This week on the Mod Roundup (yee-haw!), a modder adds some much needed crossbows to Fallout 4—but watch out, some of your enemies can use them too. Also, XCOM 2 gets a UI mod that tracks your soldiers' lifetime stats during your campaign and lets you know how good they are at beating the odds. Finally, if you're tired of manually replacing your water pipes with heating pipes in the Snowfall expansion to Cities: Skylines, there's a mod that makes it a one-click affair—if you can afford it.

Here are the most promising mods we've seen this week.

Crossbows of the Commonwealth, for Fallout 4

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Crossbows. In Fallout 4. Good idea! And this isn't some hastily slapped-together weapon skin, it's a nicely animated and fully functional addition to your arsenal. You can add attachments to it at your workbench, you can load it up with flaming arrows, and it's a silent weapon that compliments any of your stealthy characters. Just be careful: if you use this mod, raiders you encounter might be armed with crossbows as well.

Lifetime Stats, for XCOM 2

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This mod adds some UI information that tells you your soldiers' stats throughout your campaign. You can now see how many lifetime shots they've taken, how often they've hit or missed, and how many of their shots have been critical ones. It also includes some fun details like how often your soldiers have overcome the odds. In other words, how lucky they've been in the past. Let's hope their luck holds out just a little longer.

Water Pipe Upgrader, for Cities: Skylines Snowfall

Download link

If you're playing the Snowfall expansion for Cities: Skylines, upgrading your water pipes to heating pipes just got a lot easier. Like, one-click easier. Rather than running along each section of pipe, you can upgrade them all at once—if you have the cash—with a single click. I don't feel like it's a cheat: there's nothing particularly enjoyable about retracing all your pipes by hand, a section at a time. This just makes getting your city warm a whole lot easier.

More information about the changes coming to Fallout 4's Survival Mode have appeared on Reddit, thanks to the datamining efforts of a user by the name of ShaneD35. According to what he's found, Survival Mode will ensure that you die sooner, faster, more often, and for more reasons than ever before.

Bethesda subsequently confirmed on Twitter that the findings are legit, though alas there's no word on when it will be ready to go live.

Our fans are too smart. Early look at #Fallout4 Survival Mode on @reddit. We re still messing w/ it. More to come! https://t.co/1YmVBIt6W0

— BethesdaGameStudios (@BethesdaStudios) February 24, 2016

Here's what you have to look forward to when Survival Mode arrives:

Saving: Manual and quicksaving are disabled. To save your game, you'll need to find a bed and sleep for at least an hour.

Combat: Combat is more lethal for everyone. You now deal, but also take, more damage. You can increase the damage you deal even further with "Adrenaline" (see below).

Fast Travel: Fast Travel is disabled. If you wish to be somewhere, you'll have to physically travel there.

Weighted Ammo: Bullets and shells now all have a small amount of weight, which varies by caliber. Heavier items such as fusion cores, rockets, and mini-nukes can really drag you down.

Compass: Be sure to keep your eyes peeled, as enemies will no longer appear on your compass. As well, the distance at which locations of interest will appear has been significantly shortened.

Adrenaline: Survival automatically grants the Adrenaline perk, which provides a bonus to your damage output. Unlike other perks, the only way to increase your rank of the Adrenaline perk is by getting kills (hostile or otherwise). The higher your Adrenaline rank, the higher the damage bonus. Sleeping for more than an hour, however, will cause your Adrenaline rank to lower. You can check your current Adrenaline rank at any time in the Perks section on the Stat tab in your Pip-Boy.

Wellness: You'll find it difficult to survive without taking proper care of yourself. You must stay hydrated, fed, and rested to remain combat-ready. Going for extended periods of time without food, water, or sleep will begin to adversely affect your health, hurting your SPECIAL stats, adding to your Fatigue (see "Fatigue" below), lowering your immunity (see "Sickness" below), and eventually even dealing physical damage to you.

Fatigue: Fatigue works like radiation but affects your Action Points (AP) rather than your Hit Points (HP). The more Fatigue you've built up, the less AP you'll have for other actions. The amount of Fatigue you've accumulated is displayed in red on your AP bar.

Sickness: A comprised immune system and a few questionable decisions can end up getting you killed. Eating uncooked meat, drinking unpurified water, taking damage from disease-ridden sources, such as ghouls and bugs, or using harmful Chems all put your body at increased risk for various ill effects. When you are afflicted with an illness, a message will appear onscreen. You can view specifics about your current illnesses by navigating to the Status section on your Pip-Boy's Data tab and pressing [RShoulder] to view your active effects.

Antibiotics: Antibiotics, which can be crafted at Chem Stations or purchased from doctors, heal the various effects of sickness.

Bed Types: The type of bed you're sleeping in determines the length of time you are able to stay asleep. A sleeping bag will save your game and may help save your life when you're desperate, but it will never allow for a full night's rest and the benefits that come with it.

Crippled Limbs: Crippled limbs will no longer auto-heal after combat and will remain crippled until healed by a Stimpak.

Carry Weight: Exceeding your carry weight reduces your Endurance and Agility stats and periodically damages your legs and health. Think of your back!

Companions: Companions will no longer automatically get back up if downed during combat and will return home if abandoned without being healed.

Enemy and Loot Repopulation: Locations you've cleared will now repopulate enemies and loot at a significantly slower rate.

While you're bracing yourself for the arrival of that little lot, why not consider customizing your Fallout 4 experience with some of the best mods so far. (Or, if the game's already too hard for your taste, have some cheats and console commands.)

Fallout 4 modders are doing a fine job without the the official Creation Kit, but without them ambitious overhauls and clever scripting are in short supply. Luckily, elusive details of the modkit's progress have escaped: it's set to arrive in April.

"Our goal [for full mod support] is between the first two DLCs," Todd Howard said in an interview with Game Informer. "It ll go up at that time on PC. In April. All of that stuff will go up on PC. People are beta testing it."

The DLCs in question are the Automatron and Wasteland Workshop packs announced last week. Howard let fly a few details around the overhauled Survival mode Bethesda has been teasing too, and it's not to be taken lightly. The game only saves when you sleep, there is no fast travel, and all sorts of diseases have survived the radiation. Though he's vague on this point, the combat is due an overhaul too, to make enemies—and presumably yourself—"less bullet-spongey".

Given the extent of the changes, the mode will get a thorough public beta test. If it doesn't go over well, Howard suggests it could stay in beta for about a month, though Bethesda doesn't want to drag it out unnecessarily.

Normally, these immersive environmental changes are the province of modders, so I'm excited to see how they toy with Bethesda's own take on survival.

I had an interesting encounter with Dogmeat in a elevator recently— interesting because he wasn't traveling with me at the time. His from-out-of-nowhere appearance, when he was supposed to be miles away in the relative safety of Sanctuary Hills, is one of the more egregious bugs I've run into in my time with the game. Fortunately, work on stomping them out continues, as demonstrated by the appearance of a new Fallout 4 beta patch on Steam.

The 1.4.124 update adds several new features, including:

• Support for add-ons
• Additional art customization added to Workshop:
• Super Mutant clutter including meat totems, meat bags and meat cart
• Raider clutter including raider poles, cages and tents
• Abstract and portrait paintings
• Variety of new signs
• More metal and wood doors variants

It also makes the usual general stability and performance improvements, and a number of more specific fixes, from ensuring that Kellog's desk remains a functioning container in the Getting a Clue quest, to correcting issues with objects in water not floating properly under certain save/load conditions. As a beta patch, you will have to opt into beta updates in your Steam library settings for Fallout 4, instructions for which are included with the patch notes, if you want to give it a go ahead of full release.