Monthly Modder: Neeher

The multi-talented Neeher talks about planning new projects and the importance of the modding community in our latest modder interview.

Neeher has released a lot of mods, and this month we’re featuring his Juger Pistols, which are tremendously fun to use and look great dual wielded. We’re also re-featuring several of his other mods, including the expansive adventure Xander’s Aid and the RadiGhoul challenge.

We chatted with him this month about modding, and he had some great insights on the modding experience, from start to finish.

Many of your mods involve new adventures, how do you go about designing these?

I think one of the most important steps in creating a quest or adventure mod is determining how much time you want to spend on it ahead of time. It will almost always take longer than expected, but you can still get a good idea based off how ambitious your idea is. This is crucial as the biggest threat is lack of motivation caused by burnout or eventual lack of caring. This happened on one of my projects I spent a year on, Settlement Story 4. I ended up disliking the story I made and decided it was beyond salvaging so I just ended it.

You’ve also created some new weapons. What are your priorities for creating these and implementing them in-game?

The biggest thing I care about when creating a weapon mod lies in the lore. Whatever I’m making is not going to be an existing real-world weapon. Fallout weapons do have similarities to real-world weapons, but not entirely, and a lot of the time they aren’t related at all. I’ve made several weapons for Fallout 4, some 10 of them haven’t been released, and all of them are either made entirely from imagination or are loosely based on a real-world weapon. Like Kelly Macabre is based around an AUG A3.

One other important step is that all assets are to be entirely handmade – the models, textures and even animations. This results in a very unique feeling weapon.

The final thing is acquisition. For example, take the Juger Pistols or Select Assault Rifle mods I made. They have unique animations that play when you find them for the first time. You go to whatever location and actually grab it off a table instead of just pressing a button to pop it into your inventory. These are always fun to do and are more memorable and exciting to the player.

You have a very broad skillset. What is your favorite part of modding?

While I can do just about every aspect of modding myself, I think my favorite part of modding is actually when the mod is finally done and I can post it for everyone to download. Then I can see people’s thoughts on it and even see Youtubers like Juicehead, Kottabos, DiscoGnome and others play around with whatever I made.

This became very apparent to me recently when I had to put my dog of 14 years down. I remade my dog, Pax the Poodle, in Fallout 4 and shared it for PC and Xbox One. The community really came through and I enjoyed sharing Paxton with everyone and seeing them sharing the stories of their best friends with me and everyone else. Not trying to depress everyone reading this, just saying that sharing with the community is my favorite part of modding.

Do you have new projects or big updates on the horizon?

Always. A large project I’ve been working on for a long time now is A Kelly Story. It has a bunch of guns and a nice worldspace to explore and all that, but it isn’t even close to being done! To fend off the burnout that I mentioned above, I do smaller projects every once and a while. Right now, I’m working on a weapon mod where all the aspects of it were voted for by people who follow me on Facebook and Youtube. I listed off a whole bunch of features people could choose from and the top voted features were mashed together to create our new weapon. In this case, a heavy class weapon that is a pump action shotgun. Should turn out pretty cool. I also intend to do more of these ‘Player’s Choice’ type of community mods in the future.

Any mods you’d like to recommend?

When I play Fallout 4, I actually don’t play with many mods installed. However, I do use some must-haves in my load order that I think a lot of people could enjoy. These, of course, aren’t my own mods.

Unlimited Companion Framework by Expired6978 (Bethesda.net, Nexus). I like to run around with Pax and Piper or Nick at the same time.

Journey by Maduin81 (Bethesda.net, Nexus). I play on Survival, but I still want to fast travel. This mod limits fast traveling to owned settlements with some other settings as well.

Survival Quick-Save by Gopher (Bethesda.net, Nexus). Sometimes, you just need to be able to save!

Player Head Tracking by Gargorias (Nexus). This is my favorite, if you play in 3rd person then this is the best mod ever. It allows the Player’s head to look at people freely instead of looking straight on. Very simple but I love it.