What factors seperates a good house mod from the bad ones?

[Dawnx2]

I've been messing around in geck making a house mod for awhile now and I'm kind of curious about what separates the good ones from the bad. I know location is a big one, but what are some of the other factors that make or break them in your opinion?

 

Currently my house mod is a bunker near 188. Comes with auto-sorting, a vertibird for fast traveling, a commissary like the ones from Lonesome Road but doesn't require EDE, some edited vanilla meshes and uses some modder's resources. It will probably not come with a quest cause that is out of my league scripting wise.

[madmongo]

A lot of it comes down to personal preferences, which is why there are so many freaking house mods. Everybody has their own idea of what makes a good house mod.

 

As you said, location matters. If it's designed for early play then it needs to be somewhere near Goodsprings. If it's designed for higher level characters then somewhere closer to the Strip is better since that will be the central hub around which quests are generally based. At this point, there are so many Goodsprings mods that I pretty much ignore any house mod tha says it's in Goodsprings.

 

I'm more of a role player, so I look for houses that are lore and immersion friendly. I personally don't care about sorters. I don't carry enogh stuff around to need sorting. In fact, if a sorter has so many storage crates that it looks unrealistic, that breaks the immersion and realism for me and is a big negative. For players who collect lots of stuff though, a sorter would be important, and they'd like to have numerous different easy-access containers. So my style and their style are completely opposistes with what we want.

 

I don't like mods that require me to download other mods and resources to make them work. If you want to use other resources, then integrate them into your mod. All I want to do is download the mod, install it, and play it. I don't want to fiddle with downloading other resources and installing all of those as well. That's a bunch of extra steps that really is just a bunch of extra hassle. I have completely passed on even trying out some mods because they relied on too many other things and I didn't want to bother going through all of the extra steps just to try out a mod that I don't even know if I'm going to like or not yet.

 

I probably wouldn't like your mod because I like the harshness of the wasteland, so I'm looking for realistic style player homes like a run-down abandoned shack where the walls are cracked and the roof is falling in. I don't want fancy things like fast travel. But that's just me and what I like. It doesn't mean your mod is bad, it means it's just not the type of mod that I am looking for. And again that goes back to personal preferences. So don't try to make a mod that will please everyone, because that's not possible. Whatever style you pick, whether it's big and fancy or small and intentionally crappy, do what's best for that style of mod.

 

Whatever you do, make it interesting. Bad house mods are the ones that just have the bare minimums in there and no style. Ok, so you have as sorter and a commisary. Is it just a sorter and a commisary, or is your sorter integrated into a nice looking room with decorations and clutter all around it? What makes your mod unique? These are the questions you need to have a good answer to. If the style is grungy wasteland, then it needs to look grungy wasteland. If the style is fancy bunker, then it needs to look like a fancy bunker. Clutter items, decorations, anything you can add to make it look more complex and interesting is better. Bare flloors, bare walls, and nothing except the functional parts is boring. Make it interesting. Give it a theme. Who built this bunker? What sorts of personal touiches did they put on it? What was their style, their theme? Is it a survivalist bunker? Is it an old Enclave hideout bunker? What is it's reason for being? What inside the bunker will catch my eye and make me think that hmm, that's something interesting that I haven't seen before? I've seen sorters. I've seen commesaries. What new things are you bringing me?

 

You've edited some meshes and are using mod resources, so that's definitely a step in the right direciton. That will put things in this bunker that make it something new, something different.

[Guest deleted2630050]

One thing that I like in a house mod is some kind of challenge where I feel like I've earned it. Usually by finding a key to the otherwise locked entrance (Which shouldn't be too hard to do in the GECK) I want to be able to call that place mine and not just some house I found that could belong to someone else for all I know.

 

Just make me earn it, and I will most likely enjoy your house mod. I'm also liking how it would look unique in a way.

Edited July 27, 2016 by GoliathUnit13074

[joshnice]

I do enjoy a mini quest to earn the anything in a fallout game, so to earn a house and it is a great point by goliath. The house I've used most wasn't a mod and was on fallout 3 and that was the one in megaton and was easy to get too as you could fast travel to megaton and get to your house quickly and as madmongo said location is key, but do you want a fast travel marker actually on the house or does that kind of break the immersion and does the mod not integrate with the game as well. I've always enjoyed the mods which have seamlessly entered the game. I've never liked a house with too many rooms for example the one in Novac and i thought megaton house was just about the right size and an en-suit always adds to the immersion.

[RoyBatterian]

Navmesh it.

 

Don't fill it with useless crap that kills your frame rate and makes the vanilla game run out of memory with texture packs installed.

 

Optimize it (room bounds and portals).

 

It should be convenient and useful.

 

Sortomatic is a plus.