If there's an asterisk next to the mod name, it means there's an incompatibility with dialog mods like FDI or XDI. This happens with older mods that were made before those interface updates came out.

>Vault 494, Vault 1080, The Lost Vault
These three mods do basically the exact same thing. Of the three, Vault 494 is the best of the bunch. It tells a couple of self-contained stories, gives you a clear idea of what its Vault-Tec experiment was meant to do, and there's a story payoff at the end. Vault 1080 (commonly called "the NVIDIA mod") was clearly just a tech demo for toddrays, but to its credit, the lighting in this mod is absolutely top notch. The Lost Vault tried to go for the exploratory/environmental storytelling aspect, but the vault is so enormous it very quickly wears out its welcome; you get the basic gist of what the vault was about and what went wrong with the first info terminal, but then it just keeps going for another two or three hours. The "Residential Zone" is the most egregiously terrible area, since it's roughly 50 identical rooms with nothing in them.

>Welcome to Goodneighbor
Still has some glaring technical flaws, notably that it breaks the main questline and it screws with exterior cell precombs, so performance takes a huge hit. The one nice thing I can say about it is that it adds a bank heist mission. Unfortunately, there's no stakes to be had in it, since you get into the vault via a secret hatch, and there's no NPCs and no way to get caught; it's really less of a bank heist and more just going into a mostly empty room with a ton of gold bars. The voice acting is also really bad in that way most fan mods tend to be, with several kinds of low-quality mics to be had. Because the mod breaks exterior precombined meshes outside of Goodneighbor (which you'll notice is around downtown Boston), performance was absolutely crippled in several downtown cells. I ended up uninstalling the mod, despite knowing that uninstalling mods with scripting has a chance of corrupting your save, simply because the performance hit was staggering.

>Tales from the Commonwealth
For many, this is the "gold standard" of what quest mods should be. And to the mod author/s' credit, the "production value" (for lack of a better phrase) is phenomenal. The voice acting is great, and the recording quality, long the deathknell of many mods, is top notch. Several of the NPCs could easily be mistaken for NPCs that could be in the vanilla game. It adds a couple of new locations with, again, some well written and well acted characters, but there's little reason to go most of those places, since there's no quests or merchants, or anything really to do. The other downside is that most of the quests are either just fetch quests, or glorified miscellaneous encounters. There's a strong feeling of anticlimax in most of the quests. The one thing I really appreciated is that the script was written around existing voiced protagonist lines, so when an NPC talks to you and you respond, it's Nate/Nora actually answering and asking questions.

>Barrenwood
This one adds a whole new mapspace, that seems roughly comparable in size to Far Harbor. Again, some top notch audio recording here, although the mixing could use a bit of work, since most of the NPCs are almost too quiet to hear over the background music. Or maybe that was intentional to hide some questionable microphone quality. Some of the encounters lean a bit too "shooting gallery" for my taste, since it seems like every map marker has a horde of 10-15 feral ghouls, but that's a personal issue I have with the mod, and I know some people might prefer that. The big thing to note is that there aren't quest objective markers. Harkening back to Morrowind, you really have to pay attention to where you're meant to go. For example, there's an objective to find a secret bank robber hideout, and there's no giant objective marker telling you exactly where that ostensibly secret hideout is. The one major downside is that as nice as the existing content is, there isn't a whole lot of it. Of all the map markers in the game, only a handful of them have anything in them or any real reason to be visited. I would still say it's worth a download and a playthrough, because I guess of all the criticisms to have, "I wish there was more of it" is probably the best one to get.

>The Secret of Huntress Manor
Probably my favorite of all of the ones I've played. Adds a new location in Far Harbor and a decently lengthed questline. The acting is surprisingly good, and it builds on the Lovecraftian Dunwich characters and story introduced in Fallout 3 and 4. Like Tales From the Commonwealth, the script is written around the base game PC dialog, so the entire mod, including Nate/Nora is voiced.

>Xander's Aid
This one was really surprising, because it actually starts off really poorly, with an OC DONUT STEELE character that really seems like some kind of horrible author self-insert (he's a pre-war ghoul, but also looks human!) and a bland empty vault, but then very quickly opens up into a brand new worldspace with plenty of quests, a few new sets of collectibles, and much to see and explore. Most quest mods start off very promisingly before running out of ideas or steam, so it's bizarre to see a mod that starts off so badly and ends on such a high note. Definitely recommended.

>Guerlot's Radioactive Stories
Adds a couple of quests, unfortunately, none of the content is voiced. The big story quest does a fairly admirable job of trying to weave itself into the existing Fallout 4 lore and story. The story is about a kid who returned home to Sanctuary right after the bombs fell and finds out he had no way of getting into Vault 111, where his parents are. From there, the quest has you following in his footsteps to try find what ultimately became of the guy. What I really enjoyed about it was that it gave you some level of choice into how invested you get in the narrative. For example, in the beginning of the quest, you go to the guy's home in Sanctuary and find one of his notes, where he states he's going to Starlight Drive-In, but may stop at the Red Rocket for the night; so the quest objective updates and it directs you to the Drive-In, but going to Red Rocket first has you find more of his journal and fill out some more backstory. Another one of the quests is a sort of scavenger hunt that uses either riddles or treasure maps similar to Skyrim and the later Assassin's Creed games to locate more clues and ultimately find the object you're looking for. The last quest takes place in a labyrinth Vault that goes on a bit too long and sort of goes off the rails when aliens show up. Also ends on a really terrible note, when you end up finding the dead body of the kid, and a huge pop-up fills the screen that says something to the effect of "Don't worry, he's supposed to be dead!" Still, though, recommended if you're looking for non-combat heavy, more story-based mods.

>Atlas Summit Redux/Lima Outpost
These two mods are by the same guy, and set out to do basically the same thing, so they're getting reviewed together. Of the two, Lima Outpost is miles better than Atlas Summit.  Atlas Summit isn't technically a "quest mod," since the bulk of the content is meant to be a new player home/settlement, but there's a small quest involved to unlock the house, and a Simulator once the house is up and running to go through a few combat scenarios and unlock some more loot. The house itself is in the middle of the Glowing Sea, so it's kind of in a horrible location, and the sheer size of it makes the house sort of a hassle to actually try and use. The high point of the mod is definitely one of the Simulator scenarios that in the terminal is described as being used for the Enclave recruits to blow off steam in their downtime, in which you play a toy soldier and have to take down toy Chinese Soldiers, and you and the other NPCs are very tiny in an enormous house.

Lima Outpost, though, is actually pretty great. It's almost hard to believe they're by the same person. Adds a quest to get a much more reasonably sized Enclave bunker, but this one is located just outside of Sanctuary, instead of the middle of the goddamn Glowing Sea. Also unlocks five or six miscellaneous quests to explore several more faction-themed bunkers throughout the Commonwealth, including a beautifully designed "control" vault, one area that without giving too much away you're kind of forced to explore, and an inexplicable NCR bunker. Each bunker unlocks either faction specific power armor sets (Enclave, Pre-War Army, Brotherhood Outcasts), or new armor sets (Vault 71 jumpsuit, NCR trenchcoat). Aside from the autistic lore screeching about the NCR on the East Coast (they had trouble expanding beyond California, what the hell are they doing on the east coast?!), and again without wanting to give too much away, a character that had no real reason to be in the Glowing Sea, there are a few nitpicky things I can point out; such as loot being too plentiful (his Enclave variation of Rad-X is worth 160 caps, and you end up with like about a hundred of them, plus about fifty of each type of vanilla chem), and a bizarre design decision to not template his actors, opting instead to create new NPCs from scratch, which means that his Vaults and bunkers, despite being populated by about 30 hostile NPCs, only has one female face and one male face to go around. These are admittedly minor quibbles in what is otherwise a good mod, though.

>Introducing Radium Inc.
Made by the same guy who did Vault 494 and the excellent Huntress Manor. Despite this being his latest mod, it's the weakest of the three I played. It's also the lightest on content. You explore a new building downtown, and depending on the choice you make at the end of the first quest, you potentially lock yourself out of more than half of the story content and locations. Adds several custom junk items to loot lists, including a new flavor of Nuka-Cola, but like a lot of mods, the balance needs some work. His new junk items, even if they're just something like a pen or bar of soap, are worth over a hundred caps, and because they're injected in vanilla loot lists, they show up everywhere.

>Sparky's Quantum Adventure*
Oooh, boy. This one is rough. Part of me feels almost guilty that I'm going to slag it off, but there are typos, spelling mistakes, and grammatical errors in almost every line of dialog. To top it off, while the mod claims to be "fully voiced," what the author doesn't tell you is that almost every single NPC in the game is voiced by the same one guy with a shitty microphone, which is already bad enough, except the player character is also voiced by the exact same guy, regardless of whether you're playing Nate or Nora. There's one bit in the beginning that stuck with me because of just how goofy it was. You come into a science lab with about ten scientists and five security guards, all of whom have the same lines of dialog and all of whom have the exact same voice. It's unfortunate, because the twist at the end and the general story premise (you're hired by someone to travel back in time to pre-war Sanctuary to prevent the Great War) could have made for a fairly decent mod in the hands of a competent modder.

>Escape From Toule House/A Strange Calling*
I'm lumping these two together, because in a way, they're sort of two sides of the same coin. They're both heavily based around using the various contraption DLC items (logic gates, buttons, sliding doors, etc) but both set out to accomplish entirely different things. Toule House is a quest mod taking place in a mansion with a series of mostly unconnected puzzle rooms. Like most puzzle games, the individual puzzles range in quality from simple yet clever ones, to funny wordplay, to ones that give you that smug sense of self-satisfaction when you figure them out, to ones that are frustrating because you can't begin to figure out what ass backwards moon logic the creator was using. But, it's ultimately a well done, and fairly technical impressive mod. I want to tear the walls down in the house just to figure out how he got some of the behind-the-scenes stuff working. A Strange Calling, much like Escape, uses switches and logic gates extensively, but this one is a more exploration- and combat-based mod, with an enormous labyrinth to explore, enemy gauntlets, and a fairly decent boss fight at the end. The final "act" gets a bit too spawn-happy, and goes on a bit too long, but there's plenty to do and collect, and again, the technical aspect of how it all fits and works together is actually pretty impressive.

>The Kelly Manor Horror
A fairly well done spoopy mod, by the same guy that did Xander's Aid. Fully voiced, including vanilla player character lines. This is another case where I really wish there was more of it. What's there is sufficiently atmospheric and creepy, but the end sort of fizzles out and you're left with almost nothing in the way of story explanation or payoff. Still worth a download and a playthrough, but it is only about half an hour long.

>Vault 83- The Librarian
Shows some glimmers of promise when it comes to design, but is ultimately let down either by inexperience or laziness on the part of the mod author, and party because of the PS4's inability to load external assets, meaning the mod author made the choice to keep the entire mod to a single esp file. The library it adds as the location where you start the quest has a really clever use of a bookcase and static objects to store holotapes with poetry and short stories written by various fan contributors, which I thought was a nice idea, but then the rest of the library is the same bookcase with non-interactive, pre-war books. The titular Vault 83 is fairly nicely designed, but gives no insight into what the purpose of the vault was, and then the story introduces time travel both unexpectedly and mostly inexplicably. The other major thing that sticks out is that this mod adds three new NPCs, all of whom are fully voiced, except one of the characters is voiced by a computer text-to-speech program for absolutely no discernible reason.

>The Code*
This one I actually have quite a bit to say about. I want to start off by saying that despite the things I'm about to say, it is worth checking out. It's mostly well put together, adds a fair number of quests, it's decently written, and both the voice acting and recording quality are, with one or two exceptions very good. The mod adds a few new, completely original locations including a new worldspace, and they work and make sense both within the context of the story, and the larger context of Fallout lore. It does reuse some existing interior cells with some of the furniture and loot moved around, but this is a common shortcut that modders do and isn't really all that noticeable, with the one exception being the subway, where he reused the exact same layout for both the arriving and departing platforms, right down to the hidden safe with identical loot being present in both locations in the same spot. The main story concerns the Reavers, a name you may be familiar with if you played Fallout: Tactics, and starts off in a four story hotel with plenty of NPCs and a decent number of quests. The only issue I had this part of the mod is that you're introduced to a power struggle going on in the hotel, with the gangs at the bottom vying to move up to the higher floors, including a small time gang called the Blades (I don't actually know if they're meant to have any relation to the Fallout 1 Blades, since this is a small group of greasers); unfortunately, this is never really touched upon or expanded in any way. You make your way to the top floor, and immediately after are told to leave to go to your next destination. I guess it says something about the quality of the mod that I was invested enough to be upset that more wasn't done with the area, but it really would have been nice to have a continuation of that story and some kind of payoff. The next area is a subway there's not much to say about, and the last area is the new worldspace, the town of Spencer, MA. This is where the game opens up more a bit more with more sidequests, new companions and their sidequests, etc.

As good as the mod is overall, there are a number of technical issues, some of which may be hard for some people to overlook. These technical issues range from minor, but mildly annoying, to performance affecting, to weird and inexplicable. Some of the minor ones involve issues with pathfinding and navmeshes. This is an especially annoying problem during the hotel segment, because you're given temporary companions, who have a habit of standing directly in your way; the biggest issue is right before the metro tunnel, since you're given three temp companions while trying to fight off several dozen radscorpions. The town of Spencer doesn't seem to have previs, precombine, or LOD data, presumably to keep file sizes down, but this means you can expect longer loading times, framerate drops, very noticeable model pop-in (it's so bad that a giant church will pop in even if you're right across the street from it), and the occasional game lockup for a second or two while the game renders the next cell adjacent to you. One interior cell is noticeably affected by the lack of previs and LOD data, since the lack of it causes every window in the building to have the weird visual "ghosting" you experience when you noclip outside of the map. A bug at the beginning involving the radio station that gives the quest meant I spent most of the mod's story not knowing who we were looking for or why. This mod also shares an issue with a quite a few other quest mods in that quest markers never go away after completing the objective, and objectives remain active until you actually finish the quest. For example, in one quest you're told to restore power to a mine, so you can go to the power substation or dive into the flooded mine to restart the pumps manually. The quest marker and objective to talk to the NPC that gives you the quest will stay the entire time, and if you go to the substation and reroute power that way, the quest objective will still tell you to go into the mine and start the pump, even though you're unable to interact with it. The most bizarre issue, though, is that all the radroaches you fight continue their living/scurrying animations for several seconds after you kill them.

Despite the glaring technical flaws, I think the mod ultimately does enough right to warrant a playthrough. I think with a slightly longer dev time, or the mod author not suddenly deciding to quit modding shortly after release, this could have been one of the great mods that people put up there with Tales From the Commonwealth or made the usual "essential mods lists." As it stands, it's a good, but ultimately flawed gem.

>Katherine's Lost Bear
Pretty much a step-by-step blueprint on how to not make a mod. I'm not usually the type of person to shit on someone's work; even the ones I don't like, I try to bookend my review with nice things. Having said that, the creator of Katherine's Lost Bear can go fuck themselves with a rake. A mod that's about three hours long with maybe enough content to fill ten minutes. The story concerns a little girl (inexplicably and very noticeably voiced by a text-to-speech program) asking you to help her find her lost bear in a vault. The vault itself is just the Vault 75 interior, but every bit of clutter, furniture, junk, debris, decoration, etc removed. It's completely empty except for a few stray synths, until you reach the Atrium, where it's completely empty except for the 30 synths all placed in a very small group. The one terminal on the Overseer's Desk (and incidentally, the only piece of furniture in the entire vault) mentions something about the little girl possibly being magic, or a demon, and a few times there's sinister writing about not helping the little girl on the walls written in blood, but this is otherwise never brought up again or explained in any way. After you're done with that, you make your way through a metro station, again, completely empty except for another group of synths, and a group of five Sentry Bots; then you make your way through an inexplicably flooded empty room, where a spawn trigger summons a group of roughly twenty level 500 synths. A spawn trigger that doesn't bother summoning them remotely out of view; they just spawn like two feet above you, then drop to the ground and start attacking. I don't know why I kept going, but I went on to the next area.

A copy of the Mass Fusion Building cell, again, with absolutely every bit of furniture, clutter, absolutely everything removed, and most of the doors disabled. It's worth noting that the Mass Fusion building is actually fairly large, at about 30 stories tall maybe, and is so long that even the main game skips roughly half of it. This mod makes you go up each floor. Every five or so floors, there's a trap you have no way to avoid or disarm, since they're set to go off by an invisible spawn trigger, including one that's completely unavoidable and rigged to six missile launchers. Somehow make it through this without chucking your computer out the window, forsaking video games and all technology altogether to go live with the Amish, and you are rewarded with a bossfight with a level 400 Courser, that even at level 115 with an Instigating, fully upgraded Gauss Rifle, I was doing less than 5% HP damage with VATS crits. Luckily, Katherine is set to not fall too behind if you tell her to wait, and instantly teleports to where you're standing, so she did and immediately killed the courser in three hits. (More on that later.)

I'm nothing if not a masochist, so I kept going. The final area is a completely unnecessary new landmass. A new landmass that despite having nothing in it but a shack and a workbench, still tanked performance upon loading and necessitated a game restart. There you finally find her bear, a friendly Yao Guai. The other nice thing about this new landmass is that it's also not navmeshed, so while I headed straight for the objective, Katherine and her bear ran around the outside perimeter of the island in the opposite direction to get to a spot about a hundred in-game distance units (feet? meters?) away. Make it this far, and you're tasked with using with the workbench to set up defenses for a synth ambush. You're given 20 real time minutes and about 10,000 of each resource to set up turrets, with absolutely no way to speed up the timer or skip it. So you're stuck there, waiting for twenty minutes for the game to continue. Then four waves of 100 leveled synths and Sentry Bots spawn all over the island. Except they don't spawn all at once, and don't come to attack your fortified position, you have to run around to hit the spawn triggers, where they immediately get dropped right on your head. After all of that, you're meant to keep Katherine and the bear as companions. So I got on the boat and headed back to the Commonwealth, where the dead body of Katherine was waiting for me on the dock. It's worth noting that despite Katherine and her bear being a sort of "tag team" companion, the bear is actually scripted to follow you, not Katherine, and you're not actually able to dismiss or give commands to the bear, so he's just a big, loud, lumbering and mostly useless companion that mostly helps you get trapped in doorways and set off floor traps.

Oh, but the mod author is not just clueless about writing, pacing, level design, and fun, they also have never heard of "balance." At several points throughout the mod, you're given the new mod exclusive weapons, such as a sniper rifle that does 1600 ballistic damage per shot and is worth 9,000 caps. Or a modified Courser outfit from the aforementioned bossfight, which provides 700 damage resistance and is worth about 12,000 caps. Or the previously mentioned Katherine's Knife that killed an almost laughably overpowered Courser in three hits, which weighs one weight unit, is Very Fast, and does 250 each (EACH) of poison, bleeding, electric, and whatever regular damage is and is worth maybe 20,000 caps; although I guess I should note that the only reason I acquired the knife was because the otherwise essential child NPC Katherine died on my save. Items so comically overpowered they're pointless, and worth so much you'll never be able to sell them, since the merchant with the highest amount of caps only has about 2,000. Loot the few crates around the mod, and you're rewarded with 70 fragmentation grenades, 20 fragmentation mines, a second copy of the 1600 damage sniper rifle, 150 Deathclaw Steaks, 100 Brahmin Steaks, and if you're so inclined, 10,000 of each crafting material from the island workbench, plus, whatever you bother to loot from the roughly 500 synth enemies.

The worst mod I had played up until this point was Sparky's Quantum Adventure, a mod that's still bad and not recommended. It's clear that Sparky was bad because of that mod author's inexperience and not sheer incompetence. The best thing I can say about Sparky's Quantum Adventure, was that it was clear the mod author had ambition, but lacked the means to truly bring his vision to life. The mod author for Katherine's Lost Bear though, is an asshole. There's no way this was accidentally this bad. It's like someone set out to make the worst mod imaginable, and wanted to tick all the boxes on how to make a bad mod.

>Concussion
I enjoyed this one. It's very short, maybe a half hour long, but it's sort of clever and has some decent level design. Did just enough right to avoid being put in the "Scraps" section.

>The Metro
I actually had high hopes for this one, for some reason. Claims to be "inspired" by the Metro and STALKER games, but that's not actually true. What it actually is is a boring slog through some metro tunnels, except most of the NPCs have been named either after a character from Metro, or something vaguely Russian, and all of the vanilla enemies have been renamed to something from either STALKER or Metro ie Mutant Hounds are called Nosalis, Dogs are called Pseudodogs, a lone Yao Guai is called a Librarian, and Super Mutants are... actually still just Super Mutants, he didn't bother renaming those. Only about a third of the NPCs are voiced, none of them very well, and also seemingly chosen at random; one incidental NPC located out of the way is voiced, but not one of the two vendors located right by the dungeon entrance. There are "anomalies" or areas where you take unavoidable damage, since there's nothing in the game akin to throwing bolts; there are ghosts which you can only see or detect with Berry Mentats, do stupid amounts of damage, and are summoned with spawn triggers; and there are points in the tunnel that weren't finished, so going the wrong way results in you falling out of the game world into the white void and being placed at the nearest entrance.

>Heather Casdin - A Unique Companion Experience
Strictly speaking, not a quest mod, but there are a few quests, and it shows up in the Quests and Adventures section of Nexus, so what the hell. Has a few interesting ideas, namely the way affinity is handled, making it impossible to just cheat it with the console. Technically has three quests, but from a practical standpoint, really only has two. One quest is there just for the purpose of giving you a permanent location marker for her, the other exists just to get her affinity up by giving her a tour of random Commonwealth locations. The one actual story quest she does have ends so abruptly I had to go to the mod page to make sure I hadn't screwed something up or missed something. She's decided to travel the wastes to avenge or get over her dead sister; when she gives you her quest, she asks you to take her to University Point, where she was killed. You get to University Point, she says "this is where my sister was killed" and... that's it. Quest over. It doesn't help that Heather's voice actress isn't particularly stellar. She tells you about her grief over her dead sister and then later confesses her love for the PC with the exact same inflection and emotional intonation that she uses when she tells you she needs Mole Rat Teeth for her shop. But even if she was able to deliver a good performance at what is ostensibly the emotional climax of her arc, she was still horribly miscast and inconsistently written. She sounds like a nebbish, bookish schoolgirl (since she basically sounds like Eileen from Regular Show) and at various times she's written to be: a vengeful badass action girl, a world weary traveler, a holistic aloof hippie, and a nebbish, bookish girl. She also has atrocious pathfinding, but I don't know if that's the fault of the engine or the mod author. Several times, I'd look behind me and she wouldn't be there, and I'd check the map and she never left the town two cells prior. Or she'd often get stuck in interior locations and wouldn't follow me outside. This issue is mitigated by the fact that the mod comes with a "signal tracker" which, when used, instantly teleports her to your location, but it was still kind of annoying. She has both a regular inventory trade menu, but also acts as a vendor, so if you're a compulsive hoarder, you can have a traveling merchant to occasionally buy your shit. She also comes with some options regarding tactics, sort of like Fallout 3 and New Vegas, where you can control how closely she follows you and how aggressive she is towards enemies, which is a welcome addition.

>Disrupting the Market
This is the sort of mod you saw around launch window, before the CK came out. It's not voiced, but the dialog is also not used in a way where you can skip it, so every line of dialog, regardless of how short, ends up taking about ten seconds. The biggest drawback with unvoiced mods is that when you don't have someone to read your script out loud, you can't hear how bad your writing actually sounds. The main quest is you following orders from a guy who is painfully obviously lying to and betraying you, and when asked by the "baddies" to team up with them, regardless of what dialog option you choose, you're thrown into combat with them. Then at the end it's revealed that the guy who was totally obviously betraying you was, in fact, totally obviously betraying you. Then he asks if you want to partner up with him anyway, or you can kill him. Choosing either option immediately ends the quest. Teaming up gives you no additional reward, and killing him has absolutely no consequences. His gangmembers who are waiting outside of the final location are still friendly to you after you kill their boss. Ordinarily I'd put a mod like this down in the scraps because it's the sort of crappy mod you were forced to make within the first year or so after launch while you waited for proper tools. Except, I looked at the upload date, and this was published July of 2018.

>Journey to Ipswich
Didn't have high hopes for this one, because it's an older mod that came out right around the time the CK was released. Was pleasantly surprised by most aspects of it, despite some bizarre and inexplicable design decisions. Adds a new worldspace, and most locations either have some background and story to tell, or are quest-related. The major issue I had with the map, though, is that I'm the type of person who likes to explore first, then do the story missions; but the way the mod is designed, all quest-related objects are spawned via script when the related quest is active. So while I explored the map in the beginning and found mostly empty, useless locations, I'd then be given a quest objective to go back and retrieve an item from a chest that wasn't there previously. These fetch quests also present an almost grind to a halt for the pacing. There are actually three separate fetch quests where you're meant to gather various supplies and parts, and the locations for every single item are all clustered in the same area. The problem is, you can only take one of the fetch quests at a time, so you'd go into town to look for rations, then have to go through several different interior locations to talk to the quest giver, then be given the second quest to go back to the same town to look for repair parts. It doesn't help that there's no shortcut exit and enter from where the quest giver is located, so you have to go through the different interior cells every time you have to leave and come back. I'm guessing this was done for the sake of padding the runtime, but it was a completely pointless and unnecessary design choice. The main character's voice actor is also not great. I'm the type of person who is willing to sacrifice bad voice acting for the sake of clean audio, and to the mod author's credit, the recording quality of his VA is great. The rest of the voices are for Mister Handies who serve as the crew of a submarine, and they're inexplicably voiced by a Vocoder or Autotuner, which makes them almost impossible to understand.

The biggest gripe I have, though, is that Journey to Ipswich acts as a prelude to a much bigger, more interesting sounding mod that doesn't exist and might not ever be made. The entire premise of JtI is that you're looking for a submarine to take you to Buzzards Bay, MA, a town torn apart by various landbarons, raider gangs, and tribals all in a continuous power struggle. So when you finally get the submarine powered and ready to go, you're unceremoniously kicked back to the shack in the Commonwealth where the quest mod starts and are told to wait for the Buzzards Bay mod. It's been two years since Ipswich was released, and there's no word from the mod team that they're even working on Buzzards Bay, so this mod sets up a cliffhanger for a mod that might not ever come. Journey to Ipswich is actually a really well made mod, but the frustrating cliffhanger makes it a little hard to recommend.

>Paradise Island/Trust in Research & Development
Both of these were just going to end up in the scraps section, until I learned they're both by the same guy. They're both very short (20-30 mins tops) mods, but couldn't be more different from each other. Paradise Island starts the quest with some nonsense about finding someone's laundry, so you set off on a boat to Paradise Island, a small new worldspace, to return it. There isn't a whole lot to do or see in Paradise Island aside from the one quest, which is a sort of scavenger hunt that has you track down clues with puzzles or riddles, and has you uncover the story behind the previous occupants of the island. There isn't a whole lot to say about this mod, but it was a nice diversion and a decent change of pace from "go to the place and kill all the things."

Trust in R&D, though, is a load of shit. The quest starts because apparently the PC remembers they used to work at an R&D facility, maybe? This is never explained or expanded upon, and seems to just be introduced for the sake of giving you a reason to go to the first quest marker to start the mod. Once inside, you're treated to some notes and terminals with some egregious typos (a terminal won't let you read its entries because you don't have a "passward") that could have easily been caught with a spellcheck the mod author didn't bother to use, and some of the worst enemy spawn triggers I have ever seen. After being told to make your way through the facility because you're looking for an employee for no adequately explained reason, (an employee, mind, that worked there before the war) you go into the next room where two Assaultrons immediately just appear out of nowhere a few feet in front of you. After making your way through the facility, you find out the employee you've been looking for, the one who worked there before the war and was also maybe your coworker(?) has been a ghoul this whole time. The biggest "fuck you" from TiR&D, though, was the almost literal "fuck you" you get at the end. Once you go through the nonsense story and find the employee (seriously, they're a fucking pre-war employee; what could they possibly be besides dead or a ghoul?), you get a text popup right before you go through the exit door that, and I'm not making this up, says something to the effect of "Congratulations, you've completed the quest and totally wasted your time." Eat a dick, mod author whose name I'm not going to bother looking up. Gorge yourself on the buffet of dicks, you twat.

What struck me the most about these two mods, and the reason I did an actual write-up for them, is that aside from being from being by the same guy, Trust in R&D was actually made after Paradise Island. One can expect a person's earliest mods to be rough around the edges, but I've never seen a modder who seemed to actively get worse.

>How the Milkman Saved Christmas
The mod starts off when you go to where a poorly acted, badly recorded NPC tells you to meet him at his farm. The farm is located in a new worldspace that seems maybe three or four times bigger than it needs to be, since all that's there is a small house and an empty barn. I don't actually know what the quest is ultimately about, because when we finally arrived, the only thing the NPC kept saying is "we're almost there." I tried killing/resurrecting, disabling/enabling, resetai, recycleactor, going to various spots around the worldspace and farm and doing "moveto player," reinstalling the mod, and all I could get out of him was "we're almost there." So this review is based on those three minutes of the mod I played.

Ordinarily, this isn't even the kind of mod I would bother to download. Just based off the name alone, I was just as likely to skip over it. But looking at the mod page on Nexus, where the author listed his "other mods," I saw he listed Fallout: The Frontier, the upcoming total conversion of New Vegas. So obviously I had to check this mod out to see what to expect from The Frontier. It should have been a huge red flag when I actually checked The Frontier's website and couldn't find this mod author listed anywhere on the site.

>Ellen the Cartographer
I actually meant to play this one before Heather Casdin, since this one was released first, but got mixed up and played them in the wrong order. This one is rough. For starters, there's far less content than Heather Casdin, since this one is designed to be a more vanilla-style companion, meaning that she only has one quest. Her affinity system works the same as vanilla and she takes up a companion slot as usual. As a result, she has far better pathfinding than Heather, but that's about where the positives end. I get that this was the first voiced companion mod, and I'm trying to give it some slack, but the voice acting is awful. For starters, the VA can't enunciate for shit, which is arguably the most important fundamental ability a voice actor needs to have besides the ability to talk out loud. She delivers every single line in the exact same drab monotone, and to top it all off, her accent and bizarre vocal cadence make her not only a chore to listen to, but often times makes her sound like a text-to-speech program. Then you get to her affinity quest, which is absolute fucking nonsense. I'm going to put a spoiler warning, but be warned that even explaining the entire plot of the quest, it won't make any goddamn sense. Ellen, as a cartographer, made her way from the Boneyard to Broken Hills, to New Vegas, to the Capital Wasteland, to the Commonwealth (hurr see what they did there?). At some point in DC, she came across a synth who became obsessed with her or fell in love with her or whatever and changed her voice and appearance to look like her. The synth clone then traveled to Quincy ahead of Ellen and joined the Gunners for some reason, and then Ellen coincidentally also ended up in Quincy as her first stop in the Commonwealth, where the Gunners attacked her for some reason, the Synth clone stole her maps and then set her free for some reason, and then the Synth clone continued to wait in Quincy for Ellen to return to try to get her maps back. Once you and Ellen arrive in Quincy and clear the area of Gunners, the synth clone shows up and explains that she destroyed Ellen's maps for some reason, and she's decided that she's no longer in love with Ellen, she wants to become Ellen, so she tries to kill the both of you. Dreadful.

>Operation Wilkes Estate
By the same guy who makes the Enclave Bunkers mods, comes another Enclave bunker mod. OK, it's actually a bit more than that, and expands on the sorely lacking backstory of the Gunners, turning them into a group of Enclave soldiers who went AWOL and decided to turn to mercenary work rather than facing the BoS in DC. I'm usually not a big fan of fancanon/headcanon/etc, but considering the vanilla gunners are basically just raiers in fatigues, this was actually a decent addition. The mod rewards with you with two player homes, which I'll touch on a bit later. It also has to be said that this mod author is really good at set dressing (or whatever you call the decorating of interior locations/dungeons). The mod itself is a bit easy, since he doesn't scale the enemies with the player, and at level 125, I went through interiors with level 14 enemies, but it's a decent length for a quest mod, and has several distinct interiors to explore. I've played the author's other mods (Atlas Summit, Lima Detachment, and his mod that mods the LAER mod, dawg), and there are a few gripes I have that I was able to ignore at first, but by this point were kind of annoying. For starters, he is way too plentiful with loot. Every interior location comes with enormous stacks of purified water, every kind of drug, dozens of pre-war food items, and he loves to go overboard with cigarettes. By the end of this mod, I ended up with 45 cartons of cigarettes and 56 packs, not to mention about a dozen fusion cores, and several missile launchers and Fat Mans (Fat Men?); I was reluctant to bring this up as an issue, because whether or not this is a problem depends on your playstyle. I play the game as a wasteland scavenger and compulsively pick up everything over a certain weight/value ratio.

There are more than a few typos and grammatical errors, and a common mistake he keeps making is that he keeps putting lit cigarettes and lit cigars in abandoned buildings, some of which have obviously not been entered since the war. The other thing that got annoying after a while is that all of his player homes are decorated with static objects. The interiors themselves look nice, but it does take a way from it a bit that I can't really decorate any part of it. Lastly, a really weird issue specific to this mod has to do with the two player homes I mentioned previously. Your ultimate reward for completing the quest mod is a spacious mansion located in a worldspace outside of the Commonwealth. It has several amenities, a couple of which seem to be unique to this mod, and when you enter the house for the first time, you get a tooltip popup that tells you what you're able to do inside and offers some encouragement to explore the location. So after exploring the player mansion, you find a secret entrance to a nuclear fallout shelter underneath the mansion, which also acts as a player home with static decorative objects. It was just a really bizarre design decision to give you a player home that's located inside of another, much larger player home. It should be noted that the two homes, much like this mod author's other player homes, feature no workshop mode of any kind. Despite the nitpicking, though, I definitely recommend giving it a shot.

>Claustrophobia
Adds a relatively short, but incredibly effective spooky horror mod inspired by PT: Silent Hills. Features one or two effective jumpscares, and some creepy and atmospheric scripting fuckery. One thing to note, and which the mod author does warn you of in the mod page, is that playing with the wrong (or right, depending on your point of view) ENB makes the game much harder to play. Some of the rooms are pitch black, and some are still almost completely dark with the Pip-Boy light, and it's made more difficult by the fact that all the windows are light sources that darken your vision when you look at them; I don't know the technical term for that, but I'm sure there is one. One thing I didn't much care for is that the "safe rooms" between floors use the low quality MIDI music from the save menu from the original Resident Evil, but as of time of this writing, this has apparently been patched out, probably due to a DMCA complaint.

>Bit Better Fallout
I completely brought this on myself. As much as I dislike using buzzwords, this is exactly what people mean when they say "Reddit humor." And actually, I'm not using that phrase as a buzzword, since the mod page itself proudly boasts that this mod was created to cater to the whims of people on Reddit. Seeing that, I decided against better judgement to download it anyway. Like I said, I brought this on myself. Almost every conversation has some smarmy, meta-/fourth wall breaking joke that makes you want to reach through the screen and punch the writer in the throat for being such a smug, self-important douche. This is an actual exchange that, if it isn't actually verbatim, is reasonably close enough to what the line was that I don't feel bad calling it verbatim: you come across a magician who sends you on an errand because he has a case of "spawnitis" which causes him to randomly clip through items, and he tells you that he hasn't had much success in the Commonwealth, so he's "Going to New Vegas, because they're more likely to appreciate a magician. Plus, I hear they have better writing." Every goddamn conversation with the NPCs in this mod is like that.

As bad as that is, that's not even the worst part. What really elevates BBF from "douchey reddit bullshit" to "pretentious douchey reddit bullshit" is that the mod replaces the loading screens with random excerpts from War & Peace. There's no joke to be made, they're not excerpts taken out of context or presented in a humorous or meaningful manner; it's just passages from War & Peace chosen seemingly at random. The mod team behind Bit Better Fallout can go fuck themselves. I'd end this review with some kind of joke at their expense, but I refuse to put more effort into writing something funny related to Bit Better Fallout than they did.

>Experiment DCM Shadow
This mod has the dubious honor of being the only quest mod I actually refused to finish. At time of writing, I'm still unsure what's going to bug me more, deleting the mod at the risk of fucking my save up with broken, leftover scripts, or leaving the mod installed. It wasn't bad in a funny way like Sparky's Quantum Adventure, or bad in a way where I still got a masochistic joy out of forcing myself to finish it like Katherine's Lost Bear. It's just bad in that way that mods that pride themselves on being hard are tedious and awfully designed. This mod is actually a combination of two mods, one the mod author had released previously (Experiment DCM), and the newer one he had put out (DCM Shadow), and I finished the first part, despite how much of a slog it was to have constantly spawning and respawning swarms of 20-30 leveled ghouls which he almost always dropped on you with spawn triggers (seriously, fuck spawn triggers). The second part, though, replaces the swarms of 20-30 trigger spawned leveled vanilla ghouls with 20-30 trigger spawned level 200 custom NPC ghouls, all of whom have 700-1000 damage resistance, immediately heal themselves for all of their health if you don't kill them in a single Stealth Archer shot, and can kill you either in one hit, or can kill you from clear across the room when they explode on death. The line between "challenging/difficult" and "utter bullshit" is not a particularly fine one, and of all of the bullshit this could be, this is definitely the utterest.

The other thing that's also worth mentioning, is that the mod author's description prides itself on bringing "role playing elements back to Fallout 4." While this is technically true, what the mod author doesn't tell you, is that he specifically means "pen and paper role playing elements." In every single room, at least once, and sometimes multiple times, a Vault-Boy tooltip pops up and is read aloud by a very bored sounding actor who describes what your character is doing and feeling. Say you walk into a dilapidated part of the laboratory that has obviously not been entered in quite some time, the tooltip pops up in the top left corner and the voice actor reads aloud "You enter a dilapidated laboratory. It has not been entered in quite some time." Or say you're walking down a hallway, and you hear the telltale raspy yell of a feral ghoul behind you that wasn't there until a fucking spawn trigger placed him there, the tooltip pops up and the voice actor says "You hear the sound of footsteps behind you. Feral ghouls are closing in on your location." This isn't immersive, it's just fucking patronizing. Oh, and the story, what little I managed to get before ragequitting, was crap. The first part is about a secret pre-war laboratory that tried infusing Jet and Psycho into a Deathclaw's DNA. Astute readers will note that not a single goddamn part of that sentence makes sense. The second part of the mod, before the invincible bullshit swarm, was about some kind of otherworldly disembodied voice who tasks you with collecting souls. And if you think that sounds like a TES Daedra quest now, the quest starts when you jump into a swirling, multicolored vortex and end up in a white void.

>Ransacked Relays and Shuddersome Subways
This is a very short mod that seems to act as a prelude to the much larger Maxwell's World. Adds two relatively small dungeons that don't have much to do or see, but have some relatively clever boss fights.

>50 Ways to Die at Dr. Nick's
I went in to this with not just the expectation, but also the intention to hate this, since it was made by one of the guys responsible for Fusion City Rising, and I am very glad to be proven wrong. There are a few pop culture references, but ultimately nothing too terrible, they're mostly relegated to quest names (eg a quest has you use and a dog track down a shipment of meds and is called "Barking Bad," that sort of thing) which I don't have that much of a problem with, since both Bethesda and Obsidian do the same thing. There are a few references that are a bit more blatant which I don't much care for, such as a line taken verbatim from Pulp Fiction, one of the characters being named Professor Farnsworth, a skull named Nedd that simply gives a popup that says "Winter is Coming," and for some reason, all of the radios in the game calling me "Al;" at least, I assume that's some sort of pop culture reference I'm not getting, because all of the radios are labeled "Don't touch this, Al!" despite that not being my character's name. The voice acting in this I think might be pretty good, to the point where I'm still not sure whether or not the female ghoul character is voiced by a mod actor or is reusing existing vanilla lines; especially since the credits only list the mod author voicing the titular Dr. Nick. The main character is also voiced, using vanilla dialog lines, although sometimes they're noticeably edited together to attempt to create new dialog, which doesn't always work. One minor annoying thing I want to mention is that Dr. Nick's office is located in a place that spawns Random Encounters, and as a result, every single time you exit his building, there is always a group of hostile NPCs that spawns a few feet in front of you; it's nothing game breaking, but it is worth mentioning.

The mod is split into three what I'll call "acts," all of which have a remarkably different feel to one another. The first act revolves around the titular Dr. Nick's office, where you have to suss out the "puzzle" of interacting with objects, all of which at first seemed designed to kill you when you interact with them. Progression is done in the form of collecting tokens from interacting with the right objects in the right order. The mod tells you you're using those tokens to purchase "Clues," but that's actually a bit misleading. You're not buying "clues" in the sense of buying hints, but are actually opening up more objects to be interacted with. For example, one of the first "Clues" you're given is a perk that simply tells you that "Time is now on your side," which allows you to interact with all clocks in the building, something you weren't able to do before without dying. After the first few puzzles, you're given a few quests that take you outside of the office in order to progress through the puzzle section further.

The second act, I'm just going to come out and say it, is absolutely terrible. This section is entirely about finding out the backstory of Dr. Nick and his office, all of which is done through a series of textdump terminals that at first tell you about how Dr. Nick invented Nightkin at age 14 or some other bullshit, then go on to pretentiously wax philosophical about the nature of propaganda and Pavlovian experiments not only for several pages, but for several terminal entries. It's so bad that it almost burned away all the goodwill the mod had earned up this point.

BUT THEN Dr. Nick informs you that his goal is to train an army of Nightkin to cleanse the Commonwealth of Raiders, and to that end has a team composed of a Super Mutant Behemoth, you, and three other people all dressed as superheroes storming Libertalia to defeat a supervillain. The only negative thing I have to say about this otherwise fantastic section (and I mean that not only to mean "of good quality" but also in the sense that it evokes fantasy/is fantastical) is that because the mod spawns a seemingly endless mass of raiders, all of whom are armed with laser weapons, missile launchers, and fat mans, performance tanked on my machine because of the high amount of NPCs and the frankly dizzying amount of particle and lighting effects.

If you're anything like me, you saw that this mod was made by someone connected to Fusion City Rising and immediately wrote it off. Don't let that questionable history turn you off of what is actually a really good mod.

>A Cannibal in Concord
Adds a short quest contained in one interior location loosely based around real life serial killer/cannibal Albert Fish. Has some decent set design with regards to the various tableaus and clutter, but the fact that there are corpses, blood stains, and body parts in every room in the house does detract from the experience because by about the halfway point, you're sort of desensitized to it. Not to mention the fact that it's literally every room in the house, from the living room, kitchen, and bedroom, to the secret rooms and locked basement; if he's got his severed heads decorating the foyer, it kind of defeats the purpose of having a secret murder basement in the first place. The mod is set up almost like an "Escape the Room" puzzle, where you have to read cryptic notes to find out where the various keys and switches are hidden, and to the mod author's credit, they're just cryptic enough to give a sense of satisfaction when you figure out the clues, but are not too obtuse to necessitate a walkthrough. On the subject of those notes, though, much like the corpse tableaus, every note in the game is about killing and how much the cannibal likes doing it. Some of them are excerpts from letters by the real Albert Fish, and some of them are very noticeably not. Because there's nothing in the murder house besides evidence of murder and a person talking about how much he loves murder, the entire experience comes off less unsettling or creepy and more just edgy and angsty. I think in the end, I would have been more unsettled if in between the heads in the freezer and the bodies of children, we find out our cannibal also likes writing crappy love poetry, or writes erotic fan fiction about The Unstoppables. Ultimately, the mod author's attempt to shock renders the experience mostly forgettable. That is, until the end, where it goes from forgettably edgy to absolute batshit bonkers nonsense. The following sentence is a spoiler: you find out the real Albert Fish (well, "real" in the sense of the one whose house it is) committed suicide, and the Institute decided to replace him with a synth who is also a cannibal, and the synth cannibal decides to create an army of cannibal wastelanders for absolutely no discernible reason, and whenever the Institute murders and replaces someone, they take their corpse to the cannibal house where the replacement Albert makes his cannibals-in-training eat the bodies of those that are replaced or some other such bullshit. It is very, very dumb.

>To Find a Hole in the Ground
Did a number of things wrong, but for some reason, I still feel compelled to recommend it. I think I ended up liking the idea of the mod more than I did the execution. The whole mod takes place as one "breadcrumb" quest with no location markers. I liked that you really had to pay attention to the notes and terminal entries to figure out where to go next. The story, though, is presented very disjointedly. It's almost like the mod author was working on two separate ideas and decided to mash them together into one. The introduction to the quest is done via a pop-up text dump when you first load the game, and unfortunately, that pop-up contains most of the relevant story information and you have no way of reading it again, except for loading an earlier save and reading the pop-up again. You're looking for someone for reasons that aren't exactly clear, then you end up finding a "landship," which is actually a decently designed repurposed fishing trawler attached to the bottom part of a tank and outfitted with guns. You read some terminal entries, and you find out this landship is attempting to find another landship and something called a "landwalker" and at some point, the ships got into a battle for some reason. Who any of these people are working for or with, why and how they managed to cobble together a powerful landship, who the people of the other ships are and who they're working for; none of these questions are answered in any way, despite them being kind of important. Following the breadcrumbs, you see evidence of the huge battle between these post-war machines. BUT, for whatever reason, instead of figuring out any of the interesting stuff about who any of these people are, or what happened to the rest of the 40-foot spider robot whose severed leg you find embedded in a building, you instead follow the trail of a random ghoul who acted as their navigator. To top it all off, you don't even end up finding the ghoul; you go through all that effort and your ultimate reward is a sort of crappy player house in the outskirts of Charlestown. After typing all of this out, I'm not actually sure why I liked the mod.

>Project Phoenix
This one's a complete mess. For starters, it was clearly written by someone not fluent in English. There are grammatical mistakes all over the place, and more than a few sentences and words that don't make sense, probably because the writer was trying to directly translate words or idioms that don't have direct English equivalents. There are three voiced NPCs, and almost commendably, the player character is also voiced, all of them by actors who aren't that great and all in thick German accents. I actually found that aspect of it rather endearing; it reminded me a bit of Zeno Clash, another game with wonky writing and crappy actors for whom English was clearly not their native tongue. One of the actors was egregiously bad, and it lead to what has to be the most unintentionally hilarious thing I have ever seen in a game: he's supposed to be voicing a malfunctioning Mr. Handy, whose dialog is interrupted by mechanical and electronic malfunction noises, and they were probably written in the script onomatopoeically. Instead of attempting to make an approximate sound effect (or even better, having the mod author mix in sound effects), the actor reads the sounds out phonetically; so he'll say something like "Good day whirr kerchap, how are you?" or whatever, just reading the sound effects as words, all in a German accent. I'll also chalk up to unfamiliarity with the language as the reason why several character names are absolutely fucking terrible; one of the doctors you come across who is meant to be the voice of reason among a team of scientists carrying out questionable work is named "Dr. Doubt" and the Japanese head of research is named "Dr. Hiro Shima." I did not just make either of those up. At one point, there's also a Chuck Norris joke on a terminal, because apparently nobody has bothered to tell Germany that it isn't 2005 anymore. I don't want to shit too hard on the mod for the acting and grammar, because I understand that it's difficult to write something in a foreign language. I will shit on it for its terrible story, however, because that would have been crap regardless of which language it's written in.

The story is an absolute mess, and throughout the roughly two hours it takes to complete the mod, I don't think I ever had any idea as to what I was doing or why. You start the mod by going to a pre-war bunker where you find the remnants of experiments carried out by a cartoonishly evil PMC under employ by the US government. The scientists are originally told to work on creating super crops during the war, but are immediately forced without warning to switch to what is essentially a super soldier serum that results in this pre-war PMC creating ghouls. You're then told to go another bunker, where you find out the PMC is not only still around and active, but are still conducting the same experiments; this is despite the fact that their employer, the US government, hasn't existed for about 200 years. You then storm their headquarters for no real reason, where you find out they have a working teleporter, which you use to go to a vault, where you then find out a group of pre-war wealthy elites have been living the entire time thanks to an endless supply of the Cabot family blood serum, which they inexplicably have access to.

The actual game design aspect is also a mess, and I doubt that has anything to do with the mod author not being fluent in English. A good quest or mod that uses a "breadcrumb" design to get you from one location to another would be completely playable without quest markers. You should be able to figure out where you're going even without the giant location marker telling you exactly what your next step is. Project Phoenix, though, sends you to locations seemingly at random, and for little to no reason. You go to the first bunker, then the quest objective updates and tells you to go to the secret underwater lab, then another bunker, then another secret lab. Why you're going there or how you know where they are seem to be unimportant details to the writer. Then when you get to the headquarters, it's massive and filled with about 100 leveled enemies, and you're forced to backtrack quite a bit for no real reason; at one point, after clearing out the 100 enemies, you go further into the lab to another separate area, which is identical to the first one, and is also filled with about 100 enemies. Then you have to go back to the first area, and roughly half the enemies have respawned. It's absolutely tedious. Once you make it to the vault, there are even more enemies, only instead of well organized, heavily armed military types, they're well organized, heavily armed random dudes in suits. To make matters worse, for whatever reason, the mod author decided to template his military guys using raiders instead of gunners, so this well-trained, heavily armed military organization is talking about randomly killing and looting and jet.

>Northern Springs
This is a difficult one to write, because as of time of writing, the mod is unfinished. The mod author claims both on the page and within the mod that it's still in Beta, so it's unfair to treat it like a complete experience. The thing is, it's still unfinished and unpolished even for a Beta, and is closer to still being in Alpha. That may seem like a trivial issue, bordering on pedantry, but it's actually an important distinction. A Beta implies "feature complete;" all of the pieces are in place, and in the state it's in, what the people playing are doing is checking for stability and bugtesting. This mod is not in what I'd consider an adequate Beta state, and is nowhere near final release. The new worldspace is there, and to the author/s' credit, is fairly well done. It feels distinctly different from any of the official worldspaces, and barring one or two minor design quibbles (the most popular restaurant in town is nonsensically placed in front of a power plant; and even for a small town, there aren't enough houses either intact or destroyed), it actually feels like it could be a real place.

Unfortunately, and this kind of ties back in to the "Alpha vs Beta" point I brought up earlier, there isn't actually a whole lot to experience, at least not yet. All of the map markers are there, but most are empty, several have groups of raiders but not anything else and no real reason to go there, and most notably, several of them have transitional doors that don't go anywhere. A few of them give a popup that say something to the effect of "This Area Coming Soon," but not all of them do, so it's hard to tell if an area is unfinished or just neglected.

As far as the quests go, there isn't a whole lot there, and what is there is kind of a mixed bag. There are no quest markers to be found anywhere, which I don't normally consider a bad thing, except you're not given any clue or idea as to where you're meant to go. The main quest starts when you find a weapon and are tasked with finding its creator, so you're told to go to the main town, Sanatogan. Nobody in that town is in any way connected to the main quest, and you don't end up finding the weapon maker until you decide to just explore every map marker and randomly come across a well-hidden shack located in a forest filled with infinitely respawning, leveled deathclaws. Another very annoying design choice was that several of the quests take you back and forth between the new worldspace and the Commonwealth. Quest chains routinely send you back and forth, which I find incredibly frustrating. I also had issues with scripts not firing or simply not being present, NPCs that won't talk to you, and quests that either abruptly end, or seemingly don't end at all. In one of the more amusing experiences, you're told to deliver a package by a shady-looking character; after delivering the package, you're told to head back for a reward from the quest giver, except when you arrive, the only thing he tells you is in Spanish, and he informs you that he doesn't speak English. An appropriate, if not underwhelming ending to a quest given by a shady character, except the quest doesn't end, so I don't know if that's what's meant to happen, or a misfired script gave him the dialog originally assigned to a different character who also doesn't speak English.

The worrying thing about the state of the questing side of the mod, is that I'm not sure if it's in this state because it's in Alpha/Beta, or if this is the full extent of what we can expect from the mod. On the mod page, the author makes a big point of telling everyone that his mod is an .esm file because he wants people to treat it as "modular," meaning he wants people to add and subtract as they see fit. Obviously the first problem with that logic, is that making it an .esm actually makes it less modular, since we now have to create an additional plugin to make any changes. The bigger problem, though, is that by emphasizing how modular it is, the design philosophy behind the mod seems less about making a complete quest mod in a new worldspace, but more about creating a new worldspace and letting everyone worry about creating quests, which is a pretty large gamble to take, because worst-case scenario is that you're ultimately left with a huge, new worldspace, but fuck all to do in it. It's a worry that only grew bigger upon reading the author's comments on his Nexus page, where he outright admits the main quest is weak because it was thrown in as an afterthought, simply because he felt obligated to throw one in.

Any criticism I may have about the mod can be easily dismissed by saying "What do you expect, it's in Beta?" which the mod itself actually does at least once. So I don't know if it's even worth mentioning that the voice acting is absolute shit. From the sounds of it, there's only one male and one female voice actor in the entire cast, both of them recording on garbage microphones; the female VA in particular sounds like she recorded all of her lines from inside a shipping container. For some reason, the mod author decided to give every NPC, both named and generic, custom idle voice lines, which means that all thirty or so people will endlessly repeat "You got a light?" and "This weather sucks!" in their terrible acting on their awful mics. Of course, "it's in Beta!" so this might eventually and hopefully get fixed.

Something that isn't affected by which release the stage the mod is in is the music, which is utter crap. What some authors don't realize is that music isn't just there to fill the silence, it's there to add to the experience, add to the ambience and atmosphere. If it isn't bombastic techno music playing inside the main town that sounds like it was ripped from a soundtrack to any 90s movie where people wear shiny leather trenchcoats and sunglasses indoors, it's bombastic generic, royalty-free butt metal. The absolute weirdest piece of music, though, comes during a segment inside of a mine cavern; it starts off with slow, twangy guitar music that wouldn't sound out of place in Metro or STALKER, but then without warning, switches immediately to what I can best describe as "video gamey" music that wouldn't sound out of place in Goldeneye 64, before again without warning, switching back to twangy guitars. The biggest crime with the music, though, is that you have no choice about it. Every other mod allows you to mute the background soundtrack by turning on a radio station, but Northwest Springs actually does the opposite, permanently muting your radio so you have no choice but to listen to bombastic techno and butt metal.

With the state the mod is in, I obviously can't recommend it. I would say to keep an eye on it, though, because there is actually some potential there. Hopefully, the mod author/team decides to take a less laissez-faire attitude towards development, and if not, then hopefully the mod proves popular enough that people do eventually end up creating content for it.

>South of the Sea
I was on the fence about writing about this one, because I have a feeling that the things I really dislike about the mod are precisely the thing the mod author set out to do, and precisely the reason a lot of people like it. This greatly expands the Glowing Sea area, with several new map markers, new Children of Atom, and a lot of places to explore. The issue I had, though, is one of incentive. I don't really feel like there's much of a reason to go to the places. There are no quests to do, no loot to pick up outside of leveled Steamer Trunks and Junk items, and no self-contained stories/tableaus to give a semblance of what these places are currently for, or what they may have been for before the war. There aren't even "boss fights" or named enemies, just the same group of enemies you've been fighting the entire game, except for the aforementioned Children of Atom, who are in actuality, still the same CoA as before, but with slightly nicer outfits.

The other thing about the interiors, is that they're massive, actually to a fault. "Oppressively large" is a phrase I kept thinking about as I was going through them. The thing is, each map marker has its own interior dungeon area, and that dungeon area is connected to about five or six other large, sprawling dungeon areas, and again, with very little to do in any of them. The set dressing in all of them is actually really well done; the hardware store looks like it used to be a hardware store, the Vault-Tec factory looks like it used to be a functioning factory, etc, but the sheer size of every area makes it a bit of a chore to actually go through. It got to the point where I just ended up using console commands to make myself undetectable because I just wanted to leave and wasn't sure if it was faster to keep pushing forward, or backtrack all the way to the beginning. One area in particular is just relentlessly tedious, since it starts off with a huge interior filled with feral ghouls, then leads into another huge interior filled with Gunners, then another huge interior filled with Super Mutants, then another with more feral ghouls, then another one with Deathclaws, another with Mirelurks, another with Raiders, then one more with feral ghouls. The ultimate reward for that slog is a player home that comes with no convenient exit/shortcut, and no map marker, so if you ever want to use the player home, you'd have to go through all of those interiors again, knowing full well they'd be set to respawn all enemies after a certain amount of time. The only thing that comes close to being an actual town with anyone to talk to and anything to do besides kill several hundred enemies is a town called Hades, which was hyped up as being both a shithole, or a haven for sentient Ghouls. What Hades actually was small interior location located inside another labyrinth through several interior enemy-filled metros and caves, and ended up being an empty building with two friendly incidental NPC guards, and a merchant; the weirdest thing about Hades, though, is that located right next to the empty shop with the NPCs was a pre-war weapon store that was actually nicely decorated and stocked, but had nobody inside of it. It was completely backwards.

In the end, though, I understand that exploration for its own sake is probably what some people were after, and this is probably exactly what they wanted. As a person whose focus has been playing quest mods, though, I was expecting to be able to do something besides picking up more ammo and chems.

>Operation Manhattan
I want to start off by saying I hate this mod. I hate that there's no story. I hate that almost every enemy is summoned with a spawn trigger. I hate that those spawn triggers also set off multiple random explosions in the distance and they always drop FPS by about half. I hate that those spawn triggered enemies are always (player level+45) and are all armed with missile launchers. I hate that your temporary companions are useless tagalongs for the most part, and the remaining time, they got stuck somewhere and refuse to follow you. I hate that the enemies that aren't summoned with spawn triggers are summoned with event triggers, and are set to infinitely respawn. I hated that combat is pretty much nonstop, and the mod never gives you so much as a breather. I hate that the ultimate reward for finishing this quest mod is a bland set of "unique" power armor, yet another goddamn copy of the Deliverer, and a completely redundant missile launcher that fires nukes instead of missiles. Most of all, though, I hate that despite everything I said, despite the fact that this mod seems like it was specifically designed to do every single thing I hate, I'm still going to end up recommending the goddamn thing because it was ultimately kind of fun.

The mod starts off on a Brotherhood of Steel platform in the middle of the ocean, that you either have to fast travel to, or have to swim to if you're playing Survival. There's some backstory on the terminal about banished BoS soldiers joining the Gunners and selling them tech, but that's mostly thrown off to the wayside. The actual quest is about you and three BoS soldiers mounting a rescue for a captured BoS soldier in Manhattan. I appreciated that the BoS NPCs in this mod aren't actually tied into the BoS faction, which means if you're not on good terms with them, you're still able to play through just fine. The new worldspace of Manhattan is relatively small, and divided into three sections, Central Park where you start off, a metro tunnel, and a sort of downtown-looking area. Aside from the fact that Central Park is inexplicably walled off from the rest of the city, the mod author did a fairly admirable job of creating what post-war NYC would look like. Being the most populous city in the US, it'd be expected that it'd be hit hardest by nuclear fire, and the scorched-Earth, constant radiation storms, and thick, near impenetrable radioactive fog do help sell the illusion. In addition, it's been mentioned in Fallout games that NYC is practically a wartorn hellhole, and in OM, there's a near constant battle going on in the background between endlessly respawning Raiders, Gunners, and Super Mutants that you're sort of forced to ignore and sneak away from in order to focus on the mission. Towards the end of the quest, you find out the tech the gunners were sold were the plans to Liberty Prime, and to that end, the mod throws four or five smaller, but in no way less dangerous "Gunner Primes" at you before you ultimately make your escape.

Maybe it was just because it was far less tedious than SotS, but I came away from this mod feeling positive about it, despite feeling like it did every possible thing wrong. Or maybe it was one of those rare occasions where it did so many things wrong that they all sort of canceled each other out and ended up resulting in something positive. It was challenging, it was absurd, and despite hating every individual element of it, I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.

>America Rising - A Tale of the Enclave
I don't think a mod has pissed me off this bad, not even the deplorable Katherine's Lost Bear. Not because this mod is bad, because a bad mod I can still derive a bit of pleasure from after I say mean things about it in a Pastebin nobody will read. No, this mod made me angry because it's unfinished, and left me with two America-shaped blue balls, since it ends very abruptly and unexpectedly. I always thought the Enclave was wasted in Fallout 3, since in Fallout 4, the Sole Survivor would actually have an incentive and ideological reason to join them, which would make them a far more interesting faction. The mod kind of straddles the fence between being a continuation of the Enclave's canonical destruction in Fallout 3, and an attempt at a retcon; ie the de facto leader of the Enclave does refer to his standing army as "the remnants," but they still have a seemingly inexhaustible supply of soldiers, equipment, supplies, and an enormous secret base on an oil rig. The mod author does a really good job of emulating the quests from the base game, but that's not necessarily a good thing, since the quests in the base game were rarely little more than "go to the place and kill all the dudes."

The writing is fairly solid, and the voice acting, though better than most mods, is still a bit of a mixed bag. One or two of the main characters suffer from having a bad voice actor and bad mics, and it's made worse by the fact that one of them is meant to be a companion. Most of the incidental NPCs are also fairly well voiced, again, with one or two standouts with bad mics. It's probably worth mentioning that one of the NPCs (who is also a possible companion) does a damn good impression of Patrick Warburton, of all people, and for some reason. At first, I assumed it was just a coincidence, until the character started talking about wanting to make spinach puffs. One thing that stands out to me, and it's something I don't think the main game ever does, is that NPCs have conversations with each other that in no way involve you. You'll overhear two NPCs talking about the coffee, or the most efficient way to fix something, and in one instance, have two soldiers reprimanded by an officer for poor performance; it really helps sell the illusion that this is an actual place with real people, instead of a group of robots silently milling around waiting for you to walk by so they can tell you about how dirty their fingernails are.

One final thing to note, is that playing this mod will unavoidably make you an enemy of the BoS, since (spoiler alert for a ten year old game) the Enclave and BoS are not exactly on good terms; and as of this writing, there's no way to play through this mod as an anti-Enclave person, and from what the mod author has stated, there are no plans to do that in future. So if you're doing a Brotherhood playthrough, or you're not a fan of the Enclave, you probably have no reason to download this. I'm unsure if future plans involve making the Enclave a sort of fifth faction, and would allow you to finish the game with them, but that would be nice.

But, as you may recall, I opened this review by saying this mod pissed me off. The story concerns you unfreezing a group of US Military officers in a vault adjacent to Vault 111, and they task you with helping them rebuild America. Several missions later, the BoS attacks the base, and command starts formulating a retaliatory strike. You infiltrate a BoS base to stop a missile strike and... that's it. That's the end of the content. There's not even a teaser/stinger or a pop-up text telling you that more is coming soon, so you're left at the Enclave base, able to speak to everyone, but having nobody tell you what to do next. Right as things are getting hot and steamy, it just unceremoniously ends, and not even at a logical act break.

The mod author has done a fairly good job of keeping people up to date on progress, and this mod has had several timely updates, so assuming he's able to keep up the pace and the schedule, this will be an incredibly easy mod to recommend as soon as it's finished. As it stands, what's here is good, but it isn't finished, which makes me reluctant to recommend it, because there always exists the possibility that the author will abandon it.

>Maxwell's World
This is an awkward one to write, because as a rule, I never mention mod authors by name, and don't go back to look it up, to try to sell the illusion of objectivity. But Maxwell's World, I know the mod author's name off the top of my head; he posts on /vg/, so even though I know he'll likely never read this, it's easier to shit on something when you're behind the total veil of anonymity. Do I still refer to the author of this mod as "the mod author," or is that disingenuous because I know without too much thought that "the mod author" is Trainwiz?

At any rate, Maxwell's World is an expansion mod that's similar in content to Nuka World, although not similar in scope or tone; it takes place in the titular Maxwell's World, a sort of Disneyland-esque theme park during a bad acid trip. With one glaring, notable exception, the level design is top notch. Every area of the park feels distinct from one another, with each area having their individual themes, while still feeling cohesive in its entirety as a theme park. The one exception I mentioned to the otherwise great level design are the Employee Tunnels; this is an enormous, sprawling maze that while it has a neat gimmick (you can hide in certain nooks to avoid combat), is overly long, filled with invincible enemies, and worst of all, is mandatory to pretty much explore fully if you want to get the true ending. The other absolute standout thing about this mod is the enemy designs. Even though they are mostly just reskinned/remodeled versions of existing enemies, at no point do you feel like you're fighting the same baddies you've killed several thousand times back in the Commonwealth. From the "Feral Clowns," which are ghouls in clown makeup, to the "Revelers," which are naked, partially skeletonized humans, to the sentient killer bumper cars, the enemy design is absolutely fantastic. Each of the areas of the park culminates in a Boss Battle, which are thankfully not just "a raider with a name" or "slightly stronger ghoul." These range from giant enemies you just have to shoot until they die, or ones that require pattern recognition or light puzzle solving to beat. It's really unfortunate that neither Bethesda nor other quest modders have bothered doing more "action-adventure"/Zelda-style boss  battles, because they are absolutely a welcome addition to the formula.

Unfortunately, and this is why it was weird writing this one up, but I have to be honest, while Trainwiz demonstrated a gift for enemy design/boss battles, and level design, he kind of failed to demonstrate a gift in the other areas. The writing, for instance, is fairly shit. Most of the story is delivered in incredibly long exposition dumps, and they're so bad that the subtitles for them take up almost half the screen. The game has several endings, most of them bad, plus one "true ending." To Wiz's credit, the endings are actually all fairly different; depending on which ending you're on, the final dungeon and final boss fight are all different from one another. The problem is, getting any of the "bad" endings results in the main baddie appearing before you and basically telling you "this is the bad ending, this is not really what happened;" but getting the "true ending" results in no real answers at all, so in essence, the "true ending" is the worst of the bunch. Two of the characters are robots trying to put you under control of the villain, and look, I have no problem with swearing; hell, this pastebin is probably peppered with "fucks" and "shits," but those two robot characters sound like they were written by a nine-year-old who just saw South Park for the first time; it doesn't help that both of the actors put all of their emphasis on the swear words in every line of dialog, making it come off as really unnatural. While on the subject of the actors, it seems they were given no direction or supervision, or more than one take. Far too often, lines would be garbled from lack of enunciation, or lines would be dropped entirely, meaning the spoken words would not only not match the subtitles, but if you went solely by the spoken dialog without the subtitles, some lines wouldn't make any sense; words would be mumbled due to an unfamiliarity on the actor's part with the correct pronunciation, and other times, words would be egregiously mispronounced; for example, "hedonist" is routinely pronounced as "hayden-ist," a "roarnado" (which is clearly meant to be a combination of the words "roar" and "tornado" to mean a kind of post-war nuclear tornado) is pronounced as "row-ah-nah-do," and the word "microcosm" is mispronounced as "microsm," "micro-osm," and "microorganism" in the same exposition dump by the same actor.

The mod's biggest flaw, though, is that it's kind of a technical nightmare. Having played through a lot of quest mods, I know that the more scripting a mod has, the more prone it is to fucking up. That's just the nature of working with Bethesda's engine. Maxwell's World, though, fucked up more times than anything else related to Fallout 4 I've played. Enemy spawns would routinely not trigger, scripts would regularly not fire, and friendly NPCs would occasionally disable themselves from the game, completely blocking progress. To make matters worse, any time the game CTD'd (and it happened fairly often), the save would invariably get corrupted, meaning that any attempt to load that last save you made would immediately result in a CTD.

When it works, Maxwell's World is truly great. Its highest moments are, I would say, better than the best moments of any other mod out there, and arguably better than most of the best moments in the regular game and its DLCs. Unfortunately, with those highs, come some tremendous lows, mainly in the stability and technical department. It's ultimately still a worth a playthrough to see some of the most creative content to come out of Fallout 4, but I would keep the bugs and forum sections of its Nexus page ready on Alt+Tab for when the game invariably shits itself.

>Ball - A Fetching Mod
Absolutely, completely, 100% remotely not a quest mod. I still wanted to mention it because I think it's adorable.

>The rest/scraps
These are ones that I played and are so short or so low on content they're not worth discussing in depth, but are also not bad enough that I feel justified in spending a paragraph or several slagging it off. "What About Bub?", "The Kelly Household," "Gone Feral," "Attack on Ortaria," "Adventures of the Silver Shroud," "The Lost Building of Atlantic," "String Theory." It's worth noting that "What About Bub?" adds a new feral ghoul companion, and injects feral ghoul armor and clothing pieces into the leveled lists, but is otherwise worth skipping.