The Wasteland Calls!

It was the winter of 2015 that I played Fallout 4.  Can you believe it?  I loved the game, but there were issues here and there.  When I put it away, part of me was really looking forward to playing it again years later after mods have fixed those issues.  Is today the day?  These were my issues:

1. Let's call my first issue "baggage"
This is the first game in the series where you were handed a character with a whole life.  That's a problem with an immersive game that centers on you playing your role, your way.  It was even voice acted.

Now, I could have removed the voice acting, but I went a different way.  Start Me Up is a mod that changes your roll.  You are now some neighbor of the murdered parent, and kidnapped boy.  Just not telling us we're the spouse, and swapping in some, "A baby boy..." lines, instead of, "My son..."  It's really just that easy.  And so many more motivations make sense.  I am free to be who I want to be.  Who knows?  Maybe I won't hate Shawn with a passion this time around.

2. Companions Go Home
The title of this mod says it all.  It broke my heart every time Piper walked by saying, "Nice day.  Where we headed?"  All our helpers languishing at our settlements when they have lives to lead.  This mod simply lets you dismiss them back to those lives.

3. Needy settlers.
So the easy one is No Offscreen Settlement Attacks.  You obviously can't know about them if you're not there.  And it's too much to drop everything to run to them every time.  I'm using a couple of others, but they've been hit and miss so far.  One fun one adds an Immersive Fast Travel option.  It's balanced with costs, and you do need to build it in advance.  But it lets you move between settlements in much the same way you can travel between town in Skyrim with carriages.

4. Carry Weight
It just doesn't make sense to haul several typewriters into battle.  I'm on the new Survival option this time, and have a limited carry weight.  Not a real life limit, but something close enough to see reality off in the distance somewhere.  Salvage Beacons helps with this.  With it, you can assign a settler to coordinate supplies.  Then when you drop a craftable salvage beacon in a container, he will send someone to pick it up.  Also one to add backpacks, for esthetic roll playing purposes.

5. Survival
So survival mode isn't a mod, but it was added since I played the first time.  It add a huge element of immersion when you actually need to survive the wasteland.  However, I did need to tweak it.  Smokeable Cigarets lets me save between fights, and gives me a reasonable cost for doing so.  And I did need to add the console back to fix errors.