I started a new, heavily-modded "Survival mode" game over the weekend.
- A quick-save mod for Survival Mode. I like the more dangerous world, and I don't care about fast travel, but only being to save my games by sleeping in a bed is just irritating.
- A realistic gun-sounds mod. Boy, guns are loud. Every time I get into a gunfight outdoors, I worry that I'll be attracting ghouls and mutants from miles around. I guess the ambient gunfire is common enough that nobody cares.
- A "louder weather" mod, that turns up the visual and audio volume on rain and radstorms. Rain really comes down now, which is great. It's pretty wimpy in the vanilla game. Unfortunately, radstorms don't seem to add any environmental radiation. Still no reason to have a gas mask, except for aesthetics.
- A "darker nights" mod. Based on the screenshots, I selected the middle setting, but nights are still pretty bright, like a full moon on a cloudless night. I may reinstall that one and select darkity-dark and see what happens.
- A mod that adds accessible interiors to all of those boarded-up buildings in downtown Boston. I haven't reached Downtown yet, so I can't comment on this one yet.
- Also a mod that jazzes up (pun intended) The Third Rail. I haven't gotten down there yet, so I don't how good it is. I saw another mod by the same author that made Goodneighbor busier, adding NPCs and more vendors and increasing the general level of activity. I wasn't in love with the screenshots, though, so I haven't downloaded it yet, but I do like the idea. All of the Commonwealths communities are pretty dead. I've been looking for one that makes Diamond City better, but no luck so far.
- A mod that adds the subway tunnels and stations (a.k.a. the metro or the tube, to you Europeans). I went down into Concord Station and got into fights with some Raiders that were squatting there. There wasn't much that added to the lore or the story, but I like having more space to explore and bad guys to shoot.
- A mod that makes a bunch of stuff from the game-world available for settlements, such as those military-checkpoint security walls like you see in front of the Cambridge police station. It also lets you build Institute walls and fixtures, and choose whether to unlock those after you meet the Institute or right at the beginning. I can see myself turning Vault 88 into an Institute outpost.
- A mod that lets you patch up Sanctuary's houses. I'm not sure why, but it didn't fix the gaping holes in the roofs. It was easy to find a separate mod that did the roofs, though.
- A mod that lets you scrap all the piles of debris and weeds and stuff that clutter settlements. A second mod lets you scrap corpses from your Settlements.
- A mod that improves the variety of Settlers that arrive at your Settlements. Small percentages of them will arrive with superior equipment. The mod also makes non-named Settlers killable, so your Settlements will actually take casualties during raids.
- A mod that vastly improves the durability of Vertibirds and makes them all 50th level, but simultaneously lowers their behavioral threshold for retreating. The Pridwyn hasn't arrived in the Commonwealth yet, so I haven't seen any Vertibirds, but I was always annoyed that they were shot down so easily.
- A graphical mod that enhances the visuals and another that adds "a touch of green" to the scenery. The colors are maybe a little over-bright, a little over-saturated, but I like the idea. The Commonwealth is too drab for me, in the vanilla game.
I haven't had any real obvious issues from the mods yet, although I was at Thicket Excavations last night and there were some serious graphical problems with the granite walls. None of the mods I'm using specifically relate to the quarry or to stone walls, but who knows..?
I really want a mod that dramatically reduces the number of bullets, stimpacks and bobby pins in the world. I'm 7th level and have barely begun to explore and I'm already drowning in stuff. Over 300 rounds of .38, more than 2 dozen bobby pins and 15-20 Stimpacks. Ridiculous. I want that cut by, like, two-thirds.
Of course, none of these mods corrects the game's story flaws, but maybe someone is still working on a big mamma-jamma, like the giant mods people have done for Skyrim.
The new space opened up by "Interior Apartments" is huuuuuge. Hangman's Alley is Hangman City now. The central area you get in the default game can just be a little park or something, I dunno. 
