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| A nuclear winter with zombies and all I have is a switchblade? |
I'm Back!
It has been a long time since I played Fallout 4. I sort of randomly checked my Zombie Walkers mod on nexus mods and saw several posts where people were having trouble. I glanced through many pages of them and saw things mostly related to stability/crashes and bloated save game files.
I take a sense of ownership in what I do and felt bad about this, even though I'd been away for so long. The comments didn't inspire me to take up modding again (yet) but did inspire me to play Fallout 4 again after the long absence.
Winter and Zombies
It is the winter season here in Buffalo, NY and I've always liked snow. I thought it'd be fun to mod my freshly re-installed Fallout 4 with a winter theme to play my mod in. The screenshot above is from that setup and I wanted to call out a few of the mods I used in case anyone else wants to check them out.
Maybe i'll post a full current mod list later as it includes other game changes outside of visuals also.
My Experience
I used replacements for everything 100% except humans. Added extra spawns at 25%. Enabled NPC resurrection and set it at 60 in-game minutes and allowed zombies to infect with basic infection. Settlement attacks and Sleep Interruption were also enabled.
Overall I didn't have many issues after playing a save close to 10 hours so far. The biggest thing seems to be performance related in downtown Boston where I experience a single hard crash and some delays with spawn replacements where I could hear Super Mutants talking and firing weapons before disappearing. Also, sometimes there was delay between a head-shot and the zombie dying in that area.
Some features I didn't feel compelled to turn on (alternate death) and others I never saw executed in game and didn't really miss them (zombies eating corpses). Extra spawns seem to work well, though I had a thought that it'd be nice if this were to increase on it's own over time during play. I experienced both a settlement attack on Red Rocket and sleep interruption a few times while travelling (scary with darker nights too).
What I Learned
I remember why I enjoyed playing Fallout 4 after being away from it for so long. It really takes you away into your own sandbox world. There are some cool new mods out there that help with this immersion also.
Another thing, is that my wheels are spinning and I'm actually considering ways to improve this mod. Not promising this is going to happen, but I think this mod could benefit greatly to some modularity. Many of the nexus mods I downloaded had installers popup when using Vortex that let you pick and choose what you wanted to install. I think this would help greatly for people who only like certain aspects (eg. running with the feral ghoul overhaul only).
Some parts of my mod have been implemented since I worked on this. Several versions of death alternative mods are out there now, both standalone and as part of popular overhauls (eg. Horizon). Many point out that several spawning mods exist out there also. All of this makes me think that I can strip out some of the feature bloat and those that want those extras will still be able to include them elsewhere.
What Now?
For now I'm in the exploratory and planning phase. I'm scoping out the potential work involved with revisiting this mod and trying to decide if I want to take the plunge. Free time is not easy to come by as a father of two, but I did enjoy working on this and feel a certain responsibility to maintain it.
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