What mods are essential for an "enhanced vanilla"?

[BadWolf317]

I just bought Fallout 4 GOTY (for 14.99 yay :laugh:) so I'll be playing it for the first time. what essential mods are out there that enhance the game without changing it too much? they can improve game mechanics but not reinvent. Lore-friendly expansions are great, and the one type of game-changing mod I'd be okay with is one that adds survival elements (Fallout 3 felt like it was totally missing that).

 

THX

[tekmage]

Legendary Crafting Framework, Sim Settlements 3 in one, and possibly some or all of my Improved ecosystems mods depending on how you like your difficulty. Also, Fallout unofficial patch, and Vanilla fixes, improvements and QOL.

 

Lore friendly expansions: Outcasts and remnants, and Project Valkyrie.

Edited July 27, 2019 by tekmage

[BadWolf317]

Thanks! I already found a couple of them, like the expansions and the patch, but the rest will be helpful :laugh:

[Mornedil]

I usually play games as close to vanilla as possible, but these are a few things I had issues with during my first playthrough:

 

Settlement building limits

If you want to build big settlements, you'll need to remove the limits of how much you can build:

• Settlement limits slashed

 

Survival mode necessities:

It's a Bethesda game... and Bethesda games have bugs and crashes. In survival mode you can only save by sleeping in a bed, but the game can crash or you can get stuck, which gets extremely annoying in survival mode.

• Console enabler for Survival difficulty
• Recordable holotape (this is the saving mod I use. You find "recordable holotapes" as loot, which allows you to save the game in a lore-friendly manner)

 

Health scaling:

This was one of the biggest issues I had with the gameplay in general. When you level up, everything in the game gets more HP. I don't know why they designed it like this, but after you've reached a high level, combat takes much longer because enemies have more HP, while it's at the same time much easier because you'll also have more HP.

I recently wanted to replay the game without dealing with this issue, so I dedicated my time to creating a mod that fixes it. It removes health scaling and balances damage dealt by the player and NPCs, while also adding some new elements to combat.

• Mornedil's Combat Rework

Edited July 28, 2019 by Mornedil

[geala]

I'm not a fan of vanilla games from Bethesda. But if you like, I would play and then solve problems and annoyances on the run when you face them, by adding mods. Adding mods is usually not a problem, removing mods (with scripts) is.

 

Example: the single biggest problem of FO4 in my opinion is that later in the game any mob, even your friendly radcroach, becomes a bullet sponge. Maybe you like it when you and your supermutant adversary had fired 500 bullets into each others face point blanc for a minute (then he died because he had less stimpacks). If not, there are lots of mods which deal with it. Some can be installed during playthroughs. So don't bother now.

 

Or: your mighty power armor you're so proud of can deflect nuclear bombs but a midge can kill you easily by putting it's sting through it (aka it has no poison resistance, so stu ...). Just install a mod for it when you cannot stand it any longer.

 

One word to Survival: it's the only mode I'm playing but it is lacking severely, as some genius at Bethesda thought that survival means artificial and unimmersive hardship/hardmode. So as said before in this thread, I would also advise a) a way to save and b) enabling the console. Although I find the idea of the mod recommended above, Recordable Holotape, intriguing, in my opinion it suffers from the fact that it uses autosaves only and not hard saves. I would recommend Survival Options https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/14650 to choose from.

Edited July 30, 2019 by geala