Modified LitR - Settlement Scrapping

Building settlements manually isn't something I particularly enjoy. It's why I've deemphasized it in Radfall, it's why I built Settler Built Settlements. In addition to that, I generally try to lean into the dirty, scrappy vanilla asthetic. If I am building a settlement I want it to feel like part of the world, so I tend to leave the trash. This is why there is no automated scrapping mod included in LitR.

If you want to add some sort of mod that will help clean up your settlement, they broadly fall into two categories. Mods that automate the process, or mods that let you scrap things you normally can't (and of course some that do both). Mods that only automate the process without letting you scrap things you normally can't are generally safe in principle, assuming that the mod author hasn't accidentally scrapped something quest related, and actually knows how to tell whether something is part of precombines . The danger comes from mods that let you scrap things that are not scrappable in vanilla that are part of precombines. Breaking precombines is a significant performance issue, and if you are dreaming of building a large settlement with lots of settlers, you're already going to be pushing the both the rendering engine as well as the script engine.

There are mods out there that rebuild precombines, for example most of Deep Clean and Remodel series by VigilanceD do this. However this approach generally isn't compatible with the PRP patching for Beantown Interiors and Tales from the Commonwealth (which covers almost the entire map). Previsibine patching needs to be built against everything modifying an area, so unless someone rebuilds previs specifically against the patch I'm using, you will get broken previs at the edges between the two (side note : if anyone encounters patches for those against HaplessAccreditation's prp patches let me know, I'm not against including them in principle, and it's a thing I know a lot of people want, I just think nobody has ever done it, and I don't want to do it myself). And even if the author has successfully rebuilt previsibines, if you don't actually scrap everything that was broken down (eg the author removed roads from precombines, but you want to keep the settlement roads) you will see a performance hit because they engine is now rendering more separate objects that it was before. A beefy rig does help with this, but you the FO4 engine can only take so much. It's a 10 year old game.

I don't have any mod recommendations on this topic, as I said it's not something I've ever been interested in. The previously mentioned VigilanceD mods are generally considered pretty good, if you're running a list without extensive prp patching that will conflict (like LitR, which is why they aren't included, I just use his navmesh fixes instead), but I've never tried them. The only thing that caught my eye was Settlement Salvage Bot, as well as a few of that authors other settlement bot mods, because they take an immersive route to solving the problem. That being said I've never tested them, so I can't testify to whether they work, and how safe they are, and any potential performance impact.

So in summary, the thing to look for if you want to add some scrapping options to LitR are that specifically says that it doesn't break precombines, and check the posts and bug reports to verify this. You also probably want something relative modern - how precombines worked in FO4 wasn't something that was well understood in the early years of modding, because it was something new in the engine that Skyrim didn't have.