Fo4 Unofficial patch, necessary?

[Oynlen]

I have never bothered with this mod on PC. I had it on xb1 but since learning how to use Xedit I generally make a lot of my own changes and merge many small fixes I find into one large patch, if all they are is record changes of original Fo4 data. Such as River Fixs and water LOD fixes etc. plus a few that contain mesh fixes of altered vanilla meshes.

Looking at FO4UP, it covers A LOT! but is it necessary? for example, are the Location References for every single worldspace necessary? To include these into other mods, like Horizon's optional plug-ins would take days, I would add them to my main large patch for my load order that lives at the bottom of my load order list and covers all my plugins (but requires none as master, its all vanilla record changes so mods can be removed without breaking it) but this would take days of boring editing.. What is the reason for these Location references? Surely they are not game breaking to not include?

[Infamous95]

No mod is really ever necessary. Personal preference comes into play here. Not only does the UFO4P have record changes it also has script edits and papyrus stuff (I think). It does fix alot of good stuff but theres always room for human error so you never know what could be messed up as a result of these fixes. I personally use it myself and add other fixes/tweaks to another esp.

 

Im not sure what the location references do. I don't ever remember seeing them on NV and F3 unofficial patchs. There are alot of minor fixes in these patches that you would never notice in game. These location references could be one of those.

[woodfuzzy]

The Location References are for things like a Boss, Map markers, load doors etc. Basically things that are very specific/important to a location.

Just guessing, but I'd say they just copy as override the entire Location folder.

[sclerocephalus]

Location references are special tags for items or actors within a location. They are used by quests to fill their aliases, but they are also used by the radiant quest system to select a target location. For example, if a quest places an item in a chest to be collected by the player, it has to make sure that there's a suitable chest somewhere in the location, preferentially in the boss room (so the task won't be overly simple). To make this work as fast as possible (there's always the alternative to let a script check all containers in a location, but this will make the target selection very slow), the chest is given a special LocRefType, so the quest selector only has to check the locations for that reference. Though, there is other stuff where they are used: for example, whether a location is clearable or not depends on whether it has a boss (and that's another LocRefType). If there are actors with that LocRefType in a location, the game marks it as cleared once all these actors have been killed. If the LocRefTypes are missing, it will never be marked as cleared (and then, it will also reset much faster). If there are too few locations available to be chosen as targets by specific quests (they ususally don't look for just one LocRefTyoe), the radiant quest system may lock up, and quest givers may stop to give you new quests for a while.

[AeonsLegend]

UFO4P is not necessary. I tried it, but it changes things in the game I do not want to change and it causes extra bugs. That plus incompatibility with some other mods. I play the game without it and it's fine.