Institute Danse

Institute Danse

Provides a lore friendly method of forcing Danse to join the Institute during Blind Betrayal.

Please note that this description will discuss end game spoilers involving Danse, the Institute, and the Brotherhood of Steel. If you do not wish to have these things spoiled you should probably stop reading. Otherwise:

This mod adds an additional outcome to Danse during the Blind Betrayal quest. Since Blind Betrayal cannot occur until after the player has reached the Institute and learned about the SRB and escaped synths it seems like a missed opportunity that there’s no way to recover Danse and bring him back to the Institute after learning he is a Synth. (The morality of that choice depending on your view of Synths as sentient beings or not) So this mod makes it possible by adding a new tool in the SRB that “brute forces” Synth Recall Codes in a narrow beam that will disable a Synth hit by it. (See Other Notes) Afterwards a courser is dispatched to relay the Synth back to the Institute SRB for reprogramming. After Danse is relayed to the Institute, you can find him in the SRB chair and use the terminal on the wall to determine what his fate will be.

1. Full Factory Reset which will turn him into M7-97, a common Synth who roams the Institute Concourse without much to say or do.
2. You may choose to Factory Reset and install the Courser App since Danse’s model supports it. In this case, you can recruit M7-97 as a follower to accompany you on missions throughout the Commonwealth though he will be without power armor, affinity, or romance options.
3. Finally you may choose an experimental procedure that will modify Danse’s perception and affiliation matrices. This newer process adjusts Danse to view the Institute as if it was the Brotherhood of Steel and vice versa. This option still provides Danse’s X01 armor (this time gifted by the Institute instead of scavenged) and continues with the cannon affinity and romance options.

Other Notes:

• By my own lore, the Synth Recall Broadcaster should work on every synth you find, immediately deactivating them. Since this is my first mod, the scope of making careful and lore appropriate edits to every quest/scene involving a Synth in the game is a bit beyond me. So the Recall Broadcaster only works on Danse and only during the Blind Betrayal quest.
• Reprogramming an entire Synth takes 24 in game hours, for the process to complete you can not be in the Institute SRB. The easiest solution is to go wait in the Concourse until you see the message “It’s time to go check on Danse”.
• Where you choose to use the Recall Broadcaster in Blind Betrayal has an affect on the outcome of that quest. If you shoot Danse before convincing Maxson to spare him, it will count as you killing Danse. If you choose to shoot Danse with the Recall Broadcaster in front of Maxson, Maxson will realize you’re working with the Institute when the Courser shows up and will turn hostile resulting in you being kicked out of the Brotherhood of Steel. If you shoot him after Maxson leaves but before returning to the Prydwen then the game will continue as if Danse was left alive.
• Both Danse and M7-97 get the ability to teleport to and from the Institute just like X6-88.
• Should you force Danse to the Institute after saving him and then finish the game for the Brotherhood or Minutemen, Scribe Haylen will have modified dialog. She still thanks you for saving Danse but she will no longer talk about visiting him at Listening Post Bravo since he is no longer there.
• This mod should work with other mods that change Danse as long as you select the Affiliation Matrix rewrite option. I’ve tested with other mods that restore the cut content from Blind Betrayal and they continued to work.
• This mod attempts to fix a bug in the base game, dismissing a follower and then cancelling at the Settlement Selection screen will send Danse and M7-97 back to their correct default home positions in the Institute instead of crashing out the Workshop NPC script. This is done with a dummy workbench that has an invalid location property to cause the default scripts to finish correctly.
• Another bug this mod attempts to fix in the base game. If you have Danse as a companion before Blind Betrayal, save him, and don’t take another companion before finishing the game with the Brotherhood of Steel; Maxson would turn hostile after completing the dialogue congratulating the player on victory at the top of Mass Fusion. lol. This fix disables Danse’s Brotherhood of Steel hostility script when the Player is on the top of the Mass Fusion building.
• Though this mod should work fine on an existing game, I tested by creating new games so there could be issues. Just make sure that you haven’t completed Blind Betrayal yet.

Special Thanks:
kinggath – Without his tutorials I would have been hopelessly lost in implementing my vision. Thanks so much!
greentea101 – Without the FO4 Voice File Reference Tool I wouldn’t have been able to reuse the audio from the base game. Which would have seriously compromised the quality I was aiming for.
xEdit 4.0.3 by ElminsterAU. Updates since 2012 include TES5Edit/SSEEdit/FO4Edit by Hlp, Zilav and Sharlikran. LOD management by Sheson. – FO4Edit was absolutely necessary because I somehow managed to nudge things all over the Commonwealth. Using FO4 Edit was the best “undo” I could find to make sure my mod only touches the bare minimum it needs to.
Oxhorn – His lore breakdowns were great for helping me establish my own lore as well as understanding parts of the game I had never seen so that I had a complete picture as I tried to make my mod fit in as closely as possible with the base game using the assets that were available.