Wonder if any relevant strings have shown up in Shodan searches yet.

Still, I'd imagine most PCs and game consoles are behind a firewall and ports aren't forwarded.

In addition to the spyglass icon, if you are facing a chest/item that contains materials you've marked, they have a blue "glow" overlay that makes them stand out. Pretty sure that's part of the base game since the only mods I've installed are one to add more songs to Diamond City Radio and one to tweak lighting and improve ambient occlusion (just basic post-processing tweaks). Don't think the blue glow on tagged materials is part of either mod.

I will take a quick look at decompiling the android app this afternoon

Have you got some kind of API? I'd be happy to look into connecting your map to the game. I think it would be nice to to need an app for this, but if this runs on a responsive website, that can connect to the game independently.

Why? Bethesda has a history of making games with best in class modability and the tools they release for moders are fleshed out versions of what they use for designing the game (which usually takes a few months, FO4 tool expected early 2016).

Hell, with scripting extenders and graphics mods, some of their games like Morrowind can become nearly indistinguishable from modern AAA games nearly 13 years later. Bethesda knows this and I can't imagine them locking down anything that could be used to make their games better by their community for decades to come.

More likely that somebody writes FalloutSheep that invades privacy by dumping the inventory of anybody playing on the same network and then users demand Bethesda encrypt the data.

I find this to be a pervasive problem with Bethesda games starting a few years after The Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind was released. They pack an insane amount of complexity into their games then provide utterly feeble tools to manage it or refuse to invest time into them as that complexity grows from game to game (especially their inventory system which hasn't changed much since Oblivion). Nothing demonstrates this better than Fallout 4's base building mechanic which is leagues better (and more complicated) than in any other game I've played. You can literally build a downtown Sanctuary with a dozen 10 story tall skyscrapers with farmland and electrical infrastructure but doing so using the Workshop as it is now (months before the release of the official game editor) is absolutely maddening and down right impractical. No 2d map or overhead camera, no alignment with complex terrain like building foundations, no templating, zero interface to manage the settlers (the current community concensus is to give each settler a different hat or outfit for each available job!), and it's just down right Unintuitive in every way. The mechanic overall feels like it was part of the game design from day 1 but the interface they give you to use it was made in a weekend.

Bethesda knows their games are bought for replayability and community mods so it seems that they make a lot of sacrifices no other gaming company would, knowing that the more annoying it is the faster some modder will totally replace it with far superior execution. To be fair though, no other company cranks out fantastic open world games that are as good as Bethesda's on such a regular basis. All of this pays off when a five year old game has graphics as good as a newly released one except with half a decade of damn near professional effort by thousands of modders.

I completely agree and want these features, but I think Bethesda is faced with the issue of overcomplicating the UI for a more mainstream audience which they're obviously hoping to attract. The UI is probably already completely overwhelming for a lot of mainstream users. At some point, I'm sure adding more options, buttons, commands, and screens might make a lot of people really uncomfortable.

Obviously though there's a balancing act at play. The flip side to not having these features is that some of the inventory management stuff is a bit inconvenient and boring and cumbersome. But people tolerate that to an extent if the rest of the experience is worthwhile.

I can't help but think Bethesda takes a "World of Warcraft" approach to UI - since no level of customization will make everyone happy, they just implement a baseline and leave the rest up to modders. (And since this only applies to desktop, the baseline works out heavily tailored to consoles.)

Of course this would work more smoothly in practice if the modding tools were ready, and if UI extensions were easy to make and manage.

Normally I keep notes on decompiling game files, but this time I didn't unfortunately :/

But I didn't get too far anyway - the DemoMode.bin file contains the demo data. There's a list of locations in a custom binary format, but the titles are readable.

I tried modifying the values to make them all visible, but the app threw a parsing exception when trying to load my modified file.

Hope that helps!