Recreating Fallout 3's Super Duper Mart in Fallout 4

I’ve finally started clicking with Bethesda’s mod tools, and after a few experiments I decided to try this project. The Super Duper Mart in Fallout 3 is an excellent introduction to life outside of Vault 101. The player is tasked with finding at least food, but preferably medicine as well, inside this abandoned grocery. The level is dark, with a few still-working fluorescent lights dotting the area. Raiders have set up shop and patrol the store on top of the aisles, with plywood criss-crossing the tops of the shelves. One of them is visible when you enter, which is immediately imposing. Shopping carts are strewn about and knocking into them will alert the raiders to your presence if they aren’t already aware of you. There are locked doors to pick, terminals to hack, and a friendly robot that might help you fend off some raiders. It also has one of the few scripted sequences in the game, where a party of raiders returns midway through your scavenging and starts looking for who killed their buddies.

This all means there’s a ton of challenges to chew on for someone wanting to learn a toolset. It feels like a perfect project to familiarize myself with different parts of the toolset as I make more and more progress.

First is simply building the store itself - taking the proportions from Fallout 3 and translating them as best I can to Fallout 4. As I built the place I used some objects like shelves, doors, trash cans, vending machines, and so on to make sure the proportions were working out.

Once the main structure was built I started to add more of the furnishings and take some of the stuff I had placed - like store shelves - and muck it up. At first I kept store shelves nice and neat and aligned as they would have been before the apocalypse. Next I needed to add the chaos - turn them, bump them out of place, knock them over, and recreate the original level’s busted-up layout.

In broad strokes, this is a process of going biggest to smallest. Build the walls; add the shelves and the counters; add the bathroom stalls; then add the ammo boxes, the clutter and trash, the little tableaus that one finds in a Fallout environment.

So far I’ve mostly furnished 3 rooms that surround the main store. The store itself has its cash registers, its disheveled aisles and the trash and debris surrounding them, but is still missing the smaller clutter and there is still plenty of rubble to add.

Beyond this will be lighting. I am unsure whether I will reflect the original game’s lighting which used some still-working fluorescents or if I will alter the building to have some natural light. Once that is complete I believe the next order of business will be building the navmesh. This will let me add the initial bunch of Raiders to the map and create a patrol route for the Protectron the player can enlist. Next I will look into scripting the return of the raider party for the second wave of combat, Finally, I want to find a place in the world map to add an exterior Super Duper Mart that the player can enter. I am tentatively thinking about finding somewhere in Cambridge. I know there is already one in Lexington, so I don’t want to step on any toes there.

I plan to post more updates as I make progress.