Good time to get back into Fallout 4? State of modding.

[Dubbyk]

So I played Fallout 4 for god knows how many hours, most of it spent modding, bug hunting and playing around in the shallow end of GECK to make incompatible mods run together. (I never actually finished the story lol) Then .ESL's came out and blew the lid off the normal 255 mod limit and then I spent even more hours trying to see what mods I could turn into .ESLs to cram more mods into my load order, I think at one point I had almost 400 plugins running (granted many where tiny one weapon mods or .ini tweaks)

 

And then my hard drive crashed........... Uncounted hours of modding and testing down the tubes and I just could not bear to do all that work again after just doing it. So now it's years later and I've foolishly starting watching some Fallout lore videos on Youtube and that's gotten me wanting to try it again. So my question is, how is the state of modding in Fallout 4 now years later? Has .ESL's become the standard for small mods or do end user's still have to convert them? So is normal to still have to clean mods with FO4 edit and look for deleted nav meshes? Have the bigger staple mods like MMM, Raider Overhaul and Sim Settlement's died off?

 

Also with the coming news of the "Next Gen" patch coming in 2023 is it better to wait to get back in? Is it known if the patch will destroy modding for weeks / months after it's release and or kill older mods that are no longer being worked on as there has not been a patch in so long for the PC and while the mods may have been working fine for years this new patch will blow them all up.

 

So please share with me your thoughts on if it's a good time to come back to the game or if I should just preserve my sanity and wait for Fallout 5 sometime in ten years.

[StormWolf01]

Heyas Dubbyk!

Welcome back to the addiction! :D

 

Well... as of right now, we don't know what the "next gen" update is going to entail. :( So as of now, everything on that is pretty much conjecture.

If you were modding prior to November 19, 2019, the .162 and .163 updates changed the compatibility of mods with older versions of the game. Those mods have to be updated from having a version number of .95 to 1.0 (not difficult at all.)

 

Sim Settlements has gone to 2.0 and is much, much more complex. Still quite popular tho!

MMM? What is?

Raider Overhaul is still around, and has been popular, however, there are others that do similar. And those are equally popular.

 

Straight .esl files are kinda problematic. Especially If they're used as patches. They don't follow the load order. The game loads them as the game loads them. You'll see why that's a problem.

So what we're doing now, is flagging .esp files, as .esl files. AKA Esp-lite files.

That still allows user control, of placing them were we want them in the LO, but they're flagged as .esl files, so they go off the .esl system, not the LO hard limit.

However... any flagged .esp that has more than I THINK it's 1020 formID's in it, can potentially cause save game corruption. As that's the limit for formIDs, anything more than that will spill over, and would require a separate flagged (Esp-Lite) file.

 

I have heard, but cannot confirm... that .esp lite patches, have to go with .esp lite files, if they're patches. Again, I have only heard that, haven't tested it, and cannot confirm it.

But if true the required file that it's using as a master, would also have to be flagged.

You can find all kinds of tutes on how to flag .esp files.

 

As for the community itself.

Well.

Nexus isn't exactly the hub that it was a few years ago. :(

This happened, that happened, such and such happened... a lot of the modders have gone to discords, patreon, their own sites, alternate sites, etc etc. And some of them took their mods with them. So some of the mods aren't available here anymore. Or the older versions are still here, but the updated versions aren't. :(

[Dubbyk]

Now that you bring it up I do remember having to flag files and run some sort of "checker" program that would look into the file and count the ID's and see if it was eligible for .esl flagging. And MMM was marts mutant mod but I derped out and forgot that was a FO3 mod not FO4, I'd have to go into my nexus history to find what the big mutant overhaul mod I used for FO4 was, luckily I was pretty dedicated to liking and following all the mods I used so I could use that as a starting point on rebuilding.

[fraquar]

As a general rule I only use ESLified ESP's for patches.

I have no earthly idea why some modders release their mods as ESLified ESP's.

It's as if they expect every user of their mod has 3 billions mods installed or something.

Edited December 30, 2022 by fraquar