Fallout 4: 7 Mods That Turn It Into A Realistic Survival Game

Bring on the hunger, thirst, and real radiation damage - the things we want in a post-apocalyptic RPG.

Fallout 4 Review We've now spent solid three months blasting our way through Fallout 4's vaults, factories and wastelands - of both the urban and rural varieties - and for some of us post-nuclear Boston is starting pretty familiar, as if it were our giant, stinking irradiated backyard. In fact, you could say that things have got a little bit too comfortable for wasteland wanderers these days, as we've repopulated all the possible settlements throughout the land, cranked our power armours to the max, and have raiders fleeing at the sight of us. If you're looking to reignite that sense of fear and trepidation you had when first playing Fallout 4, then you need to turn it into a bit more of a survival game, where hunger and thirst are constant worries, radiation could prove lethal, and a single stray bullet could end your life. Thankfully, the community surrounding Fallout 4 is as active as with any Bethesda game, and there are plenty of mods out there to make it a bit more like the much-loved Hardcore mode of Fallout: New Vegas. Want your experience to be more of a struggle for survival? Sure you do, and these mods will make it so...

7. Hunger, Thirst And Sleep Deprivation

Download Hunger and thirst modDownload Eat_Drink_Sleep One of the most cherished features of the most revered game in Bethesda's Fallout series, New Vegas, was the Hardcore mode, in which food, drink and sleep are all crucial to helping you survive in the wasteland. This was, for whatever reason, dropped for Fallout 4, leaving us to rely on the good work of modders to make up for Bethesda's oversight. To that end, you can try out the Hunger and thirst mod, which cleverly makes the player 'addicted' to food and water (in its own way a fitting description of our real-world relationship with those essentials). This mod will require you to eat or drink at least once a day, otherwise you'll suffer major penalties to your stats. Eat_Drink_Sleep is not for the feint-hearted. It applies tough debuffs if you don't drink water every five hours, with the effect being a 'crippled leg' which reduces movement. If you don't eat, you get lower endurance and accuracy, while not sleeping reduces agility and gives you the 'crippled' effect, making your vision blurry. The modder recommends you go into the console and "set timescale to 10" to make time go by a bit slower (and more realistically), giving you more time between requiring top-ups. It's a bit weird when your character screams 'Argh, it's broken' upon becoming hungry, but you can just, erm, pretend he's referring to his broken... bowels? Maybe?
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Gamer, Researcher of strange things. I'm a writer-editor hybrid whose writings on video games, technology and movies can be found across the internet. I've even ventured into the realm of current affairs on occasion but, unable to face reality, have retreated into expatiating on things on screens instead.