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About this mod
Why are settlements that have been inhabited for years still covered in trash? And why do some of these same places suddenly turn out to have insufficient water as soon as you gain control of them? This mod improves these settlements to make it more believable that they've been around for a while.
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
This mod consists of a series of files that are intended to improve settlements that are inhabited before the player takes control of them. My goal is to make it more plausible that the settlers have been living in these locations for months or years, even generations.
I have decided to keep the mod separated into several plugins so that users can pick the options they wish and also because I intend to add additional options in the future. However, I have tested making a merged file with matortheeternal's Merge Plugins program and it works, as long as you make sure any custom assets are still being loaded. I could upload merged versions if requested. Unless marked otherwise, each plugin can be loaded independently of each other.
It currently affects the following settlements overall (though not every plugin effects every settlement):
Abernathy Farm, Bunker Hill, Covenant, County Crossing, Egret Tours Marina, Finch Farm, Graygarden, Greentop Nursery, Nordhagen Beach, Oberland Station, Somerville Place, Taffington Boathouse, Tenpines Bluff, The Slog, and Warwick Homestead.
Some settlements I have not yet visited other than for testing purposes, so if there are some details I may have missed that I should account for, please let me know.
---
Current Features:
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Scrap Cleanup - why should settlers leave clutter lying around when it can be salvaged for valuable junk? Or at least to get it out of the way? If you have a mod that expands scrapping, you may have found a source of resources in such trash. Well, with this plugin, the settlers decided to start recycling long ago.
This plugin cleans up piles of trash, junk, and rubble, vehicles, scattered pallets, cinderblocks, empty barrels, tires, and other clutter, as well as some icky stains. Cleans up to a little past the workshop boundary. Other than trash cleanup, clutter inside of buildings has been mostly left alone (buckets and bottles and such are still there). Cinderblocks, barrels, pallets, etc that look like they might be being used have been kept, though some things have been moved to tidy up. Despite no longer having living residents, Taffington Boathouse is still clean.
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Plants Cleanup - trash piles, old cars and the like aren't the only source of resources. If you have an expanded scrap mod on, you may have noticed organic detritus can be a good source of wood and fertilizer. But you shouldn't be the only one who knows this, right?
This plugin cleans up vines, fallen trees/branches/logs, leaf piles, driftwood, washed up seaweed, dead fish (they're not plants, of course, but I think 'plants cleanup' sounds better that 'organic waste cleanup'), and a couple instances of floating scum. Other than vines, living plants have been left alone. This time, Taffington Boathouse is unaffected, as I imagine the vines and fallen leaves could have come back since the death of the occupants.
-----
Adequate Resources - sometimes when you get control of a settlement, you find it doesn't have quite enough water. Why haven't the settlers fixed it over the years they've been there, or at least warned you before burdening you with their poor management? And didn't you just fix Graygarden's water supply problem? With this plugin, it's more believable the settlers can survive before you come in and take over.
This plugin places additional water pumps to make sure each settlement has sufficient water to support its starting population. It replaces a wild mutfruit plant in Covenant, which doesn't count towards the food supply, with a regular mutfruit plant that does. Some crops and water pumps have been added to Egret Tours Marina to make it more believable that more than one person lived there until recently. Having been inhabited until recently, Taffington Boathouse gets a water pump too.
In addition, Graygarden has a unique water source that will become available once you restart Weston water treatment plant, whether you do so on behest of Graygarden's robots or if you decide to slaughter the robots and fix the plant for yourself. After doing so, you can move, scrap, and rebuild Graygarden's pump, but you can only have one of them, and only in Graygarden. Finally, I have added three turrets, two to Bunker Hill and one to the Slog, to add a reason these settlements are as large and secure as they are. The turrets are initially of a new sort that will turn hostile to you if you attack the settlement, and are scripted to be replaced with standard workshop turrets when you gain control of the settlement.
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Adequate Resources Fallout 4 Loot Overhaul patch (FOL) - I really like Darthsith's mod Fallout 4 Loot Overhaul. Because it reduces the resources produced by crops and water sources, I had to add to my Adequate Resources plugin to ensure settlements are still self-sufficient with this mod on. Thus it adds a bunch more water pumps. However, solving the food and water shortages of Bunker Hill and Covenant that this mod introduces would require filling a lot of space with crops or water pumps. Or so I thought, until a line from Fallout 4 Loot Overhaul's description gave me an idea. It says that the lowered amount of resources "makes supply lines much more useful as they can be used to feed small but densely packed settlements without enough space to have
large crops".
This gave me the idea that Bunker Hill and Covenant would be supplied by outside sources, and the respective leaders of the settlements would oversee this. In practice, this means that Kessler of Bunker Hill and Jacob Orden of Covenant automatically supply enough food and water to make up the difference. If they die, it'll be up to you to find a way to keep the settlement supplied. These bonuses are applied to the NPCs by script, without editing their records. This plugin does not require Fallout 4 Loot Overhaul or edit any of the same records, but it does require my Adequate Resources plugin. Removing this plugin will not remove Kessler and Jacob Orden's food and water bonuses.
-----
Rebuilt Precombined Meshes - this optional patch contains newly generated precombined meshes and PreVis files for the cells I edited. Unfortunately it has a very large file size, as it contains a lot of meshes. I had problems when I tried using the patch with a ba2, so it uses loose files for now. It also edits a bunch of cells, even ones that aren't that close to the settlements, I presume for distant object rendering purposes. I've trimmed the file down as much as I dared to reduce compatibility issues, as changing the wrong thing kept resulting in objects being invisible or blinking in and out.
---
Installation/Uninstallation:
Install as any other mod with plugins and custom assets. The cleanup plugins have no custom assets, Adequate Resources has meshes/BetterEstablishedSettlements/GraygardenPump.NIF, Scripts/BESResources_GraygardenPumpScript.pex, Scripts/BESResources_GraygardenPumpSwitcher.pex, and Scripts/BESResources_TurretSwitcher.pex. Adequate Resources FOL patch has Scripts/BESResources_SupplyBonusQuestScript.pex and Scripts/BESResources_UninstallScript.pex. Make sure those are in the right places and it should be good. It should be safe to install at any time. If you've built things where Adequate Resources places things, there will be some clipping but nothing you can't easily fix in Workshop Mode.
It should also be safe to uninstall at any time. Things will go back to the way there were with one exception. BetterEstablishedSettlements-ResourcesFOL.esp edits two values directly by script, you will have to undo these to set it back to normal. To do this, before removing the plugin you should use the following console command:
player.additem xx00ec41
Replacing xx with the two-digit hexidecimal mod index of BetterEstablishedSettlements-ResourcesFOL.esp. This will add an Uninstaller Carrot which can be eaten to reset the NPCs' bonuses, and which is healthier than the uninstaller chems some other mods use. Alternatively, you can use the following console commands:
prid 1995e
setav 331 0
setav 332 0
prid 89143
setav 331 0
setav 332 0
Substituting 0 for whatever the original numbers were if you have another mod that edits those values. I really, really don't think such a mod exists, but in case there is one, the Uninstaller Carrot will reset the values to what they were before BetterEstablishedSettlements-ResourcesFOL.esp was installed. If requested, I could add a recipe to craft the uninstaller, but it seems such a minor thing, I'd hate to add more unimmersive clutter to the crafting menu for it.
Also note that in the case of workshop objects added by plugins, they will be dependent on the plugin that adds them, even if you move them. However, if you store them in the workshop and rebuild them, they no longer count as references from that plugin, and will remain after uninstalling.
---
Compatibility:
This mod edits cell records. It does not delete any references, but the Scrap Cleanup and Plants Cleanup plugins disable a whole bunch of stuff. The Adequate Resources plugins add stuff (and in the case of Covenant's wild mutfruit plant, replace one reference). I do not expect issues with any other mod if installed properly, however these plugins should be loaded above any plugins that edit cell data, such as lighting or scrapping mods. Please inform me if you find this mod doesn't work well with any other mods.
The Precombined Mesh/Previs patch is not dependent on any of the other plugins, but should be loaded after them. It is designed to work with all Better Established Settlements plugins loaded but should work with any combination, further testing may be needed. This patch edits the data of many cells, and will conflict with mods that do the same, such as Spring Cleaning and Scrap Everything, so I recommend not using the patch with those mods. I also recommend checking for compatibility in FO4Edit. It is really not difficult.
---
Known Issues:
This may lower your game's performance in the affected cells, due to disabling precombined meshes in the affected cells. However if you use a mod that already moves/removes objects in the cell or lets you scrap them, such as Spring Cleaning, there should be no further performance loss. As of the time I release this mod, my computer is below the 'minimum' specs for Fallout 4 and is still quite playable even with such mods installed. See this post for details (but note the addendum regarding settlements, which are the locations affected by this mod). Thanks go to fadingsignal for explaining this matter. Disabling precombined meshes can also cause issues placing workshop items in certain buildings. Thanks to Jstalin56 for reporting this.
As of Version 1.1, an optional patch that includes regenerated precombined meshes and PreVis is available. You do not need this patch if you have bUseCombinedObjects=0 in your ini file. (See above for compatibility). One minor bug: this patch recolors the house at Somerville Place from red to blue, and probably changes the color of some other precombined meshes too. I don't know how to fix it but hopefully nobody considers it a big deal.
If you enter workshop mode and try to move some of the objects my mod places, you might find they don't really fit exactly where I placed them. I'm still trying to learn how to give things in the CK the exact same placement limitations as the workshop has, if possible. Notably, you cannot place the Graygarden pump anywhere near where it is initially placed, unfortunately. I even removed the "place only in dirt" tag from the object and it is still picky about where it goes. So just don't move it if you like where it is. I may need some help in figuring out how to fix this.
Other than that, I've done a bunch of testing and it seems to be working smoothly for me. Please let me know if you encounter any bugs.
---
Planned Features:
I'm trying to make a plugin that adds generators to settlements that have electric lights, and to integrate all those lights into the settlement building and power system. Right now, I'm trying to figure out how exactly powered lights work (looks like something in the nif file changes when the object is powered) and how to place working power lines in the editor. Unfortunately I'm stuck on this part. I also tried to make some of the resource objects in Taffington Boathouse and Egret Tours Marina start destroyed, so you'd need to repair them to use them. I have not yet been able to properly implement this either. If anyone could help me with either of these efforts, it would sure be appreciated!
Given permission, I'd also like to make patches that place objects from other mods that should already be found in settlements.
If anyone knows more about how precombined mesh and PreVis generation works, any help improving that patch would be appreciated.
---
Recommended Mods:
Fallout 4 Loot Overhaul
Spring Cleaning (use this or)
Scrap Everything
Covenant Unrestricted - haven't tried this mod yet, but it looks neat and adds defense bonuses to Covenant's turrets
A Bunch More Unrelated Mods I Can't List Now Because I Should Just Finish Uploading This (just check what I've endorsed :p)
---
Credits:
ElminsterAU, Hlp, zilav and Sharlikran for FO4Edit
The NifTools team for NifSkope
matortheeternal for Merge Plugins
PananaCakes for helping me with scripts
Darthsith for Fallout 4 Loot Overhaul
Nverjos for Spring Cleaning
shadowslasher410 and Kuroitsune for Scrap Everything
I have decided to keep the mod separated into several plugins so that users can pick the options they wish and also because I intend to add additional options in the future. However, I have tested making a merged file with matortheeternal's Merge Plugins program and it works, as long as you make sure any custom assets are still being loaded. I could upload merged versions if requested. Unless marked otherwise, each plugin can be loaded independently of each other.
It currently affects the following settlements overall (though not every plugin effects every settlement):
Abernathy Farm, Bunker Hill, Covenant, County Crossing, Egret Tours Marina, Finch Farm, Graygarden, Greentop Nursery, Nordhagen Beach, Oberland Station, Somerville Place, Taffington Boathouse, Tenpines Bluff, The Slog, and Warwick Homestead.
Some settlements I have not yet visited other than for testing purposes, so if there are some details I may have missed that I should account for, please let me know.
---
Current Features:
-----
Scrap Cleanup - why should settlers leave clutter lying around when it can be salvaged for valuable junk? Or at least to get it out of the way? If you have a mod that expands scrapping, you may have found a source of resources in such trash. Well, with this plugin, the settlers decided to start recycling long ago.
This plugin cleans up piles of trash, junk, and rubble, vehicles, scattered pallets, cinderblocks, empty barrels, tires, and other clutter, as well as some icky stains. Cleans up to a little past the workshop boundary. Other than trash cleanup, clutter inside of buildings has been mostly left alone (buckets and bottles and such are still there). Cinderblocks, barrels, pallets, etc that look like they might be being used have been kept, though some things have been moved to tidy up. Despite no longer having living residents, Taffington Boathouse is still clean.
-----
Plants Cleanup - trash piles, old cars and the like aren't the only source of resources. If you have an expanded scrap mod on, you may have noticed organic detritus can be a good source of wood and fertilizer. But you shouldn't be the only one who knows this, right?
This plugin cleans up vines, fallen trees/branches/logs, leaf piles, driftwood, washed up seaweed, dead fish (they're not plants, of course, but I think 'plants cleanup' sounds better that 'organic waste cleanup'), and a couple instances of floating scum. Other than vines, living plants have been left alone. This time, Taffington Boathouse is unaffected, as I imagine the vines and fallen leaves could have come back since the death of the occupants.
-----
Adequate Resources - sometimes when you get control of a settlement, you find it doesn't have quite enough water. Why haven't the settlers fixed it over the years they've been there, or at least warned you before burdening you with their poor management? And didn't you just fix Graygarden's water supply problem? With this plugin, it's more believable the settlers can survive before you come in and take over.
This plugin places additional water pumps to make sure each settlement has sufficient water to support its starting population. It replaces a wild mutfruit plant in Covenant, which doesn't count towards the food supply, with a regular mutfruit plant that does. Some crops and water pumps have been added to Egret Tours Marina to make it more believable that more than one person lived there until recently. Having been inhabited until recently, Taffington Boathouse gets a water pump too.
In addition, Graygarden has a unique water source that will become available once you restart Weston water treatment plant, whether you do so on behest of Graygarden's robots or if you decide to slaughter the robots and fix the plant for yourself. After doing so, you can move, scrap, and rebuild Graygarden's pump, but you can only have one of them, and only in Graygarden. Finally, I have added three turrets, two to Bunker Hill and one to the Slog, to add a reason these settlements are as large and secure as they are. The turrets are initially of a new sort that will turn hostile to you if you attack the settlement, and are scripted to be replaced with standard workshop turrets when you gain control of the settlement.
-----
Adequate Resources Fallout 4 Loot Overhaul patch (FOL) - I really like Darthsith's mod Fallout 4 Loot Overhaul. Because it reduces the resources produced by crops and water sources, I had to add to my Adequate Resources plugin to ensure settlements are still self-sufficient with this mod on. Thus it adds a bunch more water pumps. However, solving the food and water shortages of Bunker Hill and Covenant that this mod introduces would require filling a lot of space with crops or water pumps. Or so I thought, until a line from Fallout 4 Loot Overhaul's description gave me an idea. It says that the lowered amount of resources "makes supply lines much more useful as they can be used to feed small but densely packed settlements without enough space to have
large crops".
This gave me the idea that Bunker Hill and Covenant would be supplied by outside sources, and the respective leaders of the settlements would oversee this. In practice, this means that Kessler of Bunker Hill and Jacob Orden of Covenant automatically supply enough food and water to make up the difference. If they die, it'll be up to you to find a way to keep the settlement supplied. These bonuses are applied to the NPCs by script, without editing their records. This plugin does not require Fallout 4 Loot Overhaul or edit any of the same records, but it does require my Adequate Resources plugin. Removing this plugin will not remove Kessler and Jacob Orden's food and water bonuses.
-----
Rebuilt Precombined Meshes - this optional patch contains newly generated precombined meshes and PreVis files for the cells I edited. Unfortunately it has a very large file size, as it contains a lot of meshes. I had problems when I tried using the patch with a ba2, so it uses loose files for now. It also edits a bunch of cells, even ones that aren't that close to the settlements, I presume for distant object rendering purposes. I've trimmed the file down as much as I dared to reduce compatibility issues, as changing the wrong thing kept resulting in objects being invisible or blinking in and out.
---
Installation/Uninstallation:
Install as any other mod with plugins and custom assets. The cleanup plugins have no custom assets, Adequate Resources has meshes/BetterEstablishedSettlements/GraygardenPump.NIF, Scripts/BESResources_GraygardenPumpScript.pex, Scripts/BESResources_GraygardenPumpSwitcher.pex, and Scripts/BESResources_TurretSwitcher.pex. Adequate Resources FOL patch has Scripts/BESResources_SupplyBonusQuestScript.pex and Scripts/BESResources_UninstallScript.pex. Make sure those are in the right places and it should be good. It should be safe to install at any time. If you've built things where Adequate Resources places things, there will be some clipping but nothing you can't easily fix in Workshop Mode.
It should also be safe to uninstall at any time. Things will go back to the way there were with one exception. BetterEstablishedSettlements-ResourcesFOL.esp edits two values directly by script, you will have to undo these to set it back to normal. To do this, before removing the plugin you should use the following console command:
player.additem xx00ec41
Replacing xx with the two-digit hexidecimal mod index of BetterEstablishedSettlements-ResourcesFOL.esp. This will add an Uninstaller Carrot which can be eaten to reset the NPCs' bonuses, and which is healthier than the uninstaller chems some other mods use. Alternatively, you can use the following console commands:
prid 1995e
setav 331 0
setav 332 0
prid 89143
setav 331 0
setav 332 0
Substituting 0 for whatever the original numbers were if you have another mod that edits those values. I really, really don't think such a mod exists, but in case there is one, the Uninstaller Carrot will reset the values to what they were before BetterEstablishedSettlements-ResourcesFOL.esp was installed. If requested, I could add a recipe to craft the uninstaller, but it seems such a minor thing, I'd hate to add more unimmersive clutter to the crafting menu for it.
Also note that in the case of workshop objects added by plugins, they will be dependent on the plugin that adds them, even if you move them. However, if you store them in the workshop and rebuild them, they no longer count as references from that plugin, and will remain after uninstalling.
---
Compatibility:
This mod edits cell records. It does not delete any references, but the Scrap Cleanup and Plants Cleanup plugins disable a whole bunch of stuff. The Adequate Resources plugins add stuff (and in the case of Covenant's wild mutfruit plant, replace one reference). I do not expect issues with any other mod if installed properly, however these plugins should be loaded above any plugins that edit cell data, such as lighting or scrapping mods. Please inform me if you find this mod doesn't work well with any other mods.
The Precombined Mesh/Previs patch is not dependent on any of the other plugins, but should be loaded after them. It is designed to work with all Better Established Settlements plugins loaded but should work with any combination, further testing may be needed. This patch edits the data of many cells, and will conflict with mods that do the same, such as Spring Cleaning and Scrap Everything, so I recommend not using the patch with those mods. I also recommend checking for compatibility in FO4Edit. It is really not difficult.
---
Known Issues:
This may lower your game's performance in the affected cells, due to disabling precombined meshes in the affected cells. However if you use a mod that already moves/removes objects in the cell or lets you scrap them, such as Spring Cleaning, there should be no further performance loss. As of the time I release this mod, my computer is below the 'minimum' specs for Fallout 4 and is still quite playable even with such mods installed. See this post for details (but note the addendum regarding settlements, which are the locations affected by this mod). Thanks go to fadingsignal for explaining this matter. Disabling precombined meshes can also cause issues placing workshop items in certain buildings. Thanks to Jstalin56 for reporting this.
As of Version 1.1, an optional patch that includes regenerated precombined meshes and PreVis is available. You do not need this patch if you have bUseCombinedObjects=0 in your ini file. (See above for compatibility). One minor bug: this patch recolors the house at Somerville Place from red to blue, and probably changes the color of some other precombined meshes too. I don't know how to fix it but hopefully nobody considers it a big deal.
If you enter workshop mode and try to move some of the objects my mod places, you might find they don't really fit exactly where I placed them. I'm still trying to learn how to give things in the CK the exact same placement limitations as the workshop has, if possible. Notably, you cannot place the Graygarden pump anywhere near where it is initially placed, unfortunately. I even removed the "place only in dirt" tag from the object and it is still picky about where it goes. So just don't move it if you like where it is. I may need some help in figuring out how to fix this.
Other than that, I've done a bunch of testing and it seems to be working smoothly for me. Please let me know if you encounter any bugs.
---
Planned Features:
I'm trying to make a plugin that adds generators to settlements that have electric lights, and to integrate all those lights into the settlement building and power system. Right now, I'm trying to figure out how exactly powered lights work (looks like something in the nif file changes when the object is powered) and how to place working power lines in the editor. Unfortunately I'm stuck on this part. I also tried to make some of the resource objects in Taffington Boathouse and Egret Tours Marina start destroyed, so you'd need to repair them to use them. I have not yet been able to properly implement this either. If anyone could help me with either of these efforts, it would sure be appreciated!
Given permission, I'd also like to make patches that place objects from other mods that should already be found in settlements.
If anyone knows more about how precombined mesh and PreVis generation works, any help improving that patch would be appreciated.
---
Recommended Mods:
Fallout 4 Loot Overhaul
Spring Cleaning (use this or)
Scrap Everything
Covenant Unrestricted - haven't tried this mod yet, but it looks neat and adds defense bonuses to Covenant's turrets
A Bunch More Unrelated Mods I Can't List Now Because I Should Just Finish Uploading This (just check what I've endorsed :p)
---
Credits:
ElminsterAU, Hlp, zilav and Sharlikran for FO4Edit
The NifTools team for NifSkope
matortheeternal for Merge Plugins
PananaCakes for helping me with scripts
Darthsith for Fallout 4 Loot Overhaul
Nverjos for Spring Cleaning
shadowslasher410 and Kuroitsune for Scrap Everything