Fallout 4

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n337speak

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n337speak

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About this mod

Covenant building with improved snaps. Also replaces the house prefabs with versions that have door snaps, and adds turret platform snaps to the walls. Walls now carry power!

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Kai's Covenant Walls Improved

Description

Covenant is. Awful.

So I tried to fix parts of it. And then I started making stuff buildable. And snappable. And here we are.

This makes buildable versions of all the covenant wall pieces. You know the barbed wire topped brick thing that actually looks pretty cool.

Five item categories (as of version 1.4): 

  • Barriers (wall segments, prefabbed wall pieces, and the gate)
  • Posts/Junctions (Like it sounds; these are both posts, for the 'fence' you're building, and junctions. They're awesome.) 
  • Corners (contains a selection of nine pre-made turns to make building a complete enclosed wall as easy as possible. Complete with built in elevation options).
  • Misc (currently just the turret platform)
  • Prefabs (Ploppable versions of some of the houses from Covenant, navmeshed by hand owwwwwwwwwwww and with door snaps)

You need to build endcaps posts (they're just posts from now on, or post/junction if you wanna describe their functionality, but post is easier and less ridiculous than 'endcap') between each wall segment - the barrier bits snap to the end caps, but not to each other. Some of the endcaps posts will also snap to concrete walls from wasteland workshop (because I was replacing a concrete wall at the time and this made it MUCH easier).

All are now craftable under Structures > Concrete > Covenant with subcategories for each. This menu is added via a script, so it should work with everything. Including Homemaker+similar large crafting mods. More smaller categories makes browsing much much faster, especially since you'll need to be doing wall segment - post - wall segment back and forth a lot and possibly choosing a new one of either each time. Fewer key presses.

All meshes replace the vanilla versions, which allows you to snap new turret platforms onto the existing walls in covenant. But the turret platform is the only item that currently replaces the vanilla form. I do not recommend attempting to scrap or move the walls already placed in Covenant, as this can cause LOD issues. But if this feature is enabled by another mod such as scrap everything, you may take that risk yourself as you choose.

Features
  • Snap points for everything, carefully chosen. Posts snap to concrete walls and to the covenant wall pieces. Covenant wall pieces snap to the end caps/posts. Distance calculated so that the wall pieces snap slightly into the posts, ensuring that the barbed wire will touch the poles at the top.
  • Elevation snaps so you can adjust the height of the wall as it moves through terrain. Elevation calculated so that the barbed wire should still touch the poles for each snap.
  • Vanilla pieces only - no homemaker meshes used.
  • Snap points along the top of each side of the wall that the turret platforms snap to. 
  • Turret platforms also have an 'autoplace' snap that works on most walls, similar to a shelf. So they're easier to use everywhere.
  • Replace the vanilla covenant meshes so that the walls already IN Covenant will have the turret platform snaps - in case you need to build more of them.
  • additionally, mesh replacers for the covenant houses that feature door snaps that work with vanilla doors. I won't be making the prefabs craftable or anything like that but it should make it much easier to replace the doors, which makes it easier to actually use Covenant as a settlement. These are implemented and tested, they work (in fact they work well enough that I became confused why bethesda didn't already do that) I'm just fine tuning the snap positions so that the doors don't have any obvious gaps at the top. Homemaker double doors work great for the main gate. I might make my own versions eventually from the vanilla meshes.
  • Navmeshed all the things
  • As of version 1.3, all wall segments carry power via snap points. The endcaps/posts are basically pylons with a radius of 0 now (or, alternatively, junctions from the Contraptions DLC), and you can hook wires directly to them. After that, the entire wall effectively acts like a wire (or a conduit, if you like Contraptions based terminology), and you can pass power all the way around your settlement. Or just wire your laser turrets to the nearest post. Up to you. You don't have to use this? But why wouldn't you, honestly. KEEP IN MIND that Covenant itself does not yet have this feature. (If I can find a way to add it, though, I will. It'd probably involve rebuilding the entire wall in the CK soooooo it may be a loooong while before I get that desperate).
  • The shorter two wall segments also have snap points for the new vault-tec power conduit that came with Vault-Tec Workshop, but you shouldn't need the DLC to use the power system, thanks to the post connectors. Just wire 'em up and go.
  • 1.3 also adds a new L corner prefab to make building walls easier.
  • 1.4 contains a number of fixes, and even more of those L corner prefabs. At some point I'll probably get around to intersections.

I Hate Reading. How this is different from the other covenant building sets?

  • replacements for the base game meshes, ensuring that the ones in covenant will also have snaps (this is mostly important for the turret platforms)
  • more snaps and features for them
  • carefully adjusted snap positions rather than merely snapping end to end
  • you can use it to transmit power FFS WHY WOULD YOU STILL WANT A DIFFERENT SET??

Options
Why would you need options?

Okay there is one option. You can opt to use this with Homemaker. You would need to copy the meshes that aren't the house prefabs (because the homemaker ones are different) into the appropriate Homemaker mesh folder. The turret platform for homemaker is also the vanilla mesh so this would enable the wall snapping for that.

It would not work with every homemaker mesh for this, though. Homemaker includes pre-built X and L bends, which I haven't reproduced yet. There is a workaround to build L bends on your own with these involving some tricky business with placing a wall with two endcaps, one of which is a corner friendly one, then removing the segment, building your 90 degree turn, and dropping the wall back in....................................

It's finicky but you can do it. I'll try to find a way to improve on this eventually, either through prefabs or better understanding of snap points if possible.


Given the addition of new features since release, I no longer recommend most of this, as you will lose other functionality.

Compatibility

As far as I know, this should work with any version of the game that has a Structures > Concrete category to add things into, and works alongside larger mods like Homemaker without issue - if having two recipes for very similar objects bothers anyone a patch can be made to disable the Homemaker versions. This is what I use on my system - I hand merged it with the Greenhouse+Bunker disablers provided to accommodate Snap N Build.

Installation

Install via NMM or copy the contents of the folder into your Fallout 4 Data folder and activate the plugin.

Uninstallation

There's an uninstall chem that should do the job. But if your Concrete menu is missing afterward, you'll need to get the Universal Missing Menu Fixer by DarthWayne and follow the instructions.

Future Plans

  • Make the clinic and store markers used by Penny Fitzgerald and Doctor Patricia work like other clinic and store markers so you can assign new NPCs to them in the event shit goes sideways in Covenant. Possibly make it so you can craft versions of the markers? If possible. Investigating this.
  • Prefab versions of the houses that you can craft, and have navmeshing, so you can use them in other settlements. Mostly done.

Credits
Thanks go out to DarthWayne for the Custom Categories Template, without whom I would not have been able to figure out any of this injection nonsense.