‘Fallout 4’ Mod Allows Players To Wear Customizable ‘Dragonball Z’ Scouters

“What does the scouter say about his power level?”

A new mod for Fallout 4 lets players wear the scouters from the popular anime franchise Dragon Ball Z. According to Kotaku, the scouter mod by user Ruddy88, currently available for download on the ever-popular NexusMods site, allows players to don and use the iconic head-mounted computer that many characters in the TV series and manga use to measure their opponent’s “power level.”

The scouters undeniably look awesome on just about every character, but the appeal of this mod is not just in aesthetics. The in-game scouter also adds new functionalities to the Fallout experience, such as being able to focus in on a particular target in a recon scope effect, and slow motion for more precise aiming.

With the mod you can build your own scouter with custom options like a range of different colored lenses, night vision, targeting HUD and even a tracking module. The new features can be added in various combinations, including just one, or all three running at once. You can make your own to wear in the Wasteland using an armor workbench; frames come in white or black, and lenses come in green, pink, blue or red.

Wearing a scouter in the game also adds +2 to the perception stat. Geeknoted that the device feels “like a natural fit given how a scouter is essentially a Pip-Boy you can wear on your face.”

And, yes, Dogmeat can wear one, too.

Fallout 4 Scouter mod https://t.co/nxr6DFCgC7

— Kent Sheely (@ksheely) March 11, 2016

Check out the mod showcase video posted to YouTube by theDeluxeSam, a user who posts weekly videos about the latest Fallout 4 mods.

Fallout 4‘s latest eyewear option is far from the first time someone has tried to bring Dragon Ball Z‘s futuristic eyepiece into a video game universe, or even into real life. YouTube user and professional kinkerer Kier Simmons has built an actual functioning model from a radio scouter.

“Oh sure, it won’t be able to measure your real power level (for the record, it’s probably 5). And yes, similar products exist, but Kier Simmon’s scouter (made from ‘an old 80’s radio scouter’) actually takes the idea to where we’ve always wanted, giving it a fully functioning display with animations.”

“I had to collect Scouter language graphics, vector them out, make up a few, turn them into a font, create an animation in fireworks, then bang my head against a wall until it works,” said Simmons, quoted in an article by Kotaku.

Here is the first video showing the completed version of the homemade scouter. Simmons explains how he made the alien characters that appear on the lens.

“I pulled a couple images from google to get the general idea. I then proceeded to create a few vectors in Adobe Illustrator. I expanded the set to several characters and created a font in a font creator. I then built each frame in Adobe Fireworks and compiled it as a GIF with a black background since black on the transparent OLED screen is off and thus clear.”

Unfortunately, as he repeatedly notes in the video description to endless commenters asking if they can buy one, the display he used for the device is no longer manufactured. His brilliant homemade scouter apparently cost almost $200 for the display alone.

Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z creator Akira Toriyama originally conceived the scouters as a way for readers and viewers to be able to understand different character’s strengths if they were represented as a number. However, one issue was that it made it too easy to guess who would win or lose based on their respective power levels. The solution for this lie in making the main characters power-ups special, in that their levels were dormant most of the time but increased enormously when powered up. In this way their power levels could not measured by a scouter alone.

Amusingly enough, according to Dragon Ball Wiki the scouter‘s famous tendency to explode when detecting an exceptionally high power level means it would’ve had to be based on analog rather than digital technology, explaining it’s similar to “how a counter that is rising at breakneck speed can not keep up and breaks down.”

Fallout 4 mods are not available for the Steam Workshop at this time.

[Image via Lauren Elisabeth / Shutterstock.com]