Overview:
After the Next-Gen update, a lot of great mods were rendered unusable with the so called “Next Gen Bug” that affects facegen and edited NPCs, some of these mods were Better Settlers, Varied Gunners and Varied Raiders to name some. Nuka World has some really interesting faces for their Raider Gangs that you don’t get to see much because you 1) have to be on Nuka World and 2) 90% of them are wearing masks, so I figured: the game is already loading these faces without issues here, can it load them somewhere else?
What it does:
Note this a small scope mod, not trying to replace or achieve the same as Varied Raiders. It adds faces from the NW Raider Gangs into the base game Raider face pool, to give a little more variety. Base Game Raiders have around 10ish faces, and adding these faces it bumps the number to around 30 faces.
This mod DOES NOT add the NW Gangs into the Commonwealth, but their faces to it. It also adds a chance for Ghoul raiders to spawn with Human raider groups (they use Raider voicelines, this is default by Bethesda and changing it will cause stuttering, their spawn rate is very low though).
If Bethesda does fix the Next Gen bug, then this mod kinda stops making sense and I would recommend you to use Varied Raiders instead, but I personally don’t think they will fix it so this is what I could do for a stutter-free alternative.
Installation:
If installed mid-game, you might need to allow some days for the Raider Leveled lists to refresh, so you might not see the NW faces at first.
If you are installing on a new playthrough, you will see the new faces as soon as reaching Concord.
This is a Level List edit so move it to the Level Lists modifications section on your Load Order.
To consider:
All new face Raiders are still considered “Raider” and part of the base game Raider group, however they will say gang-specific voice lines specifically raiders with The Pack faces have the most gang-specific lines and might say stuff like “Shouldn’t have messed with the pack”, I did not change this because the process to change it will result in stuttering every time this raider appear, so I just leave it be. To me, these lines doesn’t necessarily link them to the NW raider group.
Additional note:
This mod is stutter-free, as it does not add new faces but repurposes already existing ones.
The NW Raider that patrol Nuka-Town are mostly unique, so you won’t see them spawning with the base game Raider groups. This can maintain a difference between the ones spawning randomly on the Commonwealth and the ones in the park. The ones that spawn in the Commonwealth are the same as spawn radiantly on Nuka World.
Rust Devils use the base game Raider facepool, so they are affected as welll.
Requirements:
Nuka World.
Credits:
CyanidePill, I created this for myself but decided to share it in case someone is interested.
Fun fact:
I tried to get the famous Nuka World Thick Lady to spawn in the Commonwealth for like a solid two hours, but it was not possible as it would cause stuttering lol.
