A New Kind Of Companion

This mod adds a new companion to the game: Herbie, the Hermit Crab! Herbie is a vanilla-style companion, complete with the abilities to trade, wait, and be commanded while hired, and to be dismissed to any Settlement you currently own. Herbie also has several unique quirks and abilities that put him a step above regular old vanilla NPCs.

Hiring Herbie

Herbie can be found on the island containing the "Longfellow's Cabin" Settlement (meaning you MUST have the "Far Harbor" DLC to use this mod!), in or near the small outbuilding next to Longfellow's house. Talking to Herbie will start a small quest called "Hiring Herbie", which will require you to read up on the (not very good) lore explaining Herbie's origins, then learn how to make him his favorite food, Crab Chow! Once you've completed the quest, you will be able to recruit Herbie as your companion.


One of the more unique aspects of this mod is Herbie's ability to eat. There are two types of food you can feed Herbie: Crab Chow and Irradiated Crab Chow. Both can be made at any Food Station, as long as you have the proper ingredients.



Herbie will become hungry every 8 in-game hours, so be sure to talk to him fairly often! You can choose which type of food to give him, based on which ones you currently have in your inventory. Feeding him 5 Irradiated Crab Chows will cause him to start to grow, and feeding him 10 regular Crab Chows will cause him to give you a perk.


If you ever lose Herbie during your travels, or if you dismiss him to a Settlement, and then can't find him, or if maybe he's just not following fast enough for your liking, you can instantly teleport him to you using the "Herbie Summoner" item that's given to you at the end of his quest.


As stated above, giving Herbie 5 bowls of Irradiated Crab Chow will cause him to start to grow. You'll know you gave him enough bowls when you receive a message saying that he's growing. You will not be able to give him any more Irradiated Crab Chow until he finishes growing. To make Herbie grow, you need to find him a larger shell to move into. There are items located in Old Longfellow's outbuilding that, with the proper modifications, can be used to create new shells for Herbie. Once you have a shell, you will be able to talk to him about it, and ask him to use it. Doing this will cause Herbie to switch shells, giving you the old one as a Misc. item, and changing his size and appearance to reflect his growth (or shrinkage, more on that later!).

Herbie can grow twice and continue being your companion, but his third growth spurt will cause him to become too large to follow you, so he will be auto-dismissed to the Settlement of your choice.


If Herbie grows too big to follow you, he will ask to be sent to the Settlement of your choice, where he will become a new settler (he will add to the Settlement's population, but you will not be able to ask him to perform any normal settler tasks, since he's a crab and all). While at a Settlement, Herbie gains a few new abilities. You can still trade with him, but you have to do it through his regular dialogue menu now. On top of that, he has two separate abilities that he can perform once every 24 in-game hours: Gathering Supplies, and Producing Bile.

Once every 24 in-game hours, you can ask the settler version of Herbie to give you the supplies he's gathered from around the Settlement. This will cause him to give you an assortment of random crafting ingredients, from fairly common to very rare.

Herbie's other new ability as a settler is to give you an IV of "Hermit Crab Bile" every 24 in-game hours. This seemingly-disgusting bodily fluid can be used to boost the effectiveness of various healing items when combined with them at a Chemistry Station.


If you're not happy with Herbie's current size, you can force him to shrink back down by one shell at any time by giving him Concentrated RadAway. Concentrated RadAway can be made at any Chemistry Station by combining 5 regular RadAways. Giving it to Herbie will cause a message to show up saying that he is starting to shrink, after which you can talk to him and ask him to switch back into one of his older shells. If you for some reason lost the shell you need, you can get another one from a Chemistry Station for 500 Caps. Shrinking works exactly like growing, except that Herbie's counter for how many times you need to feed him will NOT be completely reset. Instead, it will roll back by 5, meaning that if you already fed him 3 times before shrinking him, you will only need to feed him 2 times to make him grow again.

While feeding Herbie Irradiated Chow will make him grow in size, feeding him regular Chow will make him grow in fondness for you! For every 10 bowls of Crab Chow you feed Herbie, he will give you a level of a special Perk called "Herbie Affinity). There are 5 total levels of the perk to gain.






You can continue to feed Herbie both regular Chow and Irradiated Chow once he's a settler. Feeding him regular Chow will still cause him to give you any Perks you don't yet have, and feeding him Irradiated Chow will still cause him to grow after 5 bowls. But, as explained in the poorly-written lore, growing too big is a bad thing. Feeding the van-sized settler version of Herbie 5 bowls of Irradiated Crab Chow will cause you to lose him as a companion/settler, as he turns into a giant green rage-monster.

Herbie will vanish from the Settlement, complete with a message explaining what happened, and after 3 in-game days, you will receive another message saying that a giant monster is attacking the Settlement at Longfellow's Cabin. Going there leads to a fight with the "Herbstrosity", a giant, glowing, hostile version of Herbie that is set to level 1:1 with the Player, in order to be a more challenging fight. There is NO WAY to turn Herbie back; you have to kill him to get rid of him. Herbstrosity's body will contain the normal loot for a hermit crab, along with 10 Hermit Crab Biles, and a special egg, that, after 3 more in-game days will hatch into a brand-new Can-shelled Herbie, who will be instantly re-hired.




Install the mod either by using a program such as Nexus Mod Manager, or by manually extracting the folders from the .zip and placing them in your Fallout 4 "Data" folder.

If you come across any bugs, errors, or conflicts in the mod, feel free to let me know either by posting here on the mod's Discussion or Bugs tabs, or by sending me a message on the Nexus Forums.