generally tends not to be an ass to people, which Cait occasionally dislikes. However, some lockpicking, a bit of the old ultraviolence (against hostiles), some crafting, or a bit of running around nekkid, and she's good to go again. I like that you actually have to consider your follower's personality when having them tag along. It's a good thing. Without that, it's just an excuse to have some extra storage space and a second gun. If an NPC truly doesn't care what you do, why are they with you? What motivation do they have to stay? Neutral isn't lack of caring about things. Anyone who simply doesn't care about anything is dead inside. (Why they are could be an interesting story, but that's not the point here.) Neutral is having mixed opinions, liking some things that might be considered good, and some that might be considered anti-social or even evil. Even a supposedly neutral merc who will follow anyone around if they're paid enough should have lines they won't cross, and things they like or dislike more than others. Otherwise, see above re: storage space and a gun. Any character who can't manage to balance out a dislike for murder, drugs, or theft is probably going so overboard toward the dark side that only darker followers would continue to tag along. That's what I thought the OP was asking for, given the aforementioned desire for followers for "players who want to kill and muder most things," and that's why I said that I hoped there would be interesting story to explain why they're on the dark side, and why such a follower would continue to stay with the character. I'd like to see what someone could come up with. Most of the stories as to why a follower joins are shallow. "Here, have some caps." "Hey, tag along." "Sure, you can follow me." There's not a lot of depth. Why are ones from opposing factions not more hostile toward each other? Why don't more of them get upset when you seduce them and then run around seducing all of the others as well? Why do so many of them fall in love so quickly? Why don't they in general have more to say? I'd love to see some deeper interactions with followers (I'm currently trying out Heather, for example), and the kind of villain who would have no issues tagging along with someone who regularly goes on a theft and murder spree across the Commonwealth while hopped up on chems, if done right, could be very interesting. Done wrong, though, as I said, it's yet another walking backpack with a gun.

Not saying there shouldn't be such followers. Just suggesting that, since they'd by their nature be a very odd lot, something more than Bethesda's "here's 200 caps, now tag along until you love me" would be nice. Otherwise, in the FO world, someone who likes mass murder and theft is basically a raider, and outside of a contrived NukaWorld setting, there aren't a lot of reasons for a raider to start following you that don't end badly, so if they're going to function as normal followers, and not trigger aggro from every non-psycho NPC you meet, some kind of interesting story would be warranted, yes?