The first round of changes for my mod were fairly straightforward. Most of the changes ended up modifying files using the Creation Kit (CK) UI and there was only one small script. It was a perfect way to get my feet wet.

Slow them down!

First and foremost, the Feral Ghouls in Fallout 4 run fast, jump around dodging bullets, and even dive at the player. While this makes for a cool enemy, it doesn't fit the traditional zombie walker theme. 

Fallout 4 has the concept of Actors which are the individual characters in the world. For feral ghouls there's an Actor defined for each type (eg. base, roamer, stalker, legendary, etc.). All Actors are linked to a Race. For feral ghouls there are actually two Races: Feral Ghoul and Feral Ghoul Glowing. I focused my updates on the Feral Ghoul race as that is far more common, though I found the two Races share a lot of data.

Character -> Race -> FeralGhoulRace

Movement speed is controlled by Movement Type and linked to a Race in the CK on the Move Data tab. When you open up the movement type, you see a bunch of numbers associated with different movement types: Standing, Walk, Run, and Sprint. Through experimentation, I found that setting any of these to 0 will disable that type at least for Feral Ghouls. 

Character -> Movement Type -> FeralGhoul_Default_MT

Initially, I set Run and Sprint to 0 and tried to increase Walk. Unfortunately, the walk speed seems capped (based on their animation?) so I ended up re-enabling Run but at greatly reduced values.

Stop the crazy diving attacks

The attack animations are also linked at the Race level on the Attack Data tab. This tab is also available at the Actor level and is inherited from the Race. The Actor also has an Animation tab that allows you to view the animations while the Race does not. 

What I did was view the various attack animations for the Feral Ghoul using one of the Actors and then going back to the Race to adjust the Attack Data. The key is to set the Attack Chance field on the Attack Data tab to 0 to disable that attack type. I did this for each running/diving attack style the Feral Ghouls have.

Aim for the head!

Damage is controlled by Body Part Data which is linked to a Race on the Body Data tab.

Actors -> Body Part Data -> actors -> FeralGhoul -> FeralGhoulBodyPartData

 Modifying this Body Part Data allows you to specify the following:

• Damage Mult - how much damage the actor takes when a body part is hit
• Health Perc - at what percentage of health does this body part become crippled/dismembered
• Hit Chance - hit chance in VATS

I used this to modify my new zombies to take less damage everywhere but the head. I wanted to preserve limb crippling/dismemberment so I didn't disable damage totally. In lowering Damage Mult I found that Health Perc should be adjusted also since the limbs are taking less damage.

Continue to Part 2

I'm creating this blog mostly to document my current journey into Fallout 4 modding.

Zombie Walkers

I've been working on a Zombie Walkers mod for a few weeks now.  The response to the mod for XBox One has been amazing. Over 20k downloads in the first month and tons of feedback through comments from users posting ideas and thoughts. Having said that, I'm finding the creation kit has some limitations that I keep running into. In some cases I've been able to work around the Creation Kit and in other cases what I want to do just doesn't seem possible.

I've been engaging with users by replying to comments and will continue to do so. However, I'm finding that isn't the right channel to get into all the technical detail I'd like to at times and Bethesda sometimes blocks my comments with their silly language filter (which sometimes blocks normal words). The mod description is also limited in size and I find myself pruning the description with each new feature release.

Moving forward I plan to use this blog to get into technical detail and better describe what I'm running into. Maybe others on the net will have solutions to the things I'm running into or other modders might find some of this information useful.

That's it for now. I have a few posts planned that will be coming soon.