BADLANDS 2

INTRODUCTION

Greetings from the Wasteland!  I've got a steaming hot pile of landscape for you to sink your eyes into.  Invest in a sturdy pair of road goggles, plan your microscope scrounging and bum-fighting to avoid the heat of the day, pack plenty of non-irradiated water, and get ready to discover all kinds of exciting new ways to get sand out of a vaultsuit.  Why is the greater Boston metropolitan region (as-was) now a baking expanse of limestone and cactus?  Search me.  Guess the bombs went off and everything turned brown.  There's a lot about Fallout 4 that never made much sense to me.  Truth is, the game was rigged from the start.

I don't usually return to themes I've already developed elsewhere.  This whole thing started with a desire to tidy up a couple of the rougher edges in the original BADLANDS.  There's a lot to that mod that is janky, amateurish, half-assed, and generally not up to par- but for the life of me I love the little bastard anyway.  It could use a bit of spit and polish though, so I rolled up my pipboy and set to work.  A fixed alpha on one texture became a replaced normal map for another, and then Desperados came out and I couldn't very well not use that as a base, and then I had to make a fresh grass setup, and then...  By the time the dust settled, it turned out I'd done made an entirely new landscape mod. REALLY BADLANDS?  WORSELANDS?  BADLANDS... 2?

This version of BADLANDS is a lot less aggressively weird than its forebear.  It has plenty of character, don't get me wrong, but it's subtler and less cartoonish.  Doesn't make this any more realistic, just stylized to a different set of conventions.  Where the original BADLANDS mashed a bunch of crazy textures together willy nilly, in this version I was more selective about using consistent assemblages of color and shape to create different palettes, biomes, and general senses of place in different sections of the map.  Texture quality is much higher overall as well, though not every individual texture is itself gigantic in resolution.  4K makes a great deal of difference for some textures, less so for others.  Everything that needs it has properly bumpy normal maps and matte, naturalistic speculars.  BADLANDS 2 is far and away the most fiddly, detail-oriented thing I've done for Fallout.  That being said, this is still a labor of love made by an amateur- there are probably still some rough edges, odd texture glitches, and the sort of visual insubordination that's part of the DIY joy of the modding experience.  If the bugs aren't catastrophic I'm probably not gonna fix 'em for you.

ABOUT BADLANDS

BADLANDS 2 retextures the landscape and the grass to look like the deserts of Aztlán.  It is designed to be used on top of the brilliant Desperados landscape overhaul.  It builds on Desperados to create a series of discrete arid environments across the