First of all - it's weird when there are just moments as simple as walking through the woods that like, absolutely blow me away but recently while playing The Video Games it's stuff like this I appreciate. Not like "WOW GRAPHICS" but it's, wow - tone.

It's moments like this where I just get any sort of overwhelming feeling just from an environment where I just gotta go "hell yeah" and record something as simple as stalking through the woods with an NPC I've set to make a trade line between two outposts.

There's context attached to this too, and quick shoutout you can download this whole modpack experience here. It basically is fallout stalker mashup and while I will one day conquer understanding the ins and outs of all the complex systems in STALKER so I can get lost in that world, since I already understand the base mechanics of Fallout, making it an incredibly difficult survival experience is a little more digestable.

The cool thing about this is it is also still incredibly difficult, and I want to build some context to why this 20 second walk in the woods moment made me have to stop and write about it.

Basically, every "day" in the game I have to prep my food, water, ammo and meds. I make a plan to go do something, and it is incredibly perilous. I can easily die once I go like 50 meters past the border of whatever outpost I've set up. For those familiar with vanilla Fallout's survival mechanics - you can only save from sleeping in a bed. This mod actually added a bypass for that so you can save whenever, but I really appreciate that part of the experience so I've made that a Rule that I follow. It also helps that there's a camping mod in the list so I can drop a sleeping bag if I think an area is safe enough and catch a snooze if I want to save between my outposts (however I have woken up to incredibly difficult enemies in my face when sleeping in the woods lol).

A lot of the complaints leveled at Fallout 4 was the base building being kinda shallow and pointless. This modpack actually doesn't change settlements at all, but the context around them with the changed world being way more dangerous actually adds significant gameplay value to how I've been playing this.

There's a mod in here that like, doubles the amount of random encounter areas, and on top of that it will spawn groups of enemies that will actually stalk you. So you can be in one of your settlements, and suddenly you're being ambushed by a group of raiders, or two radscorpions, or whatever (this is different than the radiant quests where you have to go defend your settlements) that have been tracking you for 2km as you returned home. Suddenly, you want to create actual defensible perimeters in your settlements, and you want eyes looking out all those directions so you're not as surprised. The guard posts you can build actually bring a feeling of security when you slog back to an outpost after a day of scavenging.

The other thing settlements do is start to build a sense of security between the outposts by making trade routes. Literally just having one friendly NPC you know is trekking a route similar to yours means you have another set of eyes to help stop you from getting ambushed and murdered by a hellcat or just taking 2 shots from some raider in a bush (spotting enemies is much more difficult with all the added foliage and no compass) since they can help you spot them.

Anyway, I've spent like a ~24h worth of play time just making the area between sanctuary and the drive in not a complete death trap always and it has felt like a major accomplishment. I still have to be on my wit every time I traverse through the area, but now rather than taking a full day to trek from Sanctuary through Concord and into a location, I can feel a lot more confident knowing I have some pals walking the woods and more safe places with guards I can retreat to.