I’ve spent most of my afternoons/evenings since late last year, getting back into Fallout 4 and modding it to my liking. The last time I touched fallout 4 was in 2015 when my daughter was born.
It took me some time to come to terms with the state of Fallout 4. I was modding with Vortex and got a decent modlist going for Next-Gen, but I spent a lot of time curating what works and what doesn’t and keeping in mind that some mods are dated, and had to consider whether they would work with Next-Gen or not.
Everyone was recommending to downgrade Fallout 4 – yet I had a working Next Gen list, and I was quite happy with the performance and stability and features. I wanted to share my modlist with others, but I some mods were not on Nexus, so handling a modlist of around 400 files would be a challenge. I also wasn’t sure if I was just being ignorant and missing out by not going the downgrade route.
I then stumbled upon a Reddit post recommending The Midnight Ride modlist. I tried it and loved it for several reasons:
It’s relatively easy to install
It’s well documented
It works well
It’s stable
Lots of improvements
However, I felt I didn’t gain anything from my modlist, and lost out on some features that, although not major, was important to me. But now, I’ve been exposed to Wabajack, the automated modlist installer.
I also became painfully aware that I needed to switch to Mod Organiser to accomodate Wabbajack. I haven’t used MO2 in ages, so I broke up my project into smaller pieces, and tackled each step one by one, only moving on when I reached success.
Converting to MO2 was painful, because there’s no export function. I started doing things by hand, but that took too long. Eventually I copied just the mod downloads and deployed them from there – I later discovered why this would be an issue, and it bit me in the ass by the time I had to build my Wabbajack list.
I spent a good chunk of December 2024 up to a few days ago just getting my Modlist into shape, and then learning Wabbajack and it’s intricacies.
I eventually won the day and got my modlist uploaded. I built a website and a discord support server, and fleshed out my documentation and support resources.
My point being, I did all the above, so that you don’t have to. The end result is a Next-Gen, automated install that is stable, feature rich, and combines most of the best fundemental community improvements to Fallout 4, for a fresh playthrough.