CANTERBURY ESTATES
Current Version 0.8 - BETA
by .sidekick

Canterbury Estates is a complete lore friendly overhaul of the town Canterbury Commons. By adding several new interiors, 15 new NPCs and many other features, the town feels much more alive compared to the vanilla version. Every player hears about the town relatively early in the game. All the traders talk about it as the trading hub of the wastes and I think I'm not the only one who was disappointed with what you find when you finally reach it.

If you want Canterbury to be the town it should be, this mod is for you!


///// FEATURES /////

- A lore friendly overhaul of Canterbury Commons. Now it feels like a real town!
- Many new locations (including a clinic, a bar/hotel, a common house and much more)
- 3 new guard posts complete with an interactive Alarm system.
- New player home comparable to those in Megatonor Tenpenny Tower.
- 15 new NPCs
- 3 new specialized vendors
- 2 unmarked Quests ('The wounded Regulator' and 'Back to business')
- Some new items (including 'King's Crown Whiskey' and 'Rad-Buster')


///// NEW PLACES /////

1. "Brown's clinic"
Moira's parents have set up a small clinic in Canterbury Commons. Come here if you are wounded or need medical supplies.

2. "Fortified workshop" (Player home)
The towns former mechanic Scott Wollinski closed his workshop to move on to bigger goals. Talk to Uncle Roe to find out more about what happened to him. Maybe you can find the required keycard to gain access to this new player home. It comes with all the comforts of the houses in Megaton or Tenpenny Towers, namely: a jukebox, 'My first infirmary', a 'My first laboratory' set, a Nuka cola vending machine, a player bed with well rested bonus, a workbench, a Vault Tec Bobblehead collectors stand and plenty of storage room. For any further questions, ask 'Radford', the robot butler!

3. "Townhall"
Uncle Roe has cleaned up the first floor of the old firehouse. A common room has found its place in the left garage, while Jeff Towers takes care of Canterburys water treatment plant inside the right garage. Two big water reservoirs on top of the building feed the tanks and the fresh water valve inside the plant. By adding various chemicals to the water, Towers has found a way to purify the water for the town. Come here if you wan't to stock up your fresh water supplies.

4. "Porter's Diner"
Joe Porter has rearranged his diner. He arranged several new tables and benches in the diner and moved his matress and other personal belongings to a small caravan right behind the diner. This way he has more place for his customers and a quiet place to rest.

5. "Canterbury Warehouse"
This is the place where the trading caravans buy and sell their goods. Jacob Mills runs his business in the old garage. Buy, sell or repair items in his store or use the public workbench right at the entrance. The garage is also the main base of operations for the Canterbury Commons guards. This is the place where they sleep, eat and prepare for their daily shifts.

6. "King's Hotel and Bar"
Darwin King and his wife Andrea moved into this old Radiation King store. They renovated the old building and created a nice bar and hotel for all residents of Canterbury Commons, travelling wastelanders, scavengers or other customers that need a rest from the dangers of the wastes. You can rent a hotel room for 20 caps a night or take a drink at the bar. Only here you will find the best whiskey of DC, the unique 'King's Crown Whiskey'.

7. "Guard Posts"
Dominic D'Ellsadro stocked up the towns defenses by recruiting several former mercenaries. Jefferson, Singer and Mel as well as two more mercenaries have aggreed to help. They fortified some collapsed buildings and established three new, strategically placed guard posts throughout the town. They also installed an alarm system at Jeffersons guard post to alert all townsfolk in case of an emergency.

8. "Common House"
Due to the increased security of the town, four Wastelanders have decided to settle down in Canterbury Commons.

9. "Ray's Den"
Ray is an addict. But as long as he doesn't cause any trouble, nobody really cares. He stays inside his basemant for most of the time and only leaves every day or two to get a few drinks at King's bar. There is the rumor that he sells mentats and other drugs to some of the guards to keep their senses sharp during their night shifts.


///// KNOWN BUGS AND CONFLICTS /////

This mod changes all exterior and interior cells of Canterbury Commons, as well as a small part of the Mechanists forge, so every mod that alters the same cells, may cause conflicts. I made this mod for my personal use and decided to share it with the community. I simply don't have enough time to add seperate versions or fixes for every mod that causes problems, but I will do my best to solve problems that may occur with big overhaul mods, etc.


///// DOWNLOAD /////
Grab the first beta version of the mod at Fallout Nexus: http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10323

.sidekick

Looks fantastic. I can see a lot of care went into the look of each area. They all match or better vanilla areas. A very welcome addition/improvement to the Canterbury area. The standard games' version was a big let down. Most towns were actually.
Did you finish up packages and schedules yourself, or are you still looking for help there?

I realize this is beta, but I also hav learned over time that cleaning esp that alter world spaces will greatly increase stability.

I want to use this and so thought I'd give a friendly nudge to the idea that taking out identical to master records (67 here) is rarely a bad thing and undeleting deletions to the master file (178 here) is also a very important thing to do, specifically when thinking of mod compatibility.

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/TES4Edit_Cleaning_Guide ... so even though beta only took like 2 minutes to clean.

Look forward to trying it out.

I like how this mod is crafting out. It looks like the best fit for the fallout game.
I wonder how does the alarm system work?

Thank you very much! I think it's important to make the locations believeable. Take King's bar and hotel. I tried to make it look like Darwin King once found that old Radiation King store and build his home in there. He ripped the letters of the Rad-King logo and rearranged them to fit his needs. He over-painted the small signs and opened a few walls inside to make room for his bar. It has to look as if real people were living there for years and I really enjoy cluttering these areas to tell a small story with the design of the places.

The packages and schedules are not done yet. To be honest: I really hate creating NPC behaviour! Every time I try it I loose my patience and give up. Because of that I would be very thankfull if anyone could help me with that. There are no NPCs in game with the current release, but they can be found in the Geck when looking into the mod-file. So if anyone with experience in creating NPC shedules and behaviour is interested in helping me out, just contact me and we'll see what we can do!


Thanks for the link! I tried to work as clean as possible in the Geck, but I think it's not possible to not alter any spots you don't want to change. I'll definately take a closer look at this! :goodjob:



The alarm system isn't functional yet. It is supposed to be automatically activated as soon as any of the guards has engaged combat. The activated alarm system is thought to do the following things:

• Activate an alarm sound for about 10 seconds.
  
• All guards come out of the houses and are forced into an "alarm mode" (weapon drawn, ready to fight. Maybe even directly engaging the enemy, if possible)
  
• All civilians run into their houses (maybe by defining some kind of "flee marker" for every NPC.
  
• When the threat is over, all NPCs should be returned to "normal mode" and go on with their standard shedule.

As the alarm system is intended to directly influence the NPC behaviour, this would be one of the tasks that have to be done by the "NPC-guy" I hope to find in the near future! B)

I definitely want to try out this mod, however, since I use FWE with many additional mods, I'll wait for a cleaned version before adding it to my admittedly long mod list. hehe.

BTW, Kudos to you Sidekick for making this! Sounds awesome! :goodjob:

Edit: Okay, so I couldn't wait, hehe. I must say, so far this looks really good! I posted the following in the comments section on the Nexus but wanted to repeat it here...

A little feedback...

You might want to consider making the items lying around belong to the NPCs so that when the player takes them, they would be considered stolen, and any NPC seeing the act of stealing become aggressive to the player. Like when you're in Moriarty's and try to steal something and get caught. I haven't a clue how that's done however.

Your methods sound similar to my own. I have to imagine that something could actually be there, and or had a reason to be there, before I place it in the GECK.

Packages and schedules can certainly be a pain. I would estimate that for a realistic town, you will need to spend 2 to 5 times as much time making the packages for NPCs as you will making the entire static form of the town. Dialogues and quests 2 to 5 times as long again. There are rewards though. Putting time and effort into packages, schedules, conversations and dialogues will make your creation come to life. You can have fun while building and debugging, experiencing the life of your town each time you enter it.

Just my opinion.. you might consider changing the thread title from RELz to WIP, since there is still a bit of work to be done on it before its finished

Also, you probably already know this since the outside texture doesn't show a door, but it was something I noticed when looking around, you have Joe's caravan right in front of where the employee entrance for the warehouse is. On the local map it actually shows 3 doors in that spot.

Hehe... yeah that's right. The three doors are a little workaround I used. I had to use two ladder-pieces and one hatch on the inside to make the ladder to the roof. To use them properly, I had to create three teleport-destinations for these "doors". I used three hatches and lowered two of them into the roof of the garage so you can't see them. This way you end up on the roof when you use "Ladder to Canterbury Commons", "Ladder to Canterbury Commons" (2) or the "Hatch to Canterbury Commons". Maybe I'll change this in a future version. It's not really an optimal solution. :whistling:



That sounds really nice! I got the mod to this stage at around april this year, but didn't work on it since then! Maybe I'll give the NPC-behaviour a second try, now that I had my Fallout 3 free time. Do you know any good tutorials?

I don't know of any tutorials. However, the easiest thing to do, in my experience, is to just tear apart things that Bethesda made. If you do it the way they did it, it should turn out decent.

For myself, I just chopped up a city into zones, then created paths through zones that would simulate pedestrian traffic. Then I attached packages to the paths and to zones and chopped those packages up into 3 hour intervals and voila! I had a generic city. A little more complicated than that but that is the gist of it.