Hardcore Survival of the Commonwealth

Hardcore Survival of the Commonwealth

Hardcore Survival of the Commonwealth (HSC) is a mod that increases the difficulty of Survival Mode.

Description
HSC primarily focuses on making food, water and sleep more essential to the player’s ability to function properly, as well as introducing massive reductions to carry weight and the ability to improve it.

Primary Needs
Your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats – especially Strength, Endurance, and Charisma, will see additional and more severe reductions if you don’t look after your needs to eat, drink and sleep. Furthermore, being hungry or thirsty enough will, just like with being tired, render you unable to sprint. And if you still negate your needs, you’ll eventually not even be able to run. These progressive conditions will also affect you at a much earlier stage with HSC than they would in the vanilla game. For the sake of immersion and quality, a few status messages have been edited slightly, to fit the situation regardless of which need triggered it.

The periodic damage itself, which you receive at the most extreme stages of hunger and thirst, has been significantly increased. HSC also removes the safety limit that existed in the vanilla game, which made it impossible to actually lose all your Health and die from periodic damage alone. Now however, extreme hunger or thirst can kill you if you ignore your needs for long enough.

With all that being said though; as long as you just follow a good routine for when to eat, drink and sleep, you should rarely if ever need to worry about these things.

Carry Weight
Carry weight for the player has been reduced significantly. Now the player starts with a carry weight of 30, with each level in Strength increasing it by 2. When picking the Strong Back perk, the player gains +10 to carry weight at rank 1, and another +15 to carry weight at rank 2. The Lone Wanderer perk now provides the player with +5 to carry weight at rank 1, and +10 to carry weight at rank 2.

All in all, this means that a player with a Strength of 1 and no perks will have a carry weight of 32. A player with a Strength of 10, rank 2 in Strong Back and rank 2 in Lone Wanderer will have a carry weight of 85. It may seem very low compared to you’re used to from playing the vanilla game, but remember; this is the amount of stuff your character actually is able to carry while running around without any trouble.

If you do overencumber yourself, the penalties will also be much more severe, and your ability to perform in both combat and dialogues will suffer greatly. Additionally, just as with hunger and thirst, the periodic damage from being overencumbered has been increased, although not to the same extent. However, since it too had its safety limit removed, it is possible to die from being overencumbered for an extensive period of time.

Notice: Unlike most perks that boost stats, Strong Back will actually add the ranks together. This is how it’s designed both in the vanilla game as well as when using HSC. So even when picking the second rank, the benefit of the first rank will not automatically be removed. In contrast, Lone Wanderer (and most other stat-related perks) are set to remove any previous stat boosts and only let the most recent one be active.

Other
The Adrenaline effect will now only apply its Bonus Damage to unarmed and melee attacks.

Balancing
This mod is very much open to feedback and ideas for additional modifications and improvements to be made.

This is probably self-explanatory, but do not download this mod unless you are looking to turn Fallout 4 into a realistic hardcore survival experience. If you prefer to play the game casually or more for the story, this mod is absolutely not suited for your gameplay preferences.

For an average character, this means that you will be able to carry a rifle, a pistol and perhaps a knife. You’ll be able to wear a little bit of armor and carry some supplies. But that’s about it. No longer will you carry around a small garbage dump of junk along with a dozen weapons with more ammunition than you ever would need. Using HSC could probably be a good cure against excessive hoarding too; no longer will you be able to efficiently loot every container and corpse you come across.

Power Armor may provide a small boost to your Strength, but that bonus will only take you so far. If you want to master Power Armor, you’ll need to be quite strong in the first place, and even then, you will need to sacrifice many other supplies and armor in order to manage your carry capacity.

If you wear pocketed armor pieces, they will provide the same bonuses as they do in the vanilla game. This is acceptable and fairly immersive, since pockets would play a bigger role than sheer physical strength if you wanted to carry many small items at once. Certain foods and drinks that directly boost carry weight have also retained their functionality from the vanilla game – making them very useful.

Installation
Using Vortex is the recommended method.

Requirements
This mod is intended to be played in Survival Mode. This mod requires the Far Harbor DLC.

If you install this mod on an older save, you might need to alter your Strength the first time, by using a consumable or anything similar. This should make sure that everything about your carry weight is updated and set appropriately. If you don’t do this manually, you are almost guaranteed to have it happen automatically as soon as you get hungry, or are affected by any other similar feature. Nonetheless, it’s still something worth being aware of.

Compatibility
HSC should be compatible with most mods, unless they make edits to any of the same assets.

HSC is not compatible with Night Stalker version 1.4 or older. If you are using Night Stalker, make sure you are at using version 1.5 or newer.