While the entire modding community is expecting the GECK to be released by Bethesda sometime in the near future I have my doubts and I'm looking for some kind of conformation. I need this confirmation because unlike previous titles like Skyrim, Fallout NV, etc Fallout 4 has been subjected to some rather draconian measures to prevent mods from functioning in the game such as purging the plugin.txt file on game launch and the keywords/FormID cap that disrupts and removes build icons from the game menus.

So the idea that Bethesda would release a Creation Kit that would circumvent their own policies and actions appears to be highly unlikely and yet the modding community still believes that when Bethesda said that the game would support mods they weren't referring to the weapon and armor attachments that they have called mods. And, since many of the bugs and problems with the game like food that goes inactive, NPCs that cease performing their farming animations, a complete lack of settler management tools, and some of the worst AI pathing I have ever encountered in a BETH game will never be addressed by Bethesda themselves our only option is to wait for a "script extender" and the unofficial patches.

For the life of me I cannot understand so much within the Fallout 4 world. I can ignore the mysterious appearance of barrels filled with nuclear material everywhere I go. They dropped BOMBS and not barrels in the great war right? And, I laugh at the fact that the post traumatic distress which would have paralyzed people into a state of mind where small tribes would raid, scavenge and try to survive would have been replaced by much larger tribes who would protect their farmers, value the settlers for their growth and conscription potentials and solidify and expand their power by imposing strict law and order mandates some 180 years ago. I can even ignore the fact that given the toxicity of the environment those rusty vehicles would have turned to dust 140 years ago. What I can't ignore is my own backstory. For me, I was sleeping in clean sheets with manicured lawns only days before and as I say to Piper, "You are all living in rusty shacks and killing each other." So as a player it is clear that my mission is to bring order and peace to the world. It is to build settlements for the undefended to give them a safe, secure lifestyle and to do all I can to bring the world back to clean sheets and manicured lawns.

And here is where my immersion is completely sabotaged. I chop down trees, collect yarn, and melt down wrenches and metal, and then build beds with stained mattresses? I put people back in MORE rusty shacks? I craft a set of drawers that are broken? When I build a metal roof at a workbench, why am I making an airplane wing? And, the worst most immersion breaking of all is when I stand back from my power armor, spray can in hand with the paint fumes still in the air and see an aged, rusty, faded, and scratched paint job and think, "how in blazes did I achieve that?" So, which is it? The story and mechanics of the game say that I am building new things from raw resources but the results say I am dragging back mattresses, broken cupboards and rusty sheets of iron from the ruins and garbage heaps that litter the world. Surely, the Lone Wanderer meant what he said to Piper?

So was this rather severe limit and inconsistency with settlement building merely a means to discourage the builders of castles, cities and empires? Why would we fill our homes with furniture that was designed as a component with the bugs and the gore to evoke a reaction of repulsion and "yuk"? With no actual concrete walls for perimeters within the vanilla build menu and the assortment of furnishings that really need to be burned to stop the spread of disease rather than be sat upon or slept in, it seems obvious that the intent was to discourage players from hitting the settlement size limit before they had a functioning settlement.

While I am enjoying this game, me and most other PC users can handle more. I do understand the policy of an even playing field for all platforms and hardware investments and the even playing field IS the vanilla game. However, by enforcing conformity on those of us with high end machines by purging our "plugin.txt", and creating a keyword cap that is causing a crisis in the modding community Bethesda has installed a Stalinist policy - all players will be equal and all games will perform to the lowest hardware specifications on the market. So, my questions are: Will Bethesda's Fallout 4 become mod-friendly and when? And, how long until a Creation Kit is released so that the modding community can fix the bugs, expand and repair NPC behaviour, and give the community their choices of what they want?

It will be released just have some patience

GIVE. . . ME . . MOOODZZZEHH!!!!!!

I think I lost brain cells by reading this topic. Be patient; Bethesda will release the creation kit the first quarter. If you don't like what they release, then is the time to complain. Complaining now on speculation is kind of pointless.

The game is already mod friendly, otherwise they wouldn't have used the ESP/ESM format.


And I haven't heard anything about a keyword/FormID cap - mind elaborating on that?

An interview with Todd Howard where he says the Creation Kit will release very early 2016. https://youtu.be/bNgEO6ehqp0?t=330.

I am sure console players are going to be really disappointed. Just from that interview I get a very bad feeling that no one that doesn't have the PC version will not be able to make mods for themselves. Now unless they give all assets in the creation kit.

You're probably right with that.

I'm pretty sure the 'draconian measures' were simply part of the beta testing system for the patches and weren't deactivated when the patch was made public.

Here's hoping the G.E.C.K. is released mid febuary at the latest. So many people want to make so many changes, it would be a marketing failure if Bethesda didn't jump on that wave of interest and ride it out in style.

I know quite a few folks who have refused to buy the game until the modding community gets to work. Although if that's a statement in favour of the modability of Bethesda's games or how tired people are of their perpetual bugs, I suppose is up to the individual.

If the measures to prevent us from using mods were really draconian, people wouldn't be able to circumvent them in minutes. This game is already more easily modded than any other PC game released this year, and Bethesda's given no indication that they don't intend to release the Creation Kit, but every indication that they want to make as many mods as possible available for consoles.

I don't think that was ever the point. The Creation Kit isn't something like Mario Maker, it's the (main) tool Bethesda uses to make the game themselves - and everything about it has been designed to run on PC only. They have said, though, that the way the engine itself loads plugins isn't any different across the consoles, and getting mods to run on consoles isn't the hard part - it's creating the infrastructure around getting mods, and getting Sony/Microsoft on board with the idea. Here, last night I pulled a http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3076322 that talked about this in a separate thread, I thought it was interesting:

"It actually works. If you have a devkit console you can take the PC mod files, put them on your Xbox and they work. They actually worked in Oblivion, Morrowind and Fallout 3. For all of those games, I can take the PC mods and put them on my Xbox. We have one system so we just need to figure out the logistics of: How do we get it there? How do we secure it? How do we make it safe? It’s something that we would really like to do."

At longest the GECK will be released late February. Skyrim's CK was released, what January 2012? Just have some patience. Bethesda already said mods are coming to consoles and the only reason the data files aren't on the launcher is because it's not finished.

These are the things that have happened since the 10th of November: Launching the game normally (the launcher) caused all your mods to be disabled when you entered the game - it actually purged plugin.txt and left a note telling people to not modify the file . The mod community advised those using mods to launch using the .exe file but shortly after this, a game update came and plugins.txt was purged even when launching using the exe file. As for the keyword cap, since the CK isn't out the only modding possible are texture replacements and new items like settlement building materials. However, when build icons failed to be visible in the build menus, testing showed that there was a hard cap for keywords and FormIDs in the game. Any build, create or cook icons over this number simply didn't show up in your menus. Understand, in the first weeks three or four mods with different categories of objects for crafting or settlement building was fine but as the days past and the mod authors updated their mods, adding more and more items and categories, players who had 20 or more settlements with walls and buildings using these mods had the choice of uninstalling half of them thereby leaving all their settlements broken or simply continuing with the game and not building anything.

Box maaan, I don't know why people venture an opinion when they have no knowledge of the particular issue. It amazes me. No, the measures have not been circumvented nor can they be until the creation kit is released. The solution

to the purging of plugin.txt was easy. Simply copy the esm and esp names from the data file into plugin.txt and then make it read only but it was only easy for those that knew that. We will never know how many simply saw that their mods had disappeared and threw up their hands in disgust. The second problem cannot be fixed until we can get into the workings of the game. That's where you reach the keyword cap and can't uninstall the mods you have without breaking your settlements.

What none of you seem to appreciate is that Bethesda have demonstrated that they don't want mods in this game. Imagine if I owed you money and I said, "Sure, you can have it. Come around, the door's open." However, when you arrived you found my goons shooting at anyone trying to get to that door. It would be reasonable to assume that I didn't want to give you the money. That would be a fair assessment and it would require some kind of reassurance from me. Don't you think?

Strictly speaking, what Bethesda have demonstrated is that they don't care about supporting mods until their tools are out. For a while they left in some support that, to me, looked very much like the sort of gimcrack plugin support that their designers would use in-house in the final stages of development. Then they took that out.

A better anology would be if your bank said "Sure, you can get your money out of your account" but when you got round there you found a 'Closed' sign on the door. Or even that you got there just as they locked up for the day, and they shooed you out and locked the door in your face.

The time to start worrying is when opening hours rolls around and there's still no sign of the bank opening.

In the case of mod support for Fallout, opening hours is the (deliberately vague) "very early 2016" in an interview with Todd Howard, and "Stay tuned in 2016 for the release of the all-new Creation Kit and Fallout 4 DLC content." That was posted twelve days ago on https://bethesda.net/#en/events/game/happy-holidays-from-bethesda-softworks/2015/12/22/63, just as they closed down for the holidays. And, yes, being a business where many of the staff have been in crunch-time for some while, I'd be surprised if Bethesda didn't close down for Christmas.

Whether they can stick to "very early" 2016, or what they think constitutes "very early", we can only speculate. As they were talking about how much work was involved in setting up a mod support infrastructure (probably related to mod support on consoles), there may well be some slippage.

As for the keywords limit, I'd see that as just being a case of sticking in a hardcoded upper limit in the interests of convenience or code/data efficiency. Like the hard limit on 255 plugins. Arguably sloppy coding, but unlikely to be some conspiracy against modding. They just don't support any and every conceivable mod. The FO4 engine (as with all their previous engines) isn't a general game development engine. It was designed to implement one game only, and anything extra that can be done with it is a bonus. If their programmers just didn't anticipate that the team would need many, many more keywords or FormIDs to implement FO4, then they wouldn't size the data structures to hold them.

Personally I feel hard-coded limits are a bad idea, but a fixed length array is undeniably more efficient to access than a linked list, especially if the code is running very frequently.

Anyway, time will tell whether the concerned or the confident are right. I'm confident, but I may be proved wrong. We'll see

Nice tin foil hat post, OP. I see no evidence of intent to limit mods. If they REALLY wanted to limit or forbid mods, they would have already done so.

Food for thought, OP.

I have feeling that only the hardcoe fallout people will bother with mods on consoles. specially if we will have to wait X amount of time for a mod to come out. People will lose interest if it takes to long. lets just hope bethesda delivers. Oh and if bethesda people happen to read this. forcing console players to rely on PC players isn't a good thing. It's wrong on so many levels.

Eh, even "non-hardcoe" fallout players play the game a lot. I have friends who aren't "hardcoe" fans of the series that have clocked in numerous hours and already have several characters. Hell, some have more characters then I do and I'm a huge fan of the series to the point I'll read articles on past games while listening to one of the Fallout OSTs.

Good post Andyw, and I agree that it is more likely a total lack of concern than a desire to destroy the lives of modders. Having said that, there is also another issue that could well affect the timetable for the release of the GECK. In discussions I've had about this topic many refer to previous CK releases for the other Fallout or Tamriel titles. However, Fallout 4 takes a rather bold and confusing new step when they set aside 30 or so locations for players to alter and to call their own. The limitations they placed upon these settlements come in a variety of forms.

I spent almost four days building a rather beautiful 3-story home at Warwick. As I was building this 'Malibu-style' mansion I noticed that sea gulls were continuously flying through my building from a pylon now covered with foundation stones through my walls and floors to an electricity pole above. They knew we would be building here when they put that animation in, right? Even if it was only rusty shacks. When you go to Covenant, a settlement designed by Bethesda, the caravans all camp outside the build area on the roadside but in every other settlement they march in with their cow and plant themselves inside your foundation stones or whatever you foolishly built there. So this, the inclusion of non-referenced objects like Sanctuary's hedges that make building over and around them extremely difficult and the rather severe settlement size limit say, "these areas are yours to allow your creativity to flow, but not really."

I, for one, refuse to use 90% of the vanilla building materials. I've been asleep for 200 years and I'm shocked that people haven't moved on from the initial trauma that would have begun dissipating around 180 years ago. What the Lone Survivor is doing now, housing settlers and protecting farming communities for food and water security should have occurred back then and when you consider that the classical radio channel plays pieces mostly written at the time of the Napoleonic Wars which ended in 1815, 200 years ago, his disbelief is understandable when he tells Piper, "You are living in rusty shacks and killing each other." So the game itself substantiates that the lone wanderer is going to rebuild the world and return it as best as he or she can to barbecue on Sundays and manicured lawns. So, who at Bethesda was responsible for the disconnect? Why would he/she buy shipments of timber and chop down trees to build drawers that are broken? Why would he/she be interested in building rusty shacks? And, since he/she is melting down wrenches and screwdrivers and buying shipments of steel why is he/she constructing airplane wing parts when the intention is to build a much simpler flat steel roof? Clearly, the Lone Wanderer isn't building anything - he's dragging rusty iron and gore-soaked bedding back from the garbage heaps and the actions of building and using fresh cut timber to do this are a mere game mechanic. Unfortunately, this latter interpretation does not fit with the story so why did Bethesda fill our build menus with items that were designed with the intention of evoking repulsion when covered with garbage and additional gore. Why not give us the simple pre-war items to build instead?

It is pretty obvious that the lack of external wall building icons as well as the rusty, broken, scavenged materials can't be combined to create large, lavish settlements. Those who do go beyond the settlement size limit with the vanilla materials are more likely to create a bigger eyesore. So, I assert that the thinking behind what you could build was tied to how much you could build and behind all of it is the philosophy of maintaining equality between the different PC builds and consoles. And while I understand the disappointment of console owners, they have to understand that while I may be disappointed that my $19,000 car doesn't perform like a Ferrari, that's life, we live with it. With what my graphics card cost I could have bought 5 consoles and the idea that my $5000+ rig must be limited to what a $300 console can achieve is unfair.

Nobody have said the GECK comes to consoles. Its an internal developer tool for windows using lots of windows build in features.

Using it also require full access to the file system for stuff like replacement textures or script files.

A magnitude more people use mods than making them

Yes, either it was not removed by mistake or they try to keep people from using pre geck mods as they often generate problems.

I don't see the problem here. Anyway nexus mod manager bypasses that now.

Exactly they want to limit the usage of mods during the first few months, until the game is in a more polished state and the tools pass some more testing. First months are a very busy time, lots of bugs are being discovered and lots of hardware and software issues, so perhaps putting mods on hold saved a ton of work for the support. Once things got cooled down and issues are mostly resolved it will be easier to manage the overhaul coming from the mod issues.