No Magic Compass — Fallout 4 Edition
Overview:
This is the Fallout 4 version of my New Vegas Mod of the same name.
I always found it strange how the compass magically knows where all the enemies and locations are for you. Not only is this immersion breaking, it also makes the game significantly easier, and discourages exploration.
This mod aims to fix all of that by removing the hand-holding that the vanilla compass does for you.
It is designed to work in a way that is compatible with any and all HUD mods.
Long Description:
Bethesda games have always had a lot of hand-holding present throughout a lot of their mechanics. I always found the compass, in all of the recent Fallout games, to be game-breakingly powerful, giving you instinctive knowledge of where all nearby enemies and locations are. This not only punishes the idea of exploration (instead encouraging you to just zig-zag around the wasteland from area to area), but at least for me, ruins the immersion. I always felt like the wasteland was always supposed to feel like a desolate and strange place, and the insane compass markers and arrows kept making me feel like I was in a theme park, moving from attraction to attraction, and ignoring the travel time in between. It removed the sense of wonder when you stumble on a new random location.
This mod fixes all that by disabling all Location, Enemy and Quest markers. The compass should now only tell you what direction your facing. It also still shows the player marker, but I intend to disable this in a future version.
Installation:
To install this mod, I highly recommend you use a mod manager such as Nexus Mod Manager. It’s possible to install manually, but in order to disable the quest markers, a value needs to be changed in Fallout4Prefs.ini. The fomod installer will do this for you, but if for some reason you want to install it yourself, you can simply follow these steps.
1. Make sure your Fallout 4 installation is mod ready
2. Download the mod file
3. Extract the ESP from the archive to your games data folder (C:\Program Files\Steam\Steamapps\Common\Fallout4\Data by default) using 7-zip
4. add the plugins to plugins.txt in your C:\Users\\Application Data\Local\Fallout4 folder
4b) If you want to hide only Locations or Enemies, add only the ESP you want.
5. Open Fallout4Prefs.ini at C:\Users\\my games\fallout4 with notepad, and change the line
bShowQuestMarkers=1
to read
bShowQuestMarkers=0
The mod should then be installed and ready to play.
Compatibility and known issues:
This mod does not modify the UI at all, so it should be compatible with all mods that edit the UI, including ones released in the future. This should also include mods that directly modify the compass on the HUD.
This mod was created with TESVSNIP. I know some people don’t like that utility, and the mod itself seems to work fine, but this is just a heads up.
This mod should be relatively bug free. There are no currently known issues, however I haven’t rigorously tested it – I have played with it over the last few hours and had no issues with it so far. The only problem I can conceivably imagine happening is being unable to discover some locations. Every location I have discovered so far has worked fine, however I remember from the New Vegas version that there were some issues with this in the beginning.
If you find any locations which can’t be discovered, please let me know in the comments which ones and if you were able to discover them after removing the mod.
