SCOURGE

AE version can be found pinned in the posts tab!

We can all agree that enemy balancing in Fallout 4 is god-awful. Which doesn't come as a suprise as all RPG games follow the usual system of increasing health by x points for every level. This may seem fine at first, but as you play for longer and level up more you'll start to run into the bane of having fun - bullet sponges. Calling bullet sponges awful is an understatement and the only difference between them and a level 1 enemy is that the bullet sponge will drop less ammo than you used to kill it. And the worst part is that it will deal the same if not less damage than the level 1 enemy because only their defensive stats are scaled. This is completely terrible and sucks the fun out of the game past certain levels depending on how overpowered your weapons are (which I'd argue is also just as unfun if you need to exclusively use Gauss rifles to not make combat a drag). Did you know that Triggermen will have over 100 damage resistance before any of their armor is taken into account if your level is high enough? That's on top of their health being inflated too because they'll be high level by the time you see them during gameplay.

So, what's the solution?

Well, I released the original Papyrus version of SCOURGE back in June 2022 as my first ever mod because no other mod fixed bullet sponges to my liking. The issue with other rebalance mods was that if you didn't like some of their changes you had to just deal with it. Experienced mod authors/users would be able to fix it themselves through xEdit, but at that point you might as well make a personal mod. So, I decided to make a mod that allows you, the user, to tweak everything on-the-fly. If a Deathclaw felt a bit too overpowered all you had to do was open the MCM and set their stats lower and wait until you encounter a new one. It's a huge timesaver since you don't need to go into xEdit and then tweak the Deathclaws there. It was also a good excuse for me to not update the mod with balance changes because the user could make those changes themselves in seconds.

SCOURGE works by randomising NPC stats using a normal/Gaussian distribution curve. Whenever a new NPC spawns it will have its stats randomised based on the values configured through the MCM. This results in all NPCs being different the way everyone is different in real life. However, it's not completely random as the average values will be between the provided min and max, with the low/high ends being very rare. Even if you spawned a 1,000 of the same NPC there is a possibility that none of them will be at the very min or max for some stat. What makes it great is that all those stats can be edited at any time, so if you encounter a group of NPCs and they they were too tough you are able to adjust their stats in less than a minute.

Once it took