Have you modded your Survival to be realistic or artificially brutal?

[Deleted35607895User]

When I heard about and started to play on Survival Mode, I rather enjoyed it. At a point, I realized how artificial it all was just to make it "hard". Not being able to save. No console. A bullet from my 10mm does less damage than the same bullet in the same gun in the hands of a raider, which actually does more damage in their hand. A single bite from a dog or a molerat would somehow ignore my heavy combat armor and kill me instantly. Uh, no.

 

If I wanted 'artificial hard', I'd go with one of the other settings. I decided to mod the hell out of my Survival to be more realistic, which I knew would be as hard while also making some sort of sense. I returned saves and console (helping those times where I get stuck in the landscape or suddenly the game decides my illness I just contracted (insomnia) is now so bad instantly as to cause death). I took back my bottles I used so I could refill them. I changed the damage to be equal across all, but added different combat styles through mods that lengthen the time the enemy attacks and searches for you, etc. I stopped molotovs from killing by explosion (what? have they never been in a riot?).

 

How have you modded your Survival game?

[minngarm]

Technically molotovs can kill by explosion, they consume and push the air around them, thus if one exploded on your face with you trying to breath in it would burn through your lungs rather instantly.

[Deleted35607895User]

The technically part is the part that doesn't happen all that much, and Bethesda's molotovs do that 100% of the time. I added a mod so that it does only burning. Grenades are where the explosive output is kller.

 

I've been the subject of molotovs, grenade and sniper fire thanks to the military; anything hitting you in the face is deadly, but it doesn't happen 100% of the time, or even 5% of the time. Bethesda didn't separate the various throwables out very well.

[Boombro]

More about balance.

 

I don't really care about realism, there are better games for that but i want a fair, yet rewarding gameplay.

[gamefever]

For each thing that a person brings up as an issue on survival there is a strategy to overcome the issue.

 

Molotov is one of the easiest things to overcome very early in levels.

 

Lone Wander, Decent Endurance Stat, and of course insulation of some sort...Sorry its been a while since I played....But of course there is always the choice to avoid human enemies till your leveled up and equipped a bit better.

A player can easily walk into the first area with Raiders at around level 10....

With Power Armor and an assortment of high grade death spewing machinery.

[tonypoo016]

I have no idea why Bethesda left the save restriction in. I personally hate that feature. The thing about survival mode, is that you want to be immersed. I do not find having to repeat the last hour of gameplay particularly immersive, I find it annoying, tedious and boring. There's also not being able to fast travel, which is a death sentence when sometimes you can't really be bothered to walk all the way from one side of the map to the other, you just want to skip all that s#*! and actually play the game. Finally, there's minor annoyances such as different types of beds allowing you to sleep for different amounts of time. If you're exhausted from fighting for your life and scavenging the entire day in the apocalypse, would you really wake up after sleeping in a sleeping bag for three hours? I don't think you would care what you're sleeping on, you would just sleep until you don't feel tired anymore. Thankfully, I can just easily disable most of this stuff with the many excellent mods that have been made for survival mode.

[tartarsauce2]

honestly I tried to avoid a total overhaul route and ended up junking my mod portfolio and making my game crashy
it looks as if total overhauls are where it's at for this kind of thing

I'm not trying to mod fallout to be "artificially brutal" or "realistic" entirely either which way
I'd like a hunger/primary needs system, I'd like fast travel to be a bit more restricted, and saving as well (5-10 minute autosave mod) and am looking for a hunger/thirst mod I think I've found one though

the gun damages need to be a bit higher and I'm really annoyed at the constant scaling of enemies, and how guns feel like they're hitting playdough so much, I HATE. I JUST HATE. scaling health pools like that outdoing damages so that a level 50 raider gives as much trouble as like a level 10 supermutant when you're at level 50 - the strengths/weaknesses disappear at those points - so I use brutality

I desire damage thresh-hold, I want power armours to feel like unless I'm using a heavy gun with a lot of punch per hit I'm not gonna pierce that walking tank - so I'm using the DT patcher - my best experience aside from a new dawn mod giving me an encounter with a machete wielding raider power armour guy... (didn't have DT but had to jump out the lexington staircase and throw like 3 frag mines onto the bottom of that stairwell you know the one I'm sure)

was a synth eradicator with automatic? plasma sniper rifle in X-01 with unnaked mod (both normal armour and power armour count towards armour values with it) where prior to running into it I ran into another power armour using guy that was a raider and I barely managed to plink off his armour, using this alongside brutality so that when I finally did BOOM HEADSHOT, but the synth you see, synth armour had DT on it as well, and X-01 which means the total DT from both normal and power armour was such that shooting him to death with my not-sniper rifles was impossibru, so eventually I ran away and used bottlecap mines to tankbuster him

the fact that I had to actually use ulterior methods of destruction was glorious, I didn't have access to a rocket launcher even though this was war of the commonwealth spawned stuff, because I was using less loot and ammo as well

obviously, this is "realistic" but it's also gamey/arcadey in a sense
I want there to be a needs system in the background to have to maintain SOME stuff, and I'd like realism in the sense of experiences I described above, where things feel like they might in reality
and I want options when dealing with heavy brutal things, but I want those scary brutal things to be flavoured properly, wasteland arsenal gives a good example of how similarities can exist but with meaningful differences, by giving supermutants a minigun of sorts via the rocket launcher + some NIF changes + other stuff where it's a shouldermounted gattling gun, or assault rifle models with some other stuff to change them, so that super mutants have a new arsenal of inaccurate spray and pray generally mayhem inducing incendiary projectiles - it fits them

while the institute has weapons of some slight differences

personally, I think that the weapon mods (not game files but actual ingame modifications) system and the perks/level/NPC lists aren't quite tooled properly
I also use less gun users which affects raiders and mutants, super mutant overhaul, raider overhaul - although raider overhaul gives me some stuff that's a bit OP so I was thinking of toning it down slightly for my personal usage

also I'd like to see fist weapons - remain unusable with power armour but give "kung fu bonuses" of sorts where your resistance to things goes up a bit so as to make it more competitive for stuff outside of VATS

personally I think someone needs to basically go in, and create level lists/retool the entire level/hp pools, endurance stats, strength etc of every single monster in the game more or less and zone too
but this is a huge under-taking

also, weapons mods could use being less generic upgrade-ish, while I can't imagine right now what would make things better, I'd imagine that an advanced receiver vs a normal receiver of the same kind COULD be an upgrade, so that there's a sort of "generically best upgrade" but the rest of the upgrades actually give specific advantages under certain circumstances

and the perks need to reflect this in their damages as well, the game has the skyrim problem of falling apart lategame from what I've experienced even with brutality etc
also, as a personal aside, I like retooling revolvers to be better in VATS than you'd rightly expect given their other stats, so that I can use them as a sort of slow heavy hitter (but not as good as bolt-action rifles/pistols stuff) in gunplay, or VATS them as a high noon showdown quickdraw man with no name 6 shots in no time trickshot compilation
so that they actually feel different from the rest of the stuff because they kind of lack distinction - which would be okay if every gun was mostly the same with only slight nuance but I like the idea that they're *actually different* in an arcadey sense

oh also I tend to use things that up the radius of "oh right the player's here time to shoot them" a lot, it leads to a lot of stupid shenanigans but I've had a lot of fun aggroing 2-3 sentry bots (commonwealth spawns extended, more spawns combined for some fun) that had previously levelled the entirety of an that's mostly an open field near some derailed logging trains, while dying a lot and using up lots of explosives and pathing AI stupidity tricks because if I tried to escape in an open field on foot I'd get mowed down
I'm also thinking a smaller scale for deathclaws would be useful for making them DEATHclaws. they have a problem getting around, it's easy to game them jumping over a single KNEE-HIGH railing lol, and they're not that quick, they have some real pathing problems at times, ghouls leap at you when you're remotely close enough and tend to fall off cliffs, so even if I try to game them by going just underneath a cliff that's about my own height they'll still come at me and potentially get me even if I don't screw up, a deathclaw won't

I don't entirely mind behemoths being like this, because they tend to just go over small things like that, but they also make sense because they're stupid meat shields by lore anyways, I want my deathclaws to know how to get me because agile movement is one of their defining traits

also, as a retool of gear, I'd like to see a radiation overhaul, where the radiation is INTENSE. but like, almost all gear has some amount of radiation resistance, so that you can kind of really tool your gameplay style in accordance with how you're feeling
the radiation suit would still be important as all hell but you could go for a more combat or more survivalist in general, or anti-radiation setup with your gear and would have to in fact choose these kinds of things as an emergent player-choice thing as opposed to "this is the rad resist perk, this is the rad resist suit, outside of the glow you will never need these, by the way if you get 1-2 pieces of gear you're immune to radstorms" kinds of things
OF COURSE, this means naked in a radstorm will kill you in 5 seconds flat under these things, but that's the point, but it'd have to be balanced by hand in a way, so that radstorms are tolerable with the heaviest protective gear aside from a radsuit which is basically invulnerability to the stuff, and kind of dangerous in light survival gear, but all gear has some protective value in almost all circumstances

I just hate having to pick gear only on the merits of either playdough or use one time then toss instances, I want that middle of the road gear to be useful and important even when I've got access to combat armour, or metal armour

OH ALSO, leather armour needs to be a little better at protecting from physical slightly while its stealth boosts are much better and the perks for stealth are nerfed a bit, raider can be terrible it's supposed to be, metal armour needs to be great for physical damage, synth armour needs to be an inversion of combat armour where each one is good "in general" but bad compared to alternatives (I'm talking literal inversion of stats with synth being lighter, with whatever balance ending up as basically being 60/40 DR/ER for combat, 40/60 for synth DR/ER), while the marine armour could be *seriously* detrimentally heavy but basically is your "this fight NEEDS TO BE WON" armour whereas power armour, argh. this is all in mind and in keeping with using unnaked mod I guess... elsewise redo power armours to be normal armours again like in previous titles, or make heavy weapons muuuuuuuuuch more usable in power armours and less outside of them

armours really don't have niches, and gameplay mechanics need to reinforce the kinds of choices you'd kind of logically make with those, metal armour is something I bypassed in my first playthroughs because it was difficult to get until it was useless because I had combat armour already

a proper retool of armour would require some philosophy of design choices though, metal should be good for bruisers, leather for survivalists and stuff, combat for rough and ready, synthetic for people low strength/carry weight high tech people but a twin-lategame armour that's 2nd tier in protection alongside combat (good against lasers bad against the outside world, lol NERDS), raider needs stat bonuses for alternative playstyles (the I don't know what I'm doing goofball luck 10 everything else (except endurance 3) at 1 approach to life) and so on, clothing should have tiny amounts of DR just to differentiate them and make them a little more competitive with wearable under-armours because things like AWKR and armoursmith extended kind of make that a thing to be quite honest, and stat differentiation needs to matter more, I want some sort of way to kind of lock in players to a playstyle SPECIAL wise, until later game, or slow down the development of SPECIAL stats, so that the stuff on clothing makes more sense (and buff it I guess)

all of this will require some serious thought and planning though, like I said, total overhaul.
also this ties into the idea of changing damage methods, also I once changed pipeguns (just the normal ones because revolver/bolt action were okay already) to shoot railroad rifle projectiles, use railroad nails, and do a bit of bleed and poison (you're shooting someone with rusty nails what do you expect?)
really made raiders a lot more dangerous, and it was funny seeing stupid projectiles like that, the fact that the railroad nails are also heavy like shotgunshells really added to the immersion as well, since they were more common - given the lack of other ammunition using them became a bit of a priority but wasn't too detrimental due to those other effects I mentioned even against invulnerable DT (bleed and poison as a form of armour piercing given to them even if they suck in general keeping in line with my philosophy of raider tech as goofballs that can kludge things to work sorta)

also true to form, those railroad rifle projectiles, are sometimes re-usable from enemy corpses you shot, which FURTHER adds to the raider lifestyle experience if you know what I mean

Edited June 23, 2016 by tartarsauce2

[swagmoneybrah]

Meh there really aren't any great survival mods. I was expecting some mods that would make the game much harder but instead you get the simple ones.

 

Actually when I was screwing around with console I ended up giving myself around 20m xp which is about level 540 so everything simply dies in a few shots and I basically never die. Wish there was a way to make enemies scale to my level kind of boring being level 540 and mowing down level 10s and 50s etc. Or somehow find a way to level myself back down to a reasonable level..

[NexusFiles]

I think the worse thing that Bethesda did was change the way the gun's attributes are.

 

Damage is now based on the receiver rather than projectiles. Very annoying.