The team behind a suite of script extender programs for titles released by Bethesda Game Studios has announced that it is ready to release the first build of Fallout 4 Script Extender (F4SE) in anticipation of the numerous complicated mods that will need a little behind-the-scenes help.

“This is an incredibly early release,” one of the program creators wrote on the Bethesda forums, “so please keep in mind that there is only extremely limited functionality provided by this version of F4SE, that we can’t offer technical support for it, and that literally anything about it can change in the future. This is being released primarily to test against a wider audience and hopefully help some people out at the same time”

While mods that simply add new assets or change existing ones can be handled by the Creation Kit that Bethesda will be releasing sometime at the beginning of next year, there are certain mods that need some additional help that the base game can’t provide, and that is where the script extender comes in.

The purpose of the program, according to its creators, is to be “a modder’s resource that expands the scripting capabilities of Fallout 4 … without modifying the executable files on disk.” It allows modders to implement their own custom scripts using Papyrus, which greatly increases the range of functions mods are able to perform.

The last program created by this team was the Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE), which had been used with numerous mods that performed complicated in-game tasks such as adding a search bar for players’ inventories, automatically sorting items into categorized containers, or unlocking hundreds of additional options during character creation. Both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas had similar mods thanks to their respective script extenders.

One of the creators of F4SE noted in a Reddit thread that one of the most useful ways to take advantage of the script extender at the moment is by using it to rebind hotkeys that typically cannot be changed within the game.

The Fallout 4 Script Extender is currently a very early build and has extremely limited functionality, but its creators promised that many more updates will be coming.

Image courtesy of Bethesda Game Studios