A smaller Sim Settlements Lite on Xbox

[Chesnaughty]

I love Sim Settlements, and have to have it on just about every playthrough I have now, but over time Sim Settlements has been steadily growing in size. While that's obviously understandable, and while I know the original 200 mb goal of the Lite version was very unrealistic further down the line, the size of the lightweight Xbox version of Sim Settlements has become double that of the original Sim Settlements Lite now, and only 100mb less than the main file, and as updates comes out I'm worried even the smallest Sim Settlement playthrough is going to eat a quarter of filesize for console players, before any add-ons at all are factored in. I was just thinking that if, further down the line as bugfixing and mod changing outside of add-ons or expansions cool down, after a while the Lite version of Sim Settlements could get a bit of trimming, maybe removing certain clutter options or essentially gutting out city plan, town loader, or other RotC framework features in the base file, in order to compress it down into a smaller package meant to be used either standalone or with a tiny add-on or two.

 

[Catallaxis]

Sim Settlements Lite is pretty stable now, and so for players who enjoy Sim Settlements as it is but are worried about space, they can simply stop updating.

The fundamental problem is that creating and maintaining multiple versions of Sim Settlements and its expansions is very time consuming, and it takes away from time that could otherwise be spent developing the mod. The more different the full and lite versions become, the more complicated it becomes to update and test them, and so currently the lite version only removes purely aesthetic content that can be safely isolated from the rest of the mod's systems and removed without any adverse side-effects.

Currently, there are no lite versions of the official expansions: Industrial Revolution, Rise of the Commonwealth, or the two Year One Megapacks. Kinggath doesn't have the time to create, maintain, and upload multiple versions of everything just for Xbox users. However, you can make these lite versions more likely by supporting the Patreon, and encouraging other Xbox users to do the same. If we can reach the next goal (250 patrons), then Kinggath will hire an assistant to manage bug reports and push updates, and this should make lite, and perhaps lite-er, versions of Sim Settlements and its expansions more realistic (though I can't make any promises).

In any case, Kinggath has went to great lengths to accommodate Xbox users, and it's one of the major reasons why the mod is separated into multiple parts in the first place. The team has worked hard to ensure the mod is as compatible as possible with even the base Xbox One, including the recent creation of the optimized city plans. Support for Xbox has definitely not been an afterthought, but there are limits to what can reasonably be done without more resources.

I am also an Xbox only user of Sim Settlements, so I share your pain.

 

[Chesnaughty]

Sim Settlements Lite is pretty stable now, and so for players who enjoy Sim Settlements as it is but are worried about space, they can simply stop updating.

The fundamental problem is that creating and maintaining multiple versions of Sim Settlements and its expansions is very time consuming, and it takes away from time that could otherwise be spent developing the mod. The more different the full and lite versions become, the more complicated it becomes to update and test them, and so currently the lite version only removes purely aesthetic content that can be safely isolated from the rest of the mod's systems and removed without any adverse side-effects.

Currently, there are no lite versions of the official expansions: Industrial Revolution, Rise of the Commonwealth, or the two Year One Megapacks. Kinggath doesn't have the time to create, maintain, and upload multiple versions of everything just for Xbox users. However, you can make these lite versions more likely by supporting the Patreon, and encouraging other Xbox users to do the same. If we can reach the next goal (250 patrons), then Kinggath will hire an assistant to manage bug reports and push updates, and this should make lite, and perhaps lite-er, versions of Sim Settlements and its expansions more realistic (though I can't make any promises).

In any case, Kinggath has went to great lengths to accommodate Xbox users, and it's one of the major reasons why the mod is separated into multiple parts in the first place. The team has worked hard to ensure the mod is as compatible as possible with even the base Xbox One, including the recent creation of the optimized city plans. Support for Xbox has definitely not been an afterthought, but there are limits to what can reasonably be done without more resources.

I am also an Xbox only user of Sim Settlements, so I share your pain.

Maybe I'm just being a little greedy. After modding New Vegas on PC, I expected a Fallout game without anything like a script extender on consoles would result in nothing outside of armor, weapon, creature, and landscape mods. To this day Sim Settlements is such a shocking thing, how things like perks and traits require a script extender, but completely transforming and automating the settlement system into what is genuinely a sim game is something that has been accomplished without one for quite some time now, and getting something like that has made me take for granted all the work that went into it, Sim Settlements itself being so important to my playthroughs that it's actually kept me away from New Vegas.

Of course I wasn't expecting some miracle where the file would be transformed overnight, but hopefully it can be something to at least consider later, and I mean much later, down the line; as you said, it would be super unrealistic to upkeep and patch two drastically different versions of the same file while they're still being regularly updated.

For now I'm still able to make due, I just run Sim Settlements Lite by itself with Uituit's Junktown Interiors. Part of the problem was after getting my Xbox One X I had to redownload everything, and before I was running the version of Sim Settlements without the Bunker Hill build update, so I had to download about 100 mbs more. Memory juggling is part and parcel of the Xbox modding experience anyway, I just had to remove Floatsam and Jetsam to get my space working. Thanks for your reply though, after posting it the other night I felt I might have worded it a bit rude, I appreciate the response.