I remember doing this for Skyrim, and, hey: some of these may even be on Bethesda’s own mod page. Which I’m sure is very good. I mean, I’m a loyal Nexus man, but that’s just personal taste.
Anyway, in no particular order:
- Spring Cleaning. Cleans just about everything up. Including stuff that you might want to keep, so be careful, there. Essential for crafters who want more wiggle room in their settlement build limit.
- Trees Have Colorful Leaves and Fallout 4 Seasons. I loaded up Summer, and boom! It now looks considerably more alive and green and I’m sorry, I know that this is supposed to be Atomic Horror-type radiation but after 200 years the plants would have freaking recovered. Also, I like ghosting through living forests. So nyah.
- The Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch. It’s so unofficial that if Bethesda ever tried to mess with the actually-thoroughly-sung heroes that make these for each of Bethesda’s games then Bethesda would probably get visited by a torchlight mob.
- Old World Radio and More Where That Came From. Radio stations! Tons of them! Stuff on them that you really want to listen to! You know how I worship that 1950s radio show X Minus One now? Old World Radio is why.
- Better Stores. It has a bunch of stupid stuff added about craftable mary jane, but I ignore it because the mod also has vendor stations that can actually be placed inside buildings. YES. THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING ABOUT YOUR SETTLEMENTS.
- Homemaker. Come for the new buildings, stay for the clutter. So, so much clutter.
- Dino’s Decorations. Also a clutter mod, but one worth its weight in platinum. Sure, you could manually put a typewriter on one of the desks in your North-west Regional Minuteman Command HQ… but when you came back, the typewriter would be on the floor somewhere. Not Dino’s clutter. It stays where you put it.
- Art Connoisseur System. Good for fiddling with painting sizes and dimensions. Also good for various other mods.
- FallComplete – Automatically Track Quests – Locations – Magazines – Bobbleheads. Just what it says on the label. Works, too.
- Settlement Keywords Expanded, Bodyslide and Outfit Studio, Caliente’s Beautiful Bodies Enhancer, and Armor and Weapon Keywords Resource. If you’re going to be doing anything involving extra gear, weapons, settlement options, bodies, or new stuff generally then you’re going to be adding these mods anyway.
Cool. I use nexus as well. Mine:
1) Conelrad and More Where that Came From. Both music mods. I had used Conelrad in Fallout New Vegas and this is pretty much the same mod. Good stuff.
2) Darker Nights. This is a great mod as it modifies the frankly blindingly bright nights you have in most bethesda games. Has multiple levels so you can tweak what level you like. Also allows you to be able to change the enemy detection AI a bit so you are not constantly getting one shot in the dark.
3) Fr4nssons Light tweaks. Interior lighting is a pet peeve of mine. I really liked one of the interior lighting mods for fallout new vegas. The base game for F4 is better, but still has light coming from odd places. This helps a bit.
4) Key Nuker and keyring- this is kind of a must since the Misc tab in your inventory quickly becomes very unweildy after only a few hours of playing. Makes it far easier to find that journal entry you just picked up.
5) Loving Curie- this is a face re-texture for Curie. She and Piper are the two that bother me the most as far as their face with Curie edging Piper by a bit (Pipers mouth shape bother me, but Curie just looks kind of unfinished.) There is also some interesting stuff for Valentine, not because he was done horribly, but who doesn’t love Valentine?
6) Radium Rifle- no radar dish. I love the handling of this rifle, but hated the dish look for it. This mod is fairly self-explanatory.
7) Simple bug fixes- I had some odd stability issues when I tried to use the unofficial patch Moe mentions above. The thing about a good patch program is that you really do not notice if it is working or what it does.
8) True Storms. This is one of my favorites. Changes the weather to make rain a lot more tangible. Also changes Rad storms into a real bear. Also has an optional, leveled function which makes the glowing sea pretty much suicide-very quickly- if you do not wear very specific, modified power armor.
9) Vivid Fallout- This changes a lot of the ground texture. I had a problem with textures (especially on bridges) not loading properly. This did help a lot. I like it overall, but I do not like one texture much (molten asphalt is used in a lot of places where it should not be, has a weird look.) Other than that, a good mod.
10) Weapon Balance Overhaul- I hate the sponginess of the enemies at high levels and difficulties. This mod goes a long way to addressing that. One word of warning though- your sponginess is highly reduced as well (this affects the weapon damage of both you and everyone else. Combined with Survival difficulty, it can make the initial levels… challenging.) Power armor becomes more useful as well, but also means you have to repair it more.
Mods I have loaded, but have not tried yet: Rockin’ Red Rocket. I like neon. There are a lot of mods trickling out that do some major overhauls to specific, iconic locations. I like the look in some, less in others. Red Rocket always struck me as a perfect place for the player character to live. You are away from Marcy Long *shudder* & Preston if you have him in Sanctuary. Plus, it allows a nice, remote, but convenient location for storing all your stuff.
Thanks for the suggestions Moe. I have wanted to try one of the leaf mods, but did not like the look of some of the pictures. I will try these out. Also, more radio is always good stuff.
Also, one thing I will note on leaves. The game implicitly tells you that the trees are still alive, but have no leaves during game time. Where do you think all those leaf piles come from? If the trees were not alive, any leaf piles would have completely decayed and the remains blown away after 200 years. And no, no one start in on the nuclear war completely eradicating the specific bacteria that break down plant material…
Trying the keyring one even as we speak.