Gruffydd

So, you're asking us to go against the mod author's wishes, violate the terms of the Nexus, steal the work and post it on some shady site somewhere, all so you can have what you want? No. Just no. If you want it that bad, learn to mod and make it yourself.

I didn't have that experience with the radiant quests blocking settlement quests at all. Not once. Not sure why you were having so much trouble with it.

The implication in Hancock's dialogue is that he is still functional. He's surprised you're interested, but once he gets past that, he's just as good in the sack as all of the other companions (or at least gives you the same bonus).

That was also something I mentioned in my original post. At no point are you required to complete those quests, and if you don't, the penalty is not that high, especially if you don't particularly care about settlement building or settlers.

I don't think you're painting the entire picture here. The minutemen are annoying for a number of reasons. First the sheer amount of quests that they will give without you agreeing to them becomes a drag. Second the incredible ineptness of settlers to sustain themselves forcing you to supply them with literally everything. The minutemen and settler system is incredibly unimmersive because it forces you to do everything even though there's hundreds of people involved. I've played the settlement system in different ways, but the fact that they require constant attention of a pre-war lawyer is just mind boggling. You only get those quests when you 1) talk to Preston, 2) go to the Castle, or 3) turn on the radio to the Minutemen station. At no point do they track you down as you cross the Commonwealth and force quests upon you. If you don't want to do the quests, stash Preston somewhere, don't go near the Castle, and keep the radio on a different station. Issue solved. As to the complaint about the settlements, if you're still having to put that much attention into it, you're doing it wrong. I've built up every single settlement except the Mechanists (because of the floor glitch), and once you get the proper number of beds, food, and water, and get them assigned to their jobs, they are a completely maintenance-free source of caps, with the exception of the few times you get a message that one is being attacked... and now, there's a chance they don't even need your help when they are attacked, as they have a chance to fight off the attackers themselves. It sounds more like you didn't like the game as a whole, and are grumpy about not being able to play the bad guys. Which has little to do with Preston.

That's pretty much what I said in my first post ("The issue as I see it..."). It's not that there are quests, it's that you personally, as the general, have to do them all. Or ignore them. Whichever.

I actually consider some of that a flaw in the DLC. If you ignore the Automatron robot quests, they should start attacking your settlements, not just sitting patiently waiting for you to go take the quests. As to the Railroad, if I remember correctly you're asked before you join and as a condition of joining if you'd die to save a synth or some such. They're pretty committed to it, and if you're not, why are you telling them you are and joining them? Out of some completionist I-must-join-every-faction compulsion? The difference with the Minutemen faction is that you are defending/maintaining the settlements, which are an active player-owned part of the game. You've built them, you've committed to their protection (when you agreed to lead the Minutemen), and now you get to defend/help them... or not. The choice to complete the quests is yours, as is the choice to go anywhere near Preston or the Castle or turn on Minutemen radio to get assigned more of the quests. It's almost a shame that the other faction's radiant quests aren't more time-sensitive, and have no real impact on your settlements, as it ends up giving no real incentive to do any of them other than RP/xp/compulsion to complete everything. With the Minutemen at least there's a consequence, however minor, when you blow one off.

I see the complaint about the unavoidable Minutemen quests fairly often. The thing is, once you agree to lead the Minutemen, you are in the business of protecting settlements and their settlers. So, should those settlements be stagnant, where nothing ever happens to them, or only happens when it's convenient to you? No. And there's the point: you are not required to complete these quests, but there is a consequence when you decide not to (settlers die). So, you can either go about your business on your personal quest (or whatever it is you're wandering around doing), or you can do the job you agreed to do and protect people. Either way, life goes on. Failing a Minutemen quest does not negatively impact your game other than you having one less settler, and some settlers being grumpy with you as a result. Rumor has it that failing a *lot* of them might cause a settlement to leave your network, but then, if you're blowing off most of them (and keep in mind you have to keep going back to Preston or the Castle or listen to the Minutemen radio station to get more), why even bother joining the Minutemen? The issue as I see it is not that you're given quest after quest to help/defend/rescue people, it's that YOU are given the quests. You're general of a network. Eventually you have checkpoints all across the commonwealth. Yet not once can you send a squad of Minutemen to go do a quest when you're busy with something else. Having an option every X number of quests to autocomplete one (no xp, no rewards, just completes the quest) by assigning a squad to do it, with X becoming a smaller and smaller number the larger the Minutemen network gets (especially once you retake the Castle), would make a lot of sense, but no such mechanic was included. Preston ends up with all the hate, but he's only one of three ways to get those quests. If you don't want to do so many of the quests, turn off your Minutemen radio, stay away from the Castle, and don't check back in with Preston. Or get one of the many mods that reduce them. But Preston really doesn't deserve the hate for it. As an aside, I've heard people complain, not that he gives too many quests, but that he's boring, too "nice", etc. Fine. Don't join the Minutemen. Go be a BoS soldier, or take over the NukaWorld raiders. To each their own, and you don't have to be a Minuteman to complete the main story. Or even to gain settlements.

Not sure if this helps or just clouds the issue, but a number of people have been having problems with the main version (the optional SKE version works fine) of my mod Gruffydd's Signs and Posters (http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/9711/?), where it would give errors such as Error: http://filedelivery.nexusmods.com/1151/GruffyddSandP3.17-9711-3-17.7z?fid=93341&ttl=1490467014&setec=b5eee112a7fac90f8f0f98542dff86d7 , unable to finish the download. As soon as the user switched the fileserver from the generic one to the North American Premium server (thus requiring a premium subscription), it worked perfectly. I replicated this on my own account, and verified that it does indeed work once the switch to the premium server is made. Would be lovely if this could be fixed so that our non-subscribing folks can use the NMM download too.

Some people have been having similar issues with one version of one of my mods, and today found out that if you are a premium member of Nexus, changing the fileserver from the generic one to the North American Premium one fixed the issue. I don't know if this is the same issue you're having, or why it's doing it, but it did work with my mod. If you count having to be a premium member to get it to work a solution....

It might be my system, or the combination of mods I have, but I've learned to be very leery of deleting anything that is supposed to block vision. Rocks and asphalt bits and such seem to go away without issue, but as soon as I'm somewhere that I'm not "supposed to be" it starts glitching out, not rendering bits of things (like buildings, people, the ground, etc.) between me and the backdrop. Mostly it only happened to me in Sanctuary, where I had removed all of the houses to start fresh, but while I was bopping around in Far Harbor, I found a boarded up building in one of the settlement areas, and thinking I'd like to put shops inside of the building, I deleted the door. Nothing else, just the door. When I walked inside the "forbidden building", instant render glitch. Back outside? No problem. Back inside? Glitch. So, I no longer delete buildings. Just spare bits of rubbish.

Sanctuary's nice and large, but cluttered with unscrappable stuff that (in my experience at least) eventually glitched things up when I used mods to make the unscrappable scrappable. Spectacle Island is the largest in overall area, but it's very hilly. Good for terraced settlements or a bunch of widely scattered small stuff. Abernathy has some good area to it, but there's only so much you can do with the power pylon and related structure. I do like the overpasses in Graygarden and Finch (to the point where the Finch Minutemen settlement sign in my mod references it), but find them a little annoying to build on, due to the crumbly and non-scrappable nature of some of the dividers, with pipes sticking out at odd angles and suchlike. My favorite vanilla site is Starlight, as once you scrap out the radioactive crap in the pond, there's a nice open area between the diner/projection tower and the screen. On my game, I built that whole center area up to be at the same level as the diner, and made a nice flat town there. I put the farming and water pumps behind the screen, along the roadside, to give myself more building area in the central part.

What damanding said... Location mods depend A LOT on correct navmeshing and some of the newer modders arent aware of this or dont know how to do the job right. TBH its the most annoying part of the location mod's workload..... Then we have Mods that add things to the workshop that were done in a rush or didnt test everything and you could have pieces of floor or doorways that havent been navmeshed at all. ALL of the map is all ready navmeshed BUT when we edit it by adding objects or reforming the terrain...it HAS to be adjusted or in some case totally cleared and redone to fit the new shape. There are also certain occasions where the modder removed something but forgot to remove the extra collision marker that was with that part/piece thus blocking NPC's from going through ..etc. So i wouldnt say that the game has any bugs regarding the navmesh... since in most cases its the mod author's error and can be fixed. That was my point, really, that the game itself is good, but once people started tweaking with it, it got glitchy because the navmesh wasn't done, or wasn't done right. Building with added vanilla stuff? No problem. Building with added custom stuff (for instance, for me, the settlers just can't handle the doors from Snap'n'Build, and that's using 1.9, which lists as the current version)? A bit glitchy.

My NPCs still try to walk through the wall next to a doorway instead of through the doorway for a lot of the added building pieces. I should really go through the mods I'm using and make sure I've got the most recent version, but in general, in my experience, if it's not vanilla, they're often still a bit glitchy.

You need to be more specific, I think. There are some that add ease of play or fix bugs that many, many people use. Beyond those, though, it all depends on what kind of game you're wanting to play. For example, someone whose focus is unique and interesting weapons is going to have a very different list from someone whose focus is settlements.

Also, if you're going to be doing settlement building, you might want to use my two, "Gruffydd's Signs and Posters" and "Gruffydd's Signs of the Times", a categorized (either scripted or SKE/SKI available) pair of mods to add hundreds of signs and posters as placeable objects. GS&P adds custom stuff, GSotT adds vanilla stuff. Good for filling in the emptiness, and supplementing the very limited number of signs and posters available from the vanilla game.

She also voiced Doc Anderson and Trashcan Carla.

With the right perks you do substantially more damage in vats than you do without, spray crits left and right, bypass cover, and so on. Combine with gauss rifle and headshots and quite a few foes drop very quickly. Rifleman 5 + Sniper 3 + Penetrator 2 + Concentrated Fire 3 + Gun Fu 3 + Critical Banker 4 + Grim Reaper's Sprint 3 + Four Leaf Clover 4 = Multiple foes' heads exploding very quickly, even if they're behind cover, or larger beasties going down before they can get to you, and all from quite a long distance away.

For the vanilla assets, I think it's Homemaker of the mods I have installed that has an extensive selection of both pre- and post-war vehicles, including a large number of cars.

If you want a sign for your graveyard, there's a "Potter's Field Cemetery" one in my mod....

Not the ones I was thinking of, but one of those should work. Just a note, you don't need the big-name software to do your editing. GIMP works just as well as Photoshop for what you'll need to make posters, and there's freeware available to convert from png to dds. So, if you've got the expensive tools, use 'em, but if not, free alternatives are available.

I think there are a couple of mods out there with "add your own" functionality for posters. Not sure which ones they are, but I'm sure I've seen it or something close to it. (For what should be obvious reasons I'm not using them myself). Anyone else out there know which mods those were, and if they're still active?

Since you've got SKE as a required mod, might I suggest adding my two mods (SKE versions), "Gruffydd's Signs & Posters" and "Gruffydd's Signs of the Times"? Both add a bunch of signs and posters to the settlement menus (custom for GS&P, vanilla for GSotT), and are fully integrated with the SKE menu structure. Also, "Old World Plaids" from LupusYondergirl adds some nice variety to post-war settlement furnishings, and uses vanilla menus, so is likely fully compatible with your list.

Another option, especially if you're just looking for a set of labeled footlockers, would be to edit the texture for the footlocker in a program like GIMP or Photoshop, and add on the labels using whatever font you wanted (there are a number that look similar to the label letters here, or you could use stencil, or create an inverse for any font, etc.). Then, save the texture as a new texture (don't forget to convert back to .dds), duplicate the mesh and material of the existing footlocker, and reset the various file names so that the mesh and material point to the new texture. There's probably a way in the CK to just assign the new texture to the object, but I don't use the CK so I wouldn't be able to tell you for sure.

For mine, I just built the motel, popped some appropriate signage on it, and then didn't assign any of the beds to my "resident" NPCs.