Targeting HUD Enhanced
Like many people playing Fallout 4, I often have difficulty tracking down the bodies of the things I kill in the wasteland, particularly when explosives are involved. Somebody chucks a few grenades and suddenly that Legendary Whatever you were so proud to take down is nowhere to be found, probably gone forever, along with your chances of getting the Legendary loot off of its body. Almost makes me wish Rex’s Search and Mark perk had made the transition from New Vegas to Fallout 4. Almost.
What’s more maddening is that we have several ways of highlighting the living, who frankly aren’t nearly as hard to track down. “Several”… okay, two: Berry Mentats and the Targeting HUD mod for Power Armor. Still, the basic idea is there. Wouldn’t it be possible to expand that to the dead?
Unsurprisingly, it turns out the answer is yes. So with a few hours of tinkering, I’ve got the first part of what I hope to be an elegant solution to the problem.
THE MOD
Targeting HUD Enhanced does pretty much what you’d think: it enhances the Targeting HUD mod. Specifically, it expands what it will highlight to cover corpses, and changes the color of the highlight depending on if it is highlighting a friend (green), enemy (red), or corpse (blue). Highlighting will change in realtime: that is to say, if you provoke a normally friendly NPC into combat with you the highlight will switch from green to red the moment they start attacking. Similarly, killing an NPC or creature will immediately change the highlight from green/red to blue.
NOTES
This is a BETA release. The mod currently has some same-as-master record entries which are there as placeholders (more or less). You may wish to remove these entries if you are making a merged patch.
If you start this mod while in a suit of Power Armor which has the Targeting HUD, you will need to exit and re-enter the Power Armor for the effect to work. This only needs to be done when you first install the mod; you don’t have to do this every time you start the game or anything. You will also need to do the same thing if you uninstall this mod while in a Targeting HUD-equipped suit of Power Armor.
Currently this mod only affects the Targeting HUD mod for Power Armor. In the future I intend for this to work the same way for Berry Mentats. That functionality is merely a matter of me figuring out how to properly tint the Berry Mentats highlight effect, which due to the absence of the GECK is not as straightforward as it sounds (hint: it involves hex editing).
If it matters, this mod uses NO NEW TEXTURES, only one ESP file, meaning a much smaller install size and less to manage.