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PushTheWinButton

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PushTheWinButton

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About this mod

Adds hundreds more leveled, vanilla-friendly creature spawn points throughout the whole Mojave, based off unused vanilla leveled lists. All spawn points are meticulously hand-placed and distributed as evenly and fairly as possible. Includes an optional Fallout 3-style version, including robot and super mutant spawns.

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Mojave Wildlife
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Description

Mojave Wildlife is part of a trifecta of mods aimed filling (what I consider) to be the excess dead space and downtime in the Mojave Wasteland, caused by the lack of random creatures and NPCs to kill 'interact with'. Keep an eye out for the upcoming 'Raiders' and 'Citizens' modules, too.

As the name suggests, this mod focuses on the creature population that the player encounters throughout their adventure. It adds MANY more (hundreds) of random vanilla creature spawn points throughout the whole of the Mojave Wasteland, meticulously hand-placed and distributed as evenly and fairly as possible. This sets it apart from other similar mods, which tend to have a restricted creature pool and are uneven in distribution. I've tried to keep areas close to settlements and travelled roads relatively clear too, to prevent NPCs getting murdered by the local fauna. Hand-placing spawns is also preferable to scripted mods like IWS, which suffers from known savegame bloating and corruption issues. This mod takes its cue from unused creature spawns in the vanilla game so should mesh perfectly with the vanilla feel and could even be considered cut content restoration in some regards. Finally, a few specific locations have had their overall creature population increased. There are now many more ghouls on the road to and around the Repconn Test Site, and Big Mountain finally has enough Super Mutants and Nightkin to make it a believable mutie settlement. Make sure to pack some extra firepower.

That's the basic gist of things, but there are also two 'flavours' of spawns, and one optional component, meaning that there are 4 different file versions to choose from. These are:

  • Vanilla-Style Spawns: The newly-added spawn points use a leveled creature tree based on the vanilla, location-specific creature spawn lists, such as 'valley', 'hills', 'road', etc. These include size variations of vanilla creatures, like the various sizes of Coyotes, Molerats, and Bighorners. Creatures will spawn depending on your level and are sorted into five tiers; however, the spawn lists aren't Oblivion-style—you can always encounter the lowest-level creatures, regardless of your level. Most locations are capped at Tier 4 creatures, meaning that you won't be encountering Deathclaws there. Only 'mountain' spawns feature Tier 5 creatures, and these are the fewest in number. In addition, the region around Goodsprings is capped at Tier 3 spawns so it will always be less dangerous there, even in the lategame.

  • FO3-Style Spawns: All the new spawns are based on an unused Fallout 3-style creature list found in the New Vegas game files, which seemed to have been updated with a few new creatures for potential use in the newer game. The levels in the list have been corrected and organised into leveled tiers as in the previous version and more of the new creatures from New Vegas have been added to them. Taking its cue from Fallout 3, this flavour of the mod includes the potential for robot, supermutant, and ghoul spawns, compared to only creatures in the 'Vanilla-Style' version; however, the spawn rate of the more exotic creatures is lower in comparison to the other types. Please note that spawns are not location-specific in this version, which means that you can encounter Tier 5 creatures at any spawn point. Whilst this may sound like a downside, remember that the higher tier creatures have the lowest chance of spawning and only do so once you reach a high enough level, so the Goodsprings Valley won't instantly become a Deathclaw sanctuary because of this mod (it works fine in Fallout 3 too). Also, the size variations of vanilla creatures are not inlcuded in this version but they will still spawn in the vanilla spawn points.

  • No Chanced Vanilla Spawns: Most creature spawn points in the vanilla game have a set chance of spawning a creature. This is all well and good for variety when the game respawns. But, put bluntly, you're only ever going to visit the majority of locations once per playthrough, or more regularly than the three-day respawn time, so these spawn chances just contribute to the sparse population of the wasteland. This option simply removes the chance-based spawning on vanilla spawns, meaning that all spawn points will always spawn a creature.



Installation

I highly recommend using this mod with Uncut Wasteland, which un-cuts a tonne of creature and NPC spawns that were disabled for no reason in the vanilla game (probably to meet console requirements). I would have included these myself but, well, what's the point. You should already be using Uncut Wasteland in my opinion.

Standard installation procedure: simply choose ONE of the 4 versions (Vanilla/FO3-Style, with or without chanced spawns); add the file to your data folder manually or with a mod manager; and check it in your load order and you're good to go.

By the way, my preference is the FO3-Style, No Chanced Spawns version because I think it provides the most variety and challenge. Not that I'm trying to influence your choice; I just thought I'd state what I use because someone is always bound to ask. This is also the version I used in taking the screenshots, if you were wondering.


Uninstallation

This mod can be uninstalled at any time and will have no permanent effects on your game. Simply delete from your data folder and you're done.


Bugs

This mod can suffer from the vanilla bug where some creatures (mainly scorpions) glitch into the terrain. I tried to prevent this by placing all the new spawns a couple of units above the ground (they'll fall onto it as soon as their AI kicks in, so you won't see floating creatures anywhere) but the issue might still persist in a few areas. If you spot a glitched creature that definitely came from this mod, try and pinpoint the location as accurately as possible and drop me a bug report so I can bump the spawn up a few more units.


Compatibility

This mod should be compatible with almost all other mods but, as always, check with FNVEdit if you want more info.

Possible conflicts could arise with other mods which add more spawn points, which will likely result in things getting a bit hectic around the wasteland. But, hey, that might be your style.


My Mods

I spend a lot of time creating and supporting my mods, so any donations are gratefully received.