Thanks will have a look, one thing I do not understand and you refer to it often is the word 'build' what exactly do you mean by that?
In this context, 'build' is the way you set up a character. What stats you choose, what perks you choose, what weapons you intend to use, what legendary effects you intend to look for in weapons and armour, any other factors you choose. You're making a character planned for a particular combination of things, which is a form of building.
For example, a common categeory of FO76 build is called "bloodied". It's entirely planned around using a weapon with the legendary weapon effect "bloodied", which gives you increasing damage with decreasing health. So a bloodied build will depend on being mostly dead all of the time, which requires being heavily irradiated all of the time in order to reduce your maximum hit points to a small fraction of what they should be. It also requires having a weapon with the legendary effect "bloodied". Various things follow on from that - you need a way to maintain that degree of irradiation, you need to be able to survive with so few hitpoints, etc. Various versions of the bloodied build exist, e.g. bloodied stealth sniper, bloodied melee, etc. Bloodied melee is perhaps the ultimate glass cannon build in FO76 - you can do enormous damage per hit, but you have to close with your enemies and you have very few HP. Bloodied is a fairly extreme build whatever variant you use, but at least a bloodied stealth sniper is intended to never take damage. Tbe idea is that you do so much damage that you one-shot everything before it detects you. And good luck with groups of mobs or mobs with such high resistances and/or HP that they're impossible to one-shot.
I have a relatively loose build, in that I am a generalist power armour heavy weapons build with a leaning towards scavver because I run with excavator power armour. That's either the worst or second to bottom power armour in terms of protection but it gives +100 carry weight. But I'm not set up specifically for any one legendary effect on my weapon or min/maxxed for anything. Except maybe energy weapons. I have a mutation that reduces the damage I do with energy weapons and increases my resistance to energy damage. Which reminds me that I must find out if explosive damage counts as energy damage. I have a selection of weapons to allow me to vary the DPS I do and the amount of ammo I use. Gatling guns for most efficient ammo use, miniguns for highest DPS but enormous ammo use, 50 cal machineguns for in between. At the moment, only one of my 50 cals does explosive damage but I'm intending to use a gauss minigun and they're all explosive.
[..] Any other mods anyone can recommend.?
I find Perk Loadout Manager and Better Inventory very useful as quality of life mods. I think they both "that's how it should have been" mods. But be warned that PLM is a bit more complex than standard mods, as you probably already know. I think it's well worth it. Having perk loadouts greatly reduces faffing about with swapping perk cards.
But Better Inventory is simple to install and completely lovely. I've been playing without it for a while because I haven't downloaded the post-Wastelanders version and I find myself missing it. It's not a major thing, but it is. One click or button press and your stupidly cluttered aid tab is showing just the food you have. Eat up! One more and it's showing just the drinks you have. Drink up! Job done, nice and simple. Also, weight management. How much does all the stuff in your aid tab weigh? In vanilla FO76, who knows? With Better Inventory, the figure is right there when you select the aid tab. As is the combined weight of stacks of stuff. Saves you the bother of working out the total weight of 47 things weighing 0.4 units each. It's just how it should have been.
Any incoherencies in this post brought to you courtesy of Paulaner Weissbeer, a wheat beer from Munich. It's rather nice. I've just done my fortnightly lockdown food shop and got a variety of beers. One bottle and I am drunk enough to make typing a challenge. Or posting coherently.
EDIT: DanF's post reminded me of another mod I'd forgotten I'd installed because "that's how it should have been". The power armour HUD. It's crap in the vanilla game. I use the Power Armor Clean HUD mod myself. It's similar to the HoloHUD mod DanF suggested.
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout76/mods/60
