New Project: APC Home Update (Patreon)

I have always loved the design and look of Bostek's 2017 mobile home mod for Fallout 4, APC Home on the Move. They obviously put hours and hours of care and craftsmanship into every visual detail, and it really shows, in so many ways. 

I mean, just look at this thing:

It's a damn work of art.

The problem with APC Home is that once you get past the art design, the rest of it was kind of a buggy mess that didn't get better with age. The author released the mod in 2017, updated it a week later, and it's been sitting there on Nexus abandoned ever since.

Which is kind of ironic (or even meta), considering the premise of the mod is that you find the broken down, abandoned hulk of an old APC and get it back up and running. Once you do, it becomes a compact player base that you can "drive" to fast travel throughout the Commonwealth.

When I started getting into FROST, I found myself more and more wanting this as my player base. It just fits into the mood and aesthetic of FROST in so many ways. But I knew it was going to take some time and work - at the very least, an overhaul of all its scripts - to get this sweet ride back on the road in any reasonable way.

The good news was that Bostek left it with extremely generous reuse permissions: I could do just about everything other than upload the mod somewhere else, as long as I gave them full attribution for their work.

No problem.

So we are now at v1.02 of APC Home - Greslin Update, which you can grab now in the #apc-home-update channel on the GreslinGames Discord. 

This is a patch, so you still need the original mod. Just load my patch below APC Home in your load order. (See important note at the end for an additional change that you need to make.)

Changes include (so far):

Script/code overhaul. All scripts have been decompiled, tested/updated/fixed, and replaced with new versions. The mod should be fully functional.

Worldspace edits reverted and updated. The original had a lot of "junk" edits in its worldspace records, probably put there by Creation Kit (which has a bad habit of doing that). I've attempted to clean up and repair these edits, and to update worldspace references to current DLC versions.

Rewritten text. I've rewritten all the interface and story text in APC Home to clean it up, to make it more consistent and lore-friendly, and to make the fix-up story more cohesive and smooth. I've also trimmed the fix-up sequence itself to make things feel more polished. Locations have been renamed to their 2077 counterparts (Diamond City to Fenway Park, for example).

Initial encounter moved to Fort Hagen. When the original was released, it was common for modders to just throw everything they made into Concord, and APC Home was no exception. The "ruined" APC was parked on a hill not far from Abernathy Farm.

I've never liked this. Concord gets too cluttered as it is, and scoring the APC in the early game is pretty OP. That gets even worse in FROST, where your entire time in early Concord is usually spent running away and hiding. So the first thing I knew I wanted to do was move the initial encounter into midgame.

You now first find the vehicle crashed in a ditch, in front of Fort Hagen. When you fix it up, the initial trip is a very short limp to the Fort Hagen filling station, at which point you have to make a new fuel cell to go anywhere else.

Working fuel gauge. The APC runs on fuel cells that only provide a fixed number of trips per cell. The original mod did not offer any way for the player to know how many trips were left on the charge. My update includes a working fuel gauge panel on the dashboard. (Trips per cell can now be configured via patch as a global value in the ESP.)

Working weather gauge. (Users of Weather Report 1.04+ only.) If you have Weather Report 1.04+ also installed in your game, your APC will include a working weather forecast panel set just to the right of the travel map. Clicking this activator provides the same functionality as the Meteo Boy device.

I've tested this both in the vanilla game and in FROST, and everything seems to be stable and working well at this point. I plan to continue updating and improving it, particularly with an eye towards FROST compatibility.

Installing APC Home Update

This patch requires Fallout 4 and the DLCs.

To use this update patch, you first need to download and install the original APC Home on the Move mod. 

Then download the latest version of my APC Home Update patch from the #apc-home-update channel on the GreslinGames Discord. Make sure that my patch is loaded AFTER the original APC Home mod in your load order.

Now there is one last thing you must do, and it is VERY important. Look in the files included in the original APC Home package and DELETE the APC_Mobile_Base_v1.3 - Main.ba2 file. Just delete it altogether.

This archive file contains all of the original scripts that I have replaced in my own patch. However, it also includes stray copies of the ObjectReference.pex and ScriptObject.pex script files, and if left there they will badly interfere with the normal operation of F4SE scripts.

If you are using my APC Home Update patch, you no longer need the .ba2 file, so delete it. Then you should be good to go.

For weather forecast functionality, you also need my mod Weather Report (at least v1.04), available in the #weather-report channel on the GreslinGames Discord.

Have fun and have a Happy New Year!

Best,

- G.