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Destructor36

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destructor36

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About this mod

Rebalances the food, drink, healing, and crafting economies to make Survival more streamlined, esp. when playing without settlements
Hunger and thirst based on weight not caps
Food and drink values standardized and rebalanced
Inventory sorting and crafting requirements streamlined
Doctors more expensive
Fast travel enabled

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NICER Survival: Needs Inventory Crafting Economy Rebalance


What is it?

A comprehensive series of tweaks to the needs system, crafting system, and economy designed to reduce the time it takes to play on survival mode, while keeping the feeling of challenge and desperation. It does this by:
  • Making the needs system more understandable and predictable so you have a more intuitive sense of how much food and water you have and need.
  • Streamlining the crafting system, inventory, and economy so that it’s much faster to buy, cook, and manage food and drinks outside of settlements, while still being expensive to stay fed/hydrated and manage your radiation levels. Especially streamlines the economy for hydration, which is a huge time suck in vanilla Survival mode.
  • Balancing and standardizing the costs/benefits of high-value food and drinks to make them more satisfying (but sometimes risky) to use, and less tempting to hoard.
  • Enabling fast travel so that it doesn’t take 100+ hours to do a completionist playthrough, but making it expensive in terms of resources to create tradeoffs for using it.
  • Makes it much less tedious but still more challenging to do survival playthroughs if you don’t build settlements, so you aren’t forced to sink time into the Minutemen questline if you prefer to hunt, scavenge, and steal.


Why use it?

If you find it hard to understand how much you need to eat/drink: This mod subtly rewrites how hunger and thirst are calculated in survival mode to make it more understandable and better balanced.
  • Hunger and thirst is now based on item weight rather than caps: Survival Mode determined how much hunger/thirst items satisfied by how much they cost. This turned the game into an exercise of how many caps of food/drink you can loot or farm per minute of playtime. This was reasonable for many items, but seemed inconsistent for others: Nuka Quantum was 7x more hydrating than regular Nuka Cola; some foods like Iguana and Mirelurk got 3-4x more filling after cooking while others like Radstag and Deathclaw changed by <20%; Mirelurk Eggs barely filled you because their value was 0 caps. This mod makes hunger and thirst based on weight, which is more logical and easier to understand. This makes survival about how you make efficient choices with inventory space and money, rather than a 1:1 fee of caps for time. Now 0.1 unit of food/drink will satisfy around 1 game hour of hunger/thirst (3 real world minutes at default timescale of 20). Whether you pay a few caps, a lot, or none for those minutes comes down to how smart you are and how well you play.
  • Food and drink weights are standardized based on type: Food items now come in 5 standard tiers of weight. They range from 0.1 units (small forageable leaves and fungi) to 3 units (meat from the largest creatures). Foods from the smallest tier tend to be forageable and are easy to accrue over time, but it takes dozens every day to stay full. Larger foods come from killing powerful enemies which takes resources, but they can easily erase more than 1 day of hunger. You can usually stay full on mid-weight meat from weak enemies or packaged food in the course of normal gameplay, but you’ll need to look for cooking stations or allocate caps/RadAway to deal with their radiation. All hydrating drinks (water, cola, beer) weight the same amount and hydrate similarly, though cola and beer have risks like rads and addiction. These tiers are intuitive based on items’ physical sizes in the world and menu, making it easier to understand how much hunger/thirst an item will fill based on your experience with other similar items.
  • Some items that seemed edible but weren’t now are: This includes many small plant items like flowers, fungi, and leaves, which had an invisible setting that made them worthless as food despite having weight/caps/health restoration like all other foods. This isn’t explained anywhere, so you’ve probably eaten dozens-hundreds of these over the course of a playthrough without realizing they didn’t do anything. This makes it possible (but hard) to survive by foraging.
  • Food and drink values are explained in real time: When you eat or drink, you’ll see a brief notification showing how many hours worth of hunger or thirst each food or drink addressed. Hunger and thirst rates are still affected by activities like sprinting, fighting, and taking chems, so these numbers are estimates, not guarantees.
  • Names for each tier of hunger have been standardized: from “Pekish > Hungry > Famished > Ravenous > Starving,” to “Slightly Hungry > Hungry > Very Hungry > Ravenous > Starving.” It was never clear to me the order of severity between “Famished” “Ravenous” and “Starving.”
  • Names for each tier of thirst have been standardized: from “Parched > Thirsty > Mildly Dehydrated > Dehydrated > Severely Dehydrated” to “Slightly Thirsty > Thirsty > Very Thirsty > Dehydrated >  Severly Dehydrated.” The progression for the first 3 tiers seemed backward to me.
  • Names for each tier of fatigue have been standardized: from “Tired > Overtired > Weary > Exhausted > Incapacitated” to “Slightly Tired > Tired > Very Tired > Exhausted > Delirious.” I’ve only ever heard “Overtired” used to describe babies or toddlers, and “Incapacitated” sounded like an injury and not fatigue-specific.

If you are frustrated with the amount of time you spend looting, cooking, buying, or storing food and drinks: This mod makes it faster to craft, buy, and manage drinks, but keeps it challenging and expensive enough that you need to attend to and invest in your needs.
  • Common foods are slightly cheaper, rare foods still expensive: Small un-filling foods tend to be less valuable, big filling foods more valuable. Small fruits and packaged foods are no longer unreasonably expensive (you no longer have to sell multiple guns to afford a single noodle cup in Diamond City), but are still not very filling, so are generally only worth buying in an emergency, and you won’t get rich off scavenging. Substantial and rare foods like Deathclaw Meat/Eggs and Nuka Quantum remain expensive, creating a tradeoff between eating and selling them.
  • You no longer need to hoard multiple units of raw meat and dirty water to cook single items: A single unit of raw meat now yields a single unit of cooked meat at a cooking pot for all creatures, down from 2 or 3 for some (many were already 1). Purified water can now be boiled from a single unit of dirty water, down from 3. This makes it possible to prepare rad-free food and drinks after killing single enemies or filling single bottles, so you don’t have to find multiple bottles or kill an arbitrary number of identical enemies to eat without radiation. You’ll also no longer have small amounts of irradiated meat and dirty water cluttering your inventory or workshops after visiting a cooking station.
  • Recipes using water are standardized: All recipes that used dirty water now use purified water. This eliminates the need to retain dirty water to cook recipes (dirty water can now be converted 1:1 to purified water, down from 3:1). Many recipes already used clean water, this just makes things more consistent. Some recipes that use other more specific items like blood (deathclaw omelettes) and vodka (radstag stew) now use water for consistency.
  • Food and drinks have been renamed so similar items cluster in the menu: Raw meat, cooked meat, eggs, omelettes, soups/stews, colas, beers will all tend to cluster in groups when sorting the inventory alphabetically. For most meats, this is done by moving or adding “raw” or “grilled” at the start of the name. For drinks, fruits, and packaged foods, this is done by moving or adding variants like “fresh” “wild” “ice cold” “pre-war” etc. to the end of the names. This makes it faster to navigate the pip-boy.
  • Water will appear at the top of the inventory: To avoid having water close to the bottom (since there’s no way to skip from bottom to top), a short space has been added at the beginning of “water” item names to put them at the top of the menu. It’s barely visible in the Pip-Boy, and is totally unnoticeable when looking at water items in the world, and it will save you probably hours of scrolling over the course of a playthrough since you’ll be drinking it frequently.

If you find it unreasonably hard to stay hydrated: This mod makes water more accessible and makes more drinks hydrating to reduce the amount of time you’ll spend building settlements, gathering bottles, and seeking out spigots, but keeps it challenging to stay hydrated.
  • Water is heavier, usually more expensive, but easier to purify and more hydrating: Water now weights 1 unit (from 0.5), but is more hydrating: it takes ~5 units to go from severe dehydration to normal, down from 23(!). This means you previously needed 69 units of dirty water to prepare enough purified water to hydrate yourself, which meant a single episode of dehydration could take hours of gameplay or thousands of caps to address, especially if you don't build settlements. Dirty water has been increased from 5 to 10 caps, but purified water has been decreased from 20 to 15 caps, so it’s more expensive to afford water in general, but you require fewer units. Dirty water can be converted 1:1 to purified water (down from 3:1), so buying purified is more of a convenience cost when you’re in towns. It’s expensive to stay hydrated in the early game and hard to stock water for travel, but gathering and drinking water takes much less time since you don’t need to spend hours or thousands of caps to recover from a day of thirst even when in town, or to spend lots of time gathering water at far-away settlements.
  • Water is more accessible: More food vendors, bartenders, traders, and doctors will now sell water, with a chance to sell purified. The water vendor in Diamond City now sells more units to make it easier to stock up. The noodle vendor in Diamond City now sells water and alcohol since it’s a convenient hub. This means you can generally cure severe dehydration in any settlement if you have the caps, which makes sense because the people living there aren’t all dying of dehydration.
  • Soda is more hydrating: Nuka Colas (and Vim in Far Harbor) now all relieve as much thirst as water. Previously Nuka Cola relieved much less thirst than water (40%) while Quantum relieved much more because hydration was based on caps. They still restore a small amount of hunger and irradiate you, so they offer different benefits but you’ll still need water to survive unless you have the Leadbelly perk or can afford Radaway.
  • More drinks are hydrating: Beer, Vim, and Sap now hydrate like water, making it easier to stay hydrated in dungeons and DLC locations.
If you find yourself hoarding cooked foods to maximize their benefits: This mod makes food benefits longer but weaker and allows you to benefit from them even when hungry, to incentivize using rather than hoarding high-value items.
  • Cooked foods give weaker but longer lasting benefits: Effects like boosted Strength, Agility, AP regeneration, etc. from cooked foods now all last 1 hour of real time, which is around 1 full 24-hour day of game time at the default timescale of 20, or an 8-hour “working day” of game time when using common lower timescales like 8. Many of them were already 1 hour (Bloodbugs, Deathclaws, Softshells, Radscorpions, Yao Guai), but many had unique benefits that were as short as 5-20 minutes, which incentivized hoarding. Ones that had their duration increased generally had their magnitude reduced. This encourages using food for passive “set and forget” benefits, vs. hoarding small amounts of different foods for the short times where you need a specific benefit (a niche filled by chems and liquor). The only exceptions are “novelty foods” that offer benefits like waterbreathing or stealth, which now have shorter durations so that they don’t make perk and clothing benefits irrelevant.
  • Foods still give stat benefits when you’re hungry: Effects like boosted Strength, Agility, AP regen, etc. from cooked food now apply even if you eat them when hungry. Previously it was a waste to eat filling foods until you’d filled up on less-filling foods, incentivizing you to carry separate stores of cheap and expensive foods for different reasons. This disincentivizes hoarding high-value foods and make it less of a waste to eat them when hungry.
  • Descriptions of food benefits have been standardized: Now all foods specify their magnitude and length in their recipes and descriptions, which some did but many didn’t.
  • A few foods have been made more consistent with other similar foods: All foods heal over time vs. instantly. All cooked meats give at least a small stat/XP bonus, and no raw ones do. All foods now have at least 1 cap of value and at least 0.1 unit of weight. All foods and drinks provide at least some sustenance/hydration. All now have consistent keywords and inventory sounds. Each of these changes affects a small number of foods that behaved differently than other similar foods: they’re more bug fixes than balance changes.

If you find yourself hoarding alcohol because it’s never the perfect time to use it: This mod makes the types of alcohol (beer/wine/liquor) more distinct from each other, makes each brand or flavor of alcohol less distinct from others of similar types to disincentivize hoarding, and adds new benefits and risks to each type to make regular consumption more useful while maintaining its risk (addiction).
  • Alcohol is balanced: Most alcoholic drinks increased Strength and 1 other attribute/stat, but decreased only Intelligence, so they had more short term benefits than harms. They all now also decrease Perception (VATS accuracy), by the same amount as they decrease Intelligence (1 for beer, 2 for liquor). Their long term addiction risk is the same and not affected by this mod.
  • Beer is hydrating: Beer is now more like water, with the added upsides/downsides of alcohol. It hydrates, but has a small risk of addiction. It still increases Strength and Charisma, still decreases Intelligence, and now decreases Perception, each by 1 point. Ice Cold variants restore AP over 10 seconds, vs. 5 (similar to how food restores health). Beer lasts longer, from 3 minutes to 5, or from 1 game hour to 1 and 2/3.
  • Liquor is homogenized: Previously liquor had most of the same benefits of beer, but each gave a slightly different bonus, making it hard to know when to use which. Now all liquors have the same benefits/penalties so you don’t need to stash different types, and these effects are more extreme than those from beer: +2 STR (all except whiskey were originally +1), +25 health (originally only vodka offered this), -2 INT (down from -1), and -2 PER (newly added). Liquor lasts longer, from 4 to 7 minutes, or 2 and 1/3 game hours.
  • Wine is halfway between beer and liquor: Same benefits and duration as beer, but same magnitudes as liquor (2 points vs. 1), and it’s more valuable and heavier.

If you waste lots of time traveling to out of the way places just for crafting: This mod removes perk requirements to craft cooking stations and allows characters to unlock crafting stations that serve specific skill trees with perks other than Local Leader, so that low/mid-Charisma characters don’t have to spend dozens of hours traveling to specific settlements for crafting over the course of a playthrough.
  • Cooking stations can be crafted: from the beginning of the game, without the previous Local Leader perk requirement (CHA 6, Level 14).
  • Weapons workbenches can be crafted: with the Gun Nut Tier 2 (INT 3, Level 13) perk, OR the Local Leader perk.
  • Armor workbenches can be crafted: with the Armorer Tier 2 (STR 3, Level 13) perk, OR the Local Leader perk.
  • Chemistry stations can be crafted: with the Chemist Tier 2 (INT 7, Level 16) or Medic Tier 2 (INT 2 Level 18) perks, OR the Local Leader perk.
  • Power armor stations can be crafted: with the Nuclear Physicist Tier 2 (INT 9, Level 14) perk, OR the Local Leader perk.

If you find yourself hoarding RadAway, Addictol, and Antibiotics: This mod increases doctor costs for curing rads, addictions, and illnesses/injuries, because DIY cures are not especially rare or hard to craft, but still have risks (dehydration, immunosuppression) that create tradeoffs.
  • Diseases & Injuries: 15-35 > 25-50, depending on your health. This makes it cheaper than Stimpacks in most cases, worth paying for to avoid the dehydration, but more expensive than buying staple foods, which feels logical. 
  • Radiation: 40>100. This makes it cheaper than buying RadAway, but makes it harder to offset rads taken from irradiated food and water.
  • Addiction: 75>150. This makes it cheaper than buying Addictol, but makes using chems a bit riskier.

If you just don’t have the time to walk everywhere in Survival Mode: This mod enables fast travel, which turns out to be pretty well-balanced out of the box since it takes a ton of resources to go anywhere worth traveling.
  • Fast travel is enabled: You can fast travel from exteriors, homes, and cities, but your hunger/thirst/fatigue will increase faster than if you had walked the same distance in real time. Traveling more than ~halfway across the map will generally put you into the higher tiers of hunger/thirst/fatigue (3/5). This is not due to changes by the mod, it’s just due to how fast travel time is calculated. This creates a tradeoff between the high but predictable resource costs of fast travel (hunger, thirst, and needing a bed when you arrive) and the unpredictable costs and opportunities of traveling on foot.


Tiers of food, and the roles they tend to play in gameplay and the economy:
  • XS, 0.1 weight: Small plants, flowers, and fungi; Small packaged items like gum and candy. Relieve ~1 hour of hunger per consumption, and take around 2 dozen to go from starving to full. They should take more relative to weight, but there is a minum food satiety limit (feature of original Survival mode, this mod just slightly reduces it) to reduce frustration of having to find ~3 dozen plants a day to survive. Tend to be cheap: range 1-25 caps, avg. 3. Very difficult to fill yourself with while actively foraging or scavenging, barely worth hoarding unless you need them to cook, rarely worth selling, and not usually worth the radiation to eat raw unless you’ve invested in the Lead Belly perk. These are foods of last resort, or additions to harvest for crafting.
  • S, 0.5 units: Medium vegetables like corn and potatoes; Meat from small animals and insects like squirrels and Rad-Roaches; Most packaged items like Snack Cakes, InstaMash, Pork n’ Beans, etc.. Relieve ~3-4 hours of hunger per consumption, so take around a dozen to go from starving to full. Tend to be cheap: range 1-25 caps, avg. 9. Just filling enough to keep hunger at bay while fighting weak enemies on the road or in dungeons, and may be worth the radiation risk in an emergency if you can’t find a cooking pot. You’ll move through them quickly to get full, but can actually get full off them, unlike XS items.
  • M, 1 unit: Large vegetables like gourds and melons; Meat from Dogs, Hounds, and Rad-Stags; Creature eggs, and omelettes made from them; Soups made from multiple small items like Squirrel and vegetables; Substantial packaged items like Cram and potted meat; most pastries. Relieve ~8-10 hours or 1 “working day” of hunger, so take around half a dozen to go from starving to full. Have a wide range of values: 3-100 caps, avg. 30. This is where you can live off what you kill and cook, but also where you can start to economize: is it worth eating that Deathclaw egg, or could you hunt down a Rad-Stag or choke down an irradiated melon so you can cook the egg or sell it later? Makes Cram a more iconic and helpful item to find in dungeons, since it’s more filling relative to its levels of radiation than other packaged items.
  • L, 2 units: Meat from most medium-large hostile creatures like Mirelurks, Radscorpions, Yao Guai; Stews made from Medium animals like Rad-Stags. Relieve ~20 hours or one full day/night cycle of hunger, so take around 3-4 to go from starving to full. Wide range of values, but tend to be prohibitively expensive to buy: 15-100 caps, avg. 50. If you can kill a dangerous enemy or save up the resource to cook multi-ingredient dishes, you’re eating good for a day. Almost all foods in this tier offer stat benefits as well. You’d need around 2 items from this tier to recover from a long fast-travel journey.
  • XL, 3 units: Meat from apex predators: Deathclaws, Gatorclaws, Mirelurk Queens. Relieve ~30 hours of hunger, so a single one will take you from starving to almost full. All are expensive: minimum 50 caps, average 150. All offer big long-lasting stat benefits. You can recover from a long fast-travel journey or days of hunger with just 1 of these. They’re heavy, so also difficult to manage for low-Strength characters.
  • A hack for carry weight and calorie density: The weight ratios between foods are set up so that each higher tier is slightly less efficient in terms of satiety per unit carry weight. i.e., to get full from starving you have to carry: 6.5 weight units worth of small foods, 7 worth of medium, 8 worth of large, 9 worth of XL. The only exception to this is small forageable items, where you need to carry just 3 lbs. This is because survival calculates food values in a slightly non-linear way, with a floor on food values that makes extra-small 0.1-weight foods actually worth around 0.2 weight units worth of satiety. This is a dynamic from vanilla Survival mode that I’ve chosen to keep in (though changed extensively) because it opens up a “hunter gatherer” style of play, even if it’s not “realistic” in terms of calorie density or totally transparent to the player.


Types of drinks, and the roles they tend to play in gameplay and the economy:
  • Water: The staple, obviously. Cheaper, but still expensive: 10 caps base value for purified, 5 for dirty. Purified water can be 30+ caps for low-Charisma characters, but becomes at least somewhat efficient to purchase as you accrue caps or if you invest in Charisma. Dirty water can be converted 1:1 to purified at cooking pots, but is still a pain to harvest if you don’t have settlements, so you still need to plan your playthroughs around finding and cleaning it, it just takes less time. More vendors will sell small amounts of purified water, and the Diamond City water vendor now sells more of it, so you can stock up if you have the caps.
  • Nuka Cola & Vim: Now hydrates as much as water (up from 40%). Still adds a bit of satiety (20% of its weight value, which comes out to around 2 hours of hunger). Because hydration is based on weight, all tiers are now equally hydrating, where previously the base sodas were much less hydrating than water, high tier ones much more. Still irradiate you and carry risk of disease, so are a slightly higher-risk/higher-reward option vs. water. Makes it less likely that you’ll have to leave a dungeon mid-way just to get water, which really breaks the rhythmn of the story in lots of cases.
  • Beer: Now hydrates as much as water, didn’t hydrate at all before. Cheaper than water. Boosts strength and charisma (as before), decreases intelligence (as before) and perception (new). Carries same risk of addiction. Slightly higher-risk/higher-reward option vs. water, but can be a better choice for some characters who can use the Strength and Endurance benefits and don’t need Intelligence or Perceptoin. Makes it easier to get hydrated at bars in settlements.
  • Wine, Liquor, Cocktails: Still not hydrating, but offer more intense benefits/harms. A different thing.


Installation, Requirements, and Compatibility:
  • Ensure the ESP and BSA files end up in your Fallout 4/Data folder. It works manually or with a mod manager.
  • Requires F4SE to be able to measure food/drinks based on weight.
  • Requires Far Harbor and Nuka World.
  • Forwards 3 changes made by the Unofficial Patch to the main Survival Mode script (#27210, 34415, and 28263 in their changelog). Load below the unofficial patch, or the weight-based eating will not work.
  • Items added by the Coffee and Donut Workshop and Halloween Workshop Creations work and are balanced against other foods, but these Creations are not required (just the 2 main DLCs).
  • The file is ESP (not ESL) and uses file header 0.95 for VR compatibility. It can be safely flagged as ESL in F4Edit if you play not in VR and want to save yourself a load order slot.


Functionality and Compatibility Under the Hood:
  • Changing hunger/thirst to use weight rather than caps: Edits the main Survival Mode script (HC_SurvivalManager) to measure weight rather than caps. Requires F4SE to support the weight measurement function. Other mods that overwrite HC_SurvivalManager will break this. Edits made to that script by the Unofficial Patch are forwarded.
  • Displaying hours of hunger/thirst removed when eating foods: Edits the main Survival Mode script (HC_SurvivalManager) to display a message when eating/drinking. Other mods that overwrite HC_SurvivalManager will break this.
  • Food benefits work when hungry: Edits a hidden survival-specific perk (HC_SustenanceEffectsTurnOffFood) that nullifies food effects when hungry. Overwrites a change from the Unofficial Patch. This is intentional.
  • Food and drink weight, cost, name, and attribute edits: Edits most food and drink items directly. Any other mods changing same items would need a patch. This mod doesn’t touch chems, chems mods won’t need a patch.
  • Changes to food and drink crafting requirements: Edits many items’ crafting recipes. Any other mods changing same recipes would need a patch.
  • Changes to resource station crafting requirements: Edits crafting recipes for crafting stations to remove the Local Leader perk requirement, or add other perks as an alternative. Other mods that edit those recipes would require a patch. Edits the descriptions of the perks that serve as alternatives to Local Leader, but only their descriptions, not their functions. Perk mods will be compatible, but may overwrite their descriptions so they don’t mention they unlock crafting (though they still will).
  • Increasing number of merchants who sell water: Edits a small number of leveled items and leveled lists. Does not edit vendors directly, except 2 (Diamond City Water and Noodle vendors). Mods that extensively edit leveled lists may break this, but the other features of this mod will still work.
  • Nuka Cola hydrates more: Edits the main Survival Mode script (HC_SurvivalManager) to change a variable that determines how hydrating Cola is, as a % of water. Other mods that overwrite HC_SurvivalManager will break this.
  • Beer hydrates: Adds a keyword to beer items. Does not edit the main survival script.


Complementary mods: