Bethesda is hard at work with Fallout 4 lately. After releasing the Automatron DLC last week, they’ve followed up with the new Survival Mode Beta for PC users, instructions on how to opt in here.
The new Survival Mode features a laundry list of new additions, read about them here. There may be even more to be discovered however, as Bethesda said their goal of the overhauled game mode is to force players into making “interesting choices”. Bethesda said:
We did that by bringing more contrasting motivations to Fallout 4 using the type of circular systems you might find in a game like Dark Souls,
(By which we mean, two or more systems that push against each other.) This resulted in four major pillars for Survival Mode.
The four pillars of the new Survival Mode, as written by Bethesda are:
- Strategy: Intensify decisions involving when to get into combat versus when to avoid it, and also make you think more about what gear to take into combat. Then back up those decisions with faster, more brutal fights.
- Exploration: Slow down the pace of the game and encourage players to explore the nooks and crannies of the world.
- Resource Management: Balance out items in the world that may be too easy to acquire or horde, giving players more to consider when planning their current loadout.
- Role Playing: Increase the realism of the world and the issues one might face there.
Along with the new survival mode came the Fallout 4 1.5 Patch. Details below, as written by Bethesda.
New Features
New Survival difficulty
- Survival adds additional challenges including no fast travel, saving only when you sleep, increased lethality, diseases, fatigue, danger and more. Get detailed information on Bethesda.net.
- Characters set to Survival difficulty appear under their own Character Selection filter
- Survival difficulty characters are not backward compatible with the 1.4 version of Fallout 4. If you opt out of the Beta, do not use Survival character saved games.
Fixes
- General stability and performance improvements
- Fixed rare crash related to reloading a save that relies on Automatron
- Fixed issue with the robot workbench camera not moving properly immediately after canceling out of the menu
- Fixed issue with perks being repeatedly added when reloading a saved game while in robot workbench
- Fixed issue with Ada not properly traveling to an assigned settlement
- Robots can now be assigned as settlement vendors
- Fixed issue with “Appropriation” where blueprints would not appear properly if the container had already been looted prior to getting the quest
- In “Nuclear Option,” entering the Institute using the targeting helmet on Power Armor no longer inadvertently causes the player to go into combat, and become stuck in the Institute
- Fixed distance check with Robotics Expert perk
For those on console, you’ll be getting Fallout 4’s Survival Mode and the patch in April. Look forward to that along with Fallout 4’s second DLC, the settlement based Wasteland Workshop.