GOG is having a giveaway for the total conversion mod of Fallout: London.

You can read about it here.

Thanks, Marian! I read about it this morning, but wasn't sure where to get it!

It should be interesting.

I'm going to let a bunch of downloads happen and see how it goes. It's particular about which version you have.

I've played for 15 minutes and the highlight so far is hearing, "Wah, wah neva chaanges." in British accent. Using the GOG version of Fallout 4 is the most painless way to install this mod because GOG is still selling the old version, the one before the recent next-gen update. The old version of FO4 is what works best for Fallout London.

If you have the Steam version of FO4, you have to "downgrade" it to before the next-gen version, which is a very tech-heavy process if you do it manually, and a very unsafe one if you use the third-party utility (provided by Fallout London) that asks for your Steam user name and password.

I already have the Steam version of FO4. But I ended up buying the GOG version for $15.99. This way, I can have both the next-gen and non-next gen versions of FO4. I suspect we need both versions for the time being (and near future) since many mods are compatible to one but not the other.

I've been waiting for this forever.


I have the GOG Fallout 4 GOTY edition. Is that the one to use? Actually, I'd better uninstall my FO4 game altogether, but it would be good to know if I have the right version of it.

This is what it says at the link Marian posted...

GOG FO4 is definitely the recommended version. You need to keep it installed. Then you need to go to a different page to download Fallout London: https://www.gog.com/en/game/fallout_london . During installation, you will be warned that while playing Fallout London, you won't be able to play vanilla Fallout 4. Fallout London will completely take over, until you finish it and uninstall it.

That is why I also have the Steam version of FO4, in case I need to go back to the vanilla game.

Well, I'm definitely not done in the original game, so I will wait. Just hit level 72 and cleaning up a lot of old quests. Still haven't put The Institute out of its misery.

One way to have two separate copies of Fallout 4 is to create two Windows user accounts on your PC, then install Steam (or GOG) and Fallout 4 on the two accounts. I haven't tried this method and don't know if there is any gotcha. But this is usually how family members share one PC: Mom has her account and programs, while Dad has his, on the same PC.

Since Fallout76 has a big issue stemming from its recent update, I may install my GOG Fallout 4 and Fallout London, give it a whirl.

I've played thousands of hours of Fallout 4 and now my mods won't work anyway, so I uninstalled the whole shebang including the saves and I'll start fresh.

So the game installed and started to run flawlessly, but now it's crashing constantly at the same place other people are reporting crashes -- after a train ride into the city. After each crash I can move forward a bit more in the game, but it's becoming too frustrating to continue at this point.

It's too bad, because visually and gameplay-wise it's fantastic.

Hopefully these issues will be fixed ASAP.

The suggested fix is to install the Nexus/Vortex mod Buffout4 but I can't get that mod to even download, let alone install. I just get an error message. Again, frustrating given that I've downloaded literally hundreds of mods for Fallout 4 in the past.

Hopefully other people are having the same problem with the Buffout4 download and it will be corrected.

There was a problem somehow with my Nexus account verification. Who knows?

Anyway, once I corrected that, the mod installed automatically (I use Vortex downloads) and now the game run perfectly.

*********

My first impressions of the game are that it is superb.

Visually, it's far more beautiful than any Fallout game. The music is fantastic, The voice acting is great. The setting is disorienting because it's London, and things look different. They feel different. The food is different and the medications are different. The random enemies are different. But it's still Fallout and you know what to do and when to do it.

This could be a lot of fun.

So glad it's working for you now! I really hope you enjoy it.

Luckily I haven't had a single crash in 3+ hours, even though crashes are usually a regular occurrence whenever I play any modded, older Bethesda games (Oblivion, Skyrim, FO3, FO4).

"Tickets," not caps, are apparently this game's currency. The opening area (the "mysterious lab") has a room with a bit of an easter egg: a terminal that has all the mod donors' names. There is an elevator that takes you to the top floor, where a "jammed door" can be opened with 7+ Strength (which I couldn't do), and supposedly good loot is inside. And there is the area where you exit to the train station. Those are the highlights of the opening area. There isn't a single weapon anywhere in the opening area, as far as I could see. After you exit the train, you are told you take extra damage until you find a doctor. So this is decidedly harder difficulty early on. In Fallout 3 or 4, you get a security baton or gun very early on, and things generally don't seem as hard.

There was a walking cane in the underground area just before you get to the train, plus a magazine, beside a corpse on a bench The cane can be used as a weapon. The radshrews were relatively easy to punch, at least.

I guess we can go back to open that door later in the game.


My biggest surprise was a couple of foxes; I ignored them thinking they were just foxes like in Fallout, and they insta-killed me. I guess the British foxes are finally getting their revenge on humans.

Wow, I completely missed the walking cane, and I thought I had combed the place pretty well. I play at the very hard difficulty, and the radshrews could kill me with their damage-over-time poison.

I've also started seeing some CTDs. But after I set "Run as Administrator" in the f4se_loader.exe file (screenshot), and set the custom executable to be f4se_loader.exe in GOG Galaxy (screenshot), I haven't had a crash since.

Since i installed Buffout4 I have only had one crash, which is acceptable. The game feels pretty stable now. If I have any more trouble I'll look at that.

I'm finding it difficult and I've run out of ammunition for my best gun. I think I may have gone to far astray in my wandering. However, I have found my dog companion! So the wandering was worth it. Now I'll go back to the starting area again and move out more slowly.


EDIT:

Okay, I am now revising my opinion of the game.

Sadly, it is almost unplayable if you're anything but a melee player. There is almost no ammo to be found anywhere so a VATS/Ranged character is basically DOA. There are no areas that don't have large mobs of enemies, so exploration isn't a whole lot of fun. A VATS shotgun blast to the head nicks a ghoul in the ear and does almost no damage. There is no easy starting area to explore and gain levels.

I've put thousands of hours into Fallout games and I'm having trouble on Easy.

It's turned into a slog. Too bad, because it looks fabulous.

Getting that pet dog has helped a lot, because he is like Dogmeat, and can fight enemies with you. Ammo is definitely scarce. After 4+ hours, I think I've got only about a sum total of forty 9mm rounds and thirty .32 rounds. Also, you are told you deal less damage and take more damage until you find that doctor, who is supposedly in Thameshaven. Stimpaks are scarce too. I have to kill insects and weak animals, and cook food with their meat to get healing material. Beds can heal fully, so I have to remember their locations. I'm playing at very hard difficulty, which also doesn't make things easy. I also took the "Kamikazi" perk, which raises my AP regen but makes me take +20% damage from enemies. Big mistake.

I took Kamikazi, too!

I have done better lately. First off, if you pick up a downed enemy's weapon first before anything else, then you get the ammo from that weapon. Also I took the perk that gives more ammo in containers. But dropping the difficulty has at least allowed me to enjoy the game a bit more. Once I get back up and running with a few more levels and perks I'll pop the difficulty back up again.

I found the doctor in Thameshaven but I can't recall if there was a dialogue about healing me. I'll check back with him once I'm done with my current quest. I have healed one of the two diseases.

Churchill is definitely helpful in a bind. Plus he's really cute!


EDIT: Now I finally feel as though I'm getting somewhere. Up to level 9, almost 19. It's time to put perks into weapon crafting, I think. It's still a slog, but I can take on a group of enemies now.

The doctor at Thameshaven Market cures your "Railway Spine" ailment (take 10% more damage), but doesn't cure your "Lab Rat" ailment (deal 10% less damage).

I'm only at level 5, and haven't found any settlements. And I have tons of stuff that needs storing. So I'll do what I did in Fallout 4: find a "safe" container that doesn't reset. I'll store a few items inside any container in the game, wait 48 hours or more, and if the items remain, it's a safe container. I used this strategy in Oblivion and Skyrim too. It's hard to believe that back then, games usually didn't really give you a proper stash box, which is something we take for granted today.

Near one of the airports I found a settlement location, but it's inhabited by enemies. It looks like you can actually build a settlement there. I might cruise on back there and see if I can take it over now that I have some ammunition and a halfway-decent weapon.

I've been hopping back to the Swan and Mitre to sell excess guns, but the merchant has run out of money. I would dearly love to be able to save all those guns I've had to drop.

I also installed the FOV Slider and Player Height mod (the pre-nextgen version) to make the terminals look right. For some reason, terminals in Fallout London have shrunken screens (screenshot). The mod fixes this (screenshot).

I finally have a settlement. Of course, I've played Fallout 4 with mods for so long I forgot what a slog it is to build a settlement in vanilla FO4. Just gathering enough stuff to make a couple of turrets! and of course having to have all the perks, too.

I wonder if my usual mods would work? EDIT: Answering my question, yes, at least some of them do. I'll make sure nothing I add is recent or has been updated, but anyway a lot of the settlement mods I've been using are years old anyway.


Anyway, I am now extremely impressed. Everything about this mod is great. The size of it, the details, the overwhelming number of places to explore. It really is a full game.


finally turned on the radio and heard the original songs. Some of them are hilarious.

Things are looking up on my end too. I went from having only 50 rounds of .32 ammo to about 400+ rounds after killing several human enemies. I also got a musket rifle from one of the "Jack Tar" enemies. It deals 110 damage per shot, and it allowed me to one-shot a legendary mittenlurk in the face before it had a chance to mutate (and gain all its health back). Very satisfying. I still haven't found a settlement, and have to store all my junk in some random container in the world.

Regarding the mod's crashing problem (which is the biggest issue of this mod), it is probably inherited from the original game, so I probably won't lay this on Team FOLON. I only pay attention to bugs that are truly attributable to the mod. And those have been minor so far from what I've seen. For instance, an armor workbench erroneously shows that you have a Pip-Boy, not ATTA-Boy. In the dog food factory, when you take the elevator to the basement, the elevator's voice erroneously says, "Going up."

Hi hagatha (and all who are playing Fallout London), do you see the Aquaboy/Aquagirl perk in your game? I could really use it to navigate in the flooded areas and swim in the Thames. I just don't see it on the list of perks. If it was removed, I wonder why.

The Action Boy/Girl perk is there. Because the perks are listed rather than laid out on a chart, it makes them harder to find, but it is there. I've been thinking about taking it, but at the moment I'm focusing on crafting perks to raise my weapon damage. It took me forever to find the Local Leader Perk.

My game has only crashed once in many hours since I installed the Buffout 4 perk.

However, I do have a serious bug in the settlement building; settlers don't come, or the number of settlers changes from one minute to the next, it's not possible to properly assign them to resources, and generally they stand rooted in one place and never move, unless they vanish.

Not sure where to report this bug, but I see form various fora that it's not uncommon.

As for settlements:

I'm actually looking for Aquaboy/Aquagirl, which lets you swim without taking rads. I've gathered from online discussions that it was indeed removed from the game. The developers don't want you to swim across water barriers to access areas that would otherwise be difficult to access. So they make the rads in the water prohibitively high. Even taking Rad-X or doing anything to increase your rad resistance wouldn't help. This is kind of a problematic design choice if you ask me, since Fallout games are all about going anywhere and doing anything. I was so looking forward to swimming underwater in the Thames, and I'm disappointed that I can't do it.

Oops, sorry, I misread.

Those I haven't seen. I guess they aren't available. Naturally I tried swimming directly across to get to a goal and died within about 5 seconds! So of course I had to go the long way around, which took many hours and led me off into other quests.

No problem. I was really bummed about not being able to swim underwater, since that was a big aspect in Fallout 4. Bethesda put a lot of stuff on the ocean floor for the player to discover.

I just got my first settlement in Fallout 4. From playing Fallout 4, I seem to recall that your settlers can steal your items (weapons, armor, etc.) if you leave them lying on the ground or store them in containers that they can access. So I store my items in a container up on a roof. And I only store junk items in the workbench.

Unlike in Fallout 76, crafting stations in Fallout 4 do not give you access to your junk items unless the crafting stations are in your settlement. Even if you have the Local Leader rank 2 perk that links all your settlements, you still don't have access to your junk on any crafting station outside your settlements. I'm considering installing a mod that gives me global access to junk. It sounds like cheating, but since the difficulty is quite high in Fallout London (and I play at very hard difficulty), I don't mind giving myself some advantage.

Yes, the settlement building and crafting in general is like Fallout 4, not Fallout 76.

I confess that I cheat a lot! I don't mean in the gameplay, but when it comes to settlement building, the console is my friend. I just code in the stuff I need for crafting. Life is too short to spend all my time carting junk. Normally in Fallout 4 I use a .bat file that gave you 10,000 of each crafting ingredient, but I couldn't remember how to get it to work. It lets me have fun building.

I've also added a few of my favourite settlement mods.

I have come across a couple of pretty nasty issues. The settlers are definitely bugged and most of the time you can't attach them to resources like stores. At least I have enough food at my two settlements. London Bridge is the worst but Covent Garden is also pretty bad. Not sure about the others as I haven't found them yet.

The other bug came upon me suddenly; all of a sudden my game just speeded up, and now dialogue overlaps all the time. Lockpicking is also problematic since the lockpick moves so fast.

Yes, the bugs and instability are a major issue in playing Fallout London. But as I said, they are probably inherited from Fallout 4, so I'm not eager to blame Team FOLON. We knew crashes and instability would be part of the experience, as anyone who has played heavily-modded versions of older Bethesda games knows. The instability will always exist unless and until Bethesda fixes its outdated engine. The nextgen update was supposed to help with that, but I've heard that crashes still occur with the nextgen update too.

I can definitely testify to the occasional crashes in Fallout 4. They don't happen often, but BOOM! I'm at desktop now and then! I would LOVE to install a settlement building mod, but the one you mentioned, hagatha, has a couple of broken links and I'm afraid to install it.

Another issue with Fallout London is long load times when you enter or exit an area or load a saved game. The more complex the area you are loading into, the longer the load times. Sometimes it could take 30-90 seconds or more -- often long enough for a bathroom break or tea break. I seem to recall that the vanilla version of Fallout 4 also had similarly long load times. In Fallout 76, the load times are much improved (5-20 secs) -- and Fallout 76 is probably several times bigger as a game world than Fallout 4.

Oh, I can also attest to the insane load times of 30 - 90 seconds or more. Very annoying... You'd think they would have figured out how to fix that after 8 years and the popularity of the game.

I downloaded a mod that fixed the long load times on Fallout London.

Draclvr, I use Vortex exclusively for mods and I 've not had any trouble with it. I just let the manager do the installing and it works really well, puts everything in the correct order and allows you to disable any mod that doesn't work. There are discussions on line about which ones work with the updated version of Fallout 4. I've seen a couple. Don't know how far people have gotten with it.

So far I've found about eight mods that are great with my game. I can actually work with the settlements as they are; I sent away several of the London Bridge settlers to my second settlement, which is behaving better, and now both places are happy. I note that the one dog I have in a settlement is behaving correctly and sleeps in her doghouse as usual. Good girl!

Of course, I hit the Churchill bug and he's vanished but apparently there is now a mod that fixes so I might try that next.

Otherwise, the game is a lot of fun. Much more difficult, partly because you don't know what to expect.


EDIT: The Vortex mod I use is called Long Loading Times Fix, and it's on Vortex. I just downloaded it, and viola! Much better. It's a Fallout 4 mod, so it might work on the game itself.

I just found another pretty major bug in Fallout London: those beer coasters you find in pubs are bugged. Instead of boosting your weapon damage which their descriptions say they do, they actually HALVE it. Here is a mod that fixes this and restores your weapon damage.

Oh, darn! And I was literally doing a pub crawl looking for those coasters!

Thanks for that link.

I found a huge settlement site. Clearly the FOLON team understand what makes a good site. This one has a nice grid of road with concrete foundations like Sanctuary in F4, some water for purifiers, and a huge amount of garden plot for crops. I've added some of my favourite settlement mods and really enjoying the build. So far only the London Bridge site is bugged.

Fallout London has a 1.01 update today, and it fixes a lot of issues, including most beer coasters, but NOT the combat coaster (located in The Hound) -- which still erroneously halves all your weapon damage. So you still need to use the mod I mentioned in my last post.

I was totally enjoying my settlements, which I spent a great deal of time on, and now the settlers won't assign properly. Darn. It was working fine yesterday but today they just wander around. Oh well. I'll just get back to the game.

I see that the update includes a fix for Churchill, so I'll go see if I can find him.

Settler assignments have always been problematic for me before and after the patch, although I still only have the London Bridge settlement. Only food (crops) and beds are always auto-assigned correctly. But shops, guard posts, scavenger stations, brahmin feeds, etc. are on and off, and settlers never stand at their posts. Tickets and fertilizer do show up in the workbench, indicating shops and brahmin feeds are working properly. But sometimes they stop showing up, and I have to resassign the shops and brahmin feeds.

The one thing I do love is that when you place a trough, the giant sheep drop immediately.

The London Bridge settlement is actually the most stable now in terms of happiness. I have discovered that every time I dropped in to a settlement the happiness started to drop. Turning off the settlement beacon seems to stop that. I now have four settlements.

I found another pretty major bug in Fallout London if you are into settlement building like I am. If a shop costs 50 tickets to build, the game will take 500 tickets from you. Costs 60 tickets, you pay 600 tickets. Costs 12 tickets, you pay 1200 tickets (not a typo). I posted this on reddit and several people have confirmed. This is when you need to use a console command to add tickets back to you. It is the same command that adds caps in the original Fallout 4. To add 4000 tickets, you type this in the console:

player.additem f 4000

EDIT:

It turns out that 500, 600, and 1200 are actually the correct costs, since the original Fallout 4 has those costs too. But Fallout London cuts off the zeros and shows 50, 60, and 12 instead. It is still a bug that needs to be fixed, since many players may not know the costs from Fallout 4. I've played FO4 for hundreds of hours, but it was a long time ago; and even I forgot about the shops' high costs.

I'm usually pretty happy to use the console for quality-of-life enhancements as long as it doesn't make the game too easy. I played Fallout 4 several times before I decided that scrounging for crafting materials was wasting my time and so I used mods and the console to make all of that easier.

I hadn't noticed the discrepancy between the stated cost and actual cost. I had a fair amount of tickets already, though not enough for all shops in all settlements and certainly not for the higher-level shops. I usually start with the base level trader and the base level bar.

I wouldn't mind scavenging for junk if I could explore a new area at the same time. But yes, after looting Corvega Assembly for the 20th time, I had to use console commands to "give" myself things.

I stopped playing for a few days, and now the game is crashing on start-up.

Sigh.

There must have been an update, I guess.

The last update was 1.01 on August 12th. If it crashes on start-up, the game likely has trouble loading your most recent save. In fact, this could happen to any save. Any save may be unable to load no matter how many times you try. But I seem to have found a workaround. When that happens, note the location of the save that can't load. If it was saved at Location A, then load another save, one that was saved at a nearby Location B. If that, too, doesn't load, load another save, until one loads successfully. Once you are in the game, either travel on foot or fast-travel to Location A. If you succeed, load the very first save again, the one that takes you to Location A. And you'll see that it suddenly is able to load. Restart the game, load that same save again, and it is likely to load again, even though just a few minutes ago you weren't able to load that very save.

I suspect this phenomenon is due to the engine crashing while loading the assets into the game. When you load a save game, or when you travel to a different location, the game has to load the assets into the world. Sometimes one method works but the other doesn't. I've seen the reverse happen too: loading a saved game is fine, but running or fast-traveling to another location crashes the game.