Fallout New Vegas

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geekminxen

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geekminxen

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About this mod

Returns Benny to the game as a companion after he's freed from the fort

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Changelogs
UPDATE 10/25/17 - Okay, here's the deal. The last three years have been kind of a nightmare IRL and I know it seems like I just abandoned this mod. Realistically, I'm not going to be able to do a final update, at least not the way I wanted. I do have one more feature I'd like to implement, but that'll take months, considering how infrequently I'm going to be able to work on it. But the way it stands now, except for that one feature that may or may not appear in the future, consider Benny Returns as updated as it's going to get. What does this mean? It means the double perk bug remains unfixed; multiple people have looked at the scripting, the mod's been cleaned, I've gone over everything I can think of, and it stubbornly remains. I'm sorry, but unless someone who knows more can figure it out, it's there.* Consider it Benny being a stubborn SOB. It also means no new quests, as I'd once hoped to add. On the up side, if I am able to implement that last feature, maybe it'll be a nice surprise for anyone still following this mod (thank you all, btw).

*If you know someone who's willing to look at the scripts and try to figure it out, I'd be delighted. I've done all I can.

I am very grateful to everyone who's downloaded this mod and given it a try, and to everyone who has endorsed it!


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Were you disappointed that Benny disappeared from the game after escaping from the Fort, and after planting the idea in your head that you could team up to take Vegas for yourselves? So was I. This mod remedies that tragic oversight by letting you make arrangements to meet up with Benny back in the Mojave and take him on as a companion in your quest to liberate the Strip from all comers.


DESCRIPTION

First and foremost, a huge thank you to llamaRCA and all the modders who contribute their time and knowledge on the nexus
forums. I wouldn't have even tried to mod, let alone gotten one this far, without their help. Special further thanks to llama for indulging
my zillions of questions, troubleshooting, playtesting, and letting me dissect her own mods for the structure and scripting of this one. I
have stood on the shoulders of giants, and this mod would literally not exist if it weren't for her.

So:
After freeing Benny at the Fort, you can find him at the 188 Trading Post (which seemed to me the closest safe zone to the Fort). After your initial conversation with him, he automatically becomes a companion. If fired, he goes back to his suite at the Tops. You can also fire him back to the Lucky 38 once you have access to the suite there.

He functions like a vanilla companion and will upgrade his equipped clothing and weapons when you give him better stuff, heal after battle, and make random and site-specific comments as you travel together. He'll also loot good stuff off of corpses, like the resourceful tribal he is. :)

If you're a Black Widow courier and intend to use the perk on him at the Tops during the Ring A Ding Ding quest, you might want to be sure to
activate the mod before you meet him there as it has a slight effect on the note he leaves you. If not, you can activate the mod right before
entering the Fort the first time, after vanilla Benny has fled the Strip. You can also just activate it whenever you like, as long as it's running by the time you talk to him at the Fort.

:::IMPORTANT:::

When you free Benny from Caesar's tent, make sure he gets all the way to the drawbridge (and either goes through it or does that glitchy in-and-out
fading thing he does) or the mod instance of him won't fire. (I.e., if you fast travel before he gets to the drawbridge, he won't appear at the
188.) Don't wait around; follow him straight to that door and go through it yourself, then travel to the 188 as soon as you've cleared
away enough enemies to do so. At the 188 he will approach you and initiate conversation. Do not speak to him first-- let him do his thing
or you won't be able to hire or talk to him afterward. If you're having trouble getting him and yourself out of the fort alive and don't
want to resort to console commands (gotta love killall), the changelog1.6.txt file has some suggestions.


FEATURES

Fully functional companion wheel

A robust but (hopefully) not overpowered companion-- he's had his stats upped somewhat to reflect his position as the head of a Strip family and
is toggled to essential by default (feel free to change this in the esp if you wish, but I'm assuming if you're using this mod, you kind of
want him around)

Fully voiced and lip synched (nearly 300 lines) with vanilla and edited vanilla dialogue (hopefully any repetition of vanilla comments and conversations won't be too frequent, or annoying. :> )

A companion perk that ups your luck and charisma

Access to his suite on the 13th floor, the Tops High Roller suite, and the Tops Presidential suite-- he's carrying the keys in his inventory

A hand radio that he gives you upon meeting you again after the Fort that lets you move to his location or call him to yours

Idle chatter as he follows you around the Mojave, with site-specific comments for some locations

He will wait wherever you leave him for any length of time

He is neutral, so he shouldn't refuse to carry or equip faction clothing and armor

A couple of RP characteristics, including sitting when the player sits and smoking while he's in "wait" mode

A few clothing tweaks, including cleaning up Benny's suit a little, adding an extra one in his Tops suite, and adding a female version of the texture

Special comments and *ahem* situations (repeatable fade to black) for Black Widow couriers, including the most obnoxious teddy bear in the history of Fallout (you have been warned)


CHANGES FROM 1.5 TO 1.6

Benny now sandboxes when you fire him back to his suite at the Tops. He wanders around from room to room chainsmoking, which seems terribly appropriate for him. I caught him sleeping once, too. He's enabled to do several different things, but whether he'll actually do them remains to be seen. This is Benny we're talking about, after all.

Also, a lot of the "sprucing" of the 13th floor of the Tops from the last version is gone now. Basically either I or the geck (I'm leaning toward blaming the geck, since this seems like the sort of thing it does occasionally) moved the entire floor a little to the right, creating some gaps around door frames. Fixing this came down to deleting all changes to the cell. I re-removed a few stains and turned the shaper the right way around in the workshop, but other than that, sacrificed the cosmetic changes for the architectural ones. Sorry if anyone misses the hula girl. ;D


CHANGES FROM 1.0 TO 1.5

A small quest added, given to you at the Tops by a new Chairmen, including a few new (voiced) NPCs, a (hopefully nice) reward, and a little bit of backstory for Benny

Amazing floating mountains near the 188 are fixed

Duplicate records removed/mod cleaned

His idle chatter fires more often (every four minutes instead of every seven) so he's not so quiet

<s>Benny's Tops suite has been spruced up a little, including the workshop</s>

Weirdo blank line at the beginning of dialogue choices removed

Now has an idle chatter line specific to the Courier's gravesite (thanks, jamiethe, for pointing that out!!), and in addition can no longer say anything really embarrassing over your grave like, "Too bad a conjugal visit here isn't practical." Sorry, Black Widow Couriers, if you already got whammed with that one. :>

Since the stealth boy option never worked reliably, it's been removed as option; you just need to untie him now (if you're having trouble getting out of the fort alive afterward, see Suggestions, below)

Travel marker added outside of the Tops

A bat file to reinitiate your meeting with Benny at the Fort so you can use the mod in a game where Benny has been killed, with thanks to Jaasce who figured out how to do it and kindly let me know!


REQUIREMENTS

FNV version 1.4


CONFLICTS

I don't know any specific conflicts, so if you have any, please tell me. :) Logically, he'll conflict with anything that changes Benny's scripting, and any mods that change his suite at the Tops will possibly eradicate his "fired home" marker.

KNOWN ISSUES
Nearby NPCs may continue their idle chatter during fade to black scenes, the inconsiderate jerks. Also Benny may get stuck with a "combat" expression after battle; just as with vanilla companions, talking to him will unstick the expression.

If Benny isn't at the 188 when you get there, he may be wandering the Mojave looking for you (no kidding-- people have had him show up in different towns if they didn't go straight to the 188).  Stay at the 188 and wait 24 hours.  He should show up and interrupt your waiting to greet you.  Do not talk to him first-- let him greet you.

Sometimes after he greets you at the 188, you'll get the notification of being given his perk twice and then the game freezes.  If this happens, and if you followed him straight out of the fort as recommended above, then try moving the mod down in your load list and toggling archive invalidation off and back on again.  If that doesn't work, make sure load loose files is checked in the data files section of the original loader (thanks for this tip, quantumbutterfly!).  If neither of those work, DarkForther and Dhojo suggest this:

When Benny gives you the perk and the message appears the first time, hit "~" to open the console.  Click on Benny (you will see his name and ID at the top of the screen).  Type "kill" and close the console.  Hit "OK" and Benny will fall unconscious.  When he awakes, play resumes as normal. (Thank you, DarkForther and Dhojo!)

And definitely let him talk to you first at the 188. If you talk to him before he has a chance to start his force greet, it freaks out the mod, too.


INSTALLATION

Unzip, drag and drop the esp and folders to your Data file (if you need the bat file, see the readme). Delete them to uninstall.


LOAD ORDER

Put the bennyreturns.esp in your load order with your other follower mods, if any, or as low as you can without violating the requirements of any other mods.


BUGS

If you find any bugs, PLEASE let me know. I tried to make sure everything worked, but the best laid schemes of mice and Chairmen gang aft agley. :)


CREDITS

Thank you to everyone who has downloaded this mod, and everyone who's endorsed it. I also appreciate how many of you have jumped into the discussion thread to help me and other players with some of Benny's "quirks" (read: my mistakes). And thanks to those who've uploaded screencaps!

And again I gotta thank llamaRCA for the hours of combing through my helpless scripting to bring this mod to the light of day. Also thanks to the modders who answered my questions on the Nexus forums, and specifically to Jaasce & jamiethe for tremendously valuable help; and to tnu, nivea, QuintonBeck, fronz, DeZako, Felddoon, Shantih, eliralena, eonblue174, simplywayne90, ossidiana, someguynamedjoe, TrinXaS, and MajikMoshos for wanting and supporting the idea of a Benny companion mod. And drg6525 for your mod, which I'm still looking forward to. :)

Special thanks to my dear YptoGink for taking time out of his insanely busy schedule to playtest this mod and do his best to break it. Repeatedly. Special thanks to the wonderful Memai who, besides being a fantastic artist, also helped playtest the 1.5 version.

Thanks to YptoGink, JusticeHand, ScottieCamp, and Sage for voice acting. Couldn't have done it without you.

Thank you to jamiethe for his neat video review.

Thanks Bethesda for giving us the game and the GECK with which to play in it.


PERMISSIONS

It is my fondest hope for this mod that others with greater skill, experience, and/or ideas take this mod, use it as a base, and run with it. Want more/different quests? Add 'em. Want to expand or delete dialogue, go a different direction entirely with the story, *anything* differently from what I've done? Please, feel free! I only ask three things:

*Please credit me as having gone to the trouble to make the mod in the first place XD

*Please credit llamaRCA for combing through tons of scripts and spending so much time helping me fix and finish the mod

and

*Please let me know when and where your mod is downloaded so I can play with it, too!

***While I am giving permission for others to expand on this mod, I do not grant permission for my version to be simply reuploaded anywhere besides the Nexus or for any other platforms.***



OLD UPDATES

UPDATE (5/28/15)
New readme posted with another solution for the double perk glitch.  So far, this solution seems to have worked for
everyone who's tried it.

UPDATE (5/3/15)
A new development in the mod update has come up that I'm personally pretty excited about.  I
don't want to disclose it yet in case it doesn't work out, but I think
it's a neat enough feature that even if I can't get everything else I
want to work, I at least want to do an update that includes this new
opportunity.  So yes, it's looking more and more positive that there
will be at least a small update to the mod in the nearish future.  Thank you again to everyone who has downloaded Benny, and those
who keep encouraging me to expand the mod.

UPDATE (8/7/12)
Version 1.6 is posted. See below for changes. If you already have version 1.0
or 1.5 installed, copy over the .esp with the 1.6 version. You don't
have to copy over the sound, texture, or mesh folders if you're just
updating to 1.6. New readme is posted with solutions for the
double-perk/game freeze problem. [NOTE (8/7/12): Miidian13 has
discovered that this update only works with save games previous to
entering Benny's suite at the Tops. If you've already been there, when
you run 1.6 the suite will glitch (most of the furniture moves to one
spot-- it's not pretty). You'll need to start 1.6 with a save where you
haven't been to the 13th floor yet, or just stick with 1.5 if the
non-sandboxing and gaps in the walls don't bother you. Sorry, folks!]