Fallout 4 Frost Mod Guide - Wasteland Gamers

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Key Info Up Front

Mod Type: Survival Game Overhaul
Mod Creator: Naugrim04
Nexus Mods Link: Here
Required Add Ons: Automaton, Far Harbor, Nuka-World

Frost Mod Overview

Fallout 4‘s Frost mod is a sequel to the Dustmod for Fallout: New Vegas. Both mods have a similar goal: making Fallout a hardcore survival sim. The mod also focuses on delivering a new story and lore within the Fallout universe set just after the Great War that killed the world in 2077.

The story is told primarily through visual storytelling and small drops of lore that allows the player to piece together the greater story if they can survive long enough. The mod also brings overhauled survival elements, new enemies, new NPCs, new guns and items to help you adapt to the new challenges, and visual makeovers for many areas in the world.

Rather than focusing on joining factions and killing everything that goes bump in the night, Frost challenges the player to survive as long as they can in its harsh environments. It completely changes the focus of Fallout 4 from centering on leveling your character and running headfirst into conflicts to pushing the player to play conservatively and consider the pros and cons of any encounter. Death is always around the corner in Frost, and even a single decision could lead to the end of a run.

Frost Mod Features and Changes

Since Frost is a comprehensive overhaul mod, it completely changes most of the systems present in the vanilla version of Fallout 4. For starters, all quests are completely removed from the game. The only way to get experience points is through other actions which don’t have their values changed at all. Most NPCs in the game are also removed in Frost, with the ones that remain being changed enough to be unrecognizable and with very few doctors or merchants remaining at all.

Frost also brings some pretty heft changes to combat. Not only do sneak attack criticals no longer deal extra damage to enemies but going into VATS also doesn’t reduce the incoming damage that the player receives. Damage in the game is also vastly different, with most enemies and the player being killable with just one or two well-placed shots.

The accuracy of weapons is also significantly decreased, with ammunition being incredibly scarce, making engaging in combat a very costly decision. The fuse time of mines is also considerably shortened to make them an even more lethal threat while exploring the wasteland.

The environment has also been harshened to make surviving much more complicated outside combat. Not only do food and healing items spawn much more infrequently, but the time of day has been modified to impact how well you can sneak. Bobby Pins for lockpicking also spawns much less frequently, and the lockpicking minigame has been made more difficult to force players to decide when it is worth doing.

The outside surface of the world also has constant radiation that affects the player unless they have specialized gear, and the player’s hunger and thirst deteriorate at twice the rate of the normal survival mode in Fallout 4. There is also a much higher chance of Rad Storms sweeping through the map, while Frost also adds Rad Rain and Rad Fog to the list of hazardous weather.

Survival Elements

However, to be successful in Frost, you must first have a much more in-depth understanding of the mod’s survival mechanics and systems. Players, of course, have to deal with the typical Hunger and Thirst that survival mode players are accustomed to, but Frost also adds a range of diseases and afflictions that can make survival drastically more difficult if they aren’t prepared for and swiftly handled.

For Hunger, players will frequently have to scrounge up whatever edible substances they can find, sometimes even having to knowingly become diseased or take on more radiation to not starve to death. Frost uses a system identical to vanilla Fallout 4 to determine the nutritional value of food items, namely having it equal to the value of the item in Caps.

When it comes to a player’s Hunger, there are five stages that players fall through as they go longer without eating. The table of each stage, how long they take to get there, and the negative effects they afflict on the player are below.

Hunger Tier	Time to get to (real-time)	Effects
Peckish	9 minutes	-1 Endurance
Hungry	18 minutes	-1 Charisma -2 Endurance
Famished	36 minutes	-3 Charisma -4 Endurance -1 Luck
Ravenous	54 minutes	-5 Charisma -8 Endurance -2 Luck
Starving	96 minutes	-5 Charisma -10 Endurance -3 Luck Deals damage to the player periodically

The hydration value of drinkable items in Frost works identically to the nutrition value of edible items. However, not all drinkable items in the mod will restore the player’s thirst, so finding what items do is essentially a process of elimination that requires players to drink items and note what effects they have on them. Thirst also has five tiers of degradation with harsher times and their negative impacts, which you can find below.

Thirst Tier	Time to get to (real-time)	Effects
Parched	6 minutes	-1 Intelligence
Thirsty	10 minutes	-2 Intelligence -2 Perception
Mildly Dehydrated	27 minutes	-4 Intelligence -1 Luck -3 Perception
Dehydrated	45 minutes	-8 Intelligence -2 Luck -5 Perception
Severely Dehydrated	68 minutes	-10 Intelligence -3 Luck -7 Perception Deals damage to the player periodically

Players can thankfully only get one every 24 hours of in-game time regarding diseases and illnesses. However, they can be incredibly difficult to deal with when one does contract one. They are most commonly transmitted when enemies like Dogs and Ghouls damage the player. However, they also can be gained by using Chems and consuming raw food or untreated drinks.

It is inevitable that you’ll get at least one disease during your time with Frost, but if you take your time to try and minimize them as much as possible, you will get far fewer than if you didn’t. Once you get a disease, the easiest ways to treat them are consuming the extremely rare antibiotics or sleeping through their duration.

The player’s Hunger and Thirst degradation is greatly reduced while sleeping, so sleeping for a few days in a row can be done to speed up the healing process with a surprisingly small impact on their needs. Each of the diseases, their duration, and their effects are listed below.

Disease	Duration (in-game time)	Effects
Fatigue	144 Hours	Sleep need degrades at twice the normal rate.
Infection	72 Hours	Damages the player for 10 points every 45 seconds as long as your health is above 20.
Insomnia	60 Hours	Doubles the amount of sleep the player requires.
Lethargy	96 Hours	It cuts the speed you regenerate Action Points by half.
Parasites	168 Hours	Halves the benefits gained from eating food.
Weakness	48 hours	Increases all damage you take by 20%.

Insanity

Frost also measures the player’s sanity and forces them to manage the mental state of their character. A character’s Sanity is measured on a scale from 0 to 100, but it can go as far below 0 as players want. However, when a player’s Sanity is dropped below 0, they become Insane with a range of negative effects.

The only way to get out of the state is to increase one’s Sanity back above 0, meaning that letting it get too far below 0 is a very dangerous practice. Below you can find all of the modifiers that negatively and positively impact a player’s Sanity.

Positive/Negative	Action	Sanity Impact
Negative	Eating Raw Meat	-1
	Eating Strange Meat	-2
	Killing an adult human
	Taking the Mystery Spit Chem
	Drinking Fungal Purge
	Taking the Jet Chem
	Taking the Psycho Chem	-3
	Killing a child human	-10
	Using the Mysterious Serum Chem	-10
Positive	Eating cooked pre-war food	+1
	Drinking Beer or Wine
	Eating Brian Fungus
	Using the Bufftats Chem
	Drinking Gwinnett drinks, Vodka, or Whiskey	+2
	Eating Fire Belly	+2
	Using the Mentat Chem	+3
	Using the Calmex Chem	+5
	Using the Thorazine Chem	+10

With how reliant raising one’s Sanity is on Chems, it can be extraordinarily difficult to get it higher once it starts to fall. Most players will slip into Insanity at least a few times during a long Frost run, but playing carefully can go a long way in helping players keep themselves stable. If you are unlucky enough to become Insane, however, here are the effects you can expect to deal with:

-3 to your Charisma and Intelligence
You take 10% less damage from enemies
You can no longer use V.A.T.S. for any weapons that aren’t melee or unarmed
You sprint faster and take less damage while running
You are more efficient at sneaking and are 25% harder to detect while doing so
Your accuracy with ranged weapons is severely lowered
You deal 10% extra damage against enemies while using unarmed or melee weapons
Unless you have the second rank of the Trader perk, all traders will exploit your state to charge you the maximum price for any good sold while only paying you hardly anything for what you sell to them.

Perks

While the Frost mod may not have quests to earn experience, players are still able to level up their characters and unlock perks to help them better respond to the harsh conditions of the wasteland.

Many of the perks from vanilla Fallout 4 are maintained in Frost, but a select number has been tweaked or outright replaced with a new perk. The modified perks are:

Perk	Rank/Level Required	New Effect
Blitz	1 / –	Greatly expands the range of melee attacks in V.A.T.S.
Blitz	2 / 29	Increases the damage of your melee attacks in V.A.T.S. by how far away the target is.
Commando	1 / –	Increases your accuracy with automatic weapons by 20%.
	2 / 11	Increases your accuracy with automatic weapons by 40% and your range by 10%.
	3 / 21	Increases your accuracy with automatic weapons by 60% and your range by 20%.
	4 / 35	It increases your accuracy with automatic weapons by 80% and increases your chance to stagger targets.
	5 / 49	Increases your chance to stagger targets when using automatic weapons.
Cannibal	1 / –	Allows you to eat Humans to heal and fill Hunger.
	2 / 19	Allows you to eat Ghouls or Super Mutants to heal and fill Hunter.
	3 / 38	Increases the health gained by eating Humans, Ghouls, and Super Mutants.
Ghoulish	1 / –	It makes Radiation restore your health.
	2 / 24	Increases the rate that Radiation restores your health.
	3 / 48	It increases the rate that Radiation restores your health and gives you the chance to have Feral Ghouls become friendly toward you.
	4 / 50	Rad damage can also slowly restore your health.
Gunslinger	1 / –	Increases your accuracy with non-automatic pistols by 20%.
	2 / 7	Your accuracy with non-automatic pistols is increased by 40%, and your range by 10%.
	3 / 15	Your accuracy with non-automatic pistols is increased by 60%, and your range by 20%.
	4 / 27	Increases your accuracy with non-automatic pistols by 80% and gives your attacks to disarm the target.
	5 / 42	It increases the chance of your attacks with non-automatic pistols disarming your target and gives them a chance to cripple a limb.
Heavy Gunner	1 / –	Increases your accuracy with heavy guns by 25%.
	2 / 11	Increases your accuracy with heavy guns by 50%.
	3 / 21	Increases your accuracy with heavy guns by 75%.
	4 / 35	It gives your attacks with heavy guns a chance to stagger your target.
	5 / 47	Increases your carry weight by 20.
Intimidation	1 / –	It gives you a chance to pacify enemies by pointing your gun at them.
	2 / 23	Allows you to direct an enemy to attack others when you pacify them.
	3 / 50	Allows you to give enemies specific commands after you pacify them.
Lead Belly	1 / –	Decreases the radiation you gain from eating and drinking.
	2 / 6	Decreases the radiation you gain from eating and drinking further.
	3 / 17	Completely removes radiation gained from eating and drinking.
Local Leader	1 / –	Allows you to establish supply lines between settlements.
Local Leader	2 / 14	Allows you to build stores and workstations at settlements.
Ninja	1 / –	Increases the damage of melee attacks while sneaking by 50%.
	2 / 16	Increases the damage of one-handed melee attacks while sneaking by 100%.
	3 / 33	Increases the damage of two-handed melee attacks while sneaking by 100%.
Rifleman	1 / –	Increases your accuracy with non-automatic rifles by 20%.
	2 / 9	Increases your accuracy with non-automatic rifles by 40%.
	3 / 18	You can increase your accuracy with non-automatic rifles by 60% and your range by 20%.
	4 / 31	It increases your accuracy with non-automatic rifles by 80% and gives your attacks a small chance of crippling a target’s limb.
	5 / 46	Increases your range with non-automatic rifles by 50%, giving them a higher chance of crippling a target’s limb.
Scrounger	1 / –	Increases your odds of finding ammunition by 20%.
	2 / 7	Increases your chance of finding ammunition by 30%.
	3 / 24	Increases your chance of finding ammunition by 40%.
	4 / 37	Grants you a chance to gain ammunition when you fire the last round in your magazine.
Solar Powered	1 / –	Increases your Endurance and Strength by two between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.
	2 / 27	Being in sunlight restores your lost health.
	3 / 50	Being in sunlight heals your radiation.
Strong Back	1 / –	Increases your carry weight by 10.
	2 / 10	Increases your carry weight by 15.
	3 / 20	Allows you to use Action Points to run while over-encumbered.
	4 / 30	Increases your carry weight by 20.
Sniper	1 / –	Decreases your sway when aiming down a scope.
	2 / 13	Decreases your sway when aiming down a scope and gives scoped non-automatic weapons a chance to knock down your target.
	3 / 26	Decreases your sway when aiming down a scope and increases the accuracy of headshots in V.A.T.S. with non-automatic scoped rifles by 25%.

The perks that have been replaced and what the new perks do are:

Old Perk	New Perk	Rank/Character Level Required	Effect
Aquaboy/Aquagirl	Hunter	1 / –	Allows you to harvest meat from dead animals.
Aquaboy/Aquagirl	Hunter	2 / 11	Allows you to harvest hides from dead animals.
Attack Dog	K9 Trainer	1 / –	Decreases the chances of a Dog or Wolf crippling you when they attack.
Attack Dog	K9 Trainer	2 / 9	Greatly decreases the chances of a Dog or Wolf crippling you when they attack.
Cap Collector	Trader	1 / –	Decreases the price of purchased items by 25% and increases the price of sold items by 50%.
		2 / 20	Decrease the price of purchased items by 50% and increase the sold items’ price by 100%.
		3 / 41	Allows you to invest 500 caps in a store to increase its buying capacity.
Demolition Expert	Duck ‘n Cover	1 / –	Decreases the damage you take from explosives by 25% and allows you to craft explosives at Chemistry Stations.
		2 / 10	Decreases the damage you take from explosives by 50% and shows a throwing arc when using grenades.
		3 / 22	Decreases the damage you take from explosives by 75% and you don’t trigger mines.
		4 / 34	Decreases the damage you take from explosives by 95%.
Iron Fist	Warrior Monk	1 / –	Increases the damage of unarmed attacks by 20%
		2 / 9	Increases the damage of unarmed attacks by 40% and gives them a chance to unarm your target.
		3 / 18	Increasing the damage of unarmed attacks by 60% gives unarmed power attacks a chance to cripple a target’s limb. Increases the Sanity gain from the Thorazine chem by 50%.
		4 / 31	Increases the damage of unarmed attacks by 80%, gives unarmed power attacks a higher chance to cripple a target’s limb, and increases the Sanity gain from all chems by 50%.
		5 / 46	Increases the damage of unarmed attacks by 100% and makes unarmed critical hits in V.A.T.S. paralyze the target.
Lone Wanderer	Wanderer	1 / –	Decreases the damage you take by 5% and increases your carrying capacity by 5 as long as you don’t have any Settlements.
		2 / 17	Decreases the damage you take by 10% and increases your carrying capacity by 10 as long as you don’t have any Settlements.
		3 / 40	Increases the experience you get for killing an enemy by 50% as long as you don’t have any Settlements.
		4 / 50	Increases your Action Points by 25, increases your range by 20% with all weapons, gives you 20% better accuracy with all weapons, and increases your experience gain from all sources by 300% as long as you don’t have any Settlements.

Settlements

Frost players can still establish Settlements just like in Fallout 4 to make surviving a bit easier. However, they have been modified to make them a bit more challenging to build and maintain. For starters, most settlement items have had their crafting requirements changed, new ones have been introduced, and many have schematics in the open world that have to be found before you can craft them.

Many settlement locations also already have peaceful inhabitants living there, requiring players to kill them before taking control of the settlement themselves. Growable crops have also largely been removed, only allowing players to grow Glowing Fungus and Brain Fungus which are helpful for managing your Sanity but don’t offer any nourishment. The locations where players can establish Settlements are:

Coastal Cottage: Has hostile enemies that must be dealt with before taking control.
Country Crossing: Has hostile enemies that must be dealt with before taking control and is unable to support crops.
Croup Manor: Has hostile enemies that must be dealt with before taking control.
The Compound: Located where the Covenant is in vanilla Fallout 4. Has hostile enemies that have to be dealt with before taking control, including very dangerous automatic turrets.
Egret Tours Marina: Has a hostile enemy that must be dealt with before taking control.
Finch Farm: Has hostile enemies that must be dealt with before taking control and has a few razorgrain plants that grow nearby.
Fort Independence: Comes with a Clinic Store but is inhabited by peaceful settlers.
Hangman’s Alley: Has hostile enemies that must be dealt with before taking control and is difficult to enter.
Jamaica Plain: Has hostile enemies that must be dealt with before taking control and comes with a Cooking Station.
Outpost Zimonja: Comes with an electric generator as well as two Tato and Carrot plants.
Sanctuary Hills: Has hostile Ghouls and a Survivor that must be dealt with before taking control and comes with all Workbenches.
Spectacle Island: Has hostile creatures that must be dealt with before taking control.
Taffington Boathouse: Has hostile enemies that must be dealt with before taking control.
The Slog: Has hostile enemies that have to be dealt with before taking control. Comes with three workers and carrot plants.

Getting Started in Frost

When you start a new Frost game you’ll be dropped into a place called The Beginning of Things. It is a metallic room with a terminal at the center that you can use to customize your character’s starting attributes or select from a pre-made character that guarantees it will work well. Then, there are three doors that you can walk through to select your starting location on the map.

The leftmost door leads to Spectacle Island, a small coastal island that is a frozen wasteland with very few resources to support any life. The middle door takes the player to the Access Tunnels and is the standard starting area. This area is a good one for new players as it helps them gather supplies and get their bearings before having to deal with the harsh environment above the tunnels.

The final door goes to a highway near the Weston Water Treatment Plant. This door is a medium starting difficulty, as it does not have as harsh of an environment as Spectacle Island but does throw players right into the thick of survival without much preparation.

Frost Do’s and Don’ts

Do:

Get comfortable surviving with low needs and a disease or crippled limb. They are all expensive to get rid of, so you’ll have to accept the fact that you will typically be in bad shape.
Take advantage of crafting stations whenever you come across one.
Be cautious when engaging in combat and try to use terrain and different types of enemies to your advantage.
Don’t be afraid to run away from an engagement gone wrong.
Never leave your settlement without sleeping first.
Don’t carry gear around with you that you won’t use. If you want to save it for later find somewhere to store it. Carrying Capacity is harshly cut down, and all of it needs to be used for things that you actually can use in the moment.
Sleeping in a bed restores all hit points and limb damage, so make sure to sleep frequently.
Take the Hunter perk as early as possible to have a steadier supply of food.
Cook any and all food to avoid taking on unnecessary radiation.
Use alcohol and chems to help get you out of sticky situations, but be careful not to rely on them so much that you become addicted.
Familiarize yourself with your most-used crafting recipes so that you know exactly what to be on the look for while looting locations.
If you go insane, use it to your advantage by using melee weapons and stealth.
Find a way to establish yourself in Downtown. It has pivotal access to multiple areas and plays a big role in the mod’s story.
Don’t be afraid to use the numerous other mods for Frost to tune it to your own preferences.

Don’t:

Blame yourself if your first couple of runs doesn’t go well. Frost takes a lot of time and patience to learn.
Don’t be so afraid of dying that you never engage with any parts of the mod. Death will come easily while playing Frost, but you will learn how to manage within its systems and combat.
Explore the exterior of the world without a gas mask, as the radiation will quickly make you regret it.
Attack aggressively in melee without ever blocking.
Waste ammunition shooting enemies in the body if you have the time to line up a headshot.
Think that the perks that add range and accuracy to guns aren’t worthwhile. They can save your life more times than you would think.

FAQs

**Question: Does Frost in Fallout 4 have an ending?**

Answer: There is an ending to the main storyline at the center of Frost, but you can keep playing afterward and it is never referenced as or presented as an ending to the mod or your playthrough.

**Question: Is Frost available in the console versions of Fallout 4?**

Answer: No, Frost is currently only available on the PC version of Fallout 4.

**Question: Is Frost for Fallout 4 still being worked on?**

Answer: The mod has received numerous updates and other mods to modify it, and it doesn’t seem like the community or the mod’s creators are planning on stopping.

Continue reading related Fallout 4 Mod Guides:

Horizon Mod Guide