Welcome To The Wasteland mod for Fallout 3

The WELCOME TO THE WASTELAND mod brings hardship back into the fallout world and rebalances many game systems to make for a more complex game, with more complex interaction between skills and abilities and with better overall balance.
It aims to give the player more and harder choices to make in the game, and provide a more atmospheric, harsher fallout world.
It makes no change for the sake of change, and and is a complete package in that each change plays off and contributes to another to create an overall more interesting balance to the game, and a different kind of gameplay that requires you to scrounge and sell whatever you can, eat food to survive, and think much more about which perks and skills you take.

Short Gameplay Explanation*

You will no longer get a new level every 10 minutes.

You'll need to do more quests in order to level up fast.
Those XP raising perks might actually be useful (though I still wouldn't take em).

You no longer get stims and meds and equipment wherever you go.
Even ammo is somewhat harder to find, and more expensive.
Now you'll be scrounging whatever you can get from fallen enemies and the environment so you can go and sell it to buy some more meds or ammo at early stages.

You won't be carrying a huge load of everything. medicine has weight now, and you need food which is also weighted. think carefully about how much you want to put in Strength, or alternatively in Barter skill and Charisma.

You'll sigh with relif whenever a quest gives a big payout, knowing that for a while yet you'll have the equipment you need.
Vanilla-Unecessary skills like Barter are suddenly very good to have, and skill points are that little bit more precious now that you can't cheat with clothes or get the educated perk. Unless you specialize a bit more, chances are some of those locks or terminals might actually be out of your reach now.

You'll be irradiated by the food you now must eat to survive and by the more dangerous environment and creatures.

You'll sing praise of a high medicine skill for increased radaway effects. Radiation penalties are more severe as well.

Your crippling injuries will last a while longer during exploration because stimpacks will either be hard to get and valuable.

You'll no longer step out of the vault with 16 stims and 200+ 10mm bullets.
You'll step out of there with very little more than the clothes on your back, and you'll have to be couragous indeed to go straight to bandit hideouts.

Trekking through the wasteland feels much more like.. well, trekking through a wasteland.
If you don't take care, you'll run out of supplies, and that is bad.
You won't step out of springvale elementary with a kings ransom of medicine and stimpacks now. you'll be happy enough just to get the guns and armor off of raiders in order to sell for food and ammunition.
That's the kind of balance im talking about.

This is what I call Fallout, and the game I wanted to play when I first loaded fallout3 up.

Welcome to the Wastland.

Savegame compatible, but recommended for use with a new game, on high and very high difficulty settings.
Updating to new versions of this mod will not need restarting and will continue flawlessly.

What I've done is rebalance the importance of various skills, perks, abilities, food, medicine and radiation, in addition to various misc. changes that support this:

1) Made food much more healthful and more irradiated. (food is now a main source of HP and it's important to stock up at your local tavern for long treks)

2) Made stimpacks very rare, ultrapowerful and very expensive. (more like FO2. remember how expensive stims were in the first half?)

3) All medicine now weighs 0.5, and food weights have been adjusted as well (most are 0.5 but some are 0.1, no more huge stockpiles, you'll have to decide between guns/meds/food/armor etc now.)

4) Changed the 'enchantment' quality of nearly all clothes and armor (no more +5 repair vaultsuit. your skill picks matter more now. some armors such as power armor now have more damage resistance quality, etc. no more changing suits to repair your weapons.. much less 'magic armor' in the game overall, though what makes sense stays, like +1 Perception for a hat that shades you from the sun, and so on. Of course I couldn't possibly remove the unarmed damage bonus from the clown mask, but thats about that.)

5) Significantly increased accumulation rate of radiation in irradiated areas and when swimming in water (use protection of any kind you can get. radiation is actually = dangerous!)

6) Changed radiation/hp values for drinking from sinks (more rad. finding food is better now.)

7) Food Sanitizer now has a great effect on unpurified water and overall better usage. also weighs a lot less, worth a lot more (sell it? keep it? hmm)

8) 1 more skill points per level (to make up for the loss of skill clothing and the educated perk)

9) removed educated perk (those 'regular' skill perks seem much more appealing now!)

10) a bit less ammo boxes in the game, but more ammo at vendors (little boost to melee chars and more of that fallout wasteland feel)

11) bullets price value raised by 1 per shot (again, the little boost to melee chars and barter skill. You will now need to consider selling ammo to get the kind of ammo you actually need, and your pocket might hurt a bit, but well, thats life in the wasteland.)

12) Combined with the PaceMod. less xp for combat/hacking/lockpicking, more for finding new locations. (exploring is better encouraged but you can explore much more before capping out)

13) shifted things around so that you'll find less loot around your starting area. exploring further is harder, much harder, but has its rewards too.

14) added guards to caravans

15) rebalanced some of the more ridiculously overpowered items and weapons.

16) removed some skill books (300 something is frankly insane. as hard as they are to find, I must accept that for replay value alone, there better be less)

All in all, many changes big and small that make fallout3 a harder game amd the fallout3 world a harsher, less forgiving world.

Special thanks go to Neclipse (Of many many mods fame, not least of which the brilliant killablekids mod), ElminsterAU (of TES4edit and soon FO3Edit fame), Rheikon, Mechanical Pirate, Circitous (of level cap remover fame) and everyone else in the #Fallout3Modding IRC channel (irc.quakenet.org was it?), for their total and absolute brilliance, and of course to Timeslip, without whom none of this (and none of most fallout3 modding to this point) would have been possible.

Furthermore, be advised that some mods can essentially break this one.
Mods that make changes that affect balance knowinlgy or unknowingly (like mods that up weapon damage, for example... the side effect of this is that you have WAY more ammo than vanilla.. etc etc)