The Fallout 4 version of Skytoxin, Falltoxin increases the danger and potency of various poisons and chemical effects in the game. Due to some fundamental differences between the two games, some things are different compared to Skytoxin. But the core idea remains the same – make poison dangerous.


Description

Initially, the main part of Falltoxin doesn't focus on radiation. This is primarily about poison damage, which is a separate thing altogether. However, it's worth noticing that a decent portion of the additional features have radiation in mind as well, especially when looking at the newer versions of the mod. Much of Falltoxin is also designed with HSC in mind, focusing on the survival aspect of higher difficulty.

To sum up most types of poison, you should expect that the damage has been decreased, but that the duration has been massively increased. It's all about patience. Yes, in many cases it might take a long time for the victim to die. Compared to the vanilla game, Falltoxin is aiming to be more realistic, whilst still keeping gameplay viable. With that being said, in a fully realistic setting, it might take weeks for many types of poison to kill, which obviously isn't going to be the case here. Still, where the vanilla game never really did anything for more than a few seconds, Falltoxin can sometimes look at minutes or even hours for some of the more extreme effects to play out. 

Along with the main mod, a separate feature is available known as the Food Add-on. This consists of three optional files that can be used alongside the main part of the mod, to make various foods more difficult and dangerous to cook and consume. This is aimed towards increasing the challenge of a survival experience, making healthy food more scarce, and thus forcing the player to think more strategically. Some items are in a grey zone, and whether they are part of the main mod or the Food Add-on can seem a little unclear, especially when it comes to the various wild plants and fungi. For the full experience of the mod, you are of course recommended to have the Food Add-on installed, but it remains optional because of the significant increase in difficulty that it introduces.

Another less gameplay oriented aspect of Falltoxin is to improve the general sense of consistency in the various text descriptions across the game. Most players probably aren't too bothered by it, but the vanilla game has a ton of inconsistencies and issues related to punctuation and spelling. As a result, the game can appear sloppy, which is somewhat unsatisfying. This isn't really unique to Falltoxin, seeing how all mods in this series would make similar text edits if they were necessary. However, with text descriptions being particularly common for the kinds of items that Falltoxin touches, it has definitely become more noticeable here. For this reason, nearly all item descriptions (appearing to the right, just above the list of ingredients in a crafting menu) have been removed from consumables and similar items. For the items that absolutely need more elaborate information than what the numbers and stats show directly, their descriptions have been revised and moved to the magic item descriptions (appearing right above the stats to the left in a crafting menu, and right above the stats in any other menu) instead. Not only are a bunch of near duplicate, inconsistent, and sometimes outright misleading texts gone, but the texts that do remain can be viewed from anywhere when you have the item, and not just from the crafting menu.


Items

Falltoxin enables you to craft items like Buffout, Med-X and Rad-X at any Chemistry Station. The Mutated Fern Flower, which according to Solomon could be used in the creation of Rad-X, now actually can. This was for some reason not possible to do in the vanilla game. When crafting poisoned caltrops, they now require rat poison, which is unlike the vanilla game, where they oddly enough had the exact same ingredients as the normal ones. In line with the rest of the mod, they will of course cause much lower poison damage, but have a much greater duration. Now being a useful ingredient, rat poison too is craftable at any Chemistry Station.

But those are just a few examples. A variety of new and old ingredients used in the creation of more advanced concoctions are available to be crafted at a Chemistry Station. A few of the new potent toxins are crafted in several steps, where a diluted or concentrated version is available. In terms of benefiting the player, you can craft items such as bandages and hand cleaning items, which could be very useful throughout the game.

Given that it's used for almost all crafting recipes in Falltoxin, as well as the fact that in the vanilla game, choosing it caused balancing issues and consistency errors, the Chemist perk is now purely related to crafting. In other words, picking it will no longer affect the duration for any type of consumables.

Chemist

Rank 1 - Spend some time in the lab! Your knowledge about chemistry allows you to cook simple drugs, medicines and poisons.
Rank 2 - You can now cook more potent drugs, medicines and poisons.
Rank 3 - You can now cook very potent drugs, medicines and poisons.
Rank 4 - You can now cook almost all drugs, medicines and poisons.


Syringes

Patience is the most dangerous tool at your disposal when using a syringer. Unlike the vanilla game, where a poison syringe was a less reliable, more inconvenient alternative to a standard firearm, Falltoxin makes them a viable alternative for stealthy killing. Particularly the syringes that cause direct poison damage have received drastic reductions to their damage, but massive increases in duration. Aim and take a shot. If you hit, you've likely sentenced your enemy to death – but not immediately, and you definitely need to remain hidden. Also, notice that people wearing Power Armor will be protected and not affected by most of the syringes.

In addition to many vanilla syringes receiving significant buffs, there are also multiple new ones. Some are variants of already existing consumables that now can be injected into a target of your choice. Others are entirely new, containing very potent toxins, or come with completely different effects. The specific perk requirements for each syringe can vary, but the common focus is on the Chemist perk. The following syringes are available with Falltoxin:

No Chemist Rank Required

• Lead Syringe
  A rather heavy syringe causes some damage on impact, and the lead poisoning then drains some of the target's Health over time.

Chemist Rank 1 Required

• Berserk Syringe
  A susceptible target may start hallucinating, and in turn attack both friend and foe.

• Maculatum Syringe
  Poison drains the target's Health over time.

• Mind Cloud Syringe
  The target starts hallucinating and suddenly believes whoever they were fighting must have disappeared.

• Nightshade Syringe
  Neurotoxin briefly paralyzes the target, and poison drains the target's Health over time.

• Radiation Syringe
  The target has a piece of radioactive material injected into the body, but whether that's healthy or not depends a lot on who you're asking.

• Stimpak Syringe
  The Stimpak works quite well when fired from a distance to heal a target.

• Yellow Belly Syringe
  The target may start hallucinating and even flee from combat, but only for a short while.

Chemist Rank 2 Required

• Bleed Out Syringe
  Hemotoxin causes the target to slowly bleed to death.

• Bloatfly Larva Syringe
  The larva of a Bloatfly is injected into the target, which proceeds to consume them from within, eventually paralyzing and killing them, whereupon it emerges from the corpse.

• Cryo Syringe
  Liquid nitrogen can have some chilling effects when injected into a target, and quickly freeze them solid from within.

• Endangerol Syringe
  The target becomes tired and soft, and much more susceptible to physical damage.

• FEV-Poison Syringe
  Specially engineered to only affect Super Mutants, any susceptible target will very quickly succumb to the poison.

• Lanesistic Acid Syringe
  The target experiences a surge of vitality, but may also start hallucinating, and in turn attack both friend and foe.

• Pax Syringe
  The target experiences a short but sudden sense of euphoria, and will quit whatever combat they might be involved with.

• Psycho Syringe
  Experiencing the effects of a drug, the target becomes more powerful in combat.

• Pyro Syringe
  Gasoline is poisonous in and of itself, and when the target's body is injected with it, they may also burst into flames.

• Shocking Syringe
  Being injected with the full power of a Fusion Cell, the target is likely to be shocked, both literally and figuratively.

• Skeeto Spit Syringe
  The target experiences a surge of vitality that lasts for a long time.

• X-Syringe
  The target feels very good when experiencing a plethora of positive effects.

Chemist Rank 3 Required

• Achilles Venom Syringe
  The target becomes much more powerful in combat, but slowly loses Health.

• Lock Joint Syringe
  Neurotoxin quickly paralyzes the target, but causes no further harm.

• Mysterious Serum Syringe
  The target becomes much more powerful in combat, but experiences hallucinations and other strange effects.

• Psychophenone Syringe
  Experiencing the effects of an unconventional drug, the target becomes extremely powerful in combat.

• Radscorpion Venom Syringe
  The venom from a feared monster quickly drains the target's Health.

• Tetrodotoxin Syringe
  Neurotoxin paralyzes the target, who quickly succumbs to the poison.

Chemist Rank 4 Required

• Botulinum Toxin Syringe
  Neurotoxin acts slowly and eventually paralyzes the target, who succumbs to the poison over time.

• Dreadful Syringe
  The target receives a nutritions injection, but with severe hallucinations quickly setting in, they will throw down their weapon and most likely run away.

Creatures

Poison attacks are surprisingly rare in Fallout, where most of the dangers are focused around radiation. A few species do use a potent venom however, such as Bloodbugs, Stingwings and Radscorpions. Just as with the rest of the mod, most species have had their poison damage lowered, but its duration increased. If left unchecked, a bite or sting from one of those creatures can lead to death. Expect that stronger variants of the various species generally will have more potent venom compared to their weaker relatives.

If you are using PADI (version 1.1 or newer) alongside Falltoxin (version 2.0 or newer), wearing Power Armor will provide extra protection from most types of venomous bites. PADI should preferably be located below Falltoxin in your load order.


Plants and Fungi

Many of the various plants and fungi found in the wilderness have received more or less severe effects when consumed. As a rule of thumb, negative effects are more common, more accentuated and last for longer compared to beneficial effects. Some may also contain hidden poison that can do serious harm over time if certain conditions are met. It is generally a bad idea to eat wild plants or fungi.

Cultivated crops have not received any of these changes in the main mod, since they are made to taste good and be a reliable source of food. This makes sense both from a gameplay and agricultural perspective. However, the cultivated crops are affected by similar effects as the wild ones if you have the Food Add-on installed, with the exception that they don't cause direct poison damage, but will continue to heal you, just like in the vanilla game.


Food Add-on

The purpose behind this (optional) feature is to reduce the amount of healthy food in Survival Mode, which otherwise tends to become very abundant. If the food is easy to come by, it's probably not very good for you, and vice versa. As a rule of thumb, you should expect the following when consuming various types of food:

• Raw food will cause serious food poisoning, irradiate you, and often hurt many other stats.
• Cooked food will usually heal you, not irradiate you as much, and depending on the food, may even boost some stats.
• Pre-war food will usually heal you, but also irradiate you, and depending on the food, either hurt or boost some stats.
• Preserved food will usually have the same effects as its normal pre-war counterpart, but without most of the radiation.
  

Cooking food now requires more ingredients. For most types of meat, you need cooking oil (which can be crafted at a Chemistry Station when you have Falltoxin installed). Many of the more useful foods will also require RadAway when being cooked, in order to remove most of the radiation from the finished product. Some of the more basic foods however, available in abundance and early on, use Rad-X instead. This may be cheaper, it also means that even after being cooked, these foods will retain a bit more radiation than the others.

Regardless of cooking, most food will at least be slightly irradiated, but this can be further mitigated by cleaning your hands with a wet wipe just before eating. The idea behind this mechanic is simply that with dirty hands, more irradiated dust would be swallowed along with the food. Unlike the hand washing mechanic available with HSC, which uses soap and water, this feature works according to the same concept, but can be used anywhere. The main drawback is that wet wipes keep your hands clean for a shorter period of time compared to soap and water. You are for obvious reasons unable to clean your hands while wearing Power Armor. The exception from all this would be most cooked soups and stews, which would be consumed from the bowl without touching the food, and as such, they will not irradiate you.

Along with all the new ingredients and mechanics, you now also need a couple of tools for cooking. Any item that's used as a tool can't be scrapped, does not contain any components, and will be found at the Miscellaneous page in your Pip-Boy. The following types of items are used as tools:

• Spatulas
• Ladles
• Frying Pans
  

It should be intuitive which tools are used to cook which foods – spatulas are used for most types of meat, ladles are used for soups and stews, and frying pans are used for omelettes. All in all, the game obviously won't provide animations for any of this, so in order to "use" a cooking tool, it's enough that you have it in your inventory. If you have FallMisc installed, you are able to craft the aforementioned cooking tools yourself.

When you have the Food Add-on installed, the Lead Belly perk works like in the vanilla game on rank 1 and rank 2. However, on rank 3, instead of removing all radiation from food and water, the perk now functions as a crafting requirement for cooking some of the more advanced foods.

Lead Belly

Rank 1 - Your digestive tract has adjusted to the weirdness of the Wasteland! Take less radiation from eating or drinking.
Rank 2 - You take even less radiation from eating or drinking.
Rank 3 - Your knowledge of the Wasteland allows you to cook advanced foods.


Balancing

With Falltoxin, you will be able to get your hands on items that have the potential to cause more damage than any other (serious) weapon or item ever seen in the game, and probably in any mod as well. However, take into consideration that crafting the more dangerous items will be very expensive and, as you know, they can only be used once per dose. In other words, you can't just use Falltoxin and suddenly get bored because no enemies stand a chance against you.

Notice that with so many new things available – and so many things being vastly more powerful than in the vanilla game – the old effects from the Chemist perk became mostly obsolete. For example, many people who played the vanilla game and were using syringes probably found this perk to be rather useful. Now however, with most effects having received such significant improvements, syringes being too weak should be among the last things to worry about.

Falltoxin should work with any difficulty setting, but is primarily designed to be used in Survival Mode.

As of version 1.1, Psychotats can actually be crafted. Looking at the vanilla assets, this was probably intended to be available in the vanilla game, but a mix up of asset names appears to have caused this not to be the case.

As of version 2.0, the perk requirement system from the 1.1 Perk Rebalance version has become the standard. This version also allows lingering poison damage to affect the player, which was not possible in previous versions or in the vanilla game. This version also introduces a special category for crafting poisons, a few small tweaks to their effects, and some small changes and additions to the syringes. Along with version 2.0 also comes the Food Add-on, which consists of three optional files that make food more difficult to cook and consume.

As of version 2.1, the main part of the mod now focuses a lot more on healing and radiation along with the poison, which is notable given the introduction of the bandage and hand washing mechanics. The mod has also received some balancing for a multiple effects and crafting recipes, a few new poisons and antidotes, several new syringes, as well as some changes to the Chemist perk's functionality. Furthermore, the mod has received a lot of polish, fixing multiple sounds, models, preview transforms and text errors from the vanilla game. In addition to that, the Food Add-on also introduces various fixes for crafting recipes, along with more detailed and accentuated effects for consuming various types of food, where radiation and hand hygiene are a main focus, along with the new food poisoning mechanic. Even cultivated crops may pose a level of danger when consumed, which makes this version differ from the design idea applied in previous versions of the mod.

As of version 2.2, the mod features new chems, including Stimtats, a pill with caffeinating properties, and Psychorads, a radioactive variant of Psycho. This version also introduces a number of new penalties for consuming many types of chems. Finally, this version introduces some small fixes to texts, menus and leveled lists.


Differences from Skytoxin

Unlike Skyrim, where crafting and buying are mostly separate things, they are much more interconnected in Fallout 4. As such, Falltoxin has an impact on a larger part of the game. Skytoxin was made so it could be used alongside an alchemy mod, whereas Falltoxin hopefully should be enough on its own.

As of September 2020, the plan is that Skytoxin eventually should receive an update, which will take some inspiration from the balancing made by Falltoxin. In the current version 1.0 however, Skytoxin has much more dramatic effects, doing more damage quicker. Falltoxin has been made based on the knowledge that this was a design flaw.


Installation

Using Vortex is the recommended method.

Due to user requests, any new update for any mod in this series, uploaded to the Nexus from August 14, 2021 and onward, should no longer follow the system where the same ESP file would be given a new name for each new version. Instead, new version names should be given to the ZIP file in which the other files are contained. For mods in the collection where one or more ESP files have a name that ends with a version number, they will be renamed back to their original names in their next update, and the plan is to not rename published ESP files after that point.


Requirements

This mod requires the Far Harbor DLC.

For the Food Add-on files, you need their respective DLCs. These files should preferably be placed below Falltoxin in your load order.


Compatibility

Falltoxin should be compatible with most mods, unless they change any of same the assets that were used here.

Falltoxin is not compatible with Night Stalker version 2.1 or older. If you are using Night Stalker, make sure you are at least using version 3.0 or newer.


Mod Collection

This mod is part of a larger collection of mods aiming to make Survival Mode more difficult and immersive. They come packaged as separate mods in order to allow the player to choose which they want or not, but using them all together should hopefully bring out the best and the most immersive survival experience possible. The mods come in three main categories:

Survival

The mods in this category are aiming to make the game significantly more difficult and immersive in every way they can.

• HSC
  The primary mod of the entire series, HSC is the foundation for an extremely challenging survival experience. This mod focuses on making food, water and sleep management much more essential, as well as making sure things such as carry weight, healing, medical services and damage scaling are far more realistic and challenging than ever before. All the other mods in this series are designed or updated according to the standards set by HSC. For anyone looking to make their survival experience harder and only were to download a single mod in this collection, this should be it.

• HSC-SB
  Where the main HSC mod made sure to make food, water and sleep more important, HSC-SB makes these things more difficult to obtain. Introducing massive challenges in what you are able to build, along with a system for using tools in the construction of more or less everything, settlement building should be far less of a convenient safe zone than it was before.

• Falltoxin
  This mod significantly increases the danger and potency of most types of poison in the game, both from wild creatures as well as the syringes you are able to use. Falltoxin also comes with an optional secondary set of mods known as the Food Add-on, which increases radiation in food, and introduces simple mechanics related to food poisoning and nutrition. These mechanics add a third layer to the food aspect, and are of course designed with HSC and HSC-SB in mind.

• FallMisc
  Enabling the player to craft a bunch of tools and other useful items, this mod adds a lot of convenience. Aside from essential items, many other mods in the series will be referencing FallMisc, rather than having each mod introducing its own set of craftable tools. Both HSC-SB and Falltoxin rely a lot on FallMisc for this purpose.

• WDI
  This mod increases the damage for a variety of weapons from the vanilla game. It also introduces a few new special mechanics for a few weapons, making them more unique than before. Additionally, WDI increases the durability of most turrets. All in all, most of the changes made by this mod will be useful both to you, your allies, and your enemies.

• PADI
  This mod increases the defensive capabilities of Power Armor, a few other types of armor, and gas masks. It also introduces a variety of new features related to Power Armor, making it more detailed and functional. All in all, most of the changes made by this mod will be useful both to you, your allies, and your enemies.

Environmental

The mods in this category are focusing on making various obstacles in the world more difficult to overcome.

• Fallfall
  This mod increases falling damage to a much more realistic level. This should encourage the player to navigate the world in a more careful manner. Not only does it make the world feel bigger, but it also adds a lot to the immersion when you actually have a reason to properly navigate the environments, rather than carelessly performing super dangerous jumps and stunts without as much as a scratch.

• Swimout
  This mod significantly increases the amount of radiation in the various bodies of water across the game. This should encourage the player to actually stay on land, use bridges to cross rivers, and avoid falling into the water.

• FallExD
  This mod increases incoming and outgoing damage for the player in Survival Mode. This makes the game's combat far more dangerous.

• Fallock
  This mod makes lockpicking significantly more difficult, and gives lockpicks some weight. All in all, this should encourage the player to be more careful when picking locks.

Perks

The mods in this category are focusing on improving the variety of features some perks can have, but they also exist as a way to prevent certain perks from completely undermining gameplay mechanics intended to make the game more challenging.

• SPI
  A mod that improves a bunch of perks that had too little or too weak usage throughout the game. This mod comes in three editions, where the two others could be considered for everyone, but the HSC Edition is particularly designed for being used alongside HSC.

• Night Stalker
  A mod that adds new functionality to the Night Person and Cannibal perks. Aside from being fun and allowing for a new playstyle, this mod introduces a small new penalty to cannibalism.

• TWG
  A mod that adds new functionality to the Ghoulish perk. Aside from being fun and allowing for a new playstyle, this mod introduces small penalties depending on where you are.

• RTT
  A mod that adds a few small mechanics to the Solar Powered and Rooted perks. Aside from adding a few new fun and convenient mechanics, the main point of this mod is to reduce the ability to heal radiation damage when in the sun. Being able to get rid of radiation that easily undermined a huge part of the mods with features related to radiation, such as HSC and Falltoxin.