What Is Radfall?

A massive overhauled and finely tuned Fallout 4 experience. It is designed to rebalance the game with the goal of making the game less of a sandbox power fantasy, and turning FO4 into an actual survival game, without turning it into a grindy simulator you need a spreadsheet to keep track of everything. Instead of just adding more "survival" mechanics, it slims down and rebalances the existing vanilla game, to make it so surviving the post apocalypse requires engaging with the world, and managing your resources carefully.

Radfall started as an all-in-one compilation of several of my survival mods, plus my perks overhaul. I was running into issues developing them as seperate modules, and so I decided that I'd rather do it as an all-in-one, with a single universal load order patcher. I decided to do it as a Patreon exclusive as a way to say thank you to my supporters. Users wanting a free version of Radfall can still install some or all of my mods from the Nexus (with the required patches and load order patchers), and that can get you about 80% of the way there.

There are two ways to use Radfall - Either as a simple one-step installation on top of a stock Life in the Ruins load order, or you can do-it-yourself into your own modlist. Note that if you're going the DIY route, that I strongly recommend using a mod that handles loot rarity and general game balance - my personal recommendation (and what I use in LitR) is Lunar Fallout Overhaul, but there are several different overhauls available, each with it's own take on general balance. Use whatever you like, or even keep it vanilla if you want.

How to get Radfall

Radfall is available to all current paid patron subscribers at no extra cost.

Non-subscribers can purchase access to just this collection of posts (including the download, and all future updates) for a one-time payment.

Features

Health And Healing (Stimpacked)

One of the issues with Vanilla Fallout 4's Survival Mode is the healing and damage system. By massively increasing the amount of damage the player takes, and decreasing the amount of damage the player deals, the game gets turned into an action respawn shooter, where you try encounters over and over until you can pass it without dying. Instead of using a stimpak or food to get back your lost health, you respawn, which makes the game less survival and more tactical.

In order to make combat less of a tactical respawn action game and more of a strategic survival one, Radfall introduces a segmented health system. Food only heals you to the top of a segment, in order to get segments back you need to see a doctor or use a Stimpak or Medpak.

Check out the full Health System Overview

Carry Weight (Loaded Out)

It's widely agreed that Fallout's Over-Encumbered mechanic is terrible. If you pickup 1 gram too much, suddenly you can't run or fast travel, and you're forced to drop something to be able to move again. The penalty here is taking the game's most boring mechanic (movement) and making it even more boring. This is just bad game design, particularly in an open world game where you can just come back for things later. It doesn't force the player to choose between one thing and another, it just forces the player to waste time.

The primary design goal is to make Encumbrance a manageable state, and to introduce player choice around when the player chooses to be encumbered, and how much to risk being encumbered. The player has less carry weight (a lot less, if you're in survival) and so they will be forced to choose more often, BUT dipping into over-encumbrance is now manageable, especially with the strong back perks, and traveling while encumbered back to base should be possible, as long as you keep your weapon holstered. The end result is that the player is forced to choose how far to push their luck carrying loot home.

Check out the full Carry Weight System overview

Crafting

Food & Drink

In vanilla fallout, within the first few minutes of the game the meat starts throwing itself at you. Radroaches, molerats, mongrel dogs, all these "tasty" little stimpaks with legs that practically jump into your pockets- so much so that in survival, you can't even begin to carry it all. There's no feeling of scarcity, and you mostly end up just ignoring meat drops.

At the same time, for most of those raw meat items, there's a single, boring, recipe to grill them. Some mods have tried to make cooking more of a crafting system, but they always end leaving the crafting menu (even more of) a confusing mess. In vanilla, for the scant few meats where you actually have a choice about what to cook with it, the options are hidden away, impossible to easily compare, because there are so many useless recipes to grill a hundred different meat types (that you didn't bother to pick up in the first place).

Check out the full Food and Drink Crafting overview.

Weapons (Degrade and Salvage)

Have you ever looked at the scope on your 10mm Pistol, and thought to yourself, "Why can't I just take the scope from there, and put it on my rifle? Well, now you can!

Radfall massively overhauls weapon crafting, via a custom fo4edit script that adds receiver degradation, and reworks the crafting recipes to use a universal weapon scrap system.

Check out the full weapon crafting overview.

Power Armor

In Vanilla FO4, Power Armor isn't very special. You get handed a free set in one of the tutorial quests, and keeping it running is easy, the only drawback is it doesn't really protect you very well. Life in the Ruins does quite a lot to overhaul Power Armor progression already- from blowing up the free tutorial PA, to reworking balance and progression and requiring Perks to repair it. Radfall is basically the icing on that cake, giving a few extra tweaks to how it's crafted and the related perks.

Check out Power Armor Crafting Overview.

Settlements (Home Unimprovement)

Do you agree the workshop crafting menu is a bloated mess? Does the idea of having to manually decorate a settlement with crap that has zero gameplay effect bore you? Do you want a streamlined settlement crafting experience that focuses on crafting things that matter?

In Radfall, the basic idea is that the player is forced to use what already exists in a settlement, instead of terraforming it from the ground up into a new city, de-emphasizing the settlement building aspect of the game, and allowing the player to focus more on the questing and combat gameplay loops. Almost all the structures, furniture, and decorations have been completely disabled from the build menu. If you're running LitR, this builds on top of a selection of pre-built player homes, as well as mods that heavily rework the minutemen questline, and my Settler Built Settlement mod.

But, if unlike me you enjoy building settlements, Radfall does come with MCM configurations to revert the workshop menu changes.

Check out the full Settlement Crafting Overview

Perks (True Perks)

The core problem with the Vanilla Perks in FO4, is that Bethesda decided to drop the skill system, which means that a lot of the perks end up just doing the job of skills, which makes them boring. A lot of mods out there try to fix this by adding back the skill system. Radfall takes a slightly different approach- what if all the perks were actually worthy of being called "Perks"?
The perks in Radfall have been rebuilt from the ground up to offer interesting choices and a totally new gameplay experience. Every single perk has been reworked, and the entire poster has been re-arranged as part of this.

See the full perk overview.

Economy (Barter)

Have you ever thought it odd that vendors will literally buy anything and everything? Regardless of whether it's something they might be able to sell. Or maybe you're the kind of player who thinks it's crazy that they're basically willing to be your personal pawn shop, showering you endlessly with caps for bringing them your garbage. Or maybe you are just interested in a game where the economy doesn't break before level 5.

The economy in Radfall is heavily based on Trade. Vendors don't have a ton of caps, so instead of dragging back every single scrap of junk to any old vendor and just converting it to caps, you will have to find items that a particular vendor is interested in- generally things that they sell, as well as high-value items they're interested in. A weapons vendor will buy high value weapons, but won't be interested in Chems, whereas a Chem vendor will. Some items are universally valueable, like cigarettes.

See the full Economy overview.

Combat

In general, Radfall doesn't make a lot of changes to the difficulty of combat. I've built it mainly to handle the survival resource aspects of the game. In LitR, I rely on Lunar Fallout Overhaul to handle the balance of the main game (and if you're running a non-LitR list I recommend grabbing it, or another similar mod like Damn Apocalypse), along with mods like Super Mutant Redux, and Gunner Outfit Overhaul, and a Dangerous Deathclaws to make NPCs that should be harder more of a challenge.

However, there were a few minor tweaks I've mod on top of all that as part of Radfall.

Survival Mode

LitR makes a handful of changes directly to survival mode, and Radfall makes further changes on top of that. The overall goal is to make FO4 a feel like survival game natively, instead of just a power fantasy with some extra pointless systems tacked on top.

See the full description of changes to the survival systems