- New cosmetic buildings:
I absolutely love those things. The only reason I'm not loudly demanding more is that they might clutter up the buildings screen. Perhaps they could be absolutely last in the list, and not have any assigned hotkeys? Then we could make as many as we wanted; I think it's worth repeating that I absolutely love the idea and the possibilities for execution.
I accept ideas what we could upgrade "cheesemaker" to? "Distiller" and make both cheesemaking and alcohol reactions depend on him, and turn brewer into another profession for advanced stuff?
That's an interesting idea. Nothing comes to mind at the moment, but there are also a lot of extremely specific skills that could be parsed down. Perhaps Cook could be used for cheesemaking and brewing? That would free up several new skills to use for advanced industries: things like making firearms and building scientific equipment.
In addition I plan to remove shields alltogether as "overpowered walls of defense". They would be replaced with pip-boys, totems, riot batons, brass knuckles and the like. And they would have either 0 or very low block chance. Then there would be high-tech "directional forcefields" which would be like normal shields.
That would make particular sense in a modern setting; right now a wooden shield can deflect the shots from rifles. It would also make combat more lethal, of course; that's mostly a nerf to the player's defenses and Brother survivability, so I would do some playtesting before giving my solid opinion on it. It would go a long way towards making ranged combat a more viable option, though.
Another thing to consider - the research system. I think you should be able to research holodisks and pre-war books and get "science notes". Then you would combine a number of such notes into a "scientific breakthrough". Then you would use that "scientific breakthrough" with additional science notes to get the next level of tech, and the breakthrough would stay. I could make a tech tree using this.
I think it would be cool if the player could choose which area to direct his research towards. In the pony mod, salvage was completely random; if you wanted robot parts you were out of luck, because there was no way to manipulate the odds towards any particular goal. If these were generic notes that could be combined into specific breakthroughs (or maybe themed notes, like 'electronics notes' and 'physics notes' that could each be used on certain breakthroughs?) then the player could make decisions rather than roll with whatever the RNG gives him.