Be curious to see what happens. Never been too heavy into Mods but often been tempted. and I love how so many people can invent their own narratives for Fallout (and Skyrim), that's the real strength of the games to me
Results of preliminary testing with Horizon and a series of compatible mods are in. Steam says I've played 2,170 hours as of the time of this post.
*If* Survival difficulty and adding more minutiae to Fallout 4 are what you want, Horizon and its compatible mods will thoroughly scratch that itch. I do believe that Horizon is a much-needed improvement to FO4's Survival difficulty. There is a compatible mod that overhauls power armor to a degree I find acceptable. Said modifications are configured at mod installation, making the availability and abundance of power armor for your playthrough entirely at your discretion.
If you want expanded personal narratives I suggest using "Quest" mods to further enrich your experience. There is a 'trilogy' of such mods I've yet to play but am itching to try: Fusion City Rising, Outcasts and Remnants and Project Valkyrie. From the mod description Project Valkyrie seems to offer the possibility of a legitimate 'happy ending' for the Commonwealth under your character's leadership, or varying permutations thereof.
To my knowledge no quest mods have been balanced around Horizon which will almost certainly make them much more difficult due to the massive health most foes will have compared to your character. Two other quest mods that are enjoyable and add to the sillier side of Fallout in their play are Tina's Cookiepocalypse and 50 Ways to Die at Dr. Nick's. The latter is well done with minimal errors that I could detect - the ones I did were in the voice work which isn't surprising given that seems to be my thing in games.
I like the concept of 'Survival' elements in Fallout. What I don't like is when the game is not engineered with such elements incorporated from the ground up. They still feel bolted on to me, including using Horizon, although this does improve upon this style of gameplay.
As far as what mods I've found to be consistently remaining in my mods list:
#1 is UFO4P (Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch) is a must-have, no exceptions. It fixes things that otherwise force you to reload or use console commands to deal with, which is super-annoying. Even after 3 years they've yet to catch all of the bugs, but they're steadily chipping away at them in their free time.
#2 is Cheat Terminal. If nothing else this mod will get you unstuck, pull your companion to you when they get stuck and other useful tricks so that you can play on Survival and still be able to fix the stupid that even 3 years of UFO4P have yet to fix / may not be able to fix. For this capability alone I cannot recommend this mod enough. One of its many features that I always use is a cheat that cuts the lockpicking mini-game down to "if you have the perk and a bobby-pin, you bypass the lock". I have come to loathe the lockpicking and hacking mini-games in Fallout 4 - and having earned Lockpicking and Hacking to the max, bobbleheads and magazines for both plus companion perks pertaining to same a half-dozen-plus times over ... screw that. After 2100+ hours I want my game time to be more productive.
#3 is DEF UI and its accompanying inventory tagging system, including options for the three popular such mods: VIS_G, Bhaal's and Horizon. Asides from Quest mods that can't be bothered to tag their own stuff so as to minimize inventory clutter this is pretty much a backbone mod for a bunch of other mods.
#4 is AWKCR (Armor and Weapons Keywords Community Resource) is another backbone mod that anchors lots of other mods into a common reference framework built around the game engine's many keywords. This hasn't been updated since its 3.2 incarnation on Beth.Net IIRC - on the Nexus it's at or beyond version 8.
#5 is Easy Hacking. As mentioned under Cheat Terminal above this is solely because I've more than earned the 'right' to bypass the Hacking mini-game down to a few seconds of precious in-game time.
#6 is Everyone's War which makes either gender of your character a combat veteran. It's a small thing but it matters, especially given that the 'lore' for Fallout indicates that the ongoing 'hot war' with Communist China has been raging for a decade or more with casualties on both sides in the millions. I could elaborate on this at length, but who wants to read that? ;)
#7 is D.E.C.A.Y., a recent addition I've come to value as it transforms the ambulatory leather sacks that are the vanilla feral ghouls into much more aesthetically appealing critters with missing bits, mold and more. Optional add-ons include removing their 'evasive dance' nonsense and reducing their loot.
#8 is a pair of mods: Anyone Can Fill a Bottle! and Fast Filling Bottles. Lets me accumulate vast amounts of purified water without having to play on Survival to do it - and to do so quickly.
#9 is the Extended Lore Project which adds notes and holotapes that help flesh out the backstories in the game quite a bit.
#10 is Fort Strong - no BS which opens up the location to exploration and acquisition of the goodies without having to play nice with the BoS. I'll almost certainly enter this place long before I even go to Goodneighbor or Cambridge so this is a must-have mod for my playthrough.
#11 is a pair of mods by GKX: Log Walls and Sandbag Fortifications that do what they say they do: add pointy-topped wood palisades and sandbag-based walls, trenches, firing pits and more to your settlement options.
#12 is another pair of mods: Simple Artillery and 155mm Howitzers. The vanilla mortars burn an unnecessary amount of framerate/processing power for the animations that you won't see more than once or twice in all likelihood. In trade you get artillery that can cover the entire map of the Commonwealth. As I've stated before the howitzers are going onto Spectacle Island, crewed by robots, fortified inside of sandbag-based firing pits. With no food/water production and no requirements for beds/food/water for these robots that islet should remain unmolested by Raiders et al for the entire game.
#13 is This is My Bed. Lets you build beds that don't count towards your settlement's bed count and thus aren't contaminated by filthy settlers.
#14 is yet another pair of mods: Streamlined Pip-boy and Clean Black Pip-boy. The first one makes the pip-boy much smaller in 3rd person view while the second makes the screen crisp and easy to read. Compatible with most pip-boy skins unless you want to use a Pip-pad or another mod that alters the default pip-boy meshes.
#15 is No respawing super-mutants. The in-game lore over and over again is that various agencies abduct people and transform them into super-mutants for whatever idiotic reason before unleashing them on the unsuspecting wastelands. In Fallout 4 the Institute is culpable for having done so but that program was wrecked by Virgil on his way out the door. The logical extension of this is that there are a finite number of super-mutants in the Commonwealth. This mod applies this logic. Once you kill 'em all off, there should be either no more whatsoever or very, very few of them via random encounters.
#16 is Craftable SPECIAL books which does two things. First it removes the cap from reading You're SPECIAL! books improving your base SPECIAL 1 point without limit. Secondly is that it adds something worthwhile to acquiring the gobs of burned books and burned textbooks scattered throughout the game that respawn 2 or 3 times per in-game month. Every stack of 100 of either (not both - each has their own recipe) lets you make another such book. It usually takes me 2-3 months in-game to accumulate enough of these to make me a happy Sole Survivor.
#17 is Brawl Bug Fix which fixes a bug that neither Bethesda nor the UFO4P team have ever addressed. Which is to say that on the rare occasions one gets into a brawl in FO4 (unlike Skyrim which has lots of brawls) that the game engine doesn't take anything you have that uses 'spells' to function and suddenly makes the brawl a lethal engagement, which is all sorts of bad.
#18 is Barefoot Footstep 1.2.
#19 is CWSS Redux v2 which adds indoor plumbing. Since the post-Bomb survivors have managed to keep fusion reactors, energy weapons and power armor more-or-less working how come not a soul has figured out something comparatively simple such as plumbing?! This used to drive me nuts until I came across this mod. Finally one can take hot showers and use the loo.
#20 is Creative Clutter which I acquire for the simple purpose of building functioning refrigerators for much the same reason as #19. How come the only fridge in the entire Commonwealth is Buddy ... it makes no sense. Now I can build a variety of fridges in my settlements and not have to deal with super-slow not-essential Buddy. Buddy you need for its integrated micro-brewery, not for its fridge.
Creative Clutter adds a lot of goodies. Many of them will chew through your settlement limits faster than you can blink, so be careful with that.
#21 is Generator Fusebox - More Realistic Version which adds four different fuse-box generators to meet your electricity generating needs without cluttering your settlements with noisy-as-Hell generators. These little babies let me decentralize my power grids, freeing up triangle counts for more useful stuff such as turrets, howitzers and crafting stations.
#22 is TNR Shoulder Lamp which adds the shoulder lights from Aliens to the game. Gunners somewhat often will wear them in addition to being able to craft them. Be aware that this does not play well with weapon-mounted lights in my experience, so choose one or the other.
For non-Horizon games is #23: Lore-Based Power Armor Changes (LBPAC). This finally addresses my biggest pet peeve about Fallout 4: the overwhelmingly early proliferation of power armor. Starting as obscenely early as level 28 in vanilla you can start seeing randomly-spawned bits of X-01 - by level 60 entire suits, just randomly sitting on some frame which doesn't make sense for an environment that's been salvaged continuously for more than 2 centuries.
#24 is also a new acquisition Raider Overhaul which breathes much-needed depth into the Raiders of the Commonwealth. I do not believe that it affects the Nuka-World Raiders. Now the Raiders are scumbags again. There is a patch for this to work with Horizon for those who like it.
#25 is Kill XP which features several different capabilities. I use it for one thing and one thing only: to "kill" XP acquisition past a certain level. It doesn't actually zero out xp awards, but it does cut it down to I think 1% of normal. This lets me keep the game somewhat balanced so that every mook isn't the top-shelf critter for their species taken to Eleventy-Stupid like it gets in vanilla when you attain 100th+ level.
Settlements are - as we all know - a massive time-sink. There are 34 'vanilla' settlements in a full-DLC game as I recall. It can take many hours to build each one, sometimes 100+ depending on how detailed and persnickety one is about how everything fits together.
Fortunately there are solutions available via mods that attempt to address this black hole of a time sink that is the FO4 settlement system.
In order of prior consideration:
1. Transfer Settlement Blueprints is the precursor to #2 (below). The concept is that someone builds a settlement then uses the mod to upload it into one of the TSB's 50 blueprint slots. One then shares it as a blueprint mod. When one acquires a settlement for which you have acquired a blueprint, you fire up TSB and apply the blueprint. The upload/deployment phase can take a long time depending on the settlement's object count. A huge place like Vault 88 I've seen blueprints with object counts of >3k and one I think has a 10k object count.
The tricky part with TSB is that many of the blueprints break pre-combined meshes which is a HUGE no-no. There was one set of 34 that didn't do so which I was seriously eyeballing.
Until I got to the F4SE requirement. I've downloaded it as it is required for a few things ... but to be blunt I'm leery about it since the last update was more than a year ago the last I looked.
2. Sim Settlements and its many expansions, specifically Rise of the Commonwealth and the new Conqueror mods.
RotC features "city plans" - the same basic concept as TSB - that you assign a leader to manage for you while you kill things and take their stuff. There is at least one city plan for each settlement - usually 3+, often 5+, sometimes more - except Home Plate. In a nutshell this series of mods lets you eliminate varying quantities of playing time with building settlements. You can assign plots manually and build each settlement one 'lot' at a time if you so desire, plus build whatever else you like without using a city plan, or go hands-off and let the city plan and your minions do all of the work.
Conqueror is brand new, but in a nutshell it's aimed at expanding a Raider-style playthrough. I like it for being able to pre-determine which of the non-Quest settlements already exist in-game, how well-developed they are, which city plan is used ... in short, it offers great promise.
3. Architect, currently a part of Horizon. It is in what I would consider to be a mid-Alpha state ... use it if you feel like it, but I'd rather not have this much minutiae to deal with.
A viable supplement to basing out of settlements are player homes. The Creation Club has at least 3 - of those three, only the Chester Condo is lore-based safe from external threats as far as I am aware. The other two are good to loot-n-scoot and serve as 'safe houses' for a quick night's rest.
Of the mod-based ones there are quite a few. The ones I've used and would recommend are Commonwealth Express Courier Stations and the 'Better Homes and Bunkers' series (which ones to use depends upon your specific plans regarding their attached settlements). There are at least three player homes available via mods in Goodneighbor. Several address Home Plate - have fun sorting through them all! A mod I've only seen on Beth.net adds five player homes throughout the Commonwealth - it's well done and they use locations I don't believe anyone else does ... but I've not looked at it in two full months (see previous mentions of these homes). They're pretty well done and often chock full of nice loot.
A downside to most player homes is that Survival difficulty has a nasty habit of not considering their beds 'clean'. Prepare your medicines accordingly. I find this particularly annoying as most such beds shouldn't be considered vermin-infested ... but they are, for whatever asinine reason. Not one Survival-oriented mod I'm aware of has come up with a 'delousing treatment' or the like to spritz the beds with so as to flag them accordingly.
Basement Living adds 10 repurposed interior cells that most players will recognize upon entry. This mod's unique approach is that one builds their access doors in an existing controlled settlement. The intended use is to craft yourself an access door to a small player home in a vanilla settlement to hole up in during radstorms and the like. I would use this mod to add yourself a bolthole in the smaller or more out-of-the-way settlements for safely stashing yourself and some of your stuff.
4,383.
The morning of the 23rd of October 2077 replays in my mind 4,383 times. Each replay is the same: waking, nursing Shaun before changing, swaddling and laying him down in his crib. Codsworth clanks and flits about in the kitchen. The morning news murmuring its censored blathering from the idiot box in the living room. Nate and I relish our morning shower together. Discussing Nate's speech at the veteran's hall later tonight in Boston. Morning coffee while contemplating what sort of breakfast concoction Codsworth is assembling.
The Vault-Tec rep comes 'round 4,383 times collecting the same information over and over and over after an unspoken agreement between us gives the go-ahead to sign on with the residents' roster in Vault 111 to keep the annoying git from ringing our doorbell every morning at 9:15.
The newsman confirms the worst fears of humanity since 1945: total atomic annihilation, or our species' one and only attempt to inflict such upon itself, is locally confirmed to have begun at 9:32.
Nate follows me to Vault 111 while carrying Shaun.
9:34 a.m. - The guard who rebuffed the Vault-Tec sales rep's efforts to gain access to the vault lets my family in. Some of our neighbors who did not sign up or could not afford the price of admittance cower against the chain-link fence. They cower in some part courtesy of the two Army National Guardsmen in their T-45 power armor suits with their 5 mm miniguns. At least I think they are T-45 suits, since the T-51's are the front-line production suits, most of which are in Alaska or on duty with the units in the Gobi desert. Nate knows this better than I do. Leave it to the attorney in the family to also be the vehicular enthusiast. Robots now ... let's talk robots.
9:36 a.m. - We take our places atop the entry platform. Our final I love yous.
9:37 a.m. - An almost-blinding flash of light precedes Death's abrupt towering presence over Boston. Seconds later Death's greeting growls through the air, in my chest, grabs my heart. The scythe of Death's shockwave almost claims us before the elevator takes us far enough beneath the surface to not have our lungs sucked out through our mouths for all to see.
9:45 a.m. - we've changed into these tacky "Vault suits" and entered our decontamination pods only to find out far too late that this entire set-up is a lie. We're not being decontaminated. We are trapped, lured into suspended animation for some mysterious motive.
An indistinct feminine voice can almost be heard in my mind. They are attempting to access your memories. We shall not let them. We. Always. Win. Or we will die before letting them get what they want.
Things change. A tall balding scarred-face man and at least two assistants enter the part of the Vault we're in. The first is female whom I can both see and hear in her sealed biological laboratory suit. The other is male based on his voice, further to my right, presumably at the terminal. The lights barely function. I cannot act or speak as they open Nate and Shaun's suspended animation chamber, kidnap my son and execute Nate for taking too long to accede to their orders.
"At least we still have the back-up," that scruffy bastard says before leaving with Shaun and minions in tow, before being reclaimed by suspended animation once more.
The dreams change. The scarred stranger's intrusion, Nate's murder and Shaun's abduction integrate themselves.
Over the next 1,752 dreams I come to know that face, those voices, as well as the faces, voices and usually the names of everyone I killed "for God and country" prior to retirement. A few were gratifying, most ... most were part of the job.
No two instances of these subsequent dreams are identical to each other as was the case with the first 4,383 dreams. That's the funny thing about being a lucid dreamer. It makes attempts to manipulate my memories and mind without my consent ... well, impossible. Someone wants to know what I know. On the other hand they have things I want to know. Bit by bit I learn more.
Information passes through doors of knowledge. Doors that always open in both directions. What they are learning is not what they want, thus the door remains intact. What we are learning will likely prove invaluable. Unless they kill us in our sarcophagus first.
During these same 1,752 dreams the mushroom cloud minutely gains something resembling a voice.
My final dream, #1,753 since the Scarred Man, #6,136 in total, the mushroom cloud's voice ...
[indistinctive] blessings are upon you, go forth ... [indistinctive]
Wakey wakey Valkyrie - we're on, training simulation #18 I do believe.
I know that today is the 23rd of October 2287. This world has no idea what is emerging from Vault 111.
She is neither a mewling widower nor a grieving parent.
She is death.
I. Am. Death.
I'm 50-60 hours into this new playthrough and so far everything seems stable and fun. About 75% of this time has been spent building Spectacle Island.
UFO4P and the other mods mentioned above.
10mm SMG - I'm not a fan of the bukly Colt N99 10mm pistol so this gives me something to use 10mm ammo with.
Colt M1911A1 of Freedom - sadly the unique is in the Museum of Freedom which means I won't find it until I'm down to the latter third of this game in all likelihood.
HCP FO4 Armor n Clothing Retextures AIO (All-in-One) - this really livens up the armor, clothes and outfits in the game.
Atom Girl Outfit and Atom Girl fishnet weave option - I tend to like this outfit on the off chance I ever get around to figuring out how to make my character 'take' a unique body file and adapt her armor/outfits/etc to that 'set'. The nuka-bear backpack tickles my fancy. The eye candy aspect in 3rd-person is ... a bonus. :P
Chinese Stealth Suit and CSS Weave w/ Fixes adds a unique Chinese stealth suit to the game aboard the Yangtze. MUCH better than the lame one on the Creation Club. Intended to be a tertiary armor set in this playthrough.
Basement Living and Basement Living Picket Fences Patch - the combination provides 2 'basements' (tiny player homes that attach to an owned settlement and connect to that settlement's workbench stores for crafting) per issue of Picket Fences you acquire in-game. In this playthrough these will give me small personal spaces within which to sleep, bathe, poo, craft and store stuff in about 1/4 of the total number of settlements.
Battery Generator adds a 1 power output fuse box at a mats cost equal to what you should get from scrapping the improvised batteries found adjacent to many 'wasteland' crafting stations.
Better Explosives for making things go BOOM. This can include yourself.
Better Homing Beacons fixes the Yangtze's tac-nuke missiles so that they're much more useful.
Better Junk Fences and Better Shack Bridges are nice bits of settlement construction improvements. I'll need them for the massive project that Spectacle Island will become.
Better Gold Bars for the bling. Gold bars weigh almost 25 pounds and have 400 units of gold scrap built into them. Adds a nasty fight in the particular bank where the gold bars, coins, skulls and miscellaneous neat goodies can be found in Boston. It's a shame that this isn't compatible with another metal bars mod though, as the latter ruined this mod's lovely gold textures and detail work for its bars.
Boston FPS Fix AIO - so far, so good. It's definitely been helping as far as I can tell.
CBBE and Bodyslide as they are required for the previously mentioned quest mods.
VIS-G Item Sorting and copious compatibility patch-mods, including Creation Club content patches.
Campsite Simple Wasteland Camping, for those must-stay-out-in-the-field trips. This mod's kits can handle a dog and one companion in terms of tent and bedding capacities.
Caravan Shotgun - the classic over-under double-barreled shotgun.
The Widow - unique double-barreled shotgun found on the perimeter of Concord. In some ways the late acquisition during this playthrough will probably work out well as this unique weapon packs a Hell of a wallop. I use flechette rounds in it for maximum carnage.
Commonwealth Buff-et adds a lot of neat goodies to the culinary facets of the game, including at least 2 new booze-themed crafting stations (a bar and a cocktail table) plus a gaggle of neat new recipes.
Commonwealth Express Courier Stations provide player homes across the main map that will permit me to extend how long I can play without having to acquire any settlements asides from Spectacle Island.
Creative Perks retools the perks in a KISS manner that is better suited to a no-Power-Armor playthrough. The mod's author is a fan of Survival which makes some of the revisions of little or no value to me. Nonetheless this is my favorite perk overhaul mod.
Custom SPECIAL lets you pick from I think 4 different 'pools' of starting SPECIAL ranging from all-1's to all-10's. There are 2 or 3 settings in between.
Female Vats Smack-talk and Flirty Commonwealth (set to a female PC) for a bit more talking for the not-insignificant amount of time Valkyrie will be spending in the company of ... no one.
Graf's Assaultron Armor provides one of the more aesthetically appealing piecemeal armor mods in the game that aren't slooty or ... well, stupid-looking (like much of the vanilla armor is). Acquisition is via assaultron corpses, so it'll take a dozen or so assaultron 'victims' to provide a full set of armor for 1 person.
Grenade Expansion Pack 2 is effectively an AIO provider of many things grenade, as previously mentioned much earlier in this thread, including remote-detonation kaboom, an M-79 grenade launcher and of course .. throwing knives!
Have a Beer and Smokeable Cigars Cigarettes etc. Her world was nuked, her hubby murdered and her only child kidnapped. She's damned good and well going to have 1 or 2 smokes a day and an ice cold beer now and then, dammit. I get to watch her do it. Survival games get an autosave option that doesn't involve a gross sleeping bag or disgusting gore-soaked mattress in an alley or worse.
Immortal Cats because reason.
LAER adds an electro-rifle to the game with an option to be able to build robots and turrets of same. I've elected to not add them to the level looting lists.
Lever-Action Rifle Customization for teh prettez.
LC-1 Laser Carbine adds a non-toaster laser to the Institute's arsenal. It is not a replacer per se, especially early on.
Lasers Have No Recoil
Immersive Scrapping and Insignificant Object Remover
Locksmith so I can keep my stuff secured.
M1 Garand - shouldn't be on the scumbags' level loot lists. I'll have to make one or find one of the uniques. Might be found now and then as a boss' weapon.
Portable Folding Chair - sadly the author never got around to figuring out how to make it into both a chair and a melee weapon as far as I am aware.
Cambridge Bungalow Player Home - provides the obvious in an area where there aren't any other player homes to operate out of.
Remove Ugly Flat Trash and Remove Generic Posters - further overall FPS improvements. Combined with several other mods and disabling the HD textures pack my FPS seems to have finally become tolerable in the busiest parts of Boston.
See-Through Scopes in combination with Custom Optics is one of those subtle pairings that works really well together. No more black scope 'stuff'.
Satellite Color World Map Combo - it uses a colorized satellite map of the Commonwealth, has FO4 guide markers on it and plays just fine with the Clear Black (screen) and Streamlined Pip-boy mods I use. Also adjusted the map's border to reflect what you actually go out into in-game. Add in using a console command of fov 90 90 and one is good to go.
Simple Bird Remover and Simply Water for those bits of further FPS improvement.
T4H Four Horsemen Skull Helms adds more neat bits to Raiders and might come into play for my character later if events push her into psychosis.
The Fridge (Wireless) is a good replacer for Creative Clutter if the only thing you are wanting is a gorram fridge to chill your beer and soda-pop in.
Traits and More Perks adds in (a) optional traits a la FO3 and FO:NV; and (b) perks you have to both qualify for and have specific materials to craft at a chem station.
Turret Stands to Turrets puts those awesome Coventry turret stands into your turrets sub-menu at your settlements.
WM Heavy Machinegun adds a Browning M2 HMG to the game.
M60 LMG adds the M-60 LMG plus turret option to the game.
Glock 86 Plasma Pistol is (sadly) not a replacer / not available in a replacer format. I'm mostly interested in acquiring the unique plasma weapons. One of them is quite silly but could prove ... amusing.
Wanderer's Trench Coat is my primary armor for the first third+ of the game.
Wasteland Wound Care drastically cuts down on the mounds o' stimpaks one can end up with during the game. You can now find all kinds of questionable pharmaceuticals in the wastelands. Bandages are more often your methods of post-combat health and limb damage recovery.
Wooden Prefabs Extended adds a few more options to the prefabricated buildings - mostly by building them on stilts so you can have them not overrun by the Commonwealth's persistent shrubbery.
We Are the Minutemen and Militarized Minutemen are cooperative mods that make the Minutemen not suck eggs, hopefully.
FO4 War Tags I *hope* is LBPAC compatible. This mod offers some serious bad-assery in tailoring one's power armor appearances. Just because I won't be *using* power armor - unless something gives me no actual alternative - doesn't mean I don't want to make the unique suits I expect to collect look AWESOME.
No Power Armor Strength Cap should, simply put, have power armor act as a +10 Strength boost instead of the fixed 11 Str derpiness.
RPG-7 with weapon replacer mod to replace, including known uniques, all missile launchers with RPG-7's, including custom animations etc.
Sim Settlements 3-in-1; Mega Year 1 AIO; Wasteland Ventures AIO; Ruined Homes and Gardens; Industrial City; Homestead; Industrial City Dispatcher Radio; IDEK's Logistics Station; MJC's AIO pack; Workshop Framework and Sim Settlements: Conqueror.
This combination, despite Conqueror's very early development state, should result in all but 8 or so of the 34 settlements being independent communities all by themselves, including ALL of the Far Harbor settlements. Spectacle Island didn't have an option to build it as independent which is fine for my plans for making said island into a robot-run howitzer hotel plus a bonus basement hacienda.
Specifically excluded settlements are the Castle, Sanctuary Hills, Red Rocket Truck Stop, Coventry, Vault 88, Boston Airport, the Nuka-World Red Rocket and by manual removal Egret Tours Marina. Sim Settlements to date has never attempted to modify nor fielded a city plan for Home Plate.
ETM had to be so removed as the Conqueror settlers would murder Phyllis Daily and hand the marina over to you by ... telegram, I guess.
It takes hours for Conqueror to pre-build this many settlements in advance. You will want to make sure your system can keep the game running in 'idle' without logging you out (which Steam seems to like to do to me ... assuming that it is Steam and not the game itself doing it).
As an aside the "industrial" Sim Settlement's stuff sprinkles scads of little goodies throughout the game. One of these are more than 50 beer recipes for your breweries. You can go into your minion's shops etc and poke around. There is another one that lets you build an Archimedes system as I understand it. And more is potentially out there in the world ... ;)
Last but not least are this playthrough's quartet of content expansion/quest mods: Fusion City, Outcasts and Remnants, HotC and Project Valkyrie.
So far Spectacle Island is coming along well, although I have to deal with Automatron to crew the howitzers. For now it has a barebones basement for me, a functioning mirelurk repulsion system and the beginnings of the infrastructure required for two batteries of howitzers.
Well, to be clear, "barebones basement" has all necessary non-PA crafting, a bath tub, toilet and sink, a bed and a proper fridge.
"Infrastructure" has been thorough. All howitzers are emplaced within fighting pits, two tall towers provide the intended basis for line-of-sight howitzer fire direction, six watch towers provide guard stations, a mixture of M-60 LMG, missile and Mk VII vanilla HMG turrets provide passive defense and the primary occupied area is completely enclosed with a gate facing the original generator-shipwreck. A back-up power fuse-box is attached to the anti-mirelurk emitter. The landing dock that is the default fast travel point has five more HMG turrets on Coventry platforms covering it. The aforementioned generator-shipwreck runs a string of streetlights and searchlights plus another quintet of HMG turrets stand guard there.
A quonset hut sits atop a large warehouse-concrete foundation as the intended location wherein my primary robotics crafting station is meant to be located. Once I complete Automatron ADA will reside at Spectacle Island overseeing the robotic company that will operate all of the howitzers and guard towers.
It finally dawned on me as to what is arguably my biggest pet peeve about Fallout 4's "Survival" mode.
Which is to say that it removes the locational compass indicators. The player's character is a pre-War inhabitant. They should have a pretty good idea of most of the landmarks in pre-Bomb Boston. Most of the locations didn't move. Almost all of them were repurposed.
What Survival does is greatly shrink down the distance at which one becomes aware of the locations. This makes sense for about a fourth of the locations in the Commonwealth. Most of them should be on your map out of the vault.
Auto-magically learning were almost all of the things are requiring a perk is ... silly. There is at least one mod that makes this information immersively acquired via finding one of a few maps in-game at locations of your choosing upon installing the mod. I didn't grab the mod since I'm using the Commonwealth Express Courier Stations mod which I believe has the functional equivalent of said map incorporated into it, hopefully piecemeal across all eight stations.
My character should know where most of the locations are (especially the ones that are pre-Bomb). Especially the attorney, whom have notoriously excellent memories as a general rule of thumb. The combat vet's memory isn't any slouch either - if anything, they should have kept the bad guy indicator or this indicator should be acquired at Awareness 2.
Add in the bolted-on feel of the Survival mechanics in general ... makes me use other mods to simulate some elements of a survival game (Wasteland Wound Care) and some personal discipline during game play (maintain a running average of 7 hours's sleep per day to keep up that Well-Rested XP bonus perk) and I get 'close enough'.
"It just works." :P
3 Dec 2287
"There hasn't been much to document until today. I've been exploring the post-Bomb Commonwealth of Massachusetts these past 41 days.
"Spectacle Island has become my 'lair' of sorts. Grand designs of robot-crewed howitzers provide daydreams. Lucid nightmares haunt me at nights. What scares me some is that I think I'm growing accustomed to this dog-eat-dog world.
"So far I've not met a soul that wasn't trying to kill me, eat me alive, capture me for 'involuntary pleasures' or worse.
"Until today I've been to wondering if there was any hope for us as a species.
"Today I entered what I presumed would be just another semi-collapsed subway station, the one that has been closed since early February 2077 on Park Street in downtown very near the Commons.
Turns out to be the entrance into a very incomplete Vault 114. I recall that there were still openings for 114 on the news as part of the broadcast prior to Chinese atomics changing my world forever.
"The Vault-Tec terminals in here indicate that it was another experimental vault. This is establishing a pattern after examining similar records in 111 and 95: Vault-Tec's intention is/was to conduct a combination of multi-layered experiments on the ultimate captive subject pools. 114 was ostensibly to see how those from the highest ranks of the pre-Bomb world order adapted to minimal amenities, dense housing and having an Overseer - a Vault Boss - that in all likelihood would have hated their guts with a burning passion.
"The place is crawling with wanna-be mobsters, complete with pin-striped suits or suspenders-n-slacks, various fedoras, Thompson submachine guns and "mob-speak". This crew's boss was a tubby bastard by the name of 'Skinny' Malone. I talked a bit of sweet ear poison to his 'flame' Darla. I wasted his two goons, she bashed Malone's brains out with her aluminum baseball bat and split.
"I did say something about meeting a non-scumbag? Forgive me, dear journal. The non-scumbag that was cooped up courtesy of Malone's orders was an android detective by the surname of Valentine, operating out of 'Diamond City', a 'wasteland city' that rose within the grounds, stands and tunnels of the Green Mile baseball stadium.
"In the meanwhile my explorations continue. For now I'm collecting intact books and 'liberating' entire microfiche archives that survived the preceding twenty-one decades. Few people know this, but microfilm is typically made with silver, platinum or palladium during processing. In combination with 21st century archival processing techniques there is a great deal of knowledge that potentially survived the Bombs and Father Time. There are enough microfilm and microdot readers that I've already come across that salvaging the lot should result in at least a handful of functioning readers.
"Codsworth was almost certainly fried by the bomb's EMP. My husband is very dead. My son has been gone for decades.
"This detective offers the best chance of tracking down that scarred scumbag who murdered Nate and oversaw Shaun's abduction. More likely it'll be his grave or any descendants, assuming some mutated horror didn't eat him years ago. If this Valentine can track that scarred scumbag for me ... well, I guess I can poop on his headstone or something. Once I have the lay of the land here.
"The idea of entering a living community right now gives me the heebie-jeebies. Almost as bad as the buzzing of those godawful giant mosquitoes."
I've got to hang up the convenience factor of Sim Settlements: Conqueror. It has been too buggy for words, which is a damned shame.
It also means starting over which is uncharacteristic of the Sim Settlements mods which can otherwise be readily installed / uninstalled with little or no problems.
So, after 2,308 hours according to Steam it is time for ...
a
clean
break
in this journal.
Bastiches.
"For the past two months I've been roaming Massachusetts searching for that scarred-face bastard in the wretched hives of scum and villainy that infest the Commonwealth like a pernicious cancer. I've avoided the more heavily populated locations of Goodneighbor and Diamond City. No sense in having to wade through several hundred scumbags at once until I can bring sufficient firepower to bear against that many potential foes.
"Along the way I've acquired surviving microfiche archives and a compressed computer archive from the Boston Public Library. "Overdue books" are the majority of the salvageable printed texts that have endured the centuries. The Bugle, Vault-Tec's regional HQ, high schools including DB Tech, HalluciGen, Med-Tek Medical ... the list is extensive.
"Some Forged nutters had set up camp around a bonfire in the woods near some mysterious bunker featuring a helipad and extraordinarily aggressive defense turrets. One of their number was wearing a unique suit of power armor, a 'Hellfire' suit. I was able to salvage the plates and frame-attachable systems from his corpse.
"There is a Nuka-Cola-themed cafe across the street from Hubris Comics. Sadly Ellie, the woman that had done all of the hard work I found murdered in the Prost Bar, shot in the back and left to bleed out against the jukebox. Based on her journal Raiders and other scumbags are aware of the location. Cleaned out and noted for overnight stays only.
"A trail of never-delivered Captain Cosmos promotional boxes and a seperate trail left by a 'synth courser' - some sort of android assassin concocted by the local boogeymen - coincided in what was once 'the' building in pre-bomb Boston: Hub 360.
"Hubris Comics was in a cross-promotional production featuring their namesake space opera hero Captain Cosmos, a TV production studio and the U.S. Space Agency. It seems that they were in the final days of production using not one but two combat-grade USSA power armor suits, complete with environmental and live directed energy weapon systems. The one I restored to proper working order is a sonic weapon.
"In the same building as the aforementioned TV studio is the deceased 'courser's' deluxe suite. Luxuriously appointed even by pre-Bomb standards it is under the control of its masters. Detailed notes are taken along with the largest supply of uncontaminated 'stuff' I've yet encountered. This 'Institute' is clearly dangerous with their robot people and androids, albeit they have their own resource limitations. Still, calling kip in an abode that they appear to be able to surveille and access at-will does not seem to be a particularly prudent course of action.
"Across the river in Chester I came across an abandoned multi-level residence with roof access. The poor bastard that had previously claimed it shortly before I thawed out died on the wrong side of the river while he was rummaging through an ice box. The lack of blood splatter or dismemberment makes me believe that he may well have died from radiation accrued from swimming in the local water one time too many.
"This residence suits my needs perfectly. It is in an area with little hostile traffic. The interior space is capacious with self-contained fusion power boxes that, with a little basic wiring, will permit installation of almost anything a girl bent on exterminating scumbags could possibly need. The ground level was a diner with two half-baths and a small storage room. The second level was a large storage space that now stores four power armor suits. I can fit a fifth suit in here along with the eight crafting stations I currently have deployed in here. The upper levels are pre-Bomb, deteriorated from the passage of time and neglect.
"The third level features a living room, small dining room, kitchen, laundry room and bathroom. I renovate the kitchen, installing a working cooking station salvaged from one of the many crates in the Vault-Tec HQ building along with a new combination refrigerator-freezer. I've also stacked up new sinks and toilets from the same source to replace the non-functioning plumbing. A bit of elbow grease with plumbers' snakes should clear out this particular problem. Might have to replace the entire building's pipes, but that's not a particularly big deal at this point. The microfiche archives I've accumulated so far contain innumerable plumbing texts nor is there a union to whine about it.
"The fourth level is a combination of a full bathroom, storage space, guest room and primary bedroom along with access to the roof patio. The large storage room I gleefully deposit the staggering variety of nasty and unique weaponry and munitions I've accumulated so far.
"Note to self: set up weapons lockers for each suit of power armor. Preferred weaponry are Browning M-2 HMGs and RPG-7 launchers plus ammunition and power cores for all of them.
"All of this typing about logistics is dodging the real question I suppose. Rather, the real answers. Are the people of the Commonwealth worth attempting to save when so many of them are scumbags?
"Irony has no bounds. Captain Zao of the Yangtze, a Chinese missile submarine, proved that it might well be worth the seemingly insurmountable effort. He's been stuck in the harbor for more than 200 years living with sincere regret at having followed orders. Sure, it would have been easy enough to simply kill him.
"But to what end? Vengeance for a world long gone, when he wasn't one of the people that gave those orders? He's suffered more during the previous 200+ years than I could hope to inflict upon him as a ghoul. Watched and heard the awful carnage in the aftermath of launching his boat's missiles through the periscope and its microphone. Had to endure the deterioration of his crew into zombies while others died horribly ... so much so that he left their preserved bones littered about his boat.
"He wants to go home to China, if he can, or die trying. Rebuild house by house if he can, or die trying.
"On the upside he had a genuine Chinese stealth suit stashed away, in addition to handing me three homing beacons. Three get-out-of-jail-free cards of a sort ... or obliterate the jail cards. I'd call that a pretty good trade despite the amount of Rad-away I had to guzzle dealing with his submarine. Added bonus is that removes one source of pernicious radiation from the harbor. Heard on the radio this morning that the Yangtze was seen underway leaving the harbor.
"If a Chinese submarine captain can muster the will to return across the globe to rebuild by whatever divine entities are still listening I can try to do the same here at home.
"Who knows maybe I'll meet a non-scumbag somewhere along the way. Strong is a scumbag, but one I couldn't justify murdering under the circumstances. I left him to his own devices once we got that meathead Rex Goodman free of his own idiocy. The nine scumbags at the amphitheater ... oh, oh my that was so tempting. They're scammers, con-artists ... but fairly obvious ones. Maybe the mirelurks will cross the little footbridge and eat them all for me."
22nd-23rd Dec 2287; days 60-61. Malden Township
"Malden Center is, was, a stop on the orange line that had been occupied by a slightly more intelligent than normal gang of Raider scumbags. Two squads of the Institute's robot people had largely massacred them all by the time I got to the bottom of the station. Had to finish off the surviving robot people and scumbags so as not to get shot in the face during all of the excitement. Three fusion cores, all fully charged, among other sweet loot.
"Medford Memorial Hospital and Med-Tek Research held all kinds of good salvageables, including medicines, some non-perishable foodstuffs and a single dose of something called 'Prevent'. Had to wipe out the big green scumbags and their hounds too. Par for the course.
"Slocum Joe's corporate headquarters didn't have much of it left standing. The one still-intact office was the CEO's corner suite. Three raiders were futilely taking turns pummeling the locked cast iron safe. The big prize they were trying to get was an unapproved recipe for 'Buzz Bites'. Basically an oversized donut hole injected with very hot coffee that would stay nearly boiling hot for hours. The recipe was rejected by the health board due to their overwhelmingly reliable ability to scald the mouths of those who eat them.
"There's a massive sinkhole that a comparatively docile deathclaw lizard has taken up as its lair. While deathclaw beer steaks are very, very tasty dishes I'm not in the habit of casually killing these creatures. Their generally aggressive disposition usually takes care of provoking rockets to the face, but this one is different. Happy to leave this one alone.
"The real kicker here in Malden is Vault 75 beneath Malden Middle School. As is so often the case a gang of Gunner scumbags had forced entry and taken up residence. As is almost always the case this vault too was an experiment.
"Unlike Vault 95's experiments pertaining to surviving forced substance withdrawal or 111's experiments in forced early exiting of staff into the post-Bomb world combined with remote monitoring and control of subjects involuntarily stored in cryogenic stasis, Vault 75's nominal and apparently accomplished purpose was to engineer superior humans.
"Based on the surviving records this experiment was relatively successful despite a frightfully minute genetic pool upon which to draw. They considered only having to murder 74% of the 18 year old 'graduates going to Uptoptown' to be a remarkable achievement.
"Their steadily improving genetic specimens appear to have eventually grown more intelligent and thus more aware of their particular situation over time. Based on the condition of vault 75 there was a spectacularly violent exit as part of these young adults' successful annihilation of their complacent, overconfident self-appointed 'betters'. Evidence suggests that the surviving rebellious young adults evacuated this vault with their younger relatives. Where they went to is unknown at this time.
"My supposition is that the scientific staff of vault 75 had significant supplies of human genetic materials upon which to draw. Over time - how much is unclear - their entirely under-18 population grew and was culled annually based on their esoteric standards.
"Further evidence as recorded on a series of holotapes left behind by a man from the 'Brotherhood of Steel' adds considerable depth to my information on Vault-Tec and 'the Enclave'. In a nutshell our President and his hand-picked minions - as documented by the Boston Bugle as well as this scribe's own records - fled to a supposedly abandoned oil well off of the California coast shortly after our military victory in Anchorage, Alaska. This body of persons formed the leadership of a 'shadow government' styling itself 'the Enclave'.
"Supposition by this scribe is that the Enclave was already enough in the know that they intended to forge a new America from the irradiated ashes of the old. At this time I have no further information on the Enclave's final fate.
"Additional information within the scribe's records indicates that Vault-Tec built roughly 120 vaults with the last one having completed construction in June of 2074. Several of these vaults had not completed construction before nukes flew, how many is a matter of speculation although I would guess as many as one in four.
"Vault-Tec, according to the scribe's information, had constructed a secret vault just for their leadership, chosen companions and families within which to flee. This was not part of Project Safehouse that funded the 120-122 publicly known vaults.
"My current theory is that it would require four hundred thousand properly-sized vaults to safely house the entire pre-Bomb population of the continental U.S. Given the minute number of vaults actually built, the existence of Project Safehouse, the pre-Bomb government's growing desperation, Vault-Tec's own inexplicable conduct within these vaults - including often deliberately shoddy engineering - and so forth ...
"At this point 'total atomic annihilation', quoting the sales rep's pitch that fateful Saturday morning, seems to have been rather deliberately triggered by people yet-to-be determined. There is too much of a pattern of deliberate preparedness, especially by Vault-Tec, accompanying a malignant desire to determine a 'new humanity' from remotely acquired sensory data from the ten dozen vaults.
"It isn't much of a stretch to believe that if Vault-Tec and the Enclave had one 'known' secret hideout that they don't have others. Ones that survive to this day. Perhaps this Institute I keep hearing about is the local inheritor of either group. I suspect Vault-Tec is slightly more likely than the Enclave to have originated this particular group.
"Bastards, Enclave and Vault-Tec both. I hope they're enjoying a slow spit-roasting in Hell."
Nahant peninsula, Libertalia
"According to the records here by James Wire the genesis of the Raider gangs of the Commonwealth began here in May 2282 when the group he led here settled into this tangled heap of trash barges and derelict fishing boats.
"They arrived in the aftermath of General Becker's death. He was the leader of a local militia group known as 'the Minutemen'.
"The Minutemen, as in, the Minutemen of the American Revolutionary War?
"Hrm.
"Guessing that Colonel Hollis who was killed by Clint's crew of Gunners sometime earlier this year in Quincy was Becker's second-in-command. Piecing it all together my supposition at this time is that the Minutemen fell apart due to indecision after Becker's death. At this time it is unknown if General Becker was assassinated/murdered, eaten by some horrific mutated monster or died of natural causes.
"By the end of the 2282-2283 winter Wire's Raiders had enough of caravan guard work for traders operating out of Bunker Hill only to get stiffed on the agreed-upon payment in food and other supplies. By April Wire had established a protection racket. The kind that is 'pay or get wasted' rather than 'pay and we'll protect you, or exact revenge if we can't'.
"At least Wire had the decency to regret the way his life had turned before he had the extraordinarily bad idea of shooting at me. .308 migraines are messy affairs."
=====================================================
"Stayed home for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2287. Dawn of the 26th of December rose and the itch to hunt down a certain scarred-face scumbag renewed. Went out onto the roof-patio into a rad-storm. Headed to the coast north of the Nahant peninsula.
26th-27th December 2287
"That damned rad-storm slowly followed me up the coast all the way from Chester to Kingsport and Salem. As the storm broke over Salem I'd already helped out Reba's crazy one-man militia owner by way of massacring mirelurks and either destroying or collecting quite a few mirelurk eggs. The storm drove me into the basement of the Museum of Witchcraft.
"Ordinarily the deathclaw lizard's aren't particularly frightening because they're so big only severe weather or dense foliage prevents seeing them at considerable range. Inside the mostly-intact museum it was quite a bit scarier. I didn't know what particular specimen of man-rending lizard lurked above. It deliberately ate one of the several Gunners' corpses in a hole not far inside from the basement entrance, letting gruesome chunks and bits fall in a shower of gore onto the floor a few yards ahead of me.
"What the lizard failed to account for was how dangerous my fellow bipedal meat-snacks can be. Or that for a few of us the "fight or flight" instinct results in anger and violence far more often than fear and flight. Pappa deathclaw ate an RPG-7 rocket to the kisser.
"After listening to the Gunners' holotapes in combination with the previous non-violent encounter in Malden I resolved to return the one surviving egg from their clutch of twelve to its mother's nest. If all else fails I have an adrenaline shot and another loaded rocket."
late afternoon 28th Dec 2287: Mishkra Fishpacking Plant
"At a distance this is clearly a budding scumbag lair of the Raider variety courtesy of their signature tall triangular tents. They appear to have only moved in recently as the usual Raider decor of decapitated, dismembered, impaled and mutilated corpses is completely absent.
"Crossing the bridge from the remnants of a cottage upon on a hill not far off to the plant's west something seems off.
Raiders are usually a talkative bunch as part of their limited repertoire in alleviating boredom. Crossing over in broad daylight towards the obvious entrance ordinarily would have had their snipers on watch taking pot-shots at me. Not to mention the typical smack-talking and dire threats to my naughty bits.
"Instead the only sounds are those of the ocean lapping at the shore in its incessant indifference to humanity. No bugs, no birds, no radio ... nothing.
"I find dead Raiders all about the outside of the facility, none of them appear to have gotten off a shot. All of them were killed by single shots to their noodles. I explore the entire perimeter, pausing to pick off a half-dozen or so zombies on the shore across the water to the north, before finding myself at the plant's emergency roof hatch.
"These head shots are too accurate for Gunners. Only Institute coursers are so precise.
"I must be cautious.
"Entry via the roof hatch is without incident. Discovering more and more precisely slain Raiders as I go. This bunch appears to have been part of the enormous Tar Walker Raider Clique out of the Philadelphia wastelands.
"It isn't until I descend into the lower levels of the complex that I encounter an entire squad of Institute robot people. A surprisingly large number of this group are mostly or fully armored and wielding the lethal LC-1 laser carbines that seem to have started replacing those clunky old toasters-with-lasers-and-handles things that the Mayoral Shelter crew were almost entirely armed with. Fortunately for me I do not encounter the courser that I believe to have been the sniper that wiped out this entire crew of scumbags.
"A full sweep and clear of the entire plant is completed before I egress once more out via the roof hatch. My head isn't vaporized into atomized chunky salsa, leading me to believe that the courser did its assigned task and moved on to its next assignment. These 'bots were left behind to handle mop up and find whatever it is they were looking for and I now presumably have.
"A few more of 'em were patrolling the exterior of the building, most likely ones that exited while I was downstairs.
"Tomorrow I head out to the west. I passed through the area once before some weeks back. The asylum, creamery and the old brick tower beckon for exploration and de-scumbagging. I'm hoping that the deathclaw lizard's egg doesn't hatch before I find its mother's nesting grounds. Not so sure that a deathclaw would be a particularly easy pet to raise given my current lack of facilities and resources to make such an attempt ..."
29 December 2287 - 10 January 2288
"Cleared out quite a few nests of scumbags along the coast, including a couple of cells of cultists devoted to an entity they call 'Atom'.
"These self-styled 'Children of Atom' lunatics worship being irradiated and welcome the afterlife in a manner they dub 'the great division' - aka, fission. The cell in the lighthouse at Kingsport had a pet 'glowing one' zombie that they'd been feeding passersby to, using its green glow as the place's beacon. A second cell just up the road from the lighthouse was no more welcoming of strangers. Religiously motivated scumbags are the worst sort. I hope that there aren't too many of them.
"The scary part is that adaptation to the environmental radiation has already lead to several mutations of the human genome. The most prevalent are zombies, then ghouls and lastly the giant super-mutant scumbags and their even-larger behemoth-like kin. It is likely that at some point an otherwise normal-appearing human could manifest a fully-radiation-adapted genome that could be inherited. If this genetic mutation is dominant that is the ballgame. Ghouls without the burn victim look in other words.
"Most of Massachusetts' smaller scumbaggery nests have been cleared out. I've steered clear of the heavier combat zones near the western end of Cambridge and the old Watts Consumer Electronics store on Cambridge's north-northeasterly river bank. In addition a healthy distance is being kept from Goodneighbor, Diamond City and the currently occupied by non-scumbag smaller settlements scattered throughout the Commonwealth."
"Vault-Tec and other pre-Bomb business entities do not retain exclusive license to madness-driven 'scientific research' to attain their ends. A woman in her late 50's had established an organization of some sort with a devoted group of followers manning both a pleasant facade of a small fortified community whose purpose was to ferret out, capture and by way of torture attempt to codify a 'test' that would trip up 'synths'.
"Specifically 'gen-3 synths' - what in pre-Bomb terminology would be identified as androids. As compared to the 'gen-1' and 'gen-2' 'synths' that are what I've been calling 'robot people'.
"There are at least two improvement grades upon the baseline androids out there - the first one is the deceased infiltration 'courser' that had been operating out of the condo in the Hub 360 building. My suspicion is that this entity had access to a steady supply of Stealth Boys.
"The second improvement grade are combat-grade coursers. One of these is my current suspect as to what was responsible for the massacre of the Tar Walker Raiders at the Mashkra fishpacking plant.
"This test of these nutjobs that until yesterday had been running their scam in Coventry and the Compound across the lake from Coventry was directly based almost word-for-word on a poorly executed personality test. One that I've come across in the Vault-Tec HQ archives. Its purpose was to assess young adults that came of age when reared in a vault. In theory it would establish the juvenile's aptitudes for operational training during their last few years before their 18th birthday.
"Unfortunately their version of it comprised all of 9 rather bizarre questions that most pre-Bomb people would have a hard time providing the answers the 'doctor' was after. Let alone anyone in this age more than two centuries after the old world was swept away in a haze of mushroom clouds that belched ashen black rain across most of the world.
"These idiots had questions about baseball. Who in the Hell these days has a clue about how any pre-Bomb sports were actually played?! Morons.
"Murderous morons that objected to my objections, drawing on myself and Honest Dan during our attempted negotiations to release Amelia Stockton from their tortures. She'd already been through much from what I saw of her when we started talking. Emaciation from near-starvation and burn damage to her face. Even if Amelia is an android she didn't deserve these jackass' deliberate tortures. To get Amelia and Dan out of their underground compound alive I had to kill all eleven of them as well as every person in Covenant itself. The guards must have let them know of my 'treachery', so the meatbags of Covenant attempted to murder me for my temerity.
"Going to come back at some point with a salvage 'bot to get the mess cleaned up. Deezer (a Mr. Handy) and Daisy (community cat) took the carnage in stride. I locked the doors shut for now. Anything that gets in is going to have to be pretty determined or able to climb or jump over the walls.
"I've accumulated enough stuff to warrant beginning construction at Spectacle Island. Thinking that some time away from people with the ocean as my companion will be just the brain bleach needed to scrub this latest episode of scumbaggery from my brain.
"I don't have the skills to build modern pre-Bomb artillery. On the upside it is possible to hand-build M114A1 155mm howitzers within the infrastructure of the Commonwealth. Saugus is vacant and there are hundreds of tons of ingots and coke there. A bit of reading and I'll make all of the steel and other smelted metals I could possibly need. A week or so should be more than sufficient. Also, much longer than that and it is possible that more scumbags will notice the sudden lack of Forged in that vicinity and come poking around.
"Assuming the skeeters and bloatflies don't get them first."
To make it perhaps a bit clearer so far I've cleared out the solid majority of the Commonwealth's on-map locations and quite a few of the "unmapped" ones as well.
Locations 'mapped' but not otherwise touched include
the occupied settlements other than Abernathe, Finch and Graygarden;
Vaults 81 and 88;
the subway entrance into Vault 114 (where a certain android detective awaits liberation);
and two locations pertinent to the quartet of quest mods I've had installed: Valkyrie's Apartment (no relation to my character) and Club Snuggle, both of which are a short jaunt east along the waterfront from Back Street Apparel.
Locations scrupulously avoided include
Drumlin Diner;
all of Concord;
the Red Rocket Truck Stop;
Sanctuary Hills (asides from the root cellar and the duffle bag on the roof of the house adjacent to said root cellar);
the Combat Zone;
Goodneighbor;
Diamond City;
the launch points for Nuka-World and Far Harbor;
the western part of Cambridge within several blocks of the police station;
the northeasterly-ish part of Cambridge near Watts / where Automatron begins;
and virtually all of the Glowing Sea other than its 'edge'.
Other than these the primary Commonwealth map is filled in.
I've yet to begin the side quests pertaining to the Black Devil power armor (Watts Electronics) and anti-material rifle (Diamond City) from the Creation Club. They'll be waiting a while. Similarly acquisition of the Widow's Shotgun will have to wait until I actually go to Concord. I love that shotgun ... but I like not having to deal with Preston and the Gang quite a bit more.
This is an exceptionally good pace from previous playthroughs at ~75 days in-game. This is largely due to mostly ignoring settlement construction other than building robust defenses at Somerville Place and replacing Coventry's defenses.
Most of this game's efforts pertaining to workshop activities up to this point have been conducted within the safety of the Chester player home while using fast travel/roof access in and out.
This saves the Voyage of the USS Constitution as the last vanilla side quest I'll do before beginning Automatron. With fast travel enabled this doesn't take an inordinate amount of play time to conclude. I'll be providing a space in advance at Spectacle Island for the first robotics workbench.
After Automatron a few more vanilla side quests will be completed, including stashing my fifth and final suit of power armor at the Chester condo.
11-31 January 2288
"Construction of the howitzer emplacements, an emergency bunker and short-range radar systems on Spectacle Island are complete. During the daylight hours, weather permitting, is when the laborious work was performed. Of the evening hours after supper I listened to and read the accumulation of holotapes and notes I'd accrued over the past eleven weeks. After doing what I could without robots to man the howitzers I return to Chester for some relaxation.
"Upon exiting the Chester condo from the ground level entrance a few days ago the neighboring ship's robot lookout identified me and announced that I was henceforth a member of the Constitutional Army. Since this was quite a bit different from the more typical encounters I've had so far, I went along with the robot to the entry hatch just above the ship's waterline.
"Amusingly the sentry bot Captain of the U.S.S. Constitution, apparently moored largely intact atop the remnants of Weatherby Savings and Loan as a result of ... oh, who knows what could have flung the ship there without destroying her. Regardless of the how, the robot crew had busied themselves over the centuries since with constructing and attaching NX-42 rockets to the ship. Salvagers and other assorted scumbags had boarded the ship and made off with or damaged a few of the ship's modern systems. Twice the scumbags attempted to forcibly board the ship.
"The second attempt after all repairs had been completed was fraught with peril. One of the boarders was a 'dreadnought', a particularly fearsome Raider with very heavy armor and usually several weapons. This one was packing an RPG-7 of his own, very nearly destroying Captain Ironsides with one shot. A dense helmet and the padded lining of my own under armor were the only reason I survived the blast in such close proximity to the captain.
"A group of 4 mercenaries were moving into the area when the allied gang of raiders and scavengers made the mistake of engaging in a two-sided firefight with the Constitution's crew and the new mercs. These mercs were the second-heaviest armed band of freelancers I've encountered so far. Only one of them survived the ensuing carnage. A shame really as their Mr. Gutsy had some pep to him.
"The most heavily-armed band of freelancers I've encountered I ran into back in both Jamaica Plain and the ruins of Quincy. These four people were not only packing serious firepower but they have the skills to make full use of their hardware. One has a fully tricked out gatling laser, the second a five or six-crank laser musket, the third is their medic and the fourth I believe is their sniper.
"After mopping up the surviving scumbags and scouring the block of land mines and loot I poked my head into the Chester Laundry building. The backroom is an irradiated treasure trove of cleaning supplies, including Abraxo, soap and assorted sundries. 7 new bars of soap this day and age is a princely acquisition indeed!
"The Constitution's rockets fired without catastrophic results, landing her atop a new perch in downtown. One of these days I'll have to make the trip over there to see how they're doing.
"Tomorrow I head to our.. my friends' family cottage in Cambridge a few blocks away from the Wattz store. The home is small but it was well-maintained. While Nate and I moved to the newly-built suburb of Sanctuary Hills they elected to update their home. They had some good acquisitions too. A 'junk compactor', an in-home miniature hydroponics system and a small self-contained power generator complemented their home.
"During the nearly forty years prior to Bomb Day families had begun returning to traditions and behaviors not seen in a century. Victory gardens, in-home self-sustaining water and power supplies and recycling systems were expensive and effective. Our builder didn't offer these systems as options, so we'd been talking to our friends about the systems they decided to install and whom they had perform the installations earlier in October.
"They had left Boston on vacation the weekend prior to the 23rd of October. It stands to reason that they left the security systems information in one of their neighbor's custody. Probably that plumber that worked a block over at the Plumber's Secret.
"I'll head to Cambridge tomorrow and track down that cottage. If it still stands and hasn't been busted into and ransacked, it will make an excellent base of operations for Cambridge. It is rather centrally located east of the older section of the university, south of Covenant/Taffington and north of Hangman's Alley."
1st-5th February 2287
"As I finished utilizing my friends' scrapping unit on the outside of their cottage in Cambridge a radio distress alert came up on my Pip-boy's radio. Tuning into the repeating broadcast a trader's caravan is under attack by robots of all things.
"The first thought that came to mind is that more robot-people were out and about randomly massacring people, more of the gen-1 and gen-2 Institute synths. Running to the location just northeast of the Wattz Consumer Electronics store I intended to visit after securing the cottage instead I found something altogether worse.
"The first indication that something different is afoot came by way of the kind of explosions that only come from something atomic-powered brewing up, two of them in rapid succession. Making my way over the hills and through the trees before coming around the parking lot side of the store...
"The trader's camp was an abattoir of butchered corpses and shattered robots spread across the battlefied. One light blue robot was being flanked by two robots. The packs festooning the blue robot tickled my instincts - this must be the defender in this fight. .308 rounds from my Garand battle rifle put down the attacking junkbots in short order.
"A palaver with the blue robot identifies her as Ada, guardian and companion to the now-deceased trader-technicians that until ten minutes ago were a salvaging team cum trader caravan making their way about the Commonwealth.
"Retrieval of a holotape and Ada's testimony identifies the engineer of this morning's slaughter as someone calling themselves by a pre-Bomb comic book villain: the Mechanist.
"Guess I should've heeded the radio broadcast to go to Goodneighbor after finding the Silver Shroud costume and props at the Hubris Comics store a couple of months back.
"Ada indicates that there are a number of squads of mechanical menaces terrorizing folk. There's also a Raider gang with a severe robot fetish known to her as the Rust Devils based on their unique identifying stencil.
"She provides her former master's technical data that permits construction of a robotics workbench. Quite the marvelous contraption that solves my concerns about just how I was going to rebuild the General Atomics factory. Now I can build and program my own robotic minions under personally controlled conditions.
"We build a robotics station on Spectacle Island, then follow the trail to the vicinity of Fort Hagen. Arriving there a 'robo-brain' and its assigned 'bots have massacred a family of farmers and their attack dogs. While we were too late to save them, avenging them was swift and certain.
"Ada is able to quickly determine that a gang of Rust Devil scumbags have set up shop in the nearby satellite array. Wasting the surface group wasn't a big deal.
"Clearing out the massive nest of them in the underground levels beneath the surface array took a bit more effort. The craziest find in there for me was the cherry set of T-60 power armor on a frame with a fully charged fusion core. Their leader, Ivy, was wearing another set of customized 'Tesla' T-60 power armor - the torso and arms specifically.
"Ada and I return to Spectacle Island with a robo-brain by the name of Jezebel and the aforementioned Tesla T-60 power armor. A compact power armor station is built in the emergency bunker and the Tesla suit is stashed therein.
"After building Jezebel a preliminary body to attach her disagreeable psychopathic brainbox to she gives up the requisite access schematic and the location of the Mechanist's Lair. I'd previously accessed the RobCo Sales and Service Center northwest of the airport but found the interior bank vault doors, terminal and wall-mounted devices beyond my skills to access.
"Now I know why. The Mechanist really knows their stuff.
"Discussing the current situation with Jezebel reveals an alarming flaw in the prime directive encoded by the Mechanist. "Help the people of the Commonwealth" is interpreted by Jezebel - and by extension the other robo-brain-led squads that are out there - as most efficiency accomplished by helping them to meet their maker.
"In other words the Mechanist's decision to utilize these robo-brains as squad leaders perverted the original directive to truly help as many people as possible into wholesale slaughter.
"After installing the 'robot key card' device into Ada we are able to access and fight our way through the massive pre-Bomb complex that Uncle Sam had integrated into the bowels of their front operation. Dozens of junkbots and eyebots are put down before even the Mechanist's significant resources and power reserves are depleted, forcing a confrontation.
"To my knowledge a dozen people were slain by the Mechanist's minions before Ada and I breached the lair's access points. We discuss her - yes I wrote her - flawed assumptions and logic progression. We further discuss the detailed history of this location, its methods and the nature of the still-living brains percolating in their tubes.
"Which is to say that Uncle Sam in their ever-increasing desperation to win the war against Communist China felt it perfectly acceptable to use convicted murderers and other scumbags as the brains implanted into this series of robots.
"The Mechanist - Isabel Cruz now - apparently felt that recurring memory wipes would be sufficient in conjunction with her three prime directives to prevent their base natures and almost-certainly permanent madness from floating in their jars without sensory input.
"She was immediately and sincerely appalled at the actual results of her efforts. Cruz wants to just hang up her mantle and quit putting her significant skills sets to use. Ada, showing remarkable restraint, did not reduce her to a set of smoking boots with charred stumps sticking out of them.
"Instead I tasked them to work together to build this complex into a non-Vault underground settlement with Ada in charge and Cruz acting as her XO. No one can bring back the dead. We can make the lives of as many others as possible better.
"Returning to Spectacle Island flush with technical know-how I upgrade Jezebel to a brain-box hovering on a Mr. Handy chassis. She'll very shortly be tasked with running a supply line to the mainland for me whether she likes it or not.
"Next I build the five assaultrons required to crew the howitzers I built last month. Using purely hydraulic frames they are tremendously strong - they can tear through any one of my power armor suits like tissue paper if they are able to engage them hand-to-hand! This makes them ideal for manning artillery in perpetuity.
"While musing over Jezebel's fate - she is after all an unrepentant mass murderer and serial killer even by post-Bomb standards - inspiration struck.
"Among the many microfiche archives are a number of civic plans. Adapting them to the wasteland environment that is the here-and-now I can build a 'manager-bot' to oversee construction and settler recruitment of the dozen uninhabited settlement locations I currently have access to.
"Build them one at a time, initiating them in rapid succession ... should take a couple of weeks or so by my estimate to get all of them started. Sounds like a plan, Stan."
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6-17 February 2288
"I severely overestimated my programming capabilities. Jackson's Ada has intelligence programming better than Cruz's, let alone anything I can put together. Now I have a 'spare' artillery assaultron roaming about Spectacle Island. The amount of adhesive it takes to assemble one of the fully hydraulic models is staggering. The 'mayoral version' takes a fourth as much. Granted, it has about a third of the armor and nowhere near the strength, so there is a trade-off.
"Instead I went from settlement to settlement helping them fend off whatever nuisances were bothering them, took care of them by carefully applied violence and welcomed them into the budding nation of Massachusetts.
"Professor Goodfeels' dormant programming was easy enough to wake up. He is the mayor of Sunshine Tidings Co-op.
"Strong was telling anyone who would listen, including that tapioca DJ on Diamond City radio, that he's seeking the milk of human kindness. To fully embrace this supposed philosophy I appointed him to his own mayorship over County Crossing. I hope he doesn't eat anyone or I'll put his big green cannibal butt down like a radscorpion. Personally I give him a 1-in-3 chance to not have to be put out of my misery. Be very, very happy for him to prove me wrong!
"Jake Finch's path to redemption is down the road as mayor of his family farm.
"Lucy Abernathy has pluck and vigor, so she's mayor of her family farm.
"Graygarden was easy enough since I'd fixed up the Weston treatment plant in early November of last year. Supervisor White is the mayor there. She's been running the place in conjunction with supervisors Brown and Green for more than 200 years, who am I to dispute their position?
"Deezer is the mayor of Covenant now. Despite his mayorship and a half-dozen souls living there that meathead DJ keeps referring to the place as abandoned.
"Once Ada and Cruz are done with the Lair I'll start tasking Ada with bringing up the currently vacant settlements to spec.
"In the meanwhile I've been hearing some nasty rumors that back up Ellie's notes in the Nuka Cafe. It seems that there are indeed a vast number of scumbags occupying the Nuka-World amusement park west-southwest of Sunshine Tidings.
"Time to add more travel stamps to my passbook. Scumbag hunting season has no end date in the Commonwealth."
18-20 February 2288
"Ellie's posthumous information regarding the presence of Raider scumbags infesting the Nuka World amusement park was spot-on. A lot of scumbags. Three different Raider gangs worth of scumbags. This is ordinarily an almost immutable physical law: raider gangs do not play well with each other.
"Seems that the aforementioned scumbags conquered the previous traders that had been running Nuka-World's primary entry zone. They enslaved them, then set up shop. Stitched together into an alliance by a moderately charismatic scumbag by the name of Porter Gage, his chosen leader was Colter, your garden variety Raider boss.
"Colter was Nuka-World's Raider Overboss. He'd gotten comfortable in his little piece of amusement park real estate. Set himself up in the Fizztop Patio and Cafe complex close to the main entrance. Stocked it with all manner of premium grub and abusable substances.
"Then he got complacent, an attitude not particularly beloved by his barely-sane psychopathic minions. Gage kept these three gangs more or less from slaughtering each other out of boredom for the better part of a year.
"About six months into their stay Gage came up with the bright idea of a Gauntlet. Colter loved it as did the Disciples gang who assumed the mantles of maintenance and renovations. Then these buggers sent out 'baiters', lures to draw in unsuspecting people to enter their gauntlet only to die horribly.
"Prior to my arrival only a handful of people made it to the end, power armor wearers from what I could discern. Then I ran the gauntlet sans any power armor. Gage advised me to hose down Colter with a squirt gun since he was clad in a uniquely Raider-esque P.o.S. suit that drew power from the bumper car 'arena' they'd set up the culmination of their gauntlet within. After tiptoeing past innumerable traps, collecting a couple dozen or so landmines and enduring a large pile of nuclear waste drums, I was game to try out the squirt gun.
"Sure enough, it worked. Guessing they didn't know much of anything about properly grounding the frame when accounting for the massive amount of power it could draw from the arena's power grid.
"It had been a long walk, a grueling 'gauntlet' and Colter would NOT shut his pie-hole. The fugly bastard kept calling me a b*tch, griping about how slow I was going.
"Serious cottonmouth from all of the rad-x and radaway, bullet wounds, bruises, contusions and that godawful-tasting bitter medicine I'd been using to keep in decent health combined to make for a particularly foul mood. That and the scumbags' repeated attempts to kill me.
"As soon as the thirst quencher did its thing on Colter's electrified power armor I went medieval on him. Power armor can be nigh-impenetrable to pistol rounds ... if it's built well. His suit wasn't built particularly well and he'd just gotten his jimmies singed. That and I know where to put my bullets for maximum armor penetration. 4 bullets, 4 crippled limbs ... then I limped over and used a rusty chainsaw to lop off his asinine head.
"Gage made his 'sales pitch' that surviving the Gauntlet and wasting Overboss Colter makes me the new Overboss of these scumbags. I played along long enough to catch some shut-eye, get a bit more of a skinny on his Grand Scumbag Empire Plan and meet the gangs' leaders.
"After meeting these five scumbags the course of action was obvious. Gotta waste 'em all. Nisha died first from a .45 full cranial evacuation through her face from the back of her skull. The last scumbag in this park to take his rightful dirtnap: Porter Gage.
" 'Why?! This is a good gig!!' "
" 'You imbecile. I told you I didn't want the job, yet you insisted. Then I saw a few things I really don't like: slaves, senseless slaughterhouses and animal abuse. I really hated putting down the attack dogs, they were just doing what dogs do that are trained that way.
" 'You on the other hand are a Raider-for-Life. As were the rest of these psychopaths. Your ears heard it right, I just killed every single one of your pet scumbags. All 102 of them ... and Gage, you, are number 103.' "
"' Not like this ... ' " *PACKLE*
" 'Jeez Louise Gage, Dixie at least had the understanding to utter 'finally' before I tossed her corpse onto one of their gruesome contraptions. Get off my patio.'
"Now the non-scumbags here are free to do as they desire. This entire place needs a deep cleansing enema that some of those crazy fashionistas used to prattle on about on the talk shows back when."
Implemented a "Kill XP" mod at 45th level which reduces XP earned to 1% of normal. Back of napkin math says if I'm ~25% of the way to 54th level that it would equate to normal progression of 292nd level.
FO4 at much above the 60th-75th level range gets stupid as far as the scumbags' and critters' health pools. I feel that the sweet spot as far as scumbags/critters are concerned is 45th-60th level.
I'm maybe a third of the way through Nuka-World's content putting me very very close to hitting 46th level. Had I not 'killed' my xp gain, I'd already be 105th level with every probability of hitting 110th by the time I clean the entire complex out.
21 February - 9 March 2288
"18 days to mop up the entirety of Nuka-World. 3 weeks in total adding in those gruellingly glorious first three days. The Red Rocket Truck Stop is up to the locals. I'm no more their Overboss than they are my Raiders or slaves.
"Not that any scumbags were left alive in any significant number.
"Of all the oddities in this place a few stand out.
"Vault-Tec just couldn't help themselves. They were conducting experiments on the general public right here in an amusement park, supposedly to improve sales. Anyone that paid money to go through was the involuntary recipient of at least 3 experiments. One of these days I hope I get a lead on their global headquarters. So I can go blow it to Hell.
"As one might expect Nuka-Cola Quantum is infused with radioactive material: strontium-90 in this case. What most will never know is that Nuka-Cola's founder, one J.C. Bradburton, during the last few years of the war was in cahoots with the War Department.
"Seems that old Bradburton wanted to survive the war come Hell or high water as with so many of the rich and famous. He got in on a project dubbed "LEAP-X". Theoretically it would transform the recipients into nigh-immortal cyborgs. Bradburton had already had a private vault constructed on site for himself.
"In exchange for surviving the war and theoretical immortality he tasked his very capable organic chemists to work with the War Department on "Project Cobalt".
"Not much technical data survived to the present day save for a few notable items. A quantum-enhanced hand grenade, and a quantum-enhanced mini-nuke that requires a specialized fat man launcher to deploy.
"Nuka-Cola Quantum was just getting spooled up to speed for production at the park's bottling plant. Bradburton didn't stop with a mere bottling plant. No he incorporated a ride into the bottling plant with its cars riding along on their rails through an actual river of the stuff.
"Nukes, time, mutations and the opportunistic nature of mirelurks moving into and nesting within and around similar industrial structures with a ready, usually radioactive water supply. In this case the results of such inundation resulted in a spectacular new subspecies of the entire mirelurk family. Call them 'nukalurks' for ease of reference.
"These brilliant blue glowing mirelurk variants are more dangerous and much tougher than the typical examples we're used to in the Commonwealth. They are also much tastier if you survive the hunting and egg gathering.
"Lastly with the guidance of a Nuka-Cola fanatic that somehow made the trip all the way from the Capitol wastelands through Tar Walker and Gunner territories to the remote westernmost fringes of the Commonwealth we located and unlocked Bradburton's personal vault. We also saw the results of the LEAP-X project as it was applied to him some 6-8 months before the war's nuclear finale.
"His head - just his head - was suspended in a transparent cold fluid of some sort, kept alive by a bank of computers and life support equipment attached to its own atomic reactor. While Bradburton had no regrets as to his weapons research as an independent for the War Department he so very much wanted his ... existence ... to finally end.
"Staring at the same view for more than two hundred years it is impressive that he wasn't incomprehensibly insane. Despite his fan-girl's objections and insistence that she would keep him company to alleviate his loneliness I did as he bade and cut the power to his noggin. The fan-girl was not particularly happy with me, but she got one of the copies of the original Nuka-Cola formula and I made off with several technical schematics of my own.
"Last oddity of all was a small group calling themselves 'Hubologists'. They believed that they alone possess great secrets to unlocking the potential of the mind. Doing so required five spacesuits with helmets from the park's Nuka-Girl ride which none of the traders in the market wanted anything to do with. I had four spare fusion cores on me, so powering up the flying saucer ride they firmly believed to be a genuine spaceship was easy enough. They had a power converter stashed nearby, then *presto*, their 'space ship' was lit and ready to go. Assuming their positions along the centrifugal positions around the inside they had be stand in the center and power the ride up. Turns out that fully powering this puppy up was more than they could handle. I left their "juiced" remains inside the 'flying saucer' and returned to Fizztop on the night of the 7th.
"The icing on the cake here was an intact suit of T-51b power armor. There aren't many of these anywhere on the Eastern seaboard before accounting for the passage of time and its attendant scavenging. Almost all of them had been deployed with front-line troops the Gobi desert, Alaska or in various shipment points on the west coast bound for China. Let alone those scattered across the Pacific.
"The early morning hours of the 9th of March I'm in said suit of power armor with bundles of swag strapped all over this bad boy and roughly 30,000 bottlecaps richer than when I arrived. I don't expect to ever return.
"I wonder how the mayors are doing?"
Pet peeve: the game counts as "murders" dispatching Nisha, Gage and the five idiot hubologists who did NOT provide clear instructions that the fourth power core would prove fatal.
*le sigh*
9 - 14 March 2288
"For most of this time things were comparatively uneventful. Patrolled between the settlements I appear to now be 'governor' of, wiping out the local arthropod and humanoid pests as needed.
"An eyebot has been roaming the entirety of the Commonwealth advertising employment opportunities at Cambridge Polymer Labs. Wiped out the scumbags in Kendall Hospital as well as a particularly unfortunate deathclaw lizard, the bugs outside of said hospital and poked around Cambridge some before an emergency distress call was picked up by the Pip-boy.
"I say 'unfortunate' for the lizard as it was at the wrong end of a fairly long hallway. Beer marinated deathclaw steaks are so good, they're the chimichangas of the wasteland!
"Seems that some group calling themselves a 'Brotherhood' are in some trouble a few blocks over from the lab at the police station. It was getting dark as I stepped out of Frat Post 115 on the night of the 14th.
"Maybe they came after Paladin Brandis? He'd said something about being on a reconnaissance mission on behalf of a 'Brotherhood of Steel'. Are these people from the same group?
"It wasn't too late to save three of these people, although one was wounded. One of their number was wearing an unusual set of power armor sans helmet with unfamiliar markings while the other two looked to be technical specialists of some sort. They were about to be swarmed under and eaten alive by zombies when I arrived from what turned out to be one flank of the building.
"I've taken quite the liking the 'wild west' vibe of Dry Rock Gulch, which means I'm equipped with a blackened combat knife, a 'western' revolver chambered in .44, a lever-action 5-shot .45-70 carbine and a few throwing knives I'd used against the scumbags inside of the hospital. I'm not an utter moron - the 'western outfit with chaps' and matching hat are woven with the best multiple-threat-grade ballistic weave I am capable of. Only half of the protection of the outfit I wore into Nuka-World, but it's a Hell of a lot lighter!
"The nice thing about zombie roamer groups like this is that it is possible to massacre them from a modestly high perch. This 'Brotherhood' bunch had erected one such as a wall with a walkway and cover-panels around the front arc of the station. Their mistake was leaving two openings in their barrier. Guessing they must have scrounged this barricade together from the delivery truck out front.
"The only way to get answers is to talk to them or hope they are carrying holotapes or other records if they decide to try and kill me."
14-17 March 2288
"The big fella with the very ... very ... nice voice is Paladin Danse of the Brotherhood of Steel. Knight Rhys - the wounded one - and Scribe Haylen are the only other survivors of his squad that traveled north from the Capitol wastelands to the Commonwealth, arriving 22 Jan 2287.
"Danse's team - recon squad Gladius - ranged far and wide across the Commonwealth, making it to the shores at Fort Strong before they'd finally suffered too many of their number killed-in-action. Explains why there were so many of the muties' meatbags throughout Fort Strong and its environs.
"His team has been holed up in Cambridge's police station since December. They've only survived this long due to having accumulated supplies for an entire squad instead of three.
"In the interim they've been attempting to improve the station's radio so as to be able to broadcast a signal to 'Scarab' for extraction. A recent attack by super-mutants sporting rocket launchers damaged the existing antennae, so they need to recover a communications system from the ArcJet complex a mile or so away. Danse is desperate enough to (a) leave a wounded Knight and a Scribe alone in the poorly defended station; and (b) ask for my help.
"Based on my brief dialog with Paladin Brandis I offered to help without expectation of reward. What Danse doesn't know is that - right now - my personal arsenal and stockpile of supplies dwarfs theirs by at least 6:1. Probably vastly more than that since I was able to clear out and assemble more than 350 mini-nukes from Fort Strong's lower levels in December.
"Note to self: secure further quantities of Nuka-Cola Quantum for the express purpose of converting existing munitions to Nuka-Nukes. There's an entire river of it, so this should be easy.
"When asked about the Brotherhood of Steel and what its 'mission' - in his vernacular - is, he describes it thusly:"
"Our order seeks to understand the nature of technology. Its power. Its meaning to us as humans. And we fight to secure that power from those who would abuse it. There are very few outside [of the] Brotherhood who appreciate the gravity of the situation we're facing as a species." Paladin Danse
"Phrased in this way I can appreciate their motivation. Later on I listen to the journal holotape Scribe Haylen left sitting out gaining further, more disturbing insight into the Brotherhood of Steel. Most pertinent is this:"
"The Brotherhood's message of hope for the future is idealistic and noble but their methods leave a lot to be desired. The leadership seems especially misguided. Instead of diplomacy, they wield violent confrontation to exert control." Scribe Haylen
"Paladin Danse and I make our way to the ArcJet rocket complex, encountering a small group of scumbags that murder a trader and her pack brahmin before we can close to within weapons range. The scumbags join their victims as carrion food. A couple of bloatflies and a pack of feral dogs are dealt with en route.
"Danse's demeanor reminds me a bit of Nate when we first met. Both are, were, professional soldiers to the core. Danse's crisp professionalism hasn't been blunted by cynicism and battle fatigue. Or he's doing a very good job of putting up a good front.
"En route to ArcJet he mentions that two previous Brotherhood reconnaissance teams had been sent to the Commonwealth during the previous decade. The first team came back laden with swag in the first years of the decade. The second team that arrived in 2284 - Paladin Brandis' squad Artemis - was never heard from again.
"Amusingly I found Danse to be ... talkative, especially for a soldier. I barely got a word in edgewise during this excursion into the complex, even while obliterating robot-people - what he calls synths. Guess I might have to adopt to the local terminology at some point.
"My first trip here was very short as the whirring of turrets and the click-tick of active protectrons was clearly audible in the lobby. This time around the Institute's robotic minions had made short work of the protectrons. Strangely they elected to bypass the turrets instead of obliterating them as they had the protectrons. In the belly of the complex beneath the test rocket fifteen synths came jumping down from the upper reaches. Turns out they had accessed the complex in a two-pronged approach.
"I am amused as this is very much the approach I prefer to an unknown structure or complex of such scope. Entry either via a less-secure rear entrance or, preferably, vertically onto a roof to access the location that way - most often the least secure entrance is on the roof or hidden in some manner.
"Danse presses forward instead of heeding a request to let me scout ahead and find the turrets' control terminal to add ourselves to their authorized persons matrix. He felt that we were caught unprepared in a sloppy sweep."
(inner voice) Sorry bucko, but you were sloppy. Your aimed is mediocre and your desperation to communicate with Scarab clouds your judgement and saps your patience. Whomever Scarab is, although logically this has to be further up his chain of command. (/inner voice)
"Danse paid me a compliment after the firefight beneath the rocket booster. I shrugged it off nonchalantly, but inside I did get a kick out of it. Thanks for insisting on all of those lessons with things that go bang and boom, Nate. They've come in handy in ways you probably wouldn't have imagined.
"After retrieving the communications hardware and returning to the surface via a small elevator Danse hits me up with a proposal. To join the Brotherhood of Steel under his command. Going with "I don't know", big fella. I've yet to consolidate the burgeoning communities of Massachusetts under the old stars-n-stripes. Maybe later.
"Danse returns to the police station while I mop up Cambridge for another couple of days.
"The idea is intriguing ... but 'violent confrontation to exert direct control' greatly concerns me. Danse's take is one thing, the other is unacceptable. I'll have to concentrate significant efforts towards expanding the civilian population, then showering them with the piles of accumulated armor and weaponry that's taking up so much storage space.
"Success at ArcJet has probably set some sort of timer into motion, one whose clock I cannot see. How long it will take Scarab to respond with an evacuation is anyone's guess. Depending upon what intelligence Gladius has gathered during their fifteen months here ..."
18-20 March 2288
"Latest communities' reports: Abernathy Farm (pop. 14), County Crossing (pop. 11), Coventry (pop. 10), Finch Farm (pop. 4), Graygarden (pop. 8), Oberland Station (pop. 2), Somerville Place (pop. 4), Sunshine Tidings Co-op (pop. 13), the Slog (pop. 15) and the Mechanist's Lair (pop. 7).
"Everyone's getting along as well as I can arrange at this point. It's just a matter of patience. Finished patrolling around Hangman's Alley when I remember that there is this Club Snuggle place down the river to the east a few blocks. After carefully applied violence to yet another couple of scumbag gangs at the Riptide and Back Street Apparel I find myself at the front door to Club Snuggle just before 1 p.m. on the 20th.
"I'm anticipating a death trap. I'm hoping for something ... I don't know, something not involving cannibals, Raiders or murderous robots.
"To the citizens of Massachusetts, if you are reading this, then Club Snuggle is a death trap. Nuke it from a safe distance. It's the only way to be sure."
20-31 March 2288
"Dirty Fred runs Club Snuggle. Amused myself for the first few days running various scumbag extermination and swag retrieval errands for him. He pays handsomely enough, about 1,000 caps per errand.
"Afterwards I made the return trip to the bottling plant at Nuka-World and loaded up on Nuka-Cola Quantum. I had 610 bottles of it when I was done. Converted all 439 mini-nukes to nuka-nukes, leaving enough Quantum on hand to convert future mini-nuke acquisitions - typically from super-mutants - in the foreseeable future.
"April showers and all of that. Tomorrow I take another tour of Massachusetts to see how everyone's coming along. Then it's off to Goodneighbor to see what the Silver Shroud radio guy is up to."
1-7 April 2288
"Finished the tour at Somerville Place. With very little in the Commonwealth beckoning my attention I went out into the Glowing Sea. Found all of the landmarks, cleared out a church full of zombies and entered what appeared to be an abandoned shack.
"Turns out that shack was a government listening post. A small number of the Institute's robot people were inside utilizing the surveillance systems. Wasted them, turned off the surveillance devices and claimed technical data retrieved by someone named "C. Kellogg" that provides the schematics to construct post-Bomb power armor.
"Between the two suits I've retrieved and stored and the technical data 'Whitesprings' and 'X-01 III' it is possible to hand-build the armor and systems for two such suits. The 'Hellfire' specifications still elude me at the moment. Modifications and repairs I can do. Building an entirely new set of plates for the 'Hellfire' suit I currently lack.
"During the unpleasantry of exploring the Glowing Sea I came across a vault entrance into what was once Ini-Tech's massive underground complex. Over the past few decades the inhabitants have transformed the complex into a place they call 'Fusion City'. Nominally an entertainment complex of great scope they have 4-stage waste and water processing and purification, a refurbished fusion core power plant and almost all of the vices one can imagine in a safe location. Surviving the trek out there is another matter as it squats in the midst of a moderate-to-high radiation zone.
"They have a pair of training simulators, one for simulating a Raider and ghoul invasion, the other for a super-mutant and deathclaw invasion. Both are highly entertaining, and they let you keep your 'loot' from within the simulation by having it waiting for you upon emergence. The young lady in the clean and skimpy Chem-I-Care nurse's uniform doesn't hurt either.
"The lady running the hotel was worried about her missing son, so I went out and found him in Vault-Tec custody.
"You read that correctly: Vault-Tec. Seems that her son was chasing down bits of information that led him to theorize that Vault-Tec initiated atomic annihilation, not the Soviets, nor the Chinese, nor that idiot who shall not be named who was our last POTUS. Somehow they caught wind of her son's investigation and abducted him by teleportation. I imagine that Fusion City's being a functioning vault means that Vault-Tec's surveillance systems remain functional.
"Teleportation ... if they figured out how to transmit organisms and inert matter without either scrambling them together in transit or worse ... the implications are almost incomprehensible.
"Being Vault-Tec they couldn't be bothered with such mundane purposes as cleaning up the wastelands around them or such nonsense. Instead they're using it to move small bands of their enforcers about to hide their dirty laundry.
"Is this how the Institute's synths and coursers move about in the world? Is the Institute a descendant organization from a vault-shielded research complex beneath the Cambridge campus?
"With more questions than answers swirling in my head I finish reconnaissance of the Glowing Sea and return to less radioactive environs. Resting at Somerville before heading towards Goodneighbor tomorrow. That fellow Kent Connolly been waiting for a response for months."
I finally have to admit defeat after attempting to tweak things for the past week. My PC cannot handle the city plans for Sim Settlements. They're simply too big graphically speaking for my system to process properly. I wouldn't recommend using the city plans on a PS4 at all.
I'll start over as the hours spent ripping out the dozen or so existing settlement plans would be a frustrating use of playing time.
Until I get caught up to where this leaves off more or less.
Having toed the waters for Fusion City and Outcasts and Remnants I've found that you have to have attained certain progress points either in the main quest or with the Railroad to unlock them.
On the upside they look to be in the range of 'really good' to 'awesome' even from what I could see of them.
Day 1 - northern side of Misty Lake cleared as far east as the mirelurk nests, as far west as the odd tangle of shrubbery in the far NW part of the map, as far south as the root cellar. Grabbed prototype sentry bot control tape, hot rod magazine, flamer fuel, valuable junk, the fat man and mini-nuke from the robot junkyard. Spent the night in the SH root cellar.
Day 2 - swept around Sanctuary Hills to the northernmost outskirts of Concord while deliberately avoiding both the truck stop and NOT prompting via proximity the Raiders in Concord to start pew-pew'ing Preston. Packled the skeeters slurping on the brahmin, back up to the bridge into SH before crossing in front of it heading west. Snagged drifter outfit and the stuff in the duffle bag. Packle the bugs and Raiders along the way while continuing to gather loot and plants up to and around the ranger cabin. Spent the night in the trailer on the outer edge of the Abernathe's property.
Day 3 - swept the remainder of the NW area down to the radioactive junkyard around the shoreline, cleared out Wicked Shipping, the hilltop encounter (Raiders this time) then across the bridge (a Mr. Gutsy is enforcing a curfew at the burned out tractor-trailer) to clear out, claim and spend the night at Sunshine Tidings Co-op. Bonus scumbags at the junk shack on stilts on the SW side. Got the Hester Electronics location from Goodfeels' maintenance routine before shutting him down. Hopefully he'll stay put, although I suspect the bug that disables him upon claiming the workshop will eat him.
Pretty sure no one wants to read the daily trivium unless I read otherwise. I'll pick back up where I left off (heading to Goodneighbor) in a week or two.
Valkyrie's Journal, Sole Survivor of Vault 111, Sanctuary Hills, Boston, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 2287
"Where to begin?
"The world was set ablaze at roughly a quarter to ten the morning of Saturday 23rd October 2077. Awoke from cryogenic suspension almost to the hour on the morning of Sunday 23rd October 2287.
"Squished 13 mutated cockroaches on the way of the vault. Found the corpse of one Lieutenant Hicks, brother Dwayne, from a colonisation ship. Poor bastard couldn't force the vault door open without a Pip-boy.
"The quantum theoreticians appear to be right: there are other dimensions, other 'copies', of the universe in parallel. This bunch of 'Colonial Marines' had the extraordinary misfortune of crossing the dimensional boundary into 'my' universe. They'd been seeking a new Earth to colonize. What they found was an Earth atomic-bombed to the brink of oblivion.
"Adding insult to injury is that some or many the scientists of their world seem to have a similar lack of ethics, morals or code of conduct that ours did. They brought along passengers upon which they conducted experiments of their own. Vault-Tec would be proud of them.
"Specifically life forms from elsewhere in their universe. Parasitic life forms that implant themselves into whatever creatures they can almost without regard as to the size of their 'hosts'. This adapts the parasites to the environment of their new host world, albeit at the expense of their hosting organisms' lives.
"Cat, dog, mutant hound, molerat, super-mutant, people whether ghoul or human, deathclaw lizards ... all are fodder for these parasitic creatures from another dimensions' outer space. I thank the stars above that they seem to be incompatible with the bugs of our world or I think I'd just find a big nuke, sit on it and detonate it.
"Arrived at the Marines' evacuation point along the rail tracks south of the old GNN TV station on the evening of the 3rd of November. Took their evac vehicle to their mothership's staging point.
"Dawn is breaking on the morning of the 5th of November as I type this. Ran out of explosive .38 ammunition around midday yesterday (about 1,200 rounds). Ran out of grenades (about 100) and .308 rounds (about 700) yesterday evening. There are an awful lot of these things here. Have plenty of 10mm and .45 ammunition, a couple dozen RPGs and launcher plus a couple dozen land mines. If I can lure the majority of them into a killing field it'd help immensely.
"If not I hope one of those crab-arachnid things with the long tails doesn't latch onto my face. I'd hate to incubate one of these horrors ..."
9th-15th November 2287
"Took more than four days to clear the 'Sulaco' of its parasitic abominations. Several more days afterwards to lug all of the loot to the dropship and return to the Commonwealth.
"Of note during this cleansing operation: radroaches in here are enormous specimens that decidedly do not agree with the abominations' existence. Not even these 'xenomorphs' could thwart the intrusion of my world's cockroaches into their birthing sacs. Having witnessed no other insectoid permutations of these things the current conclusion is that they are incompatible with arachnids and insects.
"I was able to retrieve a variety of weapon, chemical and other technical data from the ship's armory. These 'Colonial Marines' had weapons technology considerably better than most of the weaponry I've been scavenging en route across the Commonwealth to the eventual extraction point. None of these people survived their ordeal."
Farkin' Kris Kringle on a cracker.
My system really can't handle elaborate settlements as I've found out once more the hard way after 12 days and an absurd number of hours. I suspect that this is why I stopped playing FO4 the first time around in early 2016.
So the eighty-millionth reboot with an eye towards simply completing the entirety of the main game w/ DLCs (all six of them) plus the four main quest mods that interconnect with them. Vaults 81 and 88 remain optional as the concept of attempting to hand-build Vault 88 seems likely to induce seizures in my rig.
I'll be cutting out all non-Creation Club content - mostly due to the onerousness of manually chopping it out without borking the rest of the game - excepting the relatively small number of mods that I have been enjoying these past several months.
Sadly this does put the axe to the modded player homes I've become quite fond of. Quite a few of them. If your rig can handle the nearly 200 plug-in roster I was attempting to run you'll have an AWESOME game.
Mine will be acceptable.
Starting over after 2,696 hours played ... ugh.
103 mods with 136 plugins (35 of which are not optional thanks to Creation Club content). Half or less of the previous load stress ... let's see if this does the trick for once.
Oh hoh, this looks very very shiny ladies and gentlecritters: F4 New Vegas.
One hopes that they'll work with the other team working on Fallout 3 rebuilt via Fallout 4's engine to re-create the awesomeness of a Tale of Two Wastelands.
I'd prefer a Tale of Three Wastelands - from Commonwealth to Capitol to the Mojave myself. Takes no more than a year or two to deal with the first, a few months for the second and take your sweet Sasparilla-swillin' time in the new and improved Mojave.
Also, the things we do for an ice-cold Nuka-Cola in that scorching heat. Rawr!
Interesting twists in Nuka-World:
I went with my usual "massacre the scumbags" here. It is more than a little infuriating that you have to commit at least 1 act of murder to wipe them out, with the 'murder' count under the Crimes part of one Stats tab in your Pip-Boy easily going much higher during the game if one is not extraordinarily careful.
This time, finally, I've (so far) been able to stick to one (1) murder for a playthrough. Porter Gage, so far as I can determine, has to be murdered to complete the "good" playthrough for Nuka-World.
The Hubologists present the largest divergence during playthroughs that I've personally encountered in Nuka-World. The first few times one rescues their recruiter, gets them to the UFO, plug in 3 fusion cores and *voila*, instant access given a vast supply of caps and radiation protection/curatives a massive boost to INT for several days.
My last playthrough I plugged in 4 fusion cores, resulting in the Hubologists' becoming jelly and a half-dozen murders added to my tab.
This time their recruiter got himself dismembered by radscorpions long before I got within firing range with anything non-explosive. Encountering the Hubologists later they opened fire on me without provocation. At least this time they weren't murders.
I will miss that +32 INT boost though ...
The Classic 10mm and Tunnel Snakes make a return in a short-n-sweet side quest in the subway station just SW of Hangman's Alley. 7 outfits, 3 generic "Classic" 10mm's and a unique 10mm are now in my inventory. I can have a 'gang of 7' sporting some pretty bad-ass looking Tunnel Snakes swag. It matches up well with patrolman glasses and a cowboy hat.
After a surprising number of hours ... I'm done. ALL OF IT, just in time for my best friend's bachelor party this weekend and wedding in about a month from now. Yay!
Creation Club content:
Tunnel Snakes
Shroud Manor
Chester Condo
Noir Condo
Captain Cosmos (power armor)
Hellfire (power armor)
X-03 power armor "Black Devil"
Fantasy Hero (freebie for Skyrim's 25th anniversary)
Modded quest additions:
The Death Tunnel (awesome, packs 1,500 ghouls into a series of tunnels with a particularly nasty end-fight)
Wilkes Estate (expands on the Gunners nicely)
Fusion City
Outcasts and Remnants
Hookers of the Commonwealth w/ a mod that dresses them appropriately for the post-atomic apocalypse of 2287-2290
Project Valkyrie (best companion)
Nutshell: Did the mopping up of all of the side quests, including using a mod to nab all of the settlements. Built said settlements to something acceptable (self-sufficient with artillery as appropriate to the build zone). Did Goodneighbor, got Kent Connolly out from under Sinjin's "attentions", did the Silver Shroud bit for a little while.
Went to Far Harbor ... I have mixed feelings about this place. I went with my character slowly losing her mind, becoming "the Daughter of Atom" slowly but surely. Unfortunately for the Commonwealth and Acadian CoA they are all heretics. In her mind the true Children of Atom are ... kittehs. So the Children entered paradise via nuclear Division. DiMA took his overdue dirt nap and the scrubs of Far Harbor got their happy places.
Returned, went to Park/Vault 114, dug out Nick, did the main quest until it came time to hit up Parsons Asylum and free Valkyrie in the process. Of all of the companions, including those added by the above mods, she is hands down my favorite. I actually like her, mental problems and all.
In the end I managed to get all of the factions to get along, more or less, excepting the Institute. Being freed from Vault 111 as a lab rat cemented that her son was truly lost to her 60 years prior to emerging from Vault 111.
The reactor of the Institute's main lair beneath the ruins of CIT featured an unusual metallurgy, laced with substances that emitted a peculiar pattern of theta radiation. Over the following week everyone in the Commonwealth and Nuka-World became zombies, except Our Heroine, Valkyrie and Dogmeat. Those that didn't become zombies were eaten by those that did.
After 'euthanizing' countless hordes of the hungry almost-dead Mary Sue V. is 311th level. Wearing the "Black Devil" with Valkyrie kitted out in the Hellfire suit they wander into the cinematic sunset. Dogmeat sadly was devoured by a pack of chameleon uber-deathclaws. Little survives in the Commonwealth of 2290...