I spent 3 days trying to get FOLON to work following both the official website guide and every post I could find on the internet, and I finally said fuck it and played around with it myself and figured out how to get it running.
I’m posting here in case anyone else has had the same problems I did and don’t have a solution. The first half is pretty much identical to their instructions
This does not use the FOLON Downgrader, Because I dont like the idea of signing into my steam account through someone elses program.
Also don’t be in a steam beta. Use release steam
- Run steam in console mode as per instructions here. On Linux just close steam and run “steam -console” in terminal
- Download all the depot packs like they instruct.
- Create a folder elsewhere and go to where the files downloaded and empty each folder into the created folder so you have a full build of the last version of Fallout 4 (Do not alter this directory further, unless you want to have to go through all that pita downloading again, so only copy files from here, do not move them from here)
- Go find appmanifest_377160.acf in /steam/steamapps and make it read only
- Go to your /steam/steamapps/common/Fallout4 folder and delete everything it, and copy the Fallout 4 you just downloaded into the folder.
- Launch fallout once, i dont know how far you have to go, i typically go to character creation, to make sure the game creates all the necessary files
- Go to GOG and download the Fallout London files. should be 10 files, one being an .exe and the rest being bin files
- This is where we diverge. Run protontricks, If you don’t have it installed, then read install instructions here and select Fallout 4
- Ignore any missing file arch 65 errors, keep clicking okay until the “What do you want to do” window pops up
- Click install application, Ok
- In this next window, click cancel
- In this window, select Run an Arbitrary Executable (.exe/.msi/.msu) and click okay.
- In the file explorer that pops up, navigate to your FOLON installer (at the time of this posts edit it is
setup_fallout_london_2.31_revision2_(64bit)_(75054)setup_fallout_london_v1.01_iv2.31r3_(64bit)_(75422).exe) and run it - Select your desktop as the destination (Don’t select your Fallout 4 folder, It’ll just install FOLON into a Fallen London subfolder)
- one the install is done and over, select every file in that folder and copy (don’t move, copy, You want to save this folder as well in case something screws up so you don’t have to through the install steps again) the Data and src folders (this is just f4se source code folder, but it’d go in /Fallout if you installed f4se manually anyway) and all loose files beneath it to your fallout 4 folder, and tell your file manager to merge folders and overwrite files.
- Move the files in _Appdata to ~Steam/steamapps/compatdata/377160/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Fallout4/, overwriting what is there
- Move/Fallout4/ files in _Config to ~/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/377160/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/My Documents/My Games, overwriting whats there.
You should be able to launch Fallout 4 now, and have it load directly into Fallout london, and thanks to making appmanifest read only, steam will never update the game and bork your mod.
Now there are still lots of bugs in FOLON, like the train crash outside the starter area, which most people fix by installing the Buffout mod, but thats beyond the scope of this post
If any of you out there had woes getting FOLON to work like I did I really hope this helps
Edit- About 30 minutes ago, as of this edit, a patch was released to address many problems with FOLON. None of the techniques I’ve listed here for installing the main mod works with the patch. I am continuing to experiment and if I can figure it out I will edit this post again or make a replied post.
Edit 2-
Okay, I could not find a way to get the patcher to work to patch the game
But the base install files are also updated to the same version as the patch, so just redownload the executable and the bin files from gog and follow the steps in the original guide
I played a little bit of it, and it definitely does seem like a pretty impressive mod. However, even with Buffout installed, I kept crashing at the train. I’m hoping to revisit it once they’ve managed to put out a patch addressing some of the technical issues.
Did you install the prerequisite mods that Buffout needs? address library and xse plugin preloader? and have F4SE running? (you can tell its running if you get a little terminal window pop up when you launch the game, but before the game loads. If you dont see this and you have F4SE installed, switch to a GE Proton. I use GE proton 9-5)
Buffout fixed it for me, but i heard another alternative was to lower your graphics quality until you meet the guy after the train (tryin to be vague for spoilers), then you can crank them back up.
I did install all the dependencies. My guess is that I probably made a mistake somewhere while installing them. Regardless, I wasn’t able to get it working, and I didn’t have enough time to really mess with it further.
I might try it again from scratch this weekend if I have time. Maybe try the graphics quality trick if I can’t get Buffout to work, so thank you for that suggestion.
a thing that I ran into, that you should check
Make sure that your Fallout4>Data>F4SE folder only has 1 plugins folder. I ended up with two, Plugins, and plugins, somehow.
If you have that, move everything in Plugins, to plugins, and delete Plugins.
Library Addons goes into plugins, Plugin Preloader goes into /Fallout4, where the Fallout4.exe and f4se_loader.exe files are.
I think I ended up with two plugin folders from just dragging the folders into data from the archives of the mods, instead of moving the files inside of them.
This assumes you are installing the mods manually and not with mo2… but even with mo2 its better to check than be sorry, I guess.
another reply to your post to make sure you see it.
Update was released, guide has been updated. It seems much more stable and less buggy. Suggest you try reinstalling with the new version. Will, ultimately, be less headache i bet.