Dunno about what the video says, but I’m at the described state and I did most quest chains for all factions (except for pro-Institute quests).
The only thing you have to avoid is starting the specific “end-game” quests for any faction other than the
Minutemen and pursue the endgame through their quest chains. You have options to avoid attacking any other faction besides the Institute.
I still get radiants for Brotherhood, Railroad, and Minutemen. Lost no settlements. The only faction I’m kill-on-sight with is the Institute, and since they’re wiped out the only thing I have to worry about are spawns at known spawn sites.
The only things I really lost out on: keeping X6-88 as a companion (and I think I could have, I think I sequenced things slightly wrong, but he’d be inconvenient in some circumstances anyway) and losing out on the Brotherhood promotion from Paladin to Sentinel.
ETA: I think I wound up following the sequence described in Skywatcher’s link above.
My game is so heavily modded I have no idea what the base game looks like anymore. That said, I now find that trying to add new mods invariably breaks another mod or has some other weird conflict.
So I’m going to start from scratch. Delete every mod completely from my hard drive. Uninstall and reinstall FO4 just to be sure there is no detritus. Then I’m going to re-mod from scratch.
Other than patch and UI mods, what mods should I be using? Please note that I’m pretty much always a good guy - never side with Raiders or the Institute (or even the Brotherhood). For those still following this thread, let fly with your favorite mods (preferably from Nexus) and let me know why you like them.
Ellen - the cartographer adds a romanceable companion from the NCR with her own quest set in Quincy. The quest needs to be done in order ( #1, #2, and #3) otherwise it won’t work.
Athena 4.0 adds a totally not Synth android companion that Doctor Duff has been working on.
Want to see bigger breasts? Busty Grrl does that. Girly Animation does make Busty Grrl underwear jiggle; not sure if does that for other clothing.
M79 Grenade Launcher adds a launcher that fires a variety of 40MM grenades. Higher level raiders can use these as well!
Beantown Interiors adds some interesting locations. For example: there’s now a costume shop around the corner from Hangman’s Alley.
Buffed Minutemen Militia makes their patrols stronger. Also affects those who answer your flares.
M2045 Magnum Revolver Rifle is nice but a bit of a cheat item until (if?) the author adds sway while aiming with a scope. Can be found pretty early by encountering Paladin Brandis.
On Beth.Net: Better Gold Bars reconciles the value of gold in the Commonwealth with that of New Vegas.
Forgot to mention: Athena and Ellen both make (voiced!) comments that are quite amusing. Ellen’s are lore friendly and, being from the NCR, reference previous games.
Athena’s “this place is uncomfortable” dialog can be vocal circuits malfunctioning and suggesting leaving before it gets worse.
Just remembered another must-have, this one keeps radiant quests from sending you to Far Harbor or Nuka-World. Sometimes PAM will send you to kill a Courser that spawns in an area of Nuka-World that (AFAIK) is inaccessible without using the console command tcl, this will prevent that.
If you played or are playing a Brotherhood-friendly main quest line and kept Danse alive (or haven’t confronted him yet), but you’re tired of Elder Maxson being a jerk, there’s a mod that resurrects and completes some unfinished quest and script assets to allow you to challenge Maxson and re-integrate Danse into the Brotherhood. As well as elevating YOU to Elder of the Commonwealth Chapter. Pretty spiffy.
Yeah, I screwed up Ellen once and ended up deleting it. Maybe I’ll try it again. Thanks for many of the others. Maybe it’s time to use different body mods…I think I’ve gotten too used to my current ones. I guess I could enable achievements, but I never really cared about them in any game.
I tried CBBE and didn’t find it appealing. Made all the women look like they had implants.
I see somebody made the equivalent of Girly Animation for CBBE/BodySlide but it has to be implemented on every single piece of clothing. Manually. No, thanks.
NB: getting the chain link fence to snap in the direction you want is a little counter-intuitive. Want to get it to turn a corner but it only turns to the opposite corner? Use one of the pieces with no post on either end.
Solar Panels add wall mounts with 3 power and roof racks with 5 power. Very useful for adding a good amount of power without taking up much space, in locations not easily targeted. If you have the components for them.
Correction: the abandoned costume shop isn’t as close to Hangman’s Alley as I thought. It’s really down the hill from Vault 81, next to the Drumlin Diner.
Not much in the way of loot, mostly shopping baskets and plastic pumpkins. But go up to the second floor and there are some things that would normally be found in Nuka-World. Notably two animatronics, one wearing a bootleg Nuka-Girl Rocketsuit and one wearing a cowgirl outfit. Both of which can be taken.
I tried Conquest. Although the “camp anywhere” feature was nice for immersion*, the “create a settlement anywhere” feature bugged the crap out of me, simply because the resulting settlements were so half-assed and poorly integrated. like how laggy the workaround implementation of supply lines was, or non-vendor vendors.
I decided I had enough settlements already, just with the baseline game plus DLCs, and I didn’t need the aggravation of almost-settlements. As it is, keeping happiness up at all twenty-odd settlements is already nearly a full-time job. More settlements with bizarre impediments is not desirable, so I uninstalled it.
Editorial: Settlements are really (to me) one of the more fun aspects of the game, but there are already so many bugs in the default implementation that it can switch from “way fun” to “ragequit suck” in the time it takes to try to assign a new settler to a task and have him just not do it (for instance). Conquest settlements have all those bugs (settler behavior, non-transparent happiness mechanics, etc.) plus the bugs of a large mod and sketchy integration on top of it. Sounds great in principle, less so in implementation.
YMMV.
*I don’t generally play survival (because, again, I don’t play games to aggravate myself), so the sleeping bag for checkpoint feature (probably the strongest addition to the game) is useless to me.
One of the my favorite things about Far Harbor, the Mechanist expansion and Nuka-World (I really, really disliked Nuka-World for the most part) is that you can clean up debris in settlements. I really wish they’d add that to existing settlements in the Commonwealth; there’s nothing more annoying than the broken walls in the Castle or Jamaica Plain that you can’t do anything with.
I really don’t get the settlement part of the game. At first I messed with trying to lay out settlements with infrastructure sensibly placed, buildings set up like homes, and walls positioned defensively to work with guard posts and automatic defenses. And I’d try to get my settlers decent armor and weapons so they could fight, and clear out debris and generally make stuff look nice. Then I found that enemies just spawn inside your base unless you mod them not to, position of stuff just doesn’t matter for anything, and you have to show up to defend the settlement anyway. So I just started making ‘soviet-style’ settlements with a big empty building packed with sleeping bags, and all the farms and resource buildings laid out where I can easily assign people to them. It rapidly went from ‘something interesting to mess around with’ to ‘a chore that I have to set up to get stuff’. The whole feature just seems really incomplete to me, like there’s almost a cool ‘Sims’ kind of game there but it just doesn’t engage me. And the weird mix of really open options for layout with immovable, indestructible buildings and features is confusing too.