DevBlog - 6.4.0

Dev Blog - 6.4

The past 4 months or so, the list's been going through some pretty heavy renovations. I originally created the Wander profile because I wanted to take the list in a slightly different direction, focussing more on a streamlined survival experience and the core game content. Removing SS2 from the list, and cutting down to just 1 profile has given me the time to develop that vision. It's required adding/developing mods to replace some of the functionality of SS2 (Settler Built Settlements, Journey, Salvage Beacons, and rebuilding a lot of Home Unimprovement), but in general, I'm pretty happy with the changes. As awesome as SS2 is, it is a different game, and needs a purpose-built modlist, maintained by someone who actually understands the mod.

There are still a few things that I think need tweaking in LitR, regarding survival and settlement crafting, however overall the major renovations and cleanup to the gameplay design in the wake of SS2's removal are basically, finally, done. I'm not quite happy with bed crafting, I think sleeping bags are probably too hard to craft. And I want the new player homes to be better integrated both with fast travel, and with the workshop sharing (supply lines, and the craftable dropbox). The gameplay loop I want to go for, is that you pick one of the pre-decorated player homes as a primary base, and use settlements as a kind of forward operating base. I'm also interested in adding more things to the workshop crafting menu that have a purpose, and get unlocked through gameplay, especially for the Minutemen. It's not that I hated vanilla settlement crafting, I just hated that 90% of the stuff to build was completely pointless, just there as a meaningless resource drain with no gameplay effect, as a way to sink excess resources.

I've also removed Lightweight Lighting, added back True Storms and swapped the ENB back to True Sight. This is primarily driven by 1) wanting True Storms back without having to maintain patches for it, and 2) wanting mod added interiors to not be weirdly lit, which is a side effect of Lightweight Lighting. Lightweight Lighting + Spectrum did look marginally better, however my expectation is that most people either don't care that much about it, OR they care enough to want to swap to a more full featured ENB and Lighting setup anyway, and what I do in the base list doesn't matter to them anyway.

The final thing that snuck into 6.4 was a balance overhaul on melee weapons. I've reworked the damage progression on a bunch of the mod added weapons, there were a few outliers that were way overpowered. I've also included in my SMR fork a restriction that the huge, oversized weaponf for mutants cannot be used by the player unless they're in Power Armor.

The next prerelease, which is going to go up almost immediately following this because it's actually a very simple change to make, is a swap to Direct Hit & Bastion. It's a pretty fundamental change to combat balance, so I want to get opinions from people with more time actually playing the list than I have regarding how it feels.