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About this mod
Completely overhauls every perk in the game to diversify gameplay, reworking properties. Reintroduces traits, random crits, and other features from older fallout games.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
NOW SUPPORTS OLD SAVES!
Use http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/895/? before loading this mod to get back your perk points, and then install PIPBOI.
Go back to 2015. Your first playthrough of FO4. Sure, the voiced protagonist might piss you off, but when you first open the perk chart, it's something overwhelming, magical even. No less than seventy distinct perks, each with their little Vault Boy, winking at you, just begging for you to try them out.
That optimism fades very quickly. You soon discover that most perks are just boring stat bonuses, with no interesting gimmick or feature to go along with it. Not a single perk drastically affects your gameplay in any sense. On repeat playthroughs, you fall into a predictable pattern. Max out your damage perk of choice, grab some points in medic, yada yada yada. Don't even think of running a INT or CHR build, since those suck.
So ever since the game came out I've been waiting, eagerly, for someone to release a perk overhaul that makes the game more interesting. But no one stood up to the task. And weeks became months became a year or so. And I was sick and tired of waiting. And hell, I know how to mod, why not give it a shot?
PIPBOI is my attempt at remedying this egregrious fault of Fallout 4. This mod is, to date, the single largest, most inclusive and most ambitious perk overhaul made for Fallout 4. Unlike other perk mods that focus on improving a single perk, PIPBOI completely revamps the game system, and drastically alters game balance itself. It reintroduces elements like Traits and Random crits from former games, but in an immersive and interesting way, while changing perks so every playstyle and weapon type feels distinct and fun to use.
Play an unarmed build and become Kenshiro, effortlessly parrying enemies and kicking them thirty feet into the air. Grab Gun Fu and watch the game become a John Woo movie. Or go heavy gunner and become an impenetrable hulk mowing down your enemies - at least, when you're charged up. From combat engineers building sandbags and turrets to a mad scientist swarming his enemies with eyebots and noxious chemicals while preparing his doomsday device - even the most niche builds are possible and entirely viable with this mod. Hell, with the right mix of traits and perks, you can finish the game without killing a single person.
However, due to these radical changes to the system, PIPBOI doesn't work on old saves, and requires a new game.
Anyways, without further ado, let's get into the meat of the changes themselves.
GENERAL
Every perk in the game has been altered in one way or another. All perks have their level restrictions removed or greatly reduced. Each rank of a perk is generally less potent than before, and the number of ranks has increased, with most combat perks having ten ranks rather than five, with power gradually increasing along the tree. This poses an interesting dilemma - do you invest in the combat perk, or go for a mish-mash of perks that don't scale as well, but have a more immediate benefit?
While the number of perks and the magnitude of their changes prevents me from going into full detail, I can describe the most notable changes here. For the full list of changes, check the Readme (WIP)
STRENGTH
Strength now grants you 5% melee damage per rank, down from 10%.
Iron Fist is the weakest combat perk in terms of raw damage - the percent damage bonuses from this perk come to a little more than half what the other weapons get. However, it has the greatest utility options out of all the trees, and a ton of situational damage boosts. Blocking an attack while unarmed will boost your damage for your next attack, a la dark souls. Your power attacks will reduce enemy armor, and striking an enemy in the process of attacking will drastically boost your crit chance. But the signature move is the final perk, which allows you to strike an enemy with the fist of Hokuto, punching them into the sky and removing a percentage of their health. Unarmed weapons are now by far the best option against single strong foes.
Big Leagues is very different. It rewards you for taking risks and facing large groups of enemies at once, with cleave, bonus damage at low health, and healing every time you slay a foe. Finally, become the highlander with the final perk, which turns you completely immune to stagger and almost immune to damage whenever you mount a power attack - just watch your AP!
Heavy Gunner is an oddity. Most of its perks revolve around making the player stronger defensively, rather than boosting their offense. Missile Launchers and Fat Men no longer count under this perk, but have received buffs accordingly. With heavy gunner, you now deal and receive reduced damage from all weapons except for heavy guns, and build up an ubercharge while attacking. When your charge is maxed, you gain 2000 damage and energy resist. This lasts until the charge naturally drains when you stop attacking.
PERCEPTION
Bonus VATS accuracy is way down. At 10 PER, you'll have around a 60-80% base accuracy in VATS - Significantly less than the 95% in vanilla. Base AP is also raised though, so you can afford to miss more shots.
Rifleman changes are designed to encourage both sniping and hip firing. Let's face it, non-automatic rifles are kind of garbage in vanilla and need some love. With Rifleman, your attacks against full health targets will ignore half their armor. Your weapon will also gain different properties based on whether it's energy or ballistic. Finally, in a tough situation, your final round in the magazine is guaranteed to critically strike! There's one weapon, universally considered trash, that becomes VERY powerful due to this.
Locksmith now incorporates traps, allowing you to craft them and enhancing their power. At max rank, you will be able to make your own bobby pins and lock doors in exchange for them. Great way to seal enemies off or keep your settlers from going into your room!
Sniper also sees some drastic changes. No longer does it boost headshots in VATS, but only rewards continuous headshots outside of VATS. Your attacks on a crippled head now land perfect headshots, minicritting the brain. Learn to aim!
ENDURANCE
This is a biggie. And probably controversial. You no longer gain any health per level, but endurance grants 8 points of health per level. The maximum health possible with full Endurance and Life giver is around 250. Much less incentive to level endurance just for the stats.
Life Giver now has more ranks, but less health per rank. Evens out in the end. However, at max rank, you are granted one dose of the Elixir of Life (You're welcome, five remaining Tactics fans), which will instantly restore health to full, and cure all diseases and addictions.
Solar Powered is far more powerful now, but carries penalties at nighttime. Take some time off to sleep once in a while! When maxed out, your karate and friendship skills will also improve.
CHARISMA
No notable changes to the stat itself. Companions, however, have been modified significantly. Read more below.
Cap Collector now lets for invest even more caps, and in case you're just flat broke, you can counterfeit caps from scrap, though at a loss.
Animal Friend turns you feral! Once you've learned to commune with beasts, you become one. Shed your clothing and armor and weapons for some huge stat boosts. Damage against your animal friends is reduced, but they become more eager to fight for you, too!
Party Boy carries some huge buffs to alcohol effects, but be careful. You're only immune to addiction up until level 21. And past level 40, addiction chance is doubled. Because, you know, sometimes you want to roleplay an alcoholic.
Inspirational is probably the biggest change. Not only does it grant more bonuses to your companion, but when maxed out you unlock a second companion perk, provided you have the first. For example, Cait's perk makes your molotovs do more damage, Deacon enhances your sniping capability, Nick boosts your attacks against outlaws, X6-88 Turns into a terminator, and Piper writes newspaper articles that you can read for stat buffs.
INTELLIGENCE
Another big one. Intelligence now boosts your experience gain by 5% per point, rather than 3%.
Scrapper grants more scrap, and bonus critical damage for pipe weapons.
Science now has ten ranks, and a whole lot more stuff to build. You craft turrets and all sorts of gadgets. There's sandbags, barricades, force fields, etc on the defensive side, but also eyebot generators, Concussion grenades, and the compliance regulator, meaning you can run powerful non-lethal builds now. On the other hand, there's a doomsday device, which if not destroyed within 25 seconds will create a massive explosion around it, pretty much killing everything. That's a timer to GTFO.
Automatrons now need batteries to be recharged periodically. Batteries only drain in combat, and when drained they don't disable the robot, but robots suffer hefty stat penalties. Robotics Expert lets you craft batteries, makes robots drain slower, and buffs robot damage and defense. Don't worry, though, you can find batteries integrated into robot leveled lists, and just randomly around the map.
AGILITY
Your Base AP is set to 100 rather than 60, and with maxed out agility you can have up to 150 points. AP now regenerates more slowly, though, and action boy has been nerfed. Use your AP conservatively and wisely!
Gunslinger now makes you feel like a real cowboy. You reload faster at low health, pistol whipping does more damage, and always knock targets down with your first shot, with a chance to insta-kill.
Mister Sandman isn't all about killing anymore. Gain access to a sneak attack takedown that you can use to paralyze a target without killing them, and doesn't reveal you.
Ninja no longer grants sneak damage to anything but throwing weapons and one-handed melee. It also boosts sneaking speed to nearly a walking pace, and there's the 15% melee and throwing crit chance from New Vegas. You can also learn to craft shurikens. At max rank, killing a target grants you invisibility and a heafty speed boost for 10 seconds, able to be refreshed indefinitely. You can take out a whole raider camp without being seen once.
Blitz VATS range reduced. However, Blitz now grants bonuses to sprinting attacks, so you have other ways of closing the gap when playing melee.
Gun Fu's final perk gives you a pair of sunglasses. When worn, they slow time to a crawl but drain AP. Use this to pull of sick Matrix dodges and turn Fallout into a John Woo Movie. Shit I should've added doves.
LUCK
Finally, we get to Luck. Luck now boosts your critical strike chance by 1% for every point. However, VATS criticals now charge much more slowly. Save that free crit for when you REALLY need it, rather than in the vanilla game where you can use it as much as you like. But otherwise, relatively few changes.
Fortune Finder enables five Enclave safes around the world. Each contains a heafty stash of money and other goodies. However, it's on you to discover them.
Four Leaf Clover is for those that really don't like random crits. It boosts critical charge rate rather than random crits now.
Like mentioned before, traits have been re-introduced into the game. Unlike other Trait mods though, this one aims to add traits immersively and at the beginning of the game. Basically, some activatable items around sanctuary have been modified, and some added. Activating some of them, such as the Tri-fold flag or Law Diploma, will bring up a popup screen and allow you to acquire a trait. Each item has a unique trait associated with it, and you can have up to two traits.
Explore your home throughly to get the most out of it! I'll make a readme for the locations of the trait items for those people that don't want to explore though.
PIPBOY also brings a slew of balance changes to accompany these perk reworks.
- Player level is now capped at 100. Make different characters to try different builds.
- Difficulty for survival and Very Hard adjusted to 1x damage taken and recieved. These two are what this mod was designed for.
- Blocking a melee attack only reduces its damage by 75%. This is reduced further to 25% for Power attacks. If an enemy is blocking your melee hits, power attacks are now a viable alternative to VATS.
- Adrenaline max bonus damage down from 50% to 30%.
- Stimpaks now heal only 20% of your max health, but heals significantly faster in Survival.
- Chems are generally more powerful, but addictions are more debilitating. The price to cure addictions scales with level, except for workshop doctors, which is a constant amount regardless. Addictitol is more expensive, and Refreshing Beverage no longer cures addictions.
- Power armor feels more like power armor. All damage taken in power armor is reduced by 25% before resistances, but you also move 25% slower. This can be negated with the Pain Train Perk. Fall damage is no longer negated, but reduced by 50%.
- Experience for survival changed back to 1x
- Companions now use ammo for their default weapon too, but they start off with a hefty amount and alternate melee weapons.
- Automatrons now require recharging every now and then, with a battery that drains in combat. This can be mitigated with Robotics Expert.
These new perks have also been distributed among companions and NPCs. No longer are all companions experts at stealth, you won't want to bring Strong along if you're running a stealthy playstyle. But Curie isn't very handy with a baseball bat either. Additionally, NPC health scaling is reduced, and particularly extreme examples have been toned down. No longer will you find raiders at 1000+ health wandering around the wasteland.
Once again, this requires a new game. It also requires two mods, Sean_s's Deployable Turrets 2 and Trainwiz's Throwing Weapons. Install those mods first and then overwrite their esp's with mine.
PIPBOI will NOT work with any other perk mod, due to the unique way it adjusts perk trees. Using another perk mod might cause the game to explode.
Other gameplay overhauls and balance mods will work perfectly fine, however, so long as they contain no perks and are loaded after PIPBOI. I can also make compatibility patches on request for those that do modify perks. Hell, anyone can. Use FO4edit and delete the perk references.
While not techincally incompatible, door locking mods are somewhat redundant as that functionality is already contained.
Horizon Compatibility patch released.
Revolver fanning mods are incompatible, however. That functionality is already included.
Use http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/895/? before loading this mod to get back your perk points, and then install PIPBOI.
Go back to 2015. Your first playthrough of FO4. Sure, the voiced protagonist might piss you off, but when you first open the perk chart, it's something overwhelming, magical even. No less than seventy distinct perks, each with their little Vault Boy, winking at you, just begging for you to try them out.
That optimism fades very quickly. You soon discover that most perks are just boring stat bonuses, with no interesting gimmick or feature to go along with it. Not a single perk drastically affects your gameplay in any sense. On repeat playthroughs, you fall into a predictable pattern. Max out your damage perk of choice, grab some points in medic, yada yada yada. Don't even think of running a INT or CHR build, since those suck.
So ever since the game came out I've been waiting, eagerly, for someone to release a perk overhaul that makes the game more interesting. But no one stood up to the task. And weeks became months became a year or so. And I was sick and tired of waiting. And hell, I know how to mod, why not give it a shot?
PIPBOI is my attempt at remedying this egregrious fault of Fallout 4. This mod is, to date, the single largest, most inclusive and most ambitious perk overhaul made for Fallout 4. Unlike other perk mods that focus on improving a single perk, PIPBOI completely revamps the game system, and drastically alters game balance itself. It reintroduces elements like Traits and Random crits from former games, but in an immersive and interesting way, while changing perks so every playstyle and weapon type feels distinct and fun to use.
Play an unarmed build and become Kenshiro, effortlessly parrying enemies and kicking them thirty feet into the air. Grab Gun Fu and watch the game become a John Woo movie. Or go heavy gunner and become an impenetrable hulk mowing down your enemies - at least, when you're charged up. From combat engineers building sandbags and turrets to a mad scientist swarming his enemies with eyebots and noxious chemicals while preparing his doomsday device - even the most niche builds are possible and entirely viable with this mod. Hell, with the right mix of traits and perks, you can finish the game without killing a single person.
However, due to these radical changes to the system, PIPBOI doesn't work on old saves, and requires a new game.
Anyways, without further ado, let's get into the meat of the changes themselves.
GENERAL
Every perk in the game has been altered in one way or another. All perks have their level restrictions removed or greatly reduced. Each rank of a perk is generally less potent than before, and the number of ranks has increased, with most combat perks having ten ranks rather than five, with power gradually increasing along the tree. This poses an interesting dilemma - do you invest in the combat perk, or go for a mish-mash of perks that don't scale as well, but have a more immediate benefit?
While the number of perks and the magnitude of their changes prevents me from going into full detail, I can describe the most notable changes here. For the full list of changes, check the Readme (WIP)
STRENGTH
Strength now grants you 5% melee damage per rank, down from 10%.
Iron Fist is the weakest combat perk in terms of raw damage - the percent damage bonuses from this perk come to a little more than half what the other weapons get. However, it has the greatest utility options out of all the trees, and a ton of situational damage boosts. Blocking an attack while unarmed will boost your damage for your next attack, a la dark souls. Your power attacks will reduce enemy armor, and striking an enemy in the process of attacking will drastically boost your crit chance. But the signature move is the final perk, which allows you to strike an enemy with the fist of Hokuto, punching them into the sky and removing a percentage of their health. Unarmed weapons are now by far the best option against single strong foes.
Big Leagues is very different. It rewards you for taking risks and facing large groups of enemies at once, with cleave, bonus damage at low health, and healing every time you slay a foe. Finally, become the highlander with the final perk, which turns you completely immune to stagger and almost immune to damage whenever you mount a power attack - just watch your AP!
Heavy Gunner is an oddity. Most of its perks revolve around making the player stronger defensively, rather than boosting their offense. Missile Launchers and Fat Men no longer count under this perk, but have received buffs accordingly. With heavy gunner, you now deal and receive reduced damage from all weapons except for heavy guns, and build up an ubercharge while attacking. When your charge is maxed, you gain 2000 damage and energy resist. This lasts until the charge naturally drains when you stop attacking.
PERCEPTION
Bonus VATS accuracy is way down. At 10 PER, you'll have around a 60-80% base accuracy in VATS - Significantly less than the 95% in vanilla. Base AP is also raised though, so you can afford to miss more shots.
Rifleman changes are designed to encourage both sniping and hip firing. Let's face it, non-automatic rifles are kind of garbage in vanilla and need some love. With Rifleman, your attacks against full health targets will ignore half their armor. Your weapon will also gain different properties based on whether it's energy or ballistic. Finally, in a tough situation, your final round in the magazine is guaranteed to critically strike! There's one weapon, universally considered trash, that becomes VERY powerful due to this.
Locksmith now incorporates traps, allowing you to craft them and enhancing their power. At max rank, you will be able to make your own bobby pins and lock doors in exchange for them. Great way to seal enemies off or keep your settlers from going into your room!
Sniper also sees some drastic changes. No longer does it boost headshots in VATS, but only rewards continuous headshots outside of VATS. Your attacks on a crippled head now land perfect headshots, minicritting the brain. Learn to aim!
ENDURANCE
This is a biggie. And probably controversial. You no longer gain any health per level, but endurance grants 8 points of health per level. The maximum health possible with full Endurance and Life giver is around 250. Much less incentive to level endurance just for the stats.
Life Giver now has more ranks, but less health per rank. Evens out in the end. However, at max rank, you are granted one dose of the Elixir of Life (You're welcome, five remaining Tactics fans), which will instantly restore health to full, and cure all diseases and addictions.
Solar Powered is far more powerful now, but carries penalties at nighttime. Take some time off to sleep once in a while! When maxed out, your karate and friendship skills will also improve.
CHARISMA
No notable changes to the stat itself. Companions, however, have been modified significantly. Read more below.
Cap Collector now lets for invest even more caps, and in case you're just flat broke, you can counterfeit caps from scrap, though at a loss.
Animal Friend turns you feral! Once you've learned to commune with beasts, you become one. Shed your clothing and armor and weapons for some huge stat boosts. Damage against your animal friends is reduced, but they become more eager to fight for you, too!
Party Boy carries some huge buffs to alcohol effects, but be careful. You're only immune to addiction up until level 21. And past level 40, addiction chance is doubled. Because, you know, sometimes you want to roleplay an alcoholic.
Inspirational is probably the biggest change. Not only does it grant more bonuses to your companion, but when maxed out you unlock a second companion perk, provided you have the first. For example, Cait's perk makes your molotovs do more damage, Deacon enhances your sniping capability, Nick boosts your attacks against outlaws, X6-88 Turns into a terminator, and Piper writes newspaper articles that you can read for stat buffs.
INTELLIGENCE
Another big one. Intelligence now boosts your experience gain by 5% per point, rather than 3%.
Scrapper grants more scrap, and bonus critical damage for pipe weapons.
Science now has ten ranks, and a whole lot more stuff to build. You craft turrets and all sorts of gadgets. There's sandbags, barricades, force fields, etc on the defensive side, but also eyebot generators, Concussion grenades, and the compliance regulator, meaning you can run powerful non-lethal builds now. On the other hand, there's a doomsday device, which if not destroyed within 25 seconds will create a massive explosion around it, pretty much killing everything. That's a timer to GTFO.
Automatrons now need batteries to be recharged periodically. Batteries only drain in combat, and when drained they don't disable the robot, but robots suffer hefty stat penalties. Robotics Expert lets you craft batteries, makes robots drain slower, and buffs robot damage and defense. Don't worry, though, you can find batteries integrated into robot leveled lists, and just randomly around the map.
AGILITY
Your Base AP is set to 100 rather than 60, and with maxed out agility you can have up to 150 points. AP now regenerates more slowly, though, and action boy has been nerfed. Use your AP conservatively and wisely!
Gunslinger now makes you feel like a real cowboy. You reload faster at low health, pistol whipping does more damage, and always knock targets down with your first shot, with a chance to insta-kill.
Mister Sandman isn't all about killing anymore. Gain access to a sneak attack takedown that you can use to paralyze a target without killing them, and doesn't reveal you.
Ninja no longer grants sneak damage to anything but throwing weapons and one-handed melee. It also boosts sneaking speed to nearly a walking pace, and there's the 15% melee and throwing crit chance from New Vegas. You can also learn to craft shurikens. At max rank, killing a target grants you invisibility and a heafty speed boost for 10 seconds, able to be refreshed indefinitely. You can take out a whole raider camp without being seen once.
Blitz VATS range reduced. However, Blitz now grants bonuses to sprinting attacks, so you have other ways of closing the gap when playing melee.
Gun Fu's final perk gives you a pair of sunglasses. When worn, they slow time to a crawl but drain AP. Use this to pull of sick Matrix dodges and turn Fallout into a John Woo Movie. Shit I should've added doves.
LUCK
Finally, we get to Luck. Luck now boosts your critical strike chance by 1% for every point. However, VATS criticals now charge much more slowly. Save that free crit for when you REALLY need it, rather than in the vanilla game where you can use it as much as you like. But otherwise, relatively few changes.
Fortune Finder enables five Enclave safes around the world. Each contains a heafty stash of money and other goodies. However, it's on you to discover them.
Four Leaf Clover is for those that really don't like random crits. It boosts critical charge rate rather than random crits now.
Like mentioned before, traits have been re-introduced into the game. Unlike other Trait mods though, this one aims to add traits immersively and at the beginning of the game. Basically, some activatable items around sanctuary have been modified, and some added. Activating some of them, such as the Tri-fold flag or Law Diploma, will bring up a popup screen and allow you to acquire a trait. Each item has a unique trait associated with it, and you can have up to two traits.
Explore your home throughly to get the most out of it! I'll make a readme for the locations of the trait items for those people that don't want to explore though.
PIPBOY also brings a slew of balance changes to accompany these perk reworks.
- Player level is now capped at 100. Make different characters to try different builds.
- Difficulty for survival and Very Hard adjusted to 1x damage taken and recieved. These two are what this mod was designed for.
- Blocking a melee attack only reduces its damage by 75%. This is reduced further to 25% for Power attacks. If an enemy is blocking your melee hits, power attacks are now a viable alternative to VATS.
- Adrenaline max bonus damage down from 50% to 30%.
- Stimpaks now heal only 20% of your max health, but heals significantly faster in Survival.
- Chems are generally more powerful, but addictions are more debilitating. The price to cure addictions scales with level, except for workshop doctors, which is a constant amount regardless. Addictitol is more expensive, and Refreshing Beverage no longer cures addictions.
- Power armor feels more like power armor. All damage taken in power armor is reduced by 25% before resistances, but you also move 25% slower. This can be negated with the Pain Train Perk. Fall damage is no longer negated, but reduced by 50%.
- Experience for survival changed back to 1x
- Companions now use ammo for their default weapon too, but they start off with a hefty amount and alternate melee weapons.
- Automatrons now require recharging every now and then, with a battery that drains in combat. This can be mitigated with Robotics Expert.
These new perks have also been distributed among companions and NPCs. No longer are all companions experts at stealth, you won't want to bring Strong along if you're running a stealthy playstyle. But Curie isn't very handy with a baseball bat either. Additionally, NPC health scaling is reduced, and particularly extreme examples have been toned down. No longer will you find raiders at 1000+ health wandering around the wasteland.
Once again, this requires a new game. It also requires two mods, Sean_s's Deployable Turrets 2 and Trainwiz's Throwing Weapons. Install those mods first and then overwrite their esp's with mine.
PIPBOI will NOT work with any other perk mod, due to the unique way it adjusts perk trees. Using another perk mod might cause the game to explode.
Other gameplay overhauls and balance mods will work perfectly fine, however, so long as they contain no perks and are loaded after PIPBOI. I can also make compatibility patches on request for those that do modify perks. Hell, anyone can. Use FO4edit and delete the perk references.
While not techincally incompatible, door locking mods are somewhat redundant as that functionality is already contained.
Horizon Compatibility patch released.
Revolver fanning mods are incompatible, however. That functionality is already included.