Fallout 4 'My Creation' Interview: AndrewCX

Our latest ‘My Creation’ interview features Fallout 4 modder, Andrew CX.

Andrew, who passes his free time playing games, was highlighted not once, but twice in our Featured Mods Article for April for his USO Cubes/USO Base mods, as well as his Wacky Weapons Workshop PS4 project.

You can track all of Andrew’s mods here, and we recently we caught up with Andrew to discuss his past and future projects.

How did you get started with modding?

The launch of the Creation Kit for Fallout 4 was what got me interested in modding. By that stage I’d spent several hundred hours playing the game without mods and wanted to see what I could do with the additional tools Bethesda provided.

Once I started, I found the process of using the CK both interesting and challenging. Just the ability to easily ‘look behind the curtain’ at how the game is put together is amazing. Then to be able to go a step further and experiment with changing the game experience has certainly given me a lot of enjoyment.

I won’t lie – the CK and the process of modding can at times be intensely frustrating. There’s no instruction manual so there’s a lot of trial and error, but it’s a great feeling when I figure out how something is put together in-game and how to make changes to get the game to do what I want. The whole process for me is also quite organic in that I often start out with the intent of doing X or Y with a mod project, but as I investigate the way the game deals with those features I often end up with an entirely different mod. Sometimes because I’ve discovered a better option and went in that direction, sometimes because I can’t work out how to do something and have to change my plans, and sometimes it’s complete serendipity and the change I make with the intent of doing one thing actually ends up doing something totally unexpected that seems worth keeping.

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USO Cubes for Fallout 4 is self-described as "very non-lore friendly." How do you decide upon a mod project that could break immersion for players in the game?

That’s actually a bit of a tongue-in-cheek description. Cubes, and most of my other mods, are about giving tools to users to craft their own game experience. I leave it up to users to decide in-game what works for them.

There are plenty of immersive ways that Cubes can be used in-game (one of my planned projects I haven’t gotten to yet is to turn one of my settlements in my main save into a children’s theme park built primarily with Cubes!), but of course you can also go to a settlement like Abernathy (with a high ‘ceiling’) and build giant floating cube environments.

Cubes is one of those mods where I started out intending to do something else – in this case I wanted to make a settlement where the player could free-build a settlement in the space you visit for DiMa’s memory puzzles. That turned out to be far more of a challenge than anticipated and resulted in me tweaking the idea to make cubes that worked like the VR cubes but were buildable in normal settlements.

What has been the overall reception to the mod?

Overall the reception to my mods has been very positive and they’ve built up a great user base with some truly wonderful engaged users who not only give me helpful feedback but also pitch in to help other users in the mod comments section. My UCO, USO, SimpleSeasons, and FreeMaker series are all very popular on console (since most of my mods launched early on in console mod availability but late for PC, the user base is primarily PS4 and Xbox One).

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Cubes is the least popular part of the USO series, but that’s to be expected as it’s both the most niche part of USO and the one that adds the least variety of items (since it simply adds multiple textures of the same size cube).

Part of the reason I have chosen to use a modular model for the USO and UCO series is so users can pick and choose which parts they want (based both on DLC ownership and just interest in various things).

How much fun was it to create Wacky Weapons Workshop?

Ah, that’s the paradox of mod making, coming up with the concept is fun as is figuring out the process of making various things work, but then there’s a huge chunk of repetitive work applying the solution you’ve chosen dozens and dozens of times to change each item, etc.

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So it certainly was fun coming up with some of the ideas and testing them (projectile overrides using the fireworks graphics for instance are something I find immensely fun to play with in game) and it was personally rewarding to figure out how weapons were put together in the game in the first place (and then how to make these sorts of changes). But actually producing the mod isn’t necessarily what I’d call ‘fun.’

Fallout 4 or beyond, are there any new projects you’d like to talk about?

There are some significant projects I’m working on (which is why the flow of updates for my mods has slowed a lot). I can’t say much about them at the moment other than they are all Fallout 4 mods at this point, though I am toying with some ideas for Skyrim.

Anything else you’d like to share?

One of the things I’ve gotten the most enjoyment out of as an author is seeing how others use my mods creatively. As an example, there are a number of YouTube content creators that focus on settlement building in Fallout 4 and use PS4. There’s too many to name all of them but two stand out: norespawns and madqueenshow.

Not only is it really rewarding to see them create things I’d never thought of using my mods, but they have also have provided tons of great feedback to me, which has helped with improving my projects.

For more details on AndrewCX’s projects, visit his official projects thread on the Bethesda.net community forums.