I've just finished downloading and installing Fallout 4 and Fallout London, and my FO4 file doubled in size to 64GB... does anyone have any idea why please? I kinda need that 30GB back.

Thanks!

Hi, that's normal.

You need to add up the storage space requirements.

The "Fallout 4 GOTY" edition requires around 33 GB and "Fallout London" around 34 GB of storage space... so that's about the 64 GB you mentioned.

After all, "London" is just a mod (albeit a pretty big one) and not a "standalone" game and therefore needs most of the assets from the original game as base.

You can save some storage space by deleting the "Creation Club" content from the "data" folder as described in the installation instructions, but that doesn't really free up a lot of storage space.

While I'd agree it's normal that the Fallout 4 folder itself becomes significantly bigger after installing, the offline installer still works in a weird way and seems to waste a lot of space.

Let me explain what I mean by this.

I have downloaded both offline installers for Fallout 4 GOTY and Fallout: London from GOG on 2024-07-25, and made several attempts at installing, since I was having issues with the intro movie just freezing on one of my computers.

Attempt #1 :

- First installed Fallout 4 GOTY to "D:\Fallout 4", using "setup_fallout_4_game_of_the_year_edition_1.10.163.0_(64bit)_(66700).exe"
- Launched it and reached the in-game main menu for F4GOTY with no issue
- Exited F4GOTY
- Ran the "setup_fallout_london_2.31_revision2_(64bit)_(75054).exe" as admin, which made it extract its contents to "D:\Fallout London" (wrote 34 GB in 556 files there)
- Proceeded with the actual "installer.exe" that it started, to have it do its thing into the folder where Fallout 4 GOTY was installed, which seemed to work, as "D:\Fallout 4" grew from 34.8 GB to about 64.9 GB

I noticed that the contents of "D:\Fallout London" was still in there, in addition to having been copied to "D:\Fallout 4" : that seems a bit wasteful.

Wasn't sure if I should delete "D:\Fallout London" myself or not, but if I recall correctly, the shortcut it created to launch the mod pointed to the installer inside of there, so I decided against doing so, for fear that I wouldn't be able to uninstall later.

Anyway, I uninstalled and made a second attempt.

Attempt #2

I installed with mostly the same method, except that this time I had the Fallout London offline installer to extract directly to the same folder where Fallout 4 was already installed.
Extraction seemed to work fine, however when I ran "installer.exe", it replaced almost every file within the game's folder with a 0 byte version ( WTF ?! o_O? ) … so the game folder ended up being less than 28 MB, and then I got an error message stating :
« Application encountered an error during this operation [ failed to start the game: fork/exec D:\Fallout4\f4se_loader.exe: %1 n'est pas une application Win32 valide. ].»

Yeah, not a surprise, that file ended up being 0 bytes too…

Then, after reinstalling again using mostly the same method as in attempt #1 (except that I installed to the default folders on another computer, that is somewhere under "C:\GOG Games\" for both), a few days ago I saw in the forums here that there was a patch available.

So I attempted to launch the game with the official shortcut to installer.exe and press the "Update" button… which then got stuck on an error message telling me that I needed 36 MORE GB again ?!

… so I just closed that with Alt F4 as I didn't see any other option to abort, and used the offline patch "patch_fallout_london_2.31_Revision2_(75054)_to_V1.01_IV2.31R3_(75422).exe", which seemed to work.

And I didn't use the installer at all, but used the method that the development team describes on the official site as "Manual Installation".

This is how I did it:
- Download the GOG installer
- Unpack the installation data into a TEMP directory
- Pack the "DATA" folder in the TEMP directory into a ZIP file
- Install the ZIP file with a mod manager
- Move the INI files in the installation folder into the corresponding appdata and MyDocuments folders
- Delete the TEMP folder afterwards

It's not very intuitive and prone to errors, as the mod doesn't run or is barely stable if you make a mistake (which is why I wouldn't recommend it as a first attempt).

The complicated installation process is, in my opinion, currently the main problem with "Fallout London".

My first installation attempt didn't work because some files were apparently not copied to the correct place by the installer... with the mod manager method I was at least able to check for myself that everything was in the right place.

I hope the development team comes up with a better method, especially for future updates... downloading and installing the entire mod every time will surely become tedious and annoying for some players at some point.

However, I fear that this will not be an easy task: If, for example, data changes in a large mod archive, then it has to be downloaded in full every time... changing only certain parts within the file is not so easy and would not be practical here either.

With smaller mods this is not a problem due to the small file sizes, but with a project of this size it is a different matter.

The SureAI team did this much better years ago: Their "Elder Scrolls" Total Conversions Nehrim and Enderal were completely separate installs from their main games (Oblivion and Skyrim) and updates were automatic... one of the few examples were a application like Steam shows its advantages.

I should have clarified, the FO4 and FO London folders are separate, I was expecting each to be around 30GB (as advertised on the GoG website), but the FO4 file doubled in size to 64 GB... so now both files together are over 90GB. That is my problem =(

Then the "FO4" folder probably contains the complete installation data (as it should)... in this case you have the "London" installation twice on your hard drive.

Look in the "data" folder of the original "FO4" installation... to see if, for example, the same "LondonWorldSpace" files are in there as in your other folder.

"London" must be installed in the folder where the data for the original game is located.

Two separate installations of "Fallout 4", one for the unmodified original game and one for "London", do not work (unless you have it on Steam and then again on GOG and those two versions are installed to separate locations; in that case, both versions will access the same INI files and that will definitely cause problems).

That is why there is a note on the shop page that "London" makes irreparable changes to the original installation.

That's not entirely true, because it is possible to use the original and the mod in parallel. However, it is quite complicated to set up.

Yeah the FO4 folder does have some "LondonWorldSpace" files. I just followed GoG installer steps, so surprised it doubled itself.

No other FO4 (uninstalled Steam one before downloading GoG).

Can I delete things safely? or is re-installing my only option?

The way I see it, you can delete the "Fallout London" folder because, as I said, you need all the mod files in the original installation folder.

I suspect that the "Fallout London" folder you mentioned is the one that the GOG installer created as temporary folder for the installation data. It shouldn't actually be necessary to play.

You can of course delete everything and reinstall it, but I'm not sure if the same thing won't happen again because I can't say exactly how and where the GOG installer stores the data (which was also the reason why I did the whole thing manually using the Mod Manager installation method as described above).

### EDIT ###

The GOG installer should have unpacked 23 Elements in a specified folder (see my attached screenshot; please ignore the file named "FOLON_Install_v101.zip" because thats the one I made myself and used for the mod manager installation).

If your "London" folder looks like this (and all the correct files are already in your "FO4" folder), I assume you can delete the "London" folder.

Warning : the following message is written under the assumption that you used the Offline Installers.
You can disregard it entirely if you did not.


The shortcuts that the Fallout London Offline Installer creates, both the one on the desktop and the one that gets copied into your original Fallout 4 GOTY folder, point to the place where it originally extracted the Fallout London files.
So does the registry entry for the uninstall program.

As long as the actual installer.exe worked (which should be the case if your original Fallout 4 folder grew to almost 65 GB), then you could delete the 34 GB "Fallout London" extraction folder, but you should know that :
- you'll need to recreate your shortcut (to point to f4se_loader.exe within your Fallout 4 GOTY folder) ¹
and
- you will get an error message when trying to uninstall (Windows will detect that it can't proceed and then allow you to remove the entry from the Add/remove programs list)

¹ : You certainly can disregard this if you're using a mod manager.

Yeah that is pretty much how it looks. Thanks. I am not sure if it was offline installers, might have been? I just used GoG Galaxy. I'll look into moving the shortcut and deleting the extraction folder, thanks again.

Might be few days before I can confirm it worked for me and didn't destroy my game (gonna be away from home).

I was able to delete the Fallout London folder, and with a new shortcut to f4se_loader.exe I am able to play the game just fine, with all my saves still there. And my laptop is now 35GB lighter. Thanks guys!