NPC Patrol Tracker - Keep the Commonwealth Safe

[zant1963]

I would love if there was a mod that tracks how many hostile NPC patrols are active and then gives you a reward based on how many you have cleared. For example a boost to settlement income for keeping the number of patrols below 25%. It could also look at cleared locations and outposts. Does anyone know if this would be possible or how much work it would take?

[d4em]

Possible: yes (theoretical yes), work: a lot, and it will probably be a buggy mess at first. In the game engine, enemies are not really stored as patrols, there is no built-in way to check how many % of enemies you killed in a given interior cell, let alone exterior locations. That's besides the issue of respawning. The easiest way to do this would probably be to attach a script to the player and track how many kills they get in a given location. 

[zant1963]

On 4/1/2025 at 4:31 AM, d4em said:

Possible: yes (theoretical yes), work: a lot, and it will probably be a buggy mess at first. In the game engine, enemies are not really stored as patrols, there is no built-in way to check how many % of enemies you killed in a given interior cell, let alone exterior locations. That's besides the issue of respawning. The easiest way to do this would probably be to attach a script to the player and track how many kills they get in a given location. 

That's interesting, thanks for the info. Seems like it would be pretty difficult.

[NeinGaming]

Yeah, it would be quite the undertaking to make something like that, since you have to spawn and keep track of all the patrols in some way. Especially if you want them to change patrol points occasionally etc. But on the most rudimentary level, you could start with something that simply tracks the number of enemies (maybe have categories like regular, popcorn, bosses) spawned by the mod, and attaches a magic effect to them that makes them report back to the master quest when they die, so the counter gets decreased. I *think* that could be pretty light weight, but of course you also can't do that much with the info it provides.

It's kind of a dream of mine, to have surrounding areas affect settlements in gamey ways e.g. clear surrounding raider and supermutant dungeons, and keep new people from moving in and accumulating, to increase production on a nearby farm, because reasons. But to be honest I can't even fully formulate what I want in my head. IMO the main issue is that the game world is so huge; if you just have a few dozen patrols, you will rarely run into them. If you fill the world with so many patrols there's lots of action, and make them real smart, e.g. build up numbers near an intended target before attacking it, maybe even carrying off loot (how cool would that be!) loading a save will take ages, if it loads at all.

Faking it and centering things around the player would make it more feasible performance wise, but still a giant undertaking. I think the most realistic chance would be to generally depopulate the game, affecting both hostiles and friendlies, to make the enemies/neutrals that exist matter more; they would also have to carry a lot more loot, while the world has less of it. But on the upside, FO4 is so huge, if before any run a random 95% of the content was removed, it would still be be a game.

Edited Thursday at 11:45 AM by NeinGaming

[South8028]

Funny... If you install some mod on a vertibird patrolling a settlement, your settlers will run very far and kill all hostile NPCs ad infinitum. The detection radius of the vertibird extends to all friendly NPCs. It turns out that all you need is to create some kind of indestructible group with a huge detection radius and they will kill all your enemies in the Commonwealth. You can probably just release a group like that via some quest and they will automatically run through all enemy spawns, including those outside of uGridsToLoad, because the Red Rocket settlers with the vertibird will calmly get to Cambridge and kill raiders, ghouls and anything else they meet along the way.