So I said that I’d play through Fallout 4 all over again with mods and so I did, but it turned out that all I needed was the comprehensive Horizon overhaul mod. For a while I did have Survival Options because I can’t live without save-anywhere but Horizon has this covered as well. I won’t list everything this mod does because it’s too huge and I feel like I’ve barely touched the settlement management bits but I will go into what I liked about it and what I think could be improved.
First of all, this is indeed Survival Mode as I’d hoped it would be. One of the most annoying things about the mode as implemented by Bethesda is that it ups the game’s difficulty by greatly increasing enemy health such that they become bullet sponges. This mod rebalances combat damage and health levels completely, making it feel much more realistic. I also love how food and drink items now don’t restore health at all. You need them to satisfy hunger and thirst needs but restoring health requires entirely separate first aid kits and bandages. This does mean carrying around more stuff but the mod helps you in that regard by incorporating backpacks to increase your load capacity. In general, this is how the mod operates. It inflicts inconvenience and pain in the name of realism but also gives you plenty of tools to help deal with them.
More examples of this include the caravan routes which are used in place of fast travel. You need to build these hubs in your settlements and they need a minimum of three settlers to support the route plus it costs supply points depending on the travel distance but it does give you the ability to fast travel in a way that doesn’t break immersion. Being forced to walk everywhere is an essential part of survival mode and it’s great at showing you all kinds of unmarked places of interest and encounters that Bethesda built into this huge gamespace, but if you have to repeatedly walk the same route over and over again, it really kills the sense of fun as well. Another example is of course the availability of items to give you back save-anywhere. Initially you get consumables are each allow a manual save but you can get an unlimited use version soon enough in exchange for some cash. It’s more restrictive than the usual save system as it is unusable in combat and you can’t save too often but that’s fine. These make for great examples of why Horizon is all you need (well, plus def_ui to make the presentation prettier anyway.)
In fact due to the cargo bots and the scrap storage provided by the resource management desk hauling around loot and managing your stuff across different settlements is much easier than the base game. Ammunition may have weight so you can’t just haul everything all the time but the virtual storage space that is scrap storage gives easy access to your stash wherever you have a properly set up settlement. There are also quick shortcuts to outfit your settlers with a standardized set of gear and using fertilizer to get more of specific types of crops is very useful. In short, once everything is set up, you actually feel a lot more powerful and in control than in the vanilla game.
Of course the road to get there is still a long and difficult one. A lot of the appeal of survival mode is in being forced to drink dirty water because you can’t find clean water and having to avoid enemies because you can’t afford the resources that it would take to survive the fight. Occasionally however I wonder if the mod doesn’t overdo it. Going through the entirety of a large raider base like Corvega and not finding a single bottle of purified water or a piece of clean food is its own brand of unrealistic, especially when you can pick up plenty of alcoholic and soft drinks and drugs at the same time. I played through this with a melee character but it seemed to me that using guns regularly would be a problem due to scarcity of ammunition. Again, it gets better later with the ability to craft them but it does seem the beginning is unduly difficult.
The biggest problem is still that the mod is huge and getting to grips with it takes a long time. Many useful recipes are locked behind perks or even worse collectible magazines. As the documentation notes sometimes the unlock requirements are either one of two but they are also sometimes both and the user interface has no way of telling you which is it until you actually try to build something. The mod also reworks the perks system but I’m not sure that the decisions are always sound ones. For example, the Technologist perk is weird to me, especially when Science and Robotics are still there and this one is tied to Perception. Note however that you can pick up all sorts of magazines everywhere, including in the mailbox sent by your companions, so I suppose you will get everything eventually. Similarly power armor is effectively unusable without investing in a lot of perks.
With all of these changes, getting the mod would also be pretty much pointless for those not interesting in developing the settlements. You’d quickly run out of food, water and healing items without building the appropriate infrastructure to support your adventuring. If you’re okay with it, the mod is fantastic and I would recommend it without reservation. It really does feel like survival mode as it was meant to be played. It’s great how happy I was to run into some radstags so I could kill them for their meat. Reaching a settlement with a doctor in it is a meaningful accomplishment. And I can’t tell you how invaluable Vertibird grenades are, especially as it is now impossible to be completely immune to radiation. Once you manage to reach Virgil in the Glowing Sea once, using vertibirds to travel to and fro is so natural and easy.
It’s also important to note that this is a great mod because Fallout 4 itself is such a great game. Even after 200 hours in, I’m still coming across new locations and new encounters. Without this mod, continuous exploration feels tiresome after a while as it’s just more of the same. But the mod extends the development curve, pushing you continually expand your network of settlements, gain access to better resources and to unlock more equipment. I’m rather embarrassed by how much time I’ve put into it but I don’t regret any of it at all.
