This came about as a request from a friend. We both decided that Nuka World's Cave Crickets were hugely dispraportionate in challenge to everything else in all of Nuka World and Fallout 4.

They truly are the perfect storm of a difficult enemy.

• Fights in groups.
• Bullet Sponges.
• Jerky erratic animations making it difficult to shoot them.
• Fast.
• Hit like a god damned freight train.
• Little to no rewards for the resources spent killing them.
  

They are easily the deadliest creatures not just in Nuka World, but all of vanilla Fallout 4, and compared to other Nuka World creatures, it becomes apparent that a sadist created these. (The highest level Gatorclaw and Cave Cricket are not far off statistically...except you dont fight 6 Gatorclaw's at a time) And each one is worth...5 XP. They greatly remind me of bethesda's old enemy design practices, the damage sponges you would see in Fallout 3's dlc, and the jerky behavior seen in Oblivion.

So what does this mod do already?

-It halves the base unarmed damage done by the crickets, (Testing has shown this wont lead to half damage mind you, they still hit extremely hard even when I reduced their damage to 1 during testing, but it can be the difference between dying in two hits, or dying in three, depending on your characters HP)

-Reduces their HP by nearly half.

-Tweak XP gains slightly so that higher level crickets will give higher XP rewards.

This should make them more susceptible to being cleared out with explosives, or picked off by a volley in VATS. I suspect they will still be disproportionately tough, but my goal was to make them more manageable and not something nearly as genuinely unpleasant to fight.

If you want a harsh challenge, thats all well and good, this mod is not for you. If the Crickets were tough and annoying enough that they make you put off your excursion into Nuka World on future playthroughs, then this mod may help.