FWE + MMM = Essential? Or is it broken?

[Izzachar]

Having played XFO a while I decided to go with some mods that further affect the wasteland. I decided to go with FWE cause I liked the changes stated in the readme.

 

In the readme file to FWE it lists other mods that are nice. And the comment about MMM is that it is " an ESSENTIAL mod to be used along side FWE."

 

So I thought, I gotta get MMM to give FWE justice.

 

Now one of the major reasons I choose FWE was that it had the "worn weapons" mod and the "harsher wasteland" mod. I really like the idea of a wasteland low on resources where you gotta run around like a scavenger and be over joyed if you find a nice rifle and some ammo. This together with all other changes FWE provides seemed to be just the perfect combo. I like to not be an god killing 100 enemies at the same time. I like it if I feel like I'm just somebody with the odds against me. So by that alone a mod (MMM) that could provide you with 10 supermutants at once spawns seemed a bit out of place. But I tried it anyway however without increased spawns optional mod and all other mods that hinted in that direction.

 

So first thing I went to the super duper mart. There were probably 5-7 raiders there.And they unloaded on me with assault rifles, something that made the buss and car go boom in 1 sec killing all but two of them. The last 2, one had a flamer and the other I think a combat shotgun. I killed them and was like.... WTF? A flamer? Assault rifles? I'm level 2!

 

If this is what MMM mod does, requiring you to being able to kill that type of armed NPCs thats fine. But its not for me. And when I read FWE file this is not what I had in mind. Yet FWE readme itself says that MMM is ESSENTIAL with FWE. It seems contradictory to me?

 

Anyway the reason I'm writing all this is first and foremost to know if I might have installed one of the mods some unintended way, as it makes little sense to me that it should be this way. If its supposed to be some other way please let me know. And if its supposed to be like this its all good I simply remove the MMM mod and save it for a time I wanna play an outcast character cleaning the wasteland. And in that case I also think that MMM is not at all an essential MOD for FWE for the ppl that wanna play it lots of crappy weapons, hard to find good stuff style.

 

My first topic here on fallout nexus. Great site. Great mods. Glad to be part of the community.

[mechine]

MMM is one of the cleanest mods out there.

 

 

Mart's work is nothing short of magic.

 

 

 

You just can't say that about the other mods out there.

 

 

 

 

Hence FWE or whatever calling it Essential.

 

 

 

It's not just a mod that makes spawns 1-3 or 2-5

 

 

the bulk of the data deals with NPC's settings

 

 

stats, AI, weapons, toughness, ect.

 

 

 

Plus it does tons of other cool stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I never used XFO or FWE

 

 

 

I thought it was lame

 

 

 

I think I read maybe a paragraph into the discriptions an thought it was lame.

 

 

 

Which worked to my advantage, as you know FWE an XFO are two of the most problem causing mods out there

But that's only because we use other mods with them in the load order. I'm sure they're smooth as glass if

you run them alone.

 

 

 

 

What was it about XFO an FWE which you liked enough to decide to use it?

 

 

 

 

If you ask me I'd rather just get a few mods that do the same thing, but in a more easy to manage package

because they are seperate an not included inside one mod which combined 100 different mods.

 

 

But then I don't even use FOIP anymore, I load up the whole load order with FO3edit and fix what I need to fix

in order to use whatever mods I want with other mods you shouldn't use together. Once you start looking at the data

in FO3edit it's kind of silly to use load order rules or FOIP, when you can just make your own custom load order which

you have final say for each entry in the data. Lot of work though.

 

 

 

 

Using merge patch with FO3edit, or loading the XFO FWE after MMM might null most of the stuff like loot an NPC weapons.

 

Idk MMM an very hard makes it almost impossible difficulty, hence why XFO an FWE is kind of lame besides the fact that you can

 

get the seperate parts of XFO an FWE in small easy to manage mods, rather than 200 mods combined into 2 different ones

 

where you really only want 10% of each.

 

 

 

 

So what was it about XFO an FWE which you really wanted?

[Izzachar]

I have no doubt MMM is an awesome mod. I'm not bashing it. I just prefer the difficulty to consist of having few supplies, few tough enemies, having to choose what I wanna excel at and be almost worthless in other skills. Much like the original fallout games. When I read, see screenshots of MMM it seems that the difficulty from that mod more depends on a greater number of enemies and thats not what I prefer at this time. It feels like MMM makes fallout more into a rich world that you FPS shoot your way through (I might be wrong). I'm not playing fallout cause of its FPS but because of it role playing and I wanna get even more role playing gaming out of it, not more FPS.

 

When I come to a place with quest I dont want to be like my char was on the first play through. Good in speech, sneak, lockpick, science, guns. decent in explosives and repair. I could do everything, I could solve the quest any way I liked. I could speech to get more caps or get it easier. I could science turrets to help me and break in everywhere. I could pickpocket if I wanted to. With the small penalties to weapon dmg and accuracy from low skill I could also use any weapon. I think thats boring. Playing a mod that gives fewer SP and makes all skills important to have high values in forces me to make choices. It forces me to play a certain type of character. Now I might be forced to solve a quest by pickpocketing someones key in order to get his room and steal something. Now I can repair almost nothing without repair skill. If I wanna repair I need to get that skill over smth else. Not having barter hurt like hell in XFO it was a very useful skill now. Instead of speech giving you more caps from completed quests barter was a choice to offset that difference in isk easily. Not having medicine, repair, speech, barter and only combat skills would mean you had to buy services like healing repair etc and almost no money to buy it with. At lv 10 I had 500caps and still low on medical supplies and I had good speech and repair skill.

 

I thought XFO + Real injuries + real needs was great. Every time I found parts so I could craft a bottle cap mine I was joyed as it was almost the only way to bring down a super mutant brute. The main reason I decided to move on was that it hasn't been updated a long time and it doesn't seem to work with the new MMM.

 

I agree that merging that many mods into one does make it hard to choose for yourself. However I like almost all the changes and downloading the ~30 mods that FWE is based at would probably yield more problems then FWE does.

 

What appeals to me in FWE then (and XFO has much of the same).

 

* Richer Character Development: Fewer SPs, SPECIAL changed a bit. All to the better IMO. Leveling is slower, perk changes, Alternate start,

 

* More Realistic + Lethal Combat. I like it all execpt bullet time mode, but I simply dont use the feature.

 

* The effects of injuries are more severe, and putting yourself back together after a grueling engagement is more difficult. You can't lie down on the ground for an hour and wake up a fully healed individual.

 

* An optional "primary needs" feature requires you to eat, drink, and sleep or suffer grave consequences.

 

* Tweaks to leveled loot lists make the wasteland a less forgiving place; you’ll now find even less ammo, drugs, and the things you need to survive.

 

* Elimination of “Immersion Breakers” and free hand-outs.

 

I approve of all combat and wounding related changes.

 

* rad changes

 

* Worn weapons (crappier guns in the world at the start of the game). I hated my first fallout 3 play through where I got lucas sims Chinese assault rifle just at the start cause burke killed him. I used that rifle probably 90% of the game. I like building up in weapons slowly as I do in skills.

 

 

Then there is a few mods that I do not really think matter. I don't need it, but I'm not annoyed by them either.

 

These include, new weapons and armor, chem + food changes, ammo has weight, followers enhanced (Im not very fond of followers anyway),

 

 

The only thing I'm not 100% satisfied with is the availability of ammo vs medical supplies. Ammo is a bit to scarce on harsher wasteland for my taste but medical supplies is just perfect. However without harsher wasteland there is to much medical supplies while ammo is in a good balance.

 

 

Probably if I knew how fo3edit worked I could adjust this myself.

 

 

So why MMM?

 

* Lots of ppl like it so it has to be good

* Zones respawn

* Stat, size scaling

* Factions

* AI

* Skins and NPC diversity

* Can increase spawns.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I tried to reinstall the whole thing again. Made new game. And now it seems to work better. No funny weapons now. Havent played past lv 3 and only went to spring field school and super duper mart.

[mechine]

Oh Geez, um, that's something else about MMM it works mostly off global varibles,

 

Like for instance in your case, what's probably the most important one

 

is the increased spawns min an max, in the main MMM esp it's something like 1 or 1-2 something

 

anyhow it's packaged with increased spawns 1-3 an increased increased spawns 2-5

 

something like that, some dofus said use both at the same time to make it harder

 

but after you start looking at the raw data inside FO3edit you'll see it's only two entry's

 

one patches over the other

 

 

 

 

blah blah blah

 

 

anyhow what I"m getting at is that it even says this inside the MMM read me

 

All you would do to pretty much use MMM (because of it's enhanced AI an textures) but without the increased spawns

 

Is open the whole load order with FO3edit (the whole load order just because it's good practice)

 

Then go down to the increased spawns .esp (which is a tiny mod on the main MMM.esp)

 

open it up, an you'll see the min an max increased spawns numbers

 

 

which if you set it to 1 then it's vanilla spawns, or 1-2 low, whatever you like

 

 

 

In fact I got rid of about 3-4 or more mods just from changing these optional MMM .esp's

 

so that what I wanted was contained in the main MMM.esp

 

An example

 

I knew I wanted to use increasedincreasedspawns.esp 2-5

 

so all I did was look inside the entry for increasedincreasedspawns.esp in FO3edit

 

which shows all entrys, which had the main MMM.esp in the multiple entry list (the one furthest to the right is what fallout uses)

 

So all I did is cut an paste (or drag an drop) what I wanted to make the main .esp match the optional one

 

in this case it was drag an drop the number from the right to the left, from increasedincreasedspawns.esp to MMM.esp

 

which was 2 for a minimum an then 5 for a max (scary though you could set them to 10-20 hahahah)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yeah man, I really should start a fallout build like you.

 

It's kind of a fun idea. Next time I build a install I'll make it a XFO FWE test drive (simulation).

 

 

 

 

Anyhowz.

 

 

 

 

 

I totally agree with your aim.

 

 

But I ended up getting into making custom weapons very heavy.

 

Mostly I make more realistic versions of weapons other players have made, but

 

also a lot of it is fixing stuff that has already been made, but was messy or done wrong a little bit

 

heh, one gun caused a crash because it was missing a tiny hammer on the back of it lolz. hahah

 

 

 

 

Anyway so since I had got into the whole player made weapons thing, it sort of made the need for tougher

 

NPC's pop up, but I mean I already wanted that from running FOOK1.6 tougher enemys, Nailed to death, Ultra Onley, MMM

 

 

Because MMM was so popular I pretty much had it anyway.

 

 

So the only thing that really came of it was a standardized weapon damage rate based off factors like the

 

size of the bullet, speed of the bullet, or fire rate.

 

 

 

 

I kind of found that running FOOK1.6 tougher enemys, Nailed to death, Ultra Onley, with MMM

 

that MMM just overwrote most of the other ones, and MMM had higher (tougher) settings anyway

 

You probably wouldn't be interested in any of these mods except for Nailed to death

 

which pretty much makes the super mutants hard as coffin nails, but most of them have melee weapons

 

like the nail board, hence, "nailed to death" but it does have good scripts for the stuff, an makes them have

 

more than one name I.E. "supermutants" However, it totally clashes with MMM, so I've never really even

 

used the core content of Nailed to death, mostly just used it an the others which gave me idea of "tested"

 

NPC settings (viewing them in FO3edit) I've now dropped all those an just use the MMM.

 

 

 

 

Idk I use MMM because it seemed like the wasteland was just empty. I didn't like the idea of ever being safe.

 

Also I prefer impossible difficulty, but then I totally hate the big boss theory

 

the ideas about video games how we have to have a big bad turkey boss to make the story work

 

an that it can't be like movies. Silly huh...

 

 

 

At the same time, you know we've all kind of learned that by making the 3D game world too realistic looking

 

"ultra realistic" That the end result is usually a dead looking world...

 

Which is where giving it a sort of hint of cartoonish look to it, making the world look somewhat alive

 

but not at the cost of realism, in a rich world.

 

Maybe after the advanced technologys become the standard, then we can focus more on "ultra realistic"

 

 

 

 

That being said, it's just not the case when it comes to things not dealing with the view of the world space.

 

In fact it's quite the opposite. As gamers we tend to want everything else to be totally unrealistic.

 

Often accepting it without question...

 

Durring making some weapons I asked about a fire rate and having the slide match the fire rate.

 

Which the conversation had realism mentioned, which someone brought up the fact that hey you know

 

fallout 3 isn't very realistic. And you know it's not...

 

 

I only mention it because it might help you a bit.

 

The reason that it works so well is because it's not real at all, on average...

 

 

It can be allowed to be that way though, because it's two different paths in time.

 

Durring the 1950's there was a split in the timeline.

 

One of them became the world we live in today and the other is the fallout world.

 

Which is why the music an parts of the wasteland have 1950's stuff in it (because our butts were down in a vault for 200 years starting at 1950)

 

Something like that.

 

 

Anyhowz what I'm getting at is that the split of the timeline pretty much allows a whole lot of unrealistic elements to be added to the game.

 

 

 

Which is nice, because along with the tools bethesda gave, an the "keys" we made all kinds of stuff, and now

 

we can make an do anything we want.

 

 

 

 

Alls I'm saying is that there is a wide wide wide threshold between real an not-real in the wasteland.

 

 

So long as it's still semi realistic, it's fair game.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You should start using FO3edit.

 

 

To really learn how to use it, you have to use it a lot an screw up a lot over time with different load outs an installs.

 

There's a guide (but it's 120 pages long) LMAO, so yeah I didn't read it.

 

Just don't actually delete anything from a mod via FO3edit, rather, make all the multiple entries match

 

(redundant yes, but also more safe from the random mass conflict which can happen when you delete a entry)

 

but thankfully that doesn't happen very often, it's pretty rare, which means you can delete entries, but

 

as a Rule I would almost always copy all my .esp an .esm, then paste them in a folder on the hard drive named "backup"

 

before doing so, which it's always good practice to create a backup before even starting to mess with stuff in FO3edit

 

 

 

At the very least you need to run the Merge Patch process via FO3edit on whatever load order you have

 

which will rid you of about 25% of the crash causing mod content conflicts combining them. This is different

 

than taking two mods an merging them into one, merge patch takes a look at the lists in the load order

 

then when it won't cause a conflict by combining all of them into one list, it does so, then afterward

 

you view it to fix whatever else is in there (which is good, as a fully automated process would be a bad idea)

 

 

 

 

To merge two mods into one yes it's called merge or merge patch sometimes, but it's not done with FO3edit

 

it's a FO3 plug in utility (which is a Java Plug in) totally unrealated to FO3edit an FO3edit merge patches to fix lists.

 

 

 

You can fix stuff in FO3edit by either making choices on what it should be, or copy paste and also drag an drop

 

to get rid of conflicts, Quick edits to mods, And then also if something can't be fixed by the normal means

 

you can create overrides. (Purpose created .esp's which use multiple .esm/.esp as masters allowing all content to be put in them)

 

Like say a script is in one mod, well it's not in the other, to combine them you make a override which uses both mods as masters

 

then drag an drop what you like for the final entry (which combines the best parts of many mods down into one)

 

Stuff like whiskey which quenches primary needs thirst, give a empty bottle for metal salvage, gets you drunk from inebriation blury screen an

 

can't walk straght, then also has overdose capability from BLTC (better living thru chems), Or you can shoot the bottles an it will blow up

 

distruction data from FOOK, All of these or more, via the override process which uses all of these mods as masters

 

Allowing all of these effects which contain scripts to be merged into one final entry in the load order called a "override"

 

blah blah blah, it's all in the override first draft, hard work though...

 

Override first draft

http://thenexusforums.com/index.php?showto...amp;hl=Override

 

 

 

Arguement about Override

http://thenexusforums.com/index.php?showto...amp;hl=Override

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyways the While it's not really Overrides that you'll need to fix your load order

 

it does deal with some issue which you would run into simply fixing your load order for XFO an FWE's sake.

 

 

Heck by using Overrides I don't even use any compatibilty patches or FOIP anymore, I just get a load order an then fix it.

[Izzachar]

Wow long post, a bit in a hurry so had to read it really fast.

 

I works good now, and yeah I already used f03edit to change the spawns the way you suggested. I think I'm using 1-2 or maybe I went for 1-1. All in all I'm very pleased with the fallout 3 experience now. I wasnt when I played fallout 3 vanilla, it was a big let down for me. The old games where so hard. Fallout vanilla I had probably 100 stimpaks toward the end :S. Well the overhaul mods make it very interesting IMO. We are all gaming differently but if you want a bit more challenge or a bit more RPGish feeling I personally strongly recommend these mods.

 

I agree that MMM is a good mod, now playing it for a bit, adds a nice feeling to the NPCs, they feel much smarter AND look better.

 

About the realism I know its not realistic. I just like more factors making it more challenging and interesting to put it in a better way not counting only enemies. If all I cared about was the enemies there are better shooters around. More elements enhancing my rpg experience is what I want.

 

Thanks for the constructive feedback!.