When they’re not gathering alchemical ingredients, playing post-apocalyptic dress-up, or practising their mini-nuke touchdown throws, Fallout 4’s Sole Survivor can often be found fending off the many dangers of The Commonwealth.
Whether it’s pre-war Chinese soldiers lurking below the soil, power armour-wearing raider bosses looking for their next victim or imposing Brotherhood of Steel gunships patrolling the skies, the sheer range of enemies inhabiting post-apocalyptia makes just staying alive a minor miracle.
If you’re a vault dweller who revels in the chaos of conflict, but don’t think the vanilla game’s combat delivers a realistic level of danger, a new mod might be worth taking a look at.
Feel like Fallout 4’s skirmishes aren’t giving you enough of an adrenaline rush?
The mod in question is called ‘Gunfighter Framework’ and is the work of prolific modder ghostfc3s, whose previous work has ensured that the Sole Survivor will have to undergo training in order to to use power armour and made raiders a little more reasonable.
This time, with some help from existing mods like GloriousWarrior’s ‘Agony Animation Fixes’ and jojosmo’s ‘Real Time Cover Penetration Framework’, they’ve decided to create a successor to their mod ‘Survival First Aid’, which retains a lot of the hardcore damage effects and mechanics present in the original, but also expands on it with some fresh changes.
For instance, the new version of the mod includes separate systems designed to apply damage and enchantment-style bleeding effects to NPCs and the player, while also accurately simulating the stopping power different types of armour would have against specific ammo types and melee attacks.
Rather than simply jamming an endless amount of stimpaks and med-x into your body if you take a bullet and end up with a crippled limb or a lesion that’s slowly turning your vault suit red, you’ll have to use body part-specific treatments, such as an arm splint or a headwrap, to get rid of any lingering negative effects.
The mod also comes with a number of optional elements that add some extra hardcore twists to gameplay, such as ‘Operator Mode’, which ensures that you’ll only be able to craft improvised versions of healing items, making full-strength pre-war meds much more rare.
If you’re looking for a fresh weapon to add to the loadout you’ll be using to test out the changes enacted by ghostfc3s’ mod, a couple of other new mods, Pigness and Bwones’ ‘Lever Action Shotgun Winchester 1887’ and Broodahood and Sovereign’s ‘BH Gewehr 43 - Battle Rifle’ might be worth taking a look at.
Regardless of whether your Sole Survivor is now practising diving behind solid objects in order to avoid ruining their best outfit, make sure to follow us for more updates on interesting mods like this one for Skyrim and Cyberpunk 2077. You can also check out our mods of the month for January 2023.