Damn Apocalypse is a really cool Fallout 4 mod suite to make survival gameplay more interesting, but it falls victim to this and it makes me sad

Idea: Gathering meat from animals requires crafting a hunting kit at chemistry stations, encouraging vegan playthroughs that leverage settlement farms as an alternative

Too Far: All non-meat food recipes are soups that have been changed to require purified water, which is also now more costly to craft and no longer available from water purifiers (which just give dirty water now).

Idea: Split radiation into ingested radioactive particles (from food, drink, and weather) and tissue damage (environmental hazards like radioactive waste).

Too Far: All food gives ingested radiation, so you basically have to be constantly drinking liquor or slamming anti-rad drugs to counteract it or you enter a death spiral of radiation sickness. You’re telling me that EVERYONE else in the commonwealth is getting an IV drip of radaway on a regular basis just to survive??

Idea: Explosions from fusion and fission devices behave differently (i’m not entirely sure how this even works tbh)

Too Far: Robot explosions leave potent, long lasting sources of radiation that almost necessitates use of a hazmat suit unless you want to take prohibitive rad damage. THis is especially annoying when tackling Automatron, a robot focused DLC.

It’s almost enough to get me to make my own overhaul, but I’ve never modded before. Plus that next gen update is on the horizon and it would suck to put in a lot of work only to find a dependency has been permanently borked because of it (like .Net framework and Skyrim AE)

  • FourteenEyes [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    I always found that customizing the experience with a bunch of tweaks was far superior to almost any overhaul mod. Add seasoning to taste.

    • FlakesBongler [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      this

      It’s one of the reasons why I always detest the whole “It’s okay if the game isn’t that good, because modders will fix it” approach

      I don’t want to have to install an additional 150gb of mods to fix a game with overhauls when I could just play a good game and download one mod to make it look better

    • RION [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      10 months ago

      It’s funny, I only arrived at Damn Apocalypse because I didn’t vibe with Horizon, a much more monolithic survival overhaul for Fallout 4. I guess I’m looking for yet another step down into tweaking and modularity

  • Infamousblt [any]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    My favorite example of this is the big mod pack for Battletech. It’s full of tons of new content and lots of really great ideas executed well with tons of customization… except that they made it Dark Souls hard and refuse to let anyone change that specific aspect of it. I even made a mod that decreased the difficulty back to vanilla and posted it, and the folks who made the mod banned me from all their communities for “disrespecting their vision” or some shit and got my mod taken down from everywhere they could. Like what.

    Modders are the worst type of people in the best kind of way. Tons of free content for so many games but always one “vision” thing totally wrong and also totally unchangeable because “muh vision.” So you gotta take the good with the bad.

    • Judge_Jury [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Mod auteurs are bizarre to me because they’re already modding shit. You’d think they would have gotten over the idea of having their work modified before modifying people’s work

      • Infamousblt [any]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        I think unfortunately a lot of them get into it because they think that there was some flaw or missing piece in the game, and THEY have the PERFECT idea about how to fix it. And then they get some attention because actually their idea wasn’t awful, and that attention goes to their head and they take it as validation that yes, in fact, they are better at designing the game than the team of people who designed the game. It just goes downhill from there

  • rafflesia [she/her, doe/deer]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    This is most minecraft mods for me. Cool, a new fun/time saving gameplay mechanic, can’t wait to slog through 20 hours of tedium before I can engage with it, or switch to creative mode and immediately invalidate its purpose.

    • RION [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      10 months ago

      I would never play with random individual Minecraft mods but I do like modpacks, particularly the ones that set up progression in an interesting way. Playing through Sky Capsule Project right now, it’s a fairly novel take on Skyblock with lots of time saving measures like ProjectE

    • laziestflagellant [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      Minecraft creature mods that weren’t tested enough so it ends up that one mob spawns 100x times as often and blocks vanilla mobs and the interesting mob doesn’t spawn at all sadness

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      I feel like the most in-depth versions of that are fun though, because they’re basically just creating an entirely new gameplay loop around automation. Create in particular sets the gold standard there, because it’s all just building absurd bespoke multi-block machines to automate the resources you need to make more, bigger machines and your reward for doing that is you have a giant factory with whirring belts and working elevators and an automated train network.

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    It sucks also when you find a mod that does a cool thing but then in further updates they keep adding more “features” until it’s no longer the same mod.

  • JohnBrownNote [comrade/them, des/pair]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    You’re telling me that EVERYONE else in the commonwealth is getting an IV drip of radaway on a regular basis just to survive??

    you came out of a vault, they grew up exposed to this stuff and are several generations into that. remember the bombs fell 200 years ago, no i don’t know why everyone is still living in dirt, bethesda can’t write.

    • RION [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      10 months ago

      Vault 81 was completely isolated from the outside world until opening in 2277, and they don’t seem to have any problems with wasteland food ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

      • JohnBrownNote [comrade/them, des/pair]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        maybe the medical experiments vault found a therapy for that and the sole survivor is too much of a dingus to ask about it? “hey we can’t eat this shitty food” would’ve been an actually interesting quest chain though, the modders should add that.

  • Orannis62 [ze/hir]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    My gf is currently playing a massive Skyrim modlist and (besides the fact that one of the mods was a totally unexpected, incredibly heartfelt quest to help a transfem find a way to transition that feels so real it has to have been written by a transfem) my favorite thing about it is that all the mods are HIGHLY configurable. Most of my experience with modding has been playing this modlist, so I absolutely cannot contradict what others here are saying in general, but I haven’t felt the same problems you’ve all been talking about

    • RION [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      10 months ago

      I think a big difference is Skyrim’s popularity. With many more people being passionate about it, there’s both a higher likelihood that some talented modders will trickle out of that population, and a stable critical mass that compels people to invest in big projects. Fallout 4 has much less staying power due to being a less popular genre & aesthetic, being percieved as a let down compared to previous Fallout games, and technical issues like the precombine system that significantly hamper mod development. Put together, that’s less people modding, a lower standard of quality, and less willingness to stick around the community

      also what’s that mod you mention 👀

      • Orannis62 [ze/hir]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        Unfortunately, because it’s part of this massive 2000 mod modlist, we’re not sure what the specific mod was. The modlist is called The Lost Legacy if you want it or to look through it

  • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    It’s almost enough to get me to make my own overhaul

    sicko-lea THIS IS HOW WE GET YOU MUHAHAHAHAHA sicko-lea

    i mean technically it was stupid that you could pour purify radioactive water by putting it in a soup vanilla, but if they didn’t give you a viable alternative to clean water procurement that’s annoying.

    what the author should have done is just put in an MCM to adjust all this crap. needs mod im using in skyrim was annoying me how much water i needed, so i reduced it lea-finger-guns

    btw does your fallout 4 build have long load-times? i tolerated 2-3 minute loadtimes for a while but lately i tried all the guides & fixes i haven’t managed to get it down at all

    • RION [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      10 months ago

      nooo miyazaki i don’t wanna go to caelid the creation kit ooooooooooooooh

      my preferred solution would be to make the soup recipes require boiled water, a middle ground between dirty and purified that’s still irradiated but without disease risk. Also having additional recipes that don’t require water, like baked tatoes. Additionally I’d like to have more indigenous recipes like succotash make an appearance

      there is a config holotape available (and an mcm as a separate download) but it doesn’t have settings for anything i have issues with :')

      I’m building my load order off of The Midnight Ride which uses High FPS Physics Fix and Long Loading Times Fix by default, and I haven’t experienced a loading screen I’d call “long” yet

  • Moonguide
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    10 months ago

    Same with some collections for skyrim. Most have horny mods, most have horrible balance, and most have horrible performance and/or stability. They’re this close to being great.

    • laziestflagellant [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      I keep trying to play with Skyrim mod collections but I’m so picky about everything in that game to the point that I get mad if the town mods aren’t 100% to my taste and I will pick out singular terrain textures and/or hand edit them until I’m satisfied and by that point I might as well go back to making my own custom mod collection.

      One of these days I’ll get through the Skyrim main quest lol…

    • CrushKillDestroySwag@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      There’s one mod that makes the gameplay kinda like Sekiro and it’s the only gameplay mod you need (not including its dependencies). Abandon spellbooks, embrace katana.

      • Moonguide
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        10 months ago

        But I want to play a mage rn! It’s really the only archetype I haven’t played in any TES game. Not a dedicated caster, at least. Most I’ve done is gish.

    • RION [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      10 months ago

      My recent experiences with modding have definitely made my perception of it more cynical. Outside of straightforward things like bug fixes, mesh/texture improvements, etc., most mods are hopelessly inferior quality-wise to professionally made games. There are exceptions, and in fact a fair few of them in the Skyrim scene like jayserpa and simonmagus, but unrepresentative exceptions nonetheless.

      It makes me feel like an asshole saying it, especially since these are hobbyists doing it for a love of the game, but it’s true, and as someone who really values cohesiveness and internal consistency in games it’s impossible to ignore

      • Grownbravy [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        I played on a modded minecraft server and overlapping mods with stuff that solves the same problems and i hated how i would not know whats a dead end because one mod ends here and another does something else

      • DayOfDoom [any, any]@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        I generally avoid mods now too. Especially for first-plays of games unless it’s like a MandaloreGaming-approved game-fixing mod or it’s a game where the mod is the only thing that interests me. That mod that puts the day-time Sonic Unleashed stages into Sonic Generations’ engine is the only way I was gunna’ play part of that game. A bunch of exceptions to these like Pokemon ROMhacks, etc. but yeah…

        • Comp4 [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          Yeah I do the same for first playthroughs of games. I usually play them vanilla unless its a mod that fixes bugs/tech problems. If I really like a game I might play around with it with mods. I do love mods and if a game has a good modding community it can give you tons of extra playtime out of a game you like.

  • Great_Leader_Is_Dead@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    so you basically have to be constantly drinking liquor or slamming anti-rad drugs

    Wait? Does drinking alcohol cure radiation poisoning?

    • RION [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      10 months ago

      There’s research suggesting real life benefits from the ethanol. Additionally, the diuretic effects of alcohol help flush tritium from your system faster before it can do more damage. This is represented in the mod by healing your ingested particle damage.

      • Great_Leader_Is_Dead@hexbear.net
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        10 months ago

        Hun, funny, I read an article once about people still living near Chernobyl, and apparently some of them believed that drinking a small amount of vodka everyday protected them from cancer.