Fallout 4 in the time of COVID19 part 2: Mod Madness

Now that I am at the 2 month mark of quarantine, I have gone more than a little crazy… with Fallout 4 mods.

I loaded up ‘Sim Settlements: Rise of the Commonwealth‘ over the weekend, and it’s pretty cool. It’s a kind of autopilot for building out settlements. Settlements are an important part of the game, because they are a source of money and materials that I need to progress through the game. They are also a quick way to spend 40 levels or so building shotgun shacks for people who complain all the time about not having any beds. Also, I am not super creative with settlements, so I end up building the same things over and over.

ROTC puts the settlers to work building everything themselves. All I have to do is supply them with food, water, liquor, and drugs. The theory is that now I can spend less time building shacks and more time rolling down the streets of the Commonwealth shooting people in the head. ROTC isn’t quite the optimal build experience I was hoping for. This has nothing to do with the quality of the mod, and everything to do with the way I play Fallout.

My two main trading hubs are Sanctuary Hills and The Castle. I basically divide the ‘Wealth into two hemispheres. In the western half, all trade goes to Sanctuary. In the eastern half, traders go to The Castle. I eventually build out all of the settlements with vendors and work benches and hit them up as a traverse the ‘Wealth. It’s kind of reminiscent of The Walking Dead. The two hubs are linked together by a trader (usually Sheffield) and as I pick up new settlements, I send one settler to the closest hub to make building out the settlement that much easier.

Once I have those two trading hubs going, I’m in business, and the other settlements pretty much fall into place. In ROTC you select a settlement leader and the settlers go to work scrapping things and building stuff. The results are these awesome looking post-apocalyptic junk-towns full of crazy little nooks to explore. Overall, it’s pretty awesome.

There are a few problems though; and they lead me to loading more mods.

Problem #1: The Settlers scrap all my shit

There is warning box that literally tells you this is going to happen. I don’t know what I expected.

Once I pull the trigger, they literally knock the whole place down. Including all of the things I built to get the settlement off the ground INCLUDING THE GODDAMN ARTILLERY!! Both my little martial arts and crafts space at Sanctuary and the field artillery at The Castle disappear the second I tell them to get to work.

So if I let the settlers build out all of the settlements, then I have to find a place for me to do my thing. I am sure that if I knew more about ROTC, or city plans, or something, I could solve the problem The Right Way(tm) but that’s really not my style.

In the beginning, I used the Red Rocket Truck Stop as my main trade hub, and devoted the other settlements to being junk-towns. This worked fine until I realized I also needed an eastern trading hub. The solution of course was to use another mod.

The Red Rocket Redone settlements mod turns every Red Rocket into its own small settlement. I was doing this anyway with the Conquest Camping mod to serve as a kind of overflow housing for when my settlements were getting crowded. Now, I am doing the reverse. The Red Rocket mod makes the Red Rockets better suited for settling than Conquest, and I can take them over early on in the game. Now, as I move across The Commonwealth, I gain these buildings as support bases.

With these Red Rockets now under my protection, I can have ready access to workbenches and the like without hunting for them in the crazy junk-town settlements. I can also put artillery at each one to get fire support when I need it. Sure, I have to build out the settlement a bit to support the settlers that I dedicate to trading and gunnery, but if I can keep it small and simple, I can probably do beds in the Red Rocket, and maybe an additional shack for the settlers and put the rest to work trading between settlements. Plus the Red Rockets tend to have all the crafting stations without needing to build them. This is important early in the game because it takes a while to get the perks I need to build workshops myself. Now it’s fairly easy to pop in just about anywhere on the map take a nap, scrap stuff, and craft things.

Problem #2: The Settlers grow the wrong shit

As much as I love not having to plant tons of crops, this does impact the supply of crops that I actually care about. A motivating factor for building settlements is that they produce money and salvage. But they also produce crops. Corps are great for keeping the settlers from bitching about being hungry, but they also have two other distinct uses:

1. You can sell food at vendors for additional caps.
2. You can turn specific crops (purified water, corn, mutfruit, tatos) into vegetable starch, which you can use as adhesive to create just about every weapon or armor mod.

I know it’s probably not very appetizing for the settlers to live on a steady diet of superglue ingredients, but I need scopes and shit for my rifles so I can fight for their freedom goddammit!

So the next solution builds on the first, which is to grow glue components at my Red Rocket settlements with the help of robots via the Mister Gardener mod. Now, when I turn up a Red Rocket, I can outfit it with a couple of food bots to grow my starch components. There is a suite of bot mods available from the author, so I went ahead and loaded them all because I just love robot pets. I especially love the Mr. Law mod, that puts a Protectron on guard to help defend the place.

Problem #3: The Settlements sell the wrong shit

Another benefit of having settlements is being able to sell off loot and stock up on ammo and useful scrap. Vendors will eventually appear in the junk-towns, but it’s only after a lot of upgrades. When I was building out Red Rocket settlements using Conquest, I just put a weapons vendor there so I could sell off loot and buy ammo. Now that the Red Rocket Settlement mod makes them act more like real settlements, I can put more vendors there and collect some caps as well. It’s not a bad way of doing things, since I have Red Rockets set up as trading hubs anywa. It’s like I have a chain of franchises: The Red Rocket Trading Company. These trading posts are getting kind of advanced though, so building defenses is now becoming a priority. I wanted to park one of my companions at each one to help with defenses, but…

Problem #4: The Settlements suck up all my companions

I like to roll with a whole crew when I do my thing: Dogmeat, Warmachine, and a companion. Unfortunately, ROTC requires a companion to serve as city leader to oversee the construction of the junk-town, which basically confines the companion to the settlement. Obviously, that kind of restricts my ability to use companions for either my traveling entourage, or as security for my Red Rockets. So did what I always do, and I loaded a few more mods.

One idea was to add Nora as a companion and travel with her exclusively. She is cool, but because you get a new perk for reaching the topmost level of affinity with a companion, there is an opportunity cost associated with not taking on new companions.

I also thought about trying to load the male version of Nora, the Nate companion, and fully lean into the idea of my survivor being this pansexual polyamorous version of Captain Kirk, just banging everyone in The Commonwealth, but both mods depend on your choice of gender at the beginning of the game. So much for my statement against societal and gender norms.

Then I happened upon Nobody’s Leaders which lets you use named settlers, like Sturges or Ronnie Shaw in place of a companion. This lets me put a named settler in charge of each settlement and I can go back to roaming The Commonwealth and either helping, murdering, or seducing everyone I meet. Then, once I have extracted all the value that I can from them, I dump them at one of my numerous properties around the wasteland to guard farmers and shit. It sounds very predatory when I say it that way.

Sim Settlements and Rise of the Commonwealth have significantly modified my game experience in Fallout 4. Which is very welcome, because I don’t really have the mental or emotional space for a new game right now. My family is currently playing the new Animal Crossing, and I don’t even have room for that.