Big update. This contains the heavily requested doctor's treatment feature. Yes, they are actually useful now! Includes other features and fixes. Save compatible for updating. Update your JIP LN NVSE version for this.
What does this update change? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fixed the MCM not showing the correct mod version.
Fixed illnesses with no duration not being re-applied to reloaded NPCs.
Fixed a debug message being accidentally shown for one of the MCM options.
Doctors can now treat your illnesses.
Added MCM settings to configure the treatment expenses from doctors.
Added Leukemia as a catchable disease for NPCs.
Added Hemolysis as a catchable disease for NPCs.
Added more ways for medicines to spawn.
Added MCM settings for medicine rarity.
Added a chance that Veteran Rangers will have better equipment if they have the elite veterancy bonus.
Updated the biohazard message symbol slightly.
The treatment duration for all medicines has been doubled.
Drastically reduced Insomnia's duration. The minimum duration has gone from 24 hours, to 8 hours.
Updated the Survival Guide.
Small optimizations.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Next Update Progress:
A Bulk-toggle feature for many MCM options, to provide compatibility with mods that change the same things. (not started)
More equipment revisions for NPCs. (completed)
An alert which will let the player know in advance that they are going to vomit. (completed)
More perks/traits. (not started)
MCM settings for infection chances. (not started)
Review player infection mechanics. (completed)
Rebalance the Dead Money DLC. (not started)
Change Sleep Deprivation so that it won't drain health during sleeping. (completed)
Add a disease self-diagnostic item. (completed)
Fix MRE not giving nutrition to the player. (completed)
Fix irradiated fountains not hydrating the player. (completed)
Fix a severe bug with the Monocyte Breeder Implant infecting the player with Madre-C, S/22x, and Hemolysis. (completed)
Please note that updates will currently be released at a much slower pace, now that University has begun.
Long post ahead. Is there a way I can hide this in a spoiler? Review/Report: SurvivalCore 1.06-beta
Foreword: My run is somewhat light on scripts although I did run Project Nevada at the start. I removed Project Nevada in the middle of the Honest Hearts DLC and replace its functions with other mods. Yes, I am well aware that there could be lingering scripts or other issues because of this but I made my peace with that.
For you dear reader, this is something to keep in mind if my experiences can be applied to your game.
Key Notes: - If you’re looking for either a harder or a more survival-oriented experience from FNV, then SurvivalCore is easily for you. I highly recommend it; it’ll stay on my mod list for my next runs. - Disease mechanic rewards you for prudent planning. - Generally, an engaging system of FNV gameplay loop. - Diseases can get annoying in how often they happen and what some of them do. - The importance of disease tapers out in the late game. - NPCs vulnerable to rads and disease have a threat to break the game. - Combat is overall deadlier on both ends. - Armour on paper is more important but in practice it doesn’t make too much of a difference. - Combat is fun and frantic. - Explosives have a much-needed buff. - Fire is modified to a nice direction but is imbalanced against YOU. - Primary Needs have more presence in a game. - AP changes are interesting on paper but can be annoying in some places. - Low Primary Needs are no longer directly fatal, giving you more options to deal with them. - 1.06 works mostly well with DLCs. Dead Money being the exception.
Spoiler:
Show
Review: After at least 80 hours of gameplay, not counting the deaths/restarts, I’ve finally finished another run of FNV. Now, I had to rush the final battle because of something SurvivalCore or SC did, which I’ll explain later, but overall, SC enhanced my FNV experience.
Despite the biohazard logo, SC is more than just a disease mod although the disease mechanic is the main feature that the mod revolves on. No, SC is for better or for worse a rebalance mod to make FNV deadlier. I say that because while I generally like what Apparition, the mod author, does there are some things I disagree with or this may cause some mod conflict if you’re running another gameplay rebalance mod which is one of the many reasons why I removed Project Nevada in the middle of a playthrough.
That said, if you are a player who want a more challenging,survival-oriented experience from FNV – this mod is definitely for you. I’ll go over the features of SC and give my thoughts on them and I hope you’ll find them useful in making your decision to either give SC a try or a pass.
Disease and Sickness This is the main gimmick of the mod. SC is built on the idea that living in the wasteland should not be easy. No more eating raw meat or drinking from a glowing toilet with no worse to wear. No more mucking around in toxic and radioactive dumps or hanging around coughing people. No, now because of SC – there will be consequences and that consequence is disease. Mechanically, diseases are debuffs but as with why I think SC is pretty damn good about it is how diseases interact with the other features of this mod and the game itself.
So how can you catch a disease? Lots of ways actually. As mentioned, eating raw food or expired food carries a risk of parasites or food poisoning. Sticking around radioactive waste makes you tired and so is getting gnawed on by feral ghouls. Basically, doing anything other than staying at home has a chance of getting you sick. However other than ignoring it as suggested by ‘Dr’ Ada Straus, which is an option for most diseases btw, you can find medicine scattered throughout the wastes and occasionally sold by merchants or find a doctor to treat your disease.
With exceptions, it’s honestly not as intrusive as it sounds and why I think this system is great is that it rewards you for proper planning. No more stuffing your pockets with Stims and Doc Bags; now you have to think on where you’re going and what to bring. For example, if you foresee that you’re going into heavy combat. Perhaps it’s best you stock up on Contacts and Fatigue-b-Gones for the battle. Maybe you’re going to exterminate some feral ghouls? Better get your Plague kit prepared. More than that is that items, especially aid items have been rebalanced. For examples, stims heal more but healing powder is far lighter.
Again, it’s one of those once you get into the gameplay loop, it’s quite engaging.
As an interesting plus, NPCs too are affected by disease albeit in a more limited capacity than you are. Other than some minor stuff, some diseases can be spread via corpses and to solve that, you’re required to burn their corpses which is a pretty fun mechanics.
I will note however as of 1.06, the balance for the disease mechanic is a bit janky.
The difficulty curve of disease is just punishing in the early game where medicine and doctors who can treat disease are rare and pretty expensive. From Goodsprings to Novac to Boulder City, which I consider the first half of the game, only Doc Mitchell can cure disease, the other doctors: Ada Straus, and Alex Richards, don’t offer that service. More than the doctors are also your other resources such as food and a clean water source which again, will affect your health. A bit annoying especially on the cure side, I’ll admit but, in this half, the disease mechanic really matters and this makes for a tense game.
But as soon as you reach New Vegas, assuming you’re not skint broke, the disease for the most part is trivial. Fresh food and clean water are plenty and so are doctors. On one hand, it does fit with the theme of the game: for all the problems of civilisation, civilisation has got some big benefits over primitive/isolated living. On the other, disease is again mostly trivial. That tense feeling from the early game? Pretty much gone and barring a few diseases which I’ll get into next, you almost never have to worry about this feature again.
If you’ve read around the Posts section of this mod, you’ll probably find a few comments made by me bitching about the triumvirate of Fatigue, Concussion, and Muscle Cramp. I bring this up to highlight that there is a fine line between ‘Difficult but fair’ and ‘Just plain annoying’ when it comes to game balance and why it’s so hard to actually balance a game.
Take Fatigue for example. Fatigue is a disease that debuffs you with slower walking speed, lowered Agility, and reduced AP regeneration amongst other things. There are boatloads of way to catch this disease ranging from other diseases, rad poisoning, sleep deprivation, health loss, AP loss, and fatigue damage and according to Apparition, they all stack. I mean it makes sense; the Courier while superhuman is still human and thus can tire out but this is where the balance gets tricky.
I’ll focus on health and AP loss. As mentioned, SC is tomake FNV deadlier and one way it does this is that the damage scaling for both you and the NPCs is increased. What this means for you is that every encounter, especially against ranged enemies, is that you’ll lose a bit of health by the end of the fight and this starts the timer for Fatigue. This gets exacerbated when you try to heal with Stimpacks because those things also give you Fatigue. So now you have Fatigue, now what? Remember that AP regen debuff? Yeah when you get Fatigue, prepare yourself to get Muscle Cramps which make you even slower and it also lowers your Agility. This also lowers your AP regen even more, starting a feedback loop.
Fatigue gets worse because as soon as your AP hits zero,there is a big chance that the Courier will start stumbling. Admittedly, it was funny at first but it just got plain annoying when walking to a doctor after CCing myself to the clinic took 5 minutes because the Courier stumbled backwards to the other end of the room. If you’re not willing to use CC, then consider it a game over when you get this combo in the middle of a vault raid because getting out is damn annoying. Not hard, just annoying.
The other one is Concussion. For Concussion, you’ll get itafter taking head damage and depending on a damaged head. It makes sense to be honest but remember how damage is increased for this mod? Yes, that means that you will almost always get hit in the head and you will almost always get a Concussion no matter how small the fight. As a bonus, Concussions also increase the risk of catching Fatigue. Of all the diseases in the game, these 3 are practically unavoidable no matter what you do barring a Sniper playthrough which I wasn’t doing.
On effecting NPCs, while pretty cool in concept, you’llquickly find out why rads don’t affect your companions in vanilla: Player convenience. Vanilla hardcore mode already disincentivises you from using Companions – permadeath is real and since you’ll be hanging out in dangerous zones, this is always something to look out for. Since NPCs are now affected by disease, radioactive zones such as V34 and Camp Searchlight are extra dangerous to human Companions which are most of them; disincentivising the use of Companions even more. Yes, they will eat the cures and drink RadAways but they do it in a much slower pace than you do. Funnily enough, this bumps Raul, who is pretty good to begin with, and Lily, who is kind of weak to be honest, up a tier because they are immune to the following disease…
WARNING WITH 1.06 I’ll post the foreword again to make it very clear:
Foreword: My run is somewhat light on scripts although I did run Project Nevada at the start. I removed Project Nevada in the middle of the Honest Hearts DLC and replace its functions with other mods. Yes, I am well aware that there could be lingering scripts or other issues because of this but I made my peace with that.
One interesting and nasty borderline-gamebreaking bug Iexperienced with SC is an outbreak of Beauveria Mordicana or S/22x (Which to be a dick to the mod author: ‘Hey, you’re ahead of schedule for this feature!’). Now what is S/22x? Remember V22? The one with the plant people? That’s S/22x and SC has made it possible for you and any human NPC to catch it and I mean any NPC. S/22x is lethal and when you catch and if you don’t find/use the cure, you’ll suffer DoT until you die. That’s bad right? Yes, but it gets worse.
When an NPC dies from Beauveria Mordicana, their corpse‘plantifies’, creating a cloud of S/22x which spreads the disease and creates a permanent spawn point for Spore Carriers, which also spread S/22x from just being around them. This is where the corpse burning mechanic comes in handy but once they’ve plantified, there’s nothing you can do about it (Not even console commanding ‘disable’ will help). Usually, NPC should not get this disease unless they hang out V22 or if you make a S/22x bomb but this is why I mentioned the state of my game as a foreword.
Random NPCs are catching this disease. The triggers seem tobe truly random – an NPC will suddenly have S/22x after I leave a conversation or I enter/leave the cell, random corpses will spawn plantifying, and so on. Why I had to rush my playthrough is that the Strip and Freeside, which I run Freeside Open, are death zones of plant people. And no, it’s not just New Vegas but also other areas that are suffering outbreaks.
To be clear, I am in contact with Apparition to squash thisbug and I really appreciate that he/she/they/Zod is responsive on this bug but that said, a random outbreak of plant zombies is something that might happen if you download this mod although I cannot guarantee if SC is specifically at fault.
Combat As of 1.06, the combat and disease mechanics are all bundled in a single package and if you want to run another combat mod, you may face compatibility issues. As for me, SC is basically the only one so I’m fine.
Now on combat itself, SC makes combat much more dangerous as everything does more damage. How SC does it is by applying a damage multiplier to weapons so knife that does 10dmg in vanilla now does 15dmg on a 1.5x scaling. As a plus, the damage scaled can be customised in the Mod Configuration Menu. Overall, what this does to the game is that in theory, it makes getting into cover more important and it makes heavier armours much more valuable. ‘Theory’ being the operative word.
I say in theory, especially for armour being more valuable because through my 80-hour run, I have never once been crippled by a non-explosion attack… except for the head. Yes either through something changed to the AI by SC or PN (With the lingering scripts after I removed it) or it has always been the case like this, I find myself constantly getting chipped at the head, which the damage scaling makes armour useless. Let me explain to you why the damage scaling makes armour useless.
Say a raider is shooting at you with a hunting rifle, doing50 dmg per shot (I’m rounding down the numbers) and you are wearing a set of T-45d power armour with a DT of 25 with helmet. Oversimplifying here but that means when you get hit in the body, your armour will deduct the damage by 25 points, leaving you to suffer only 25 points of damage. Say you had 100hp, so you drop to 75hp to live and fight another day.
However, if the raider gets lucky and scores a headshot, the damage is multiplied by 2x. So after a shot to the head, your armour with reduce the damage down to 75hp, leaving you with 25hp and you barely survive. However, with SC, damage is scaled up across the board. Now maybe it’s something weird or by design but the default scaling is 5x. I will however use my setting of 2x. Now the hunting rifle deals 100 dmg per shot and getting a body shot leaves me with 25hp. A headshot now deals 200 dmg – instant death.
You may argue that no armour will be an instant kill to the chest anyway but two things. One, enemies rarely fight alone and someone will score a lucky shot (and as I mentioned, getting headshots seem really common for some reason). Two, heavy armour is designed around you wading through enemies and tanking damage. But like vanilla, avoiding the damage in the first place is just plainly safer and more efficient.
Of course, this also applies to you for better or for worse.High DT NPCs such as Deathclaws and Brotherhood Paladins die very quickly to headshots too. This however doesn’t seem to apply to bosses like Lanius and Ulysses but that’s probably because they have other stuff going on.
Despite armour not making too much of a difference, I still ran a power armour run and fighting was still dynamic and frantic as hell which I like. Some tweaking might be warranted but as a short on tweaks: explosions gaining a 75% damage buff is much needed to make them worth the trouble. Before these things are too heavy for too little damage but now they’re in a nice place. Good job!
Poisons I don’t notice too much although Green Geckos in Zionhave projectile poison, so watch out. And for the last damage bit…
Fire With how fire weapons/damage is fundamentally changed by SC,fire gets its own section. In vanilla, fire is just DoT and the DoT is either weaker than poisons or in most situations, direct upfront damage is plainly better.
SC however really ramps the damage up high and much more.Other than more damage, fire eats away limbs, and has a potential to stun lock NPCs, leaving them screaming with a voice that will haunt your dreams, and leaving them open to more fire damage, thus repeating the hell. (Fun fact: Burn wounds won’t let you pass out, so you’ll feel the pain until you die). This feature is proof that Apparition is a pyro main because the Flamer gets the spotlight.
The Flamer enjoys a much longer range, solving one of theissues with that thing in vanilla, and can set the ground on fire, establishing an area of denial. This means the Flamer is now a real flamethrower that will ruin everyone’s day. It is a bit dangerous to yourself because of a design choice/bug – the hurtbox can hit you if you fire at a certain angle, setting you on fire but that’s not the big catch to flamer type weapons. The catch is the ammo, flamer fuel which is far heavier to balance out the damage potential but this leaves two problems.
One, it is generally impractical to use any Flamer Fuel-type weapons unless you plan on them being disposable. Because of the new ammo weight, these weapons have terrible endurance – they’ll run dry really fast forcing you to use a more robust weapon. Why use a flamer that last for 20 seconds when a LMG will last you the vault?
Two, is that you see that balance choice? The higher fuel weight? That does not apply to NPCs. One of the tougher fights in the game is in the Bison Steve Hotel, Primm during the part where you have to find Deputy Beagle. In there, the Escaped Convict Leader will be wielding an Incinerator and because there is barely anywhere to move (Incinerators have a small splash range) and you probably don’t have water containers to douse the fire, you better hope you get lucky to either kill him quickly or disarm his weapon.
Speaking of containers. When you get set on fire, you either wait it out, jump into a body of water, or douse yourself with a water container which can be either made with 3 dirty water bottles or 2 purified ones. This one is directly to Apparition: can you please make the effect that water containers give you afterburn immunity for X seconds? Flamers/Incinerators are especially scary because they’ll just reapply afterburn a few seconds later anyway.
To be fair, flamers/incinerators are not the only incendiary weapons in the game. Fire bombs and incendiary grenades also enjoy this buff and for the first time, I actually find myself using fire bombs which they plainly suck in vanilla. As mentioned, fire also works on corpses to purify them of disease and as a whole, I consider this good game design because no mechanics should exist in a vacuum – ideally, every mechanic should meaningfully interact with one another…. If nothing else, setting Caesar’s corpse on fire is cathartic.
Other stuff I like the changes to Primary Needs (Hunger, Thirst, Sleep Deprivation). While they’d previous drain passively, now they drain depending on what you do and as a plus, they drain at a ‘just right’ rate where I still notice them but it’s not enough to annoy me.
I hate game mechanics where walking costs stamina or AP and SC has that. I find they don’t add any complexity to the game and is just a plain nuisance to deal with. To SC’s credit, this is an optional feature so I won’t fuss too much. However, SC does more to AP than drain it. Having low AP has pretty big consequences. One is that moving while having no AP will start accumulating fatigue damage that causes the ridiculous stumbling. The other more serious thing is that having no AP and high fatigue could give you a heart attack. Honestly, I generally find the consequences annoying but I do like that the game encourages you to go take a break every now and then (Get the Courier to sit down) to heal AP. Just fits for me.
Other stuff is that maxed Primary Needs and Rads won’t kill you, just give you debuffs is great since I have more time to react and as a masochist, I need to take some time to recover. NPCs will take antivenoms, cures, and healing items independently is a nice plus.
Before I forget, I didn’t notice any performance issues with this mod.
DLCs For the most part, SC 1.06 works fine with DLCs except DeadMoney but I’ll give a quick rundown anyway.
Dead Money – There’s barely any fresh food or clean waterleaving you in the mercy of constant parasites and food poisoning. Also because there are no doctors, getting diseased early on will gimp you until you finish the run or you reload an earlier save. Overall not quite balanced for Dead Money but it is manageable. Do note, this is my seventh run of FNV so I know what I’m doing at this point.
Honest Hearts – Plenty of food everywhere, Daniel sellsmedicine and Zion Valley is not exceptionally dangerous. However, Zion Valley is home to Green Geckos which spit poison at your companions and has some Spore Carriers which can give you or your companions S/22x – a game over at this point.
Old World Blues – With how much fighting you do, expect thetrio of Fatigue, Concussion, and Muscle Cramps and as a plus, Insomnia. However fresh food is plentiful and while the Auto-Doc cannot cure diseases, the Sink can sell you meds and there’s more than few meds and cures scattered about Big MT.
Lonesome Road – Fights are spaced far enough that Insomniaisn’t an issue and since you can leave anytime you want; diseases shouldn’t be a problem unless you’re ill prepared. Also since LR is the shortest of the four DLCs, you’re not in for an attrition fight anyway.
Conclusion Overall, I like this mod. There’re quite a few things Idisagree with but the only feature I’ll straight up call bad is stumbling but that’s more of a pet peeve really. If you want a more challenging FNV experience, load up SurvivalCore and be sure to thank or make some suggestions because Apparition around.
I greatly appreciate just how much effort went into this review! I will definitely be using this as a point of reference for updates. A side note about the spoiler tags. You should be able to condense everything with the *text here* ['/'spoiler] tags. (Remove the quotation marks in the closing tag) (It doesn't show the spoiler tags until you submit your post, I don't know why)
I apologize for the very slow progress for updates as of late. SC was getting updated almost weekly, until 1.06-beta. The dev cycle for this mod ended up being pretty long, starting early in this year, and I've managed to burn myself out. On top of this, there's University to focus on as well. Rest assured, there WILL be updates eventually, I just need to get my bearings back.
I encourage anyone to read this if you're considering using the mod for version 1.06-beta, as for the most part it is very accurate.
I will sticky this post once the spoiler tags are in place. Thanks again!
Ironically, Dead Money was the only part of the game I got through with this mod. It is not as hard as described higher if you get there at level 25-30... The main problem is water and some health restoring items (the best way is not to eat and drink, if possible). Battles are easy for sneaky character since Holorifle kill everything fast with one shot.
P.S. I like DM the most and sometimes play the game only to play DM, so my opinion is from player who extremely familiar with Sierra Madre.
Wouldn't say DM is hard, just more of SC is not really balanced to deal with DM. That said, we're both familiar enough to DM to know what to do but what of more inexperienced players who haven't memorised all the radio spots? The added pressure of the resources and concussion just makes DM a whole lot harder.
I would argue with the scarcity of clean water in the villa. If you use any mod that allows you to bottle water, you can always find some toilets or sinks that still operate in the villa somewhere, and once you get some dirty water, there's PLENTY of glass pitchers laying around, way more than you would see on the wasteland so i guess the designers thought about this. There's a lot of surgical tubing in the hospital too and there are cooking stations scattered throughout the villa. Vendors also sell some dirty water occasionally. So you really can't complain about lack of water in sierra madre. Food is a problem though.
How are you supposed to cure diseases? The doctor won't even tell me how much treatment costs, only that I don't have enough caps, so I gave the cure to myself via console. Took probably 15 cholera cures, one after another as soon as one wore off. Battled this for over a week in game and it still is not cured..? Meanwhile my health continually depletes the whole time. I like hardcore survival mechanics, but this was unplayable... Going to have to switch to another survival mod, unfortunately. :( This all being after I already had to remove the NPC affects for diseases manually in FNVEdit. I just wish there were more options in the MCM to adjust things. Fingers crossed the creator returns someday and finishes it up.
Also argue a lot about primary needs if you're playing hardcore, the weirdest s#*! happens, on some runs of the game one mod will alter the primary needs alone, on some runs it will be swapping between the mods occasionally with reloads and i even had situations where the needs draining rates were added to each other to the point that my needs rose up through 4 stages in real time as i was watching.
uninstalling seems to work, which blows because I really like the AP overhaul and other features from this mod, but until someone makes a disease-free version of this mod it's probably better to just not use it.
Edit: It appears the mod author is still active, so hopefully we see an update for this soon, but it's already been three years, so it may still be some time.
If you're committed to it, maybe a mod that allows you to set NPCs as essential will help mitigate the damage to quest-central NPCs.
I figured out a workaround. I used FNVEdit and deleted any references to NPCs getting diseased, and left the NPC Elite and Veterancy modifiers alone. This way the player can still be affected but not NPCs if you so choose. Make a backup in case this breaks anything, but I doubt it will.
Any files that have NPC in it except for the few that have Elite and Veterancy in it. I left those few files alone but any other file that has npc in it, I deleted.
I love the idea of this mod and how much more difficult it makes the game. However I cannot stick with it due to it affecting npcs. In concept the idea is interesting, but having companions and npcs die to disease or radiation isn't fun since there isn't much you could do. It just made me paranoid about losing npcs and failing quests. If you could add a toggle in the mcm that would let people turn off npc affects, that would be amazing and I'm sure I'm not the only one that would like this feature. I really hope you come back because I love this mod and want to see it grow and evolve.
I hope this gets an update to be more modular and tweakable. A lot of the ideas here are stellar but the balance is terrible and there are some really bad conflicts.
Who have the problem with Madre-C Poisoning after installing implant? This problem appears only after you have installed PHOENIX implant. I noticed, that problem is the script 'aaaSCxUDFxSicknessHandlerPlayerMadreCPoisoning' because I deleted Madre-C (for player) effect with FNVEdit and this script permanently tried to run after I have installed PHOENIX implant. Seems this script is the problem, which try to run Madre-C Poisoning after you have installed PHOENIX implant
Even on "chill" difficulty this mod is HORRIFICALLY unbalanced. Just upon loading the game, mid-save, next to the Frontier NCR camp, I contracted four diseases one after the other and died in exactly 45 seconds. I had to cheat to try and get the diseases to go away, and even when i was trying to escape from the area under the assumption all these motherfuckers were getting me sick, I still kept contracting all of the severe, live threatening, instant-death bioweapon diseases.
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Big update. This contains the heavily requested doctor's treatment feature. Yes, they are actually useful now! Includes other features and fixes. Save compatible for updating. Update your JIP LN NVSE version for this.
What does this update change?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Fixed the MCM not showing the correct mod version.
- Fixed illnesses with no duration not being re-applied to reloaded NPCs.
- Fixed a debug message being accidentally shown for one of the MCM options.
- Doctors can now treat your illnesses.
- Added MCM settings to configure the treatment expenses from doctors.
- Added Leukemia as a catchable disease for NPCs.
- Added Hemolysis as a catchable disease for NPCs.
- Added more ways for medicines to spawn.
- Added MCM settings for medicine rarity.
- Added a chance that Veteran Rangers will have better equipment if they have the elite veterancy bonus.
- Updated the biohazard message symbol slightly.
- The treatment duration for all medicines has been doubled.
- Drastically reduced Insomnia's duration. The minimum duration has gone from 24 hours, to 8 hours.
- Updated the Survival Guide.
- Small optimizations.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Next Update Progress:
Please note that updates will currently be released at a much slower pace, now that University has begun.
Hope you all enjoy this update!
Review/Report: SurvivalCore 1.06-beta
Key Notes:
- If you’re looking for either a harder or a more survival-oriented experience
from FNV, then SurvivalCore is easily for you. I highly recommend it; it’ll stay on my mod list for my next runs.
- Disease mechanic rewards you for prudent planning.
- Generally, an engaging system of FNV gameplay loop.
- Diseases can get annoying in how often they happen and what some of them do.
- The importance of disease tapers out in the late game.
- NPCs vulnerable to rads and disease have a threat to break the game.
- Combat is overall deadlier on both ends.
- Armour on paper is more important but in practice it doesn’t make too much of a difference.
- Combat is fun and frantic.
- Explosives have a much-needed buff.
- Fire is modified to a nice direction but is imbalanced against YOU.
- Primary Needs have more presence in a game.
- AP changes are interesting on paper but can be annoying in some places.
- Low Primary Needs are no longer directly fatal, giving you more options to deal with them.
- 1.06 works mostly well with DLCs. Dead Money being the exception.
Review:
After at least 80 hours of gameplay, not counting the deaths/restarts, I’ve finally finished another run of FNV. Now, I had to rush the final battle because of something SurvivalCore or SC did, which I’ll explain later, but overall, SC enhanced my FNV experience.
Despite the biohazard logo, SC is more than just a disease mod although the disease mechanic is the main feature that the mod revolves on.
No, SC is for better or for worse a rebalance mod to make FNV deadlier. I say that because while I generally like what Apparition, the mod author, does there are some things I disagree with or this may cause some mod conflict if you’re running another gameplay rebalance mod which is one of the many reasons why I removed Project Nevada in the middle of a playthrough.
That said, if you are a player who want a more challenging,survival-oriented experience from FNV – this mod is definitely for you. I’ll go over the features of SC and give my thoughts on them and I hope you’ll find them useful in making your decision to either give SC a try or a pass.
Disease and Sickness
This is the main gimmick of the mod. SC is built on the idea that living in the wasteland should not be easy. No more eating raw meat or drinking from a glowing toilet with no worse to wear. No more mucking around in toxic and radioactive dumps or hanging around coughing people. No, now because
of SC – there will be consequences and that consequence is disease. Mechanically, diseases are debuffs but as with why I think SC is pretty damn good about it is how diseases interact with the other features of this mod and the game itself.
So how can you catch a disease? Lots of ways actually. As mentioned, eating raw food or expired food carries a risk of parasites or food
poisoning. Sticking around radioactive waste makes you tired and so is getting gnawed on by feral ghouls. Basically, doing anything other than staying at home has a chance of getting you sick. However other than ignoring it as suggested by ‘Dr’ Ada Straus, which is an option for most diseases btw, you can find
medicine scattered throughout the wastes and occasionally sold by merchants or find a doctor to treat your disease.
With exceptions, it’s honestly not as intrusive as it sounds and why I think this system is great is that it rewards you for proper planning. No more stuffing your pockets with Stims and Doc Bags; now you have to think on where you’re going and what to bring. For example, if you foresee that you’re going into heavy combat. Perhaps it’s best you stock up on Contacts and Fatigue-b-Gones for the battle. Maybe you’re going to exterminate some feral ghouls? Better get your Plague kit prepared. More than that is that items, especially aid items have been rebalanced. For examples, stims heal more but healing powder is far lighter.
Again, it’s one of those once you get into the gameplay loop, it’s quite engaging.
As an interesting plus, NPCs too are affected by disease albeit in a more limited capacity than you are. Other than some minor stuff, some
diseases can be spread via corpses and to solve that, you’re required to burn their corpses which is a pretty fun mechanics.
I will note however as of 1.06, the balance for the disease mechanic is a bit janky.
The difficulty curve of disease is just punishing in the early game where medicine and doctors who can treat disease are rare and pretty expensive. From Goodsprings to Novac to Boulder City, which I consider the first half of the game, only Doc Mitchell can cure disease, the other doctors: Ada Straus, and Alex Richards, don’t offer that service. More than the doctors are also your other resources such as food and a clean water source which again, will affect your health. A bit annoying especially on the cure side, I’ll admit but, in this half, the disease mechanic really matters and this makes for a tense game.
But as soon as you reach New Vegas, assuming you’re not skint broke, the disease for the most part is trivial. Fresh food and clean water are plenty and so are doctors. On one hand, it does fit with the theme of the game: for all the problems of civilisation, civilisation has got some big benefits over primitive/isolated living. On the other, disease is again mostly trivial. That tense feeling from the early game? Pretty much gone and barring a few diseases which I’ll get into next, you almost never have to worry about this feature again.
If you’ve read around the Posts section of this mod, you’ll probably find a few comments made by me bitching about the triumvirate of
Fatigue, Concussion, and Muscle Cramp. I bring this up to highlight that there is a fine line between ‘Difficult but fair’ and ‘Just plain annoying’ when it comes to game balance and why it’s so hard to actually balance a game.
Take Fatigue for example. Fatigue is a disease that debuffs you with slower walking speed, lowered Agility, and reduced AP regeneration amongst other things. There are boatloads of way to catch this disease ranging from other diseases, rad poisoning, sleep deprivation, health loss, AP loss, and fatigue damage and according to Apparition, they all stack. I mean it makes sense; the Courier while superhuman is still human and thus can tire out but this is where the balance gets tricky.
I’ll focus on health and AP loss. As mentioned, SC is tomake FNV deadlier and one way it does this is that the damage scaling for both you and the NPCs is increased. What this means for you is that every encounter, especially against ranged enemies, is that you’ll lose a bit of health by the end of the fight and this starts the timer for Fatigue. This gets exacerbated when you try to heal with Stimpacks because those things also give you Fatigue. So now you have Fatigue, now what? Remember that AP regen debuff? Yeah when you get Fatigue, prepare yourself to get Muscle Cramps which make you even slower and it also lowers your Agility. This also lowers your AP regen even more, starting a feedback loop.
Fatigue gets worse because as soon as your AP hits zero,there is a big chance that the Courier will start stumbling. Admittedly, it was funny at first but it just got plain annoying when walking to a doctor after CCing myself to the clinic took 5 minutes because the Courier stumbled backwards to the other end of the room. If you’re not willing to use CC, then consider it a game over when you get this combo in the middle of a vault raid because getting out is damn annoying. Not hard, just annoying.
The other one is Concussion. For Concussion, you’ll get itafter taking head damage and depending on a damaged head. It makes sense to be honest but remember how damage is increased for this mod? Yes, that means that you will almost always get hit in the head and you will almost always get a Concussion no matter how small the fight. As a bonus, Concussions also increase the risk of catching Fatigue. Of all the diseases in the game, these 3 are
practically unavoidable no matter what you do barring a Sniper playthrough which I wasn’t doing.
On effecting NPCs, while pretty cool in concept, you’llquickly find out why rads don’t affect your companions in vanilla: Player convenience. Vanilla hardcore mode already disincentivises you from using Companions – permadeath is real and since you’ll be hanging out in dangerous zones, this is always something to look out for. Since NPCs are now affected by disease, radioactive zones such as V34 and Camp Searchlight are extra dangerous to human Companions which are most of them; disincentivising the use of Companions even more. Yes, they will eat the cures and drink RadAways but they do it in a much
slower pace than you do. Funnily enough, this bumps Raul, who is pretty good to begin with, and Lily, who is kind of weak to be honest, up a tier because they
are immune to the following disease…
WARNING WITH 1.06
I’ll post the foreword again to make it very clear:
One interesting and nasty borderline-gamebreaking bug Iexperienced with SC is an outbreak of Beauveria Mordicana or S/22x (Which to be
a dick to the mod author: ‘Hey, you’re ahead of schedule for this feature!’). Now what is S/22x? Remember V22? The one with the plant people? That’s S/22x
and SC has made it possible for you and any human NPC to catch it and I mean any NPC. S/22x is lethal and when you catch and if you don’t find/use the cure, you’ll suffer DoT until you die. That’s bad right? Yes, but it gets worse.
When an NPC dies from Beauveria Mordicana, their corpse‘plantifies’, creating a cloud of S/22x which spreads the disease and creates a permanent spawn point for Spore Carriers, which also spread S/22x from just being around them. This is where the corpse burning mechanic comes in handy but
once they’ve plantified, there’s nothing you can do about it (Not even console commanding ‘disable’ will help). Usually, NPC should not get this disease
unless they hang out V22 or if you make a S/22x bomb but this is why I mentioned the state of my game as a foreword.
Random NPCs are catching this disease. The triggers seem tobe truly random – an NPC will suddenly have S/22x after I leave a conversation or I enter/leave the cell, random corpses will spawn plantifying, and so on. Why I had to rush my playthrough is that the Strip and Freeside, which I run Freeside Open, are death zones of plant people. And no, it’s not just New Vegas but also other areas that are suffering outbreaks.
To be clear, I am in contact with Apparition to squash thisbug and I really appreciate that he/she/they/Zod is responsive on this bug but that said, a random outbreak of plant zombies is something that might happen if you download this mod although I cannot guarantee if SC is specifically at fault.
Combat
As of 1.06, the combat and disease mechanics are all bundled in a single package and if you want to run another combat mod, you may face compatibility issues. As for me, SC is basically the only one so I’m fine.
Now on combat itself, SC makes combat much more dangerous as everything does more damage. How SC does it is by applying a damage multiplier to weapons so knife that does 10dmg in vanilla now does 15dmg on a 1.5x scaling. As a plus, the damage scaled can be customised in the Mod Configuration Menu. Overall, what this does to the game is that in theory, it makes getting into cover more important and it makes heavier armours much more valuable. ‘Theory’ being the operative word.
I say in theory, especially for armour being more valuable because through my 80-hour run, I have never once been crippled by a non-explosion attack… except for the head. Yes either through something changed to the AI by SC or PN (With the lingering scripts after I removed it) or it has always been the case
like this, I find myself constantly getting chipped at the head, which the damage scaling makes armour useless. Let me explain to you why the damage scaling makes armour useless.
Say a raider is shooting at you with a hunting rifle, doing50 dmg per shot (I’m rounding down the numbers) and you are wearing a set of T-45d power armour with a DT of 25 with helmet. Oversimplifying here but that means when you get hit in the body, your armour will deduct the damage by 25 points, leaving you to suffer only 25 points of damage. Say you had 100hp, so you drop to 75hp to live and fight another day.
However, if the raider gets lucky and scores a headshot, the damage is multiplied by 2x. So after a shot to the head, your armour with reduce the damage down to 75hp, leaving you with 25hp and you barely survive. However, with SC, damage is scaled up across the board. Now maybe it’s something weird or
by design but the default scaling is 5x. I will however use my setting of 2x. Now the hunting rifle deals 100 dmg per shot and getting a body shot leaves me
with 25hp. A headshot now deals 200 dmg – instant death.
You may argue that no armour will be an instant kill to the chest anyway but two things. One, enemies rarely fight alone and someone will score a lucky shot (and as I mentioned, getting headshots seem really common for some reason). Two, heavy armour is designed around you wading through enemies and tanking damage. But like vanilla, avoiding the damage in the first place is just plainly safer and more efficient.
Of course, this also applies to you for better or for worse.High DT NPCs such as Deathclaws and Brotherhood Paladins die very quickly to headshots too. This however doesn’t seem to apply to bosses like Lanius and Ulysses but that’s probably because they have other stuff going on.
Despite armour not making too much of a difference, I still ran a power armour run and fighting was still dynamic and frantic as hell which I like. Some tweaking might be warranted but as a short on tweaks: explosions gaining a 75% damage buff is much needed to make them worth the trouble. Before
these things are too heavy for too little damage but now they’re in a nice place. Good job!
Poisons I don’t notice too much although Green Geckos in Zionhave projectile poison, so watch out. And for the last damage bit…
Fire
With how fire weapons/damage is fundamentally changed by SC,fire gets its own section. In vanilla, fire is just DoT and the DoT is either weaker than poisons or in most situations, direct upfront damage is plainly better.
SC however really ramps the damage up high and much more.Other than more damage, fire eats away limbs, and has a potential to stun lock NPCs, leaving them screaming with a voice that will haunt your dreams, and leaving them open to more fire damage, thus repeating the hell. (Fun fact: Burn
wounds won’t let you pass out, so you’ll feel the pain until you die). This feature is proof that Apparition is a pyro main because the Flamer gets the spotlight.
The Flamer enjoys a much longer range, solving one of theissues with that thing in vanilla, and can set the ground on fire, establishing an area of denial. This means the Flamer is now a real flamethrower that will ruin everyone’s day. It is a bit dangerous to yourself because of a design choice/bug
– the hurtbox can hit you if you fire at a certain angle, setting you on fire but that’s not the big catch to flamer type weapons. The catch is the ammo,
flamer fuel which is far heavier to balance out the damage potential but this leaves two problems.
One, it is generally impractical to use any Flamer Fuel-type weapons unless you plan on them being disposable. Because of the new ammo weight, these weapons have terrible endurance – they’ll run dry really fast forcing you to use a more robust weapon. Why use a flamer that last for 20 seconds when a LMG will last you the vault?
Two, is that you see that balance choice? The higher fuel weight? That does not apply to NPCs. One of the tougher fights in the game is in the Bison Steve Hotel, Primm during the part where you have to find Deputy Beagle. In there, the Escaped Convict Leader will be wielding an Incinerator and because there is barely anywhere to move (Incinerators have a small splash range) and you probably don’t have water containers to douse the fire, you better hope you get lucky to either kill him quickly or disarm his weapon.
Speaking of containers. When you get set on fire, you either wait it out, jump into a body of water, or douse yourself with a water container which can be either made with 3 dirty water bottles or 2 purified ones. This one is directly to Apparition: can you please make the effect that water containers give you afterburn immunity for X seconds? Flamers/Incinerators are especially scary because they’ll just reapply afterburn a few seconds later anyway.
To be fair, flamers/incinerators are not the only incendiary weapons in the game. Fire bombs and incendiary grenades also enjoy this buff and for the first time, I actually find myself using fire bombs which they plainly suck in vanilla. As mentioned, fire also works on corpses to purify them of disease and as a whole, I consider this good game design because no mechanics should exist in a vacuum – ideally, every mechanic should meaningfully interact with one another…. If nothing else, setting Caesar’s corpse on fire is cathartic.
Other stuff
I like the changes to Primary Needs (Hunger, Thirst, Sleep Deprivation). While they’d previous drain passively, now they drain depending on what you do and as a plus, they drain at a ‘just right’ rate where I still notice them but it’s not enough to annoy me.
I hate game mechanics where walking costs stamina or AP and SC has that. I find they don’t add any complexity to the game and is just a plain nuisance to deal with. To SC’s credit, this is an optional feature so I won’t fuss too much. However, SC does more to AP than drain it. Having low AP has pretty big consequences. One is that moving while having no AP will start accumulating fatigue damage that causes the ridiculous stumbling. The other
more serious thing is that having no AP and high fatigue could give you a heart attack. Honestly, I generally find the consequences annoying but I do like that
the game encourages you to go take a break every now and then (Get the Courier to sit down) to heal AP. Just fits for me.
Other stuff is that maxed Primary Needs and Rads won’t kill you, just give you debuffs is great since I have more time to react and as a masochist, I need to take some time to recover. NPCs will take antivenoms, cures, and healing items independently is a nice plus.
Before I forget, I didn’t notice any performance issues with this mod.
DLCs
For the most part, SC 1.06 works fine with DLCs except DeadMoney but I’ll give a quick rundown anyway.
Dead Money – There’s barely any fresh food or clean waterleaving you in the mercy of constant parasites and food poisoning. Also because there are no doctors, getting diseased early on will gimp you until you finish the run or you reload an earlier save. Overall not quite balanced for Dead Money but it is manageable. Do note, this is my seventh run of FNV so I know what I’m doing at this point.
Honest Hearts – Plenty of food everywhere, Daniel sellsmedicine and Zion Valley is not exceptionally dangerous. However, Zion Valley is home to Green Geckos which spit poison at your companions and has some Spore Carriers which can give you or your companions S/22x – a game over at this point.
Old World Blues – With how much fighting you do, expect thetrio of Fatigue, Concussion, and Muscle Cramps and as a plus, Insomnia. However fresh food is plentiful and while the Auto-Doc cannot cure diseases, the Sink can sell you meds and there’s more than few meds and cures scattered about Big MT.
Lonesome Road – Fights are spaced far enough that Insomniaisn’t an issue and since you can leave anytime you want; diseases shouldn’t be a problem unless you’re ill prepared. Also since LR is the shortest of the four DLCs, you’re not in for an attrition fight anyway.
Conclusion
Overall, I like this mod. There’re quite a few things Idisagree with but the only feature I’ll straight up call bad is stumbling but that’s more of a pet peeve really. If you want a more challenging FNV experience, load up SurvivalCore and be sure to thank or make some suggestions because Apparition around.
I apologize for the very slow progress for updates as of late. SC was getting updated almost weekly, until 1.06-beta. The dev cycle for this mod ended up being pretty long, starting early in this year, and I've managed to burn myself out. On top of this, there's University to focus on as well. Rest assured, there WILL be updates eventually, I just need to get my bearings back.
I encourage anyone to read this if you're considering using the mod for version 1.06-beta, as for the most part it is very accurate.
I will sticky this post once the spoiler tags are in place. Thanks again!
P.S.
I like DM the most and sometimes play the game only to play DM, so my opinion is from player who extremely familiar with Sierra Madre.
Here are replacers that are much better made:
2. Cyberware 2281 - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/6871 - Implants
3. Enhanced Vision - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/68781 - Enhanced Vision Modes(Night Vision, Thermal, EM)
4. Immersive Primary Needs - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/68720
5. lStewies Tweaks - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/66347 (for zoomable scope and hold breath)
6. Just Mods Assorted - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/66666 - Sprint & Bullet Time
7. B42 Quickthrow - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/66686 - grenade hotkey replacement
8. Misc. Gamesetting Tweaks - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/69462
9. PN - Immersive Primary Needs - https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/68720
I don't have Project Nevada but I have Critical Damage Overhaul.
Edit: It appears the mod author is still active, so hopefully we see an update for this soon, but it's already been three years, so it may still be some time.
If you're committed to it, maybe a mod that allows you to set NPCs as essential will help mitigate the damage to quest-central NPCs.
EDIT: I actually found the files and did what you suggested. I backed up my saves just in case. Hopefully it works.
What the f*#@ gives, bro??