I’ve seen a lot of people having trouble installing mods manually lately, especially people who don’t own flat Fallout 4 for reference. The information people post is usually very partial. I pieced together what I could, and everything seems to be working alright. Please let me know if I’ve missed anything!
This mod turns Fallout 4 into a Silent Hill like Nigthtmare. From now on you will be surrounded by Thick Fog, strange sounds and occasionally being dragged into a otherworld where monsters (SirenHead, Mumblers, Lyingfigures, Ghouls, Silent hill Nurses, Twin head Screamers and Dogs) await you! In other words, you may need to ESMify some of the master plugins of the 'Merged Plugin' file (if necessary), load those ESM masters and the 'Merged Plugin.esp' (set as the 'active file') into the Construction Kit, and save the result immediately as the 'Merged Plugin' file again or as a new filename.
- The first step for modding any Bethesda game is Archive Invalidation. To implement this here, edit this file:
Documents/My Games/Fallout4Vr/Fallout4VrCustom.ini
I think this file is created after running the game once, but if it doesn’t exist you can just create it. Add the following:
[Archive]
sResourceDataDirsFinal=
bInvalidateOlderFiles=1
Note: I’ve seen some posts instructing people to list your modded directories for the DataDirs value, but according to flat Fallout 4’s Archive Invalidation page, doing so is unnecessary and can drastically increase loading times.
How To Open Esp Files
- Drop your mod files into the following folder:
Steam/steamapps/common/Fallout 4 VR/Data/
This should be any files included with the mods, such as .esp, .esm, .ba2, or directories.
- Edit the following file:
%localappdata%/Fallout4VR/Plugins.txt
which is the same as the following absolute path:
C:/Users/YOUR_USERNAME/AppData/Local/Fallout4VR/Plugins.txt
This is where a lot of people are having problems. This file doesn’t exist by default but it’s just a text file and you can create it manually.
Add the full filenames of any .esp or .esm files (including the file extension) you put in the Data/ folder in the previous step. This makes Fallout aware of those files.
- Still in the plugins.txt file, put an asterisk (*) at the beginning of each filename you want to be active. This tells Fallout to load these files in-game.
And you’re done! Pretty sure that’s all the steps. It’s been working for me so far but I’ve only installed a handful of mods.
For reference, my plugins.txt looks like this:
*Insignificant Object Remover.esp
*Remove Overweight Cant Run Message.esp
*Vivid Fallout – All in One – Best Choice.esp
How To Merge Esp Files Fallout 4 Free
And a bonus: If you want to tweak different settings, rather than crawling .ini files and guessing at variables I highly recommend /u/bilago‘s configuration tool, which lists all the values used in the engine and edits them for you, as well as including dedicated menus for some of the more important tweaks.