Official Fallout 3 Catch-All

Insta pre-order. Which I've never done.

You folks playing on PC, what sort of machine are you getting along with? I'm slowly building an idea for my next machine, primarily to be a Minecraft and Fallout appliance. I know FO3 was 2008 and that FONV didn't eef things up graphically too much.

Of course, I'd want to be ready for FO4, assuming it uses the enhancements found in Skyrim. And maybe weather?

Ideally, I'd like to run with some nice mods, but that can wait. Maybe.

I'd say to wait for it to actually be announced first.

New York City, Niagra Falls, the Great Lakes, the frozen north, the setting for pretty much every Lovecraft and King story, the mighty harvests of glowing maple sap and man-eating lobster! I'm in.

Curious to hear of truly lean games. I horde like crazy, but I keep fantasizing about taking a single weapon and minimal supplies through the wasteland. Currently playing NV but it applies equally to each current-gen Fallout game.

That's essentially what I did. I would bring all the stuff I collected back to my underground hideout. But for exploration, I packed lightly. Typically a stealth gun, a sword and some grenades for the pants exploding. Under 50 kg was the way I liked to travel. Leaves more room to collect all the goodies.

I'm frequently within 10 pounds of encumbrance. I have a few stashes, but still have a sniper option, a close-quarters option (shotgun or melee), a high-firing-rate option (SMG), and often an energy option. And all the ammo I have for those items. And a refrigerator-worth of food.

Think I'm going to adapt soon.

Thinking of playing this for the first time soon after picking up the GOTY in a steam sale way back. Can anyone advise on mods to use? The "Remastered" patch and the NMC Texture Pack look promising, but I'm not even sure if they're compatible with one another, or if I might be missing any other good ones.

Kloreep wrote:

Thinking of playing this for the first time soon after picking up the GOTY in a steam sale way back. Can anyone advise on mods to use? The "Remastered" patch and the NMC Texture Pack look promising, but I'm not even sure if they're compatible with one another, or if I might be missing any other good ones.

I honestly can't think of anything specific off the top of my head beyond "Fellout". My advice would be to get the Fallout Mod Manager, and/or the Nexus Mod Manager/downloader. Very handy tools for keeping track of your mods and checking for conflicts.

Kloreep wrote:

Thinking of playing this for the first time soon after picking up the GOTY in a steam sale way back. Can anyone advise on mods to use? The "Remastered" patch and the NMC Texture Pack look promising, but I'm not even sure if they're compatible with one another, or if I might be missing any other good ones.

I recommend going to Fallout Nexus and simply looking at their top files section, then going from there. You will find a lot of great things there, but be forewarned, you'll probably end up wanting 50,000 mods!

I'd recommend Conelrad Civil Defense Radio, which is a new radio station filled with music in the same vein as the main game and civil defense announcements. Because you will get fed up with listening to Three Dog and Enclave broadcasts. Also Existence 2.0 by the same fellows, which is a bunch of all original ambient music and nihilistic robot ramblings that goes very well with exploring ruined metro stations and the like.

Fallout 3 Redesigned for less horrible faces, and Energy Visuals Enhanced for prettier plasma deaths and the like.

Gameplay wise I like Wanderer's Edition, but that might be a bit hard core and drastic a change for a first play, and you'll need a bunch of interoperability patches to make it play nice with EVE and redesigned.

Be careful with the Energy Visuals Enhanced mod. It caused a great deal of extra crashing for me. But I would definitely suggest the underground hideout mod. That is by far the greatest mod ever. Go to Fallout Nexus and look for it there.

Phew, well I asked for it.

I now have:
-NMC Textures
-Fallout 3 Redesigned AKA Project Beauty
-Fellout
-Fallout Street Lights
-Megaton Lighting Overhaul
-Conelrad radio
-Fallout Remastered (with compatibility patches for Project Beauty and Fellout)

I have to say, this mod-selection ARG is pretty fun. Maybe I'll put off Fallout 3 and play it some more.

Let's hope these all get along.

You seem to be missing the underground hideout mod.... seriously, go get it!

The description sounds like it adds some ultra-weapons in? I'm looking to not toy too much with balance first time out.

No no, it adds a little weapon cabinet with some other weapons. To be honest, I never used them. I simply love it for the wall mount where you can put all your weapons.

Ah, okay. As long as it's mainly just a place to store stuff, I can dig.

Get the High Rollers Suite mod.

Kloreep wrote:

Ah, okay. As long as it's mainly just a place to store stuff, I can dig. :D

If you want a selection of adventure mods that is focused on story/character/notes/puzzles/etc. and with limited combat you may want to check out my Fallout 3 mods.
They do introduce new weapons/items, but I've tried to balance things against vanilla assets, so there's no uber-weapons to be found.
The Mantis Imperative also features a bunch of optional balance modules, to make things tougher/reduce ammunition found/other changes.

A Note Easily Missed
An Evening with Mister Manchester
To sleep - perchance to dream
In the Shadow of the Swamp
The Mantis Imperative

Puce, that balance mod sounds great. I might have to go back and play another character for all of that.

Or is it NV compatible? (I haven't played through that yet...)

For New Vegas I have my Tweak and Balance center; it's a collection of independent modules designed to make the player's life generally a bit more miserable. There's quite a few to choose from, so if you're not sure what to grab I'd recommend the PMT - MultiTweak Pack; it combines the following modules:
Deadlier Combat Mk II
More Demanding Hardcore
Reduced Ammo & Chems
Reduced Caps & Item value
Reduced Armor & Weapon value
Destructible Ordnance
More Radiation from Pre-war Ingestibles
Reduced World Items
Slower Reloading

It also features a quaint little house the player can discover that features pinball machines (with real pinball machine noises, wheee) that can be used to customize several of the mod's features. There's also a few notes painting a slightly unsettling (or perhaps just odd) mini-story about the nature of the house.

Puce Moose, this is almost exactly what I want a new gaming rig for: GECK. Have you written up anything about modding Fallout? I know there are lots of resources, but you seem to be a great resource for this.

muraii:

I haven't written any articles specifically about modding. In my various Easter produce notes in my mods (Easter eggs hidden in my adventures) I often talk about the development process. In terms of tutorials, Cipscis's scripting tutorial is a good place to start. Bethesda's main GECK page also has a lot of helpful things.

Quick tips that have helped reduce my rage when dealing with the GECK's foibles over the past few years:

  • Save often. The GECK can be a harsh mistress, and crash for no good reason. Save frequently, and back up your saved .esp/.esm in a different folder at the end of every modding session. I've had the GECK turn cannibalistic and destroy a module I was working on, so having reliable backups can save blood, sweat, and tears.
  • Use FO3edit/FNVedit. These awesome tools not only help you keep your mod 'clean', but they can also help eradicate silly mistakes that you failed to notice until later in your mod's development. In my first mod, A Note Easily Missed, I did something to the landscape heightmap in an area that made several hundred trees/rocks/bushes float in the air. I nearly gave up on the project after thinking of the hours I'd have to spend individually relocating each object. FO3edit allowed me to correct my error in just a couple of minutes.
  • Notes. When making a new note, change the ID first, hit OK, and save it before changing any text. I've accidentally overwritten several notes by failing to do this, and it's a lesson that can save you considerable frustration.
  • History Sweep. Make sure you can account for the things you have created. Why would xxx be here? What brought it here? Who left it here? Everything should have a history, even if it's not directly revealed to the player. If you're birthing stories from the void, keep a timeline thread attached to each area. If I don't have a nifty little movie playing in my head about what this place was like before & after the war, it's time to send it back to the drawing board.
  • Mucho obligado! Now, to get the machine and check eBay for a couple cans o' focus.

    I guess I'll have to go back and read all of this.
    I recently got the bug to mod Fallout 3.
    I've been following one you tube tutorial as closely as I can, but just end up with a fallout that won't load.

    I've tried pure fose/fomm and nexus.

    Ghostship:

    When I've had Fallout completely fail to load, it's usually been from a .ini file that's referencing something that's not there (font changes, etc.) or it's messed up in some other way. You may want to delete the .ini files from your My Games/Fallout 3 folder to force the game to rebuild them.

    Fallout 3 modding is in a weird place now that the fallout nexus has its own installer and some mods from FNV have come over.

    I was just recently playing a modded game and used some of the FNV graphics mods. Here is what I've gone with. Some of the packages didn't work and I had to recreate them by extracting the mod file and using FOMM to create a mod. I haven't had many crashes. I did get some weird compatibility issue and this was solved by enabling mods one by one and seeing when I could no longer load the game. Then I had to mess with the load order just a bit I think.

    Original Fallout Mod Manager
    Fallout Script Extender (no need for 4GB memory mod now) (install this manually)
    Archive Invalidated fix

    In load order (I believe I used the Auto Sort option in FOMM):
    Unofficial Fallout 3 Patch
    EVE
    Mart's Mutant Mod
    Companion Core
    RobCo Certified v2
    Enhanced Weather - Rain and Snow
    DCInteriors Combo Edition (and the others)
    ImaginatorFO3 (this is a graphics mod)
    Cinematech (another graphics mod)
    Classic Fallout Weapons BETA
    WeaponModKits
    Robco Certified Mechanist's Edition
    Fellout
    Dynavision (another graphics mod)
    Director's Chair (UI for all those previous graphics mods)
    Greener Grass
    Neil MC Terrain Pack
    High Resolution Rocks

    All of these graphics mods remove the green tint, nice lighting, provide higher quality textures, and best of all, depth of field blur (which is awesome). The Robco Certified stuff allows you to fix robots (after a perk) and have them follow you around as helpers. Mart's Mutant stuff adds a lot of variety to the enemies.

    I may jump back in. Are there any others people have liked?

    I picked this up along with NV on a super sale, and installed both. I actually prefer FO3 more than NV so far, so im sticking with this one for a while. Installed FO3 wanderers edition, and am really liking the complexity addition it gives

    FWE, along with a pile of other mods, results in many unrequested trips back to my desktop. Here's a tip I've found after many hours of being booted:

    If it's happening when you enter/exit doors, it's probably actually the autosave. Turning off the autosave will prevent it temporarily, but you may still crash as soon as you try to save manually. If you end up with a character stuck indoors due to a consistent crash-on-save whenever you try to leave, try killing the character once. Just fire up the game, switch to third-person (usually F), open the console (usually the ` key), click yourself (you should see your character's name near the top of the screen now), and type "kill" and press enter. After you keel-over and the game reloads, try leaving and saving the game again. I have no explanation for why this works, but I've recovered my broken save file three times so far by doing that.

    Speaking of mods... Since the Mothership Zeta DLC stretches the Fallout canon uncomfortably anyhow, the Mothership Zeta Crew mod tries to do something entertaining with all that absurdity. I'd recommend it as an second or third play-through, alternate-universe power-trip. It could still use some polish, but there's a surprising amount of decent content in there, and it gets plenty of credit for originality.

    I'm glad you mentioned Mothership Zeta, Veggie. It reminded me that someone asked me about he whereabouts of my Mothership Zeta mod recently. It's still there, just nestled within my The Mantis Imperative mod (check under the optional files section). I'm not sure why I didn't publish it as a new mod when I made it, but well, there it is.

    It was my attempt to "spruce up" Mothership Zeta a bit, by giving it a bit more variety and making it a lot more challenging.

    Primary features:
    over 20 new alien food items with new meshes, textures, effects, and PiPBoy icons to find.
    New Hydroponics bay to explore
    ammunition availability significantly reduced
    alien turrets now much more powerful
    four new alien weapons (which the player can take and use against the aliens)
    the player does not recover his or her inventory until the end of the adventure
    fix to vanilla bug related to death ray disabling
    drastic reduction in the effectiveness of alien biogel
    several new abomination types, including cryo and burning abominations
    new perk

    IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/zetazeta.jpg)

    It's not anywhere near as ambitious or comprehensive as the Mothership Zeta Crew mod, but it might fit the bill if you want a nastier take on the original without a lot of drastic changes.