Fallout V: Old Thread Blues

[Avilan the Grey]

Look, lets be honest. We play Bethesda games for two reasons. First, to see what fascinating new glitches pop up, and to see which lame half-twist they've plugged in this time. I usually play through for the latter once, and then ignore it forever.

I have never played for either of those reasons
I play for two reasons: To have an extremely flexible character that looks and dresses almost exactly like I want her to, and to explore strange new worlds.

[factotum]

What important parts?

The quests where you actually had a choice as to the outcome, for a start? In Fallout 4, there are quests you can't even refuse to take--you have a choice between accepting the quest, or accepting it in a slightly snarky way. Wow, my immersion into this deep and meaningful choice is *so* high, Bethesda.

Is there any chance we can get CD Projekt Red to do Fallout 5? A world and quests like the Witcher 3 in the Fallout universe would have me drooling.

[Triaxx]

I'm managing to hang around 129 or so myself. Then again, I'm wearing Reinforced Combat Armor MKII. Protective, but heavy. I should probably switch to Advanced Recon, which is much lighter, and has a bonus to carry weight to compensate. But RCAMKII looks so awesome.

A Witcher style Fallout is one I would skip. Can't stand Witcher.

[Balmas]

Don't get me wrong, no one builds Worlds quite like Bethesda. I love digging every little secret, and nook and cranny out of them.

There really isn't a good player home in NV. That's one of the major failings in vanilla NV. Of course as usual, there are mods for that.

Personally, I never had any problems with the player homes available. The Novac motel served as my home for 98% of my first playthrough.

I mean, if I had to choose just one player home from Vanilla, it'd have to be that one. It's centrally located, you have at least two and sometimes three vendors right nearby, you have two out of three crafting stations all of fifty feet from the fast-travel point, and you only need to go through one loading zone before you're home.

In comparison, we have the four faction safehouses, the Lucky 38, and the Sink. The safehouses, in addition to requiring you to play nice with at least one of four groups, are usually out of the way, which makes them inconvenient for people who walk instead of fast-traveling. Then you get to the big granddaddy of broken that is the Lucky 38, which requires you to *loading screen* Fast travel to the Sink North Gate, *loading screen* go through the gate, *loading screen* go through the doors of the casino itself, and *loading screen* take the elevator up to where you actually want to go. That's assuming you're not walking in, in which case you need to *loading screen* enter Freeside Pt. 1, *loading screen* enter Freeside Pt 2, and then go through the steps above.

That brings us to the Sink.

The SINK works well for that purpose, once you do OWB. You can even get there at any time, even in Survival without Fast Travel, using the Transportalponder. Other than that, I typically leave discreet little caches in various locations.

Yeah, this. This was the problem. The Sink is, in my mind, the second-best Vanilla player home. The only problem is that every time I come back home, I need to dismiss my companion. And every time I come back to the Mojave, I need to wander up from Nipton to wherever I actually came from.

Luckily, Improved Transportalponder makes it so that you can take your companions with you, and while you still have to be in an outdoor cell to go back and forth, the forth actually drops you right back where you came from.

300lbs? That is just so cute! I have to have a stash place, or I 'd never get anywhere. I accidentally emptied my spare ammo chest the other day. Instant +900lbs weight.

...Out of curiosity, I loaded up the save from my "Do everything" save. After 245 hours of playing and over a million caps of money stolen bartered from merchants, I have over 21,200 pounds of ammo, plus the 80ish pounds that are kicking around my backpack when I leave the house.

Keep in mind, I'm also a hoarder who makes a habit of regularly cleaning out merchants of not just their money, but also as much ammo as I can buy with the loot I've brought with me. And given that high-level New Vegas regularly has stuff worth 3-5 thousand caps hanging around, it's been quite a lot of ammo.



RE: House mods:

Perhaps the most vital mod I can't do without is the Sortomatic modder's resource. It isn't a house mod in itself, but it makes other house mods much more powerful and useful. Instead of heading home and pressing "E," "A," a thousand times to put all the gear away and then going back to grab what I want, I can just head to a computer or a panel, hit E, and the system automatically sorts your inventory according to the arrangements you've set. For example, you can tell it to take out all consumables, but keep in 10 Purified Water, 5 Cateye, and a gecko steak for lunch. Then, when you hit the computer, it will automatically deposit all the consumables except the ones specified, and will even refill your inventory if you don't have enough to meet the preset quota.

Really, this mod singlehandedly changed how I play New Vegas. Instead of laboriously putting everything away and grabbing what I need, I could just go in, press the button, and go a-questing again.

As such, most of the house mods I have installed either include their own sorting system or a variant of the Sortomatic mod.

Spoiler: House Mods

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Mobile Truck Base is pretty much what it says on the tin. You find a van in Old Lady Gibson's scrapyard, and can buy it from her. From there, it acts as a limited form of fast travel; by adding flamer fuel to the tank, you can go from any one point on a list of landmarks to any of the others. This is great for those people who like bringing their home with them.

Sink-o-matic takes the power of Sortomatic and adds it to the Sink. It also adds something like 18 wall safes to the entryway of the Sink, each of which is compatible with Sortomatic. This pairs especially well with Improved Transportalponder, as the Sink is now both compatible with companions and has the sorting convenience of Sortomatic.

Bison Steve Hotel and Lucky Casino lets you repair the Bison Steve to its former glory. While the quest is fairly boring, it comes with two player houses, both of which are Sortomatic compatible; one in the north, near where the Wins hide out, and one in the basement of the Bison Steve itself. I think this one I mostly get for the casino, which lets you gamble nearly to your heart's content. I know there's a limit somewhere, but I've not yet found it, and playing Blackjack for hundreds of thousands of caps seems almost like cheating to me.

A World Of Pain adds a Sortomatic house available for purchase in Goodsprings. Personally, I like what AWOP does in adding in new enemies and areas, but to me it kinda ruins the feel of the early game when you have a player house and a shop full of high-level guns right outside the starting town. As such, even though it's physically a good house, I hardly ever use it.

Afterschool Special is another mod by the same author of the Bison Steve Hotel and Lucky Casino mod. This time, instead of fixing the Bison Steve, you're renovating the Goodsprings schoolhouse. Somehow, the work put into clearing the schoolhouse, cleaning it up, getting the parts necessary to power it, makes it more endearing to me, and the small size of it makes it perfect for a follower home. (For those interested, Gopher has a three video series on the mod itself, with the first video here.

I need to give special credit to the Underground Hideout New Vegas, as while it is not Sortomatic compatible, it includes its own sorting system that is less powerful, but still good. In fact, I still consider this one of the best "display" house mods, as it has an entire arsenal that allows you to show off your weapons collection, how much ammo you've collected, and the quests you've done. It even has a spot for you to showcase those gold bars you stole from the Sierra Madre when you completely missed the point of the DLC and managed to cheese the entire load of gold out of the vault.

The Lucky 38 Reloaded is also an honorable mention, but I need to knock some points off it for being basically a derivative copy of the Underground Hideout with less impressive displays. Points to this mod, though, for including the teleporter gun from UHNV, which gets rid of the need to walk through a bunch of loading screens to get home.

Those are just the ones that stand out to me from my mod list. Any thoughts? Experiences?

[Volthawk]

Yeah, in my current NV run I've been using the goodsprings house from AWOP, works pretty well (I tend to not store nearly as much stuff as there is potential for, though) and is kinda appropriate since 90% of the stuff I'm doing in that save is AWOP dungeons (seriously I've gotten to level 20 while only doing something like five actual vanilla quests). Good fun, even if they do go absolute bananas fluff-wise as you keep exploring and learning stuff about the various places around.

[Balmas]

Yeah, in my current NV run I've been using the goodsprings house from AWOP, works pretty well (I tend to not store nearly as much stuff as there is potential for, though) and is kinda appropriate since 90% of the stuff I'm doing in that save is AWOP dungeons (seriously I've gotten to level 20 while only doing something like five actual vanilla quests). Good fun, even if they do go absolute bananas fluff-wise as you keep exploring and learning stuff about the various places around.

I guess my biggest problem with AWOP is two-fold. When I use it, I suffer massive lag and microstutters, even with NVAC and NVSR installed. This is on a high-end PC, build April of last year. It just adds so much clutter that you can't avoid the framerate drop.

More problematic than the performance issues, though, is that I can't help but feel that the Underground is not very lore friendly. It seems odd to me that you can go from one corner of the map to the other without ever seeing the light of day. I find it hard to believe that somehow such an extensive tunnel system can both exist, and continue to be expanded in this day. It's weird that this group of people are somehow the only people who've figured out a dead-man's collar that destroys their things when they die. Entire bands of raiders somehow have found rare suits of power armor.

I mean, I like what they tried to do. AWOP means that there's always something new to explore, to collect, something to find. And the 4d storage devices mean that I'm up to something like 900ish storage capacity. At the same time... it just doesn't feel like it's part of New Vegas, if that makes sense. Fun, new, inventive, but with a distinct feel and approach that kind of throws my immersion for a loop.

And of course, I'm annoyed by the fact that the AWOP team continues to think that "walking around in complete darkness makes the game harder, guys, really!" No, it's not. It just means that I need to use Cateye, or a night vision mod, so I can combat my annoyance at having light that somehow goes exactly ten feet in front of me before being eaten by the Darkness.

[Volthawk]

I've sorta had to just accept that AWOP's sprawling underground setups often don't quite make sense layout-wise. I'm not even talking about the Underground, down south there's a stretch of dungeons going from that underpass where you have to kill stuff for the Outpost (forgot the name) to Nipton that are all linked together, but I was able to go in a straight line from the middle, to nipton sewers, to the area on the far left (which also had another exit around the middle). Honestly the main annoying thing about it is just that it's a ballache to navigate around, since them all just being interconnected interiors means that maps are pretty pointless unless you can remember it all, and as before surface entrances don't really help position you due to how big and all over the place the areas are (I'm still not quite sure how Frankie's entrance links to the town down there proper, although that's partly because I got sidetracked into ghoul territory by the reactor, which then turned into exploring a sewer of ghouls, and then fighting super mutants before finding yet another surface entrance). Seriously, the AWOP guys love their linked dungeons, and a place having a connected place you had no idea would be there.

Hell, the loot destruction collars would be less weird if it were just restricted to underground and tech raiders, but you find people all over the place with them - I'm pretty sure the Wasteland whatevers that turn up in towns and the new NCR elites have them, as do some jackals and such. I'm at the point where I'm considering turning that off anyway, since I'm already pretty sorted in terms of gear so the stuff they destroy is about what I have anyway, and I'm rolling in more money than I know what to do with.

Yeah, the darkness aspect is mitigated somewhat because I'm using PN so I have night vision on good helmets and such, but that in itself seems to make looking around kinda weird - it feels like, I dunno, it becomes really jerky to look around and there's a bunch of motion blur. Still a bit of a pain, but one I can deal with. Also yeah, the storage device is great, along with the recharger defender which I still use as a good sidearm.

I'm still loving it despite its flaws though, although maybe that's helped by the fact that for this character I've just been focusing pretty much completely on it - like I said, quest-wise I'm pretty sure I've only done the starting goodsprings one, some Khans quests and I think that's it, barring AWOP-specific ones. The other save that I had first and go to every so often is a bit more focused on actual NV story and quests, and I only really go to AWOP places there if I stumble across it.

Honestly when I was saying things went bananas fluff-wise, the Underground was at the back of my mind. I was more thinking about stuff like X-13 and the Redoubts (although admittedly those are a bit less crazy when you consider OWB's Transportalponder and F4's teleporter stuff). Also a lesser thing is the love for random scattered pockets of Super Mutants that are found in one part of a dungeon (using fighting raiders) but nowhere else around.

[GloatingSwine]

So what you are saying is that (in your opinion) making NV in the FO3 engine was stupid, since the game was not meant to be open world?

Only inasmuch as people assumed it would be like Fallout 3 and so looked for things that were never intended to be there.

FO:NV makes good use of the engine it has where it wants to, it uses the player's ability to see things in the world better than FO3 did, for instance. (When you first leave Goodsprings your eyes are drawn to Primm because of the ruined rollercoaster, marking it as your next destination and drawing you along the plot track, and any time you're outside at night you can see the glow of Vegas reinforcing its significance in the world, etc.)

So actually it profits a lot from being an open world, even if it decides not to stuff that world to the gills with locations that it never makes any use of full of trash to root through for skill books.

Don't get me wrong, no one builds Worlds quite like Bethesda. I love digging every little secret, and nook and cranny out of them.

Bethesda build gamespaces, not worlds.

The perennial problem with Bethesda's fallout is that nothing has happened in the 200 years since the bombs fell. Bethesda fill their Fallout with stories about what happened before the bombs fell but don't give one solitary damn about what happened afterwards. That's why Diamond City, the "jewel of the Commonwealth" is still a couple of dozen guys huddling in a ruined baseball stadium and Goodsprings is a town that's in economic decline because people are bypassing as the trail to New Vegas gets easier and needs less rest stops. New Vegas is a world where what's happening in the world now is important, and what has happened in the immediate past is important. Fallout 4 is a world where what's happening now is basically irrelevant, nobody has a reason for doing what they're doing, and nobody has done anything in their entire lives. It's a world where raiders fight over 200 year old caches of rations which should have been picked clean in six months. It's a world where a kid got trapped in a fridge for two hundred years less than five minutes walk from his parents' front door and they've been alive all that time and done nothing to try and find him (and he still knows what a ghoul is for some reason).

The actual worldbuilding in Bethesda's Fallouts is egregiously bad, it's bad enough that you have to deliberately ignore it to not have the sense of the world fall apart completely.

Bethesda do not build worlds. They fill gamespaces with stuff for the player to root through.

[Ailurus]

The perennial problem with Bethesda's fallout is that nothing has happened in the 200 years since the bombs fell. Bethesda fill their Fallout with stories about what happened before the bombs fell but don't give one solitary damn about what happened afterwards. That's why Diamond City, the "jewel of the Commonwealth" is still a couple of dozen guys huddling in a ruined baseball stadium and Goodsprings is a town that's in economic decline because people are bypassing as the trail to New Vegas gets easier and needs less rest stops. New Vegas is a world where what's happening in the world now is important, and what has happened in the immediate past is important. Fallout 4 is a world where what's happening now is basically irrelevant, nobody has a reason for doing what they're doing, and nobody has done anything in their entire lives. It's a world where raiders fight over 200 year old caches of rations which should have been picked clean in six months. It's a world where a kid got trapped in a fridge for two hundred years less than five minutes walk from his parents' front door and they've been alive all that time and done nothing to try and find him (and he still knows what a ghoul is for some reason).

The actual worldbuilding in Bethesda's Fallouts is egregiously bad, it's bad enough that you have to deliberately ignore it to not have the sense of the world fall apart completely.

Bethesda do not build worlds. They fill gamespaces with stuff for the player to root through.

That's one of my main issues with 3 and 4, summed up way better than I've been able to. Thanks

[Triaxx]

I'm currently living in Novac, and the big issue I have is that it's cramped. Which isn't much issue normally, but I can't leave my robots outside. If I do, Daisy opens fire on them.

I like AWOP because it's just on the edge of lore unfriendliness. Yes, some things don't make sense, but that's fine. Fallout is itself not internally consistent at times. I always turn off loot destruction, since I think it's silly.

I do like the various dungeons being interconnected. It gives a sense of the world existing. These people went and dug into these vast underground complexes, and either fought down the defenses enough to carve out a niche, or expanded them for their own uses.

I suspect those small groups of Mutants were ones heading for Black Mountain that wandered off and got lost. I'm now at the point where I am well equipped enough to engage some of the nastier fights in AWOP areas.

If you're looking for much larger fights hanging around, try out Warzones. It's still my go to when I want to experience giant fights.

[Triaxx]

Right, separate post time, so I can type on an actual keyboard.

You're wrong on a couple of points. Bethesda does in fact build worlds. The thing is that after it's built them, it blows them up to create the game space you're playing in. It created this big, beautiful Sanctuary Hills, and the blew it up to give you a place to explore and build stuff in.

But you seem insistent on inflicting reality on the game, so let's do that. Okay, bombs start to fall, you rush to Vault 111, and get in. You go into your Ice Cube, and... that's the end of the game. Kellogg never gets into the vault because after the first ten years, the ceiling collapsed, crushed the power generator and instead of being rapidly defrosted and regenerated, you thaw slowly over months, trapped in your pod if you do manage to wake, by debris from the ceiling. And even then you probably don't wake up because of the tiny bit of oxygen in the pod. Chances are you thaw enough to breath and that kills you, slowly suffocating because there's no room to open the door. GAME OVER.

Stay on the surface? Disintegrated by an initial shockwave, burned alive by fire, or slowly dying of radiation sickness. You might ghoulify, but you probably won't have time, as your rads jump to 1000+ which is instantly lethal. Your corpse may ghoulify, but that doesn't do you or your dead family any good.

If you want to bring realism in to the game, there's no point in playing because humanity ceases to exist entirely within the first few minutes. What doesn't die immediately disappears in the ensuing nuclear winter, as impenetrable ash clouds blanket the world, freezing every living thing on the surface. What survives lives in the very depths of the ocean. Add another two digits on the end of that 200 years, and perhaps we'll start to see early amphibians crawling out of the oceans.

And don't start with Versimilitude. I see it in your signature, waiting to be thrown at me like a knife. That only works if the game world is identical to ours. But Fallout is expressly not. Realism within a game must be internally consistent with the rules of the game world. Fallout is in fact, realistic within it's own structure. Food does last 200+ years, houses don't collapse within a couple years, robots continue doing things forever without rusting completely away. Super Mutants should not exist in our world, but they can and do in Fallout. Same with Ghouls. Squeal about realism all you want but it doesn't make for an interesting game.

'Nuclear war happened. All life ended. Game Over.'

[Volthawk]

I'm currently living in Novac, and the big issue I have is that it's cramped. Which isn't much issue normally, but I can't leave my robots outside. If I do, Daisy opens fire on them.

I like AWOP because it's just on the edge of lore unfriendliness. Yes, some things don't make sense, but that's fine. Fallout is itself not internally consistent at times. I always turn off loot destruction, since I think it's silly.

I do like the various dungeons being interconnected. It gives a sense of the world existing. These people went and dug into these vast underground complexes, and either fought down the defenses enough to carve out a niche, or expanded them for their own uses.

I suspect those small groups of Mutants were ones heading for Black Mountain that wandered off and got lost. I'm now at the point where I am well equipped enough to engage some of the nastier fights in AWOP areas.

If you're looking for much larger fights hanging around, try out Warzones. It's still my go to when I want to experience giant fights.

Yeah, I'm really in the same line of thought with AWOP, weirdness included.

Also the super mutant thing leads to something that I've noticed and love: Despite what I said earlier, so many groups in AWOP dungeons have a reason to be there, and/or the place has a history. For instance (slightly rambly story ahead, spoilering):

Spoiler

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In the first weirdly placed SM pocket I found, down south, the leader had a note on him with his orders, which sure enough explained that he was from Black Mountain and were there to loot an underground research facility, while the Jackals they were fighting were part of the group that were already down here, based in the bunker I entered from. The bunker itself had a computer with records both from the previous occupants, and the Jackals that moved in after they left, and on that computer I learnt about the various groups sent out and who led them (and I ended up killing those named people), and what was going on in the area - people were complaining about noises behind the walls, and one section of the bunker has broken walls into the ant nest in the dry lake, and the other way led to the facility through some sewers. Hell even the facility itself had some nice notes - the robots were hostile as they always were, but as you progressed through it you found computers detailing people being concerned about the robots going rogue already, and eventually you find where the humans here held out (and there were actually pulse grenade boxes there as you'd expect).

It's all just very nice, I guess, to have that kind of thought, even if it just a note here and there. The tendency to have the guy in charge of a notable group be named even if there's nothing special with them is kinda cool too (hell sometimes they have something special on them - I've still got one or two bits of apparently quest-relevant misc items I looted off named mutants that I have no idea what to do with, I guess it's someone I haven't talked to in the Underground).

In terms of progress yeah I'm at a similar point. I'm dealing fairly well with what I'm facing so far, so I'm kinda considering returning to the X-13 plotline area, which is chock full of Deathclaws.

[GloatingSwine]

Right, separate post time, so I can type on an actual keyboard.

You're wrong on a couple of points. Bethesda does in fact build worlds. The thing is that after it's built them, it blows them up to create the game space you're playing in. It created this big, beautiful Sanctuary Hills, and the blew it up to give you a place to explore and build stuff in.

Right, but in order to make it a gamespace for the player they had to preserve that blown up world and not do inconvenent things like create the sense that anyone else has ever done anything in it ever.

Not even swept the damn floors.

The other Fallout games are about the strange new world that rose out of the ashes of the bombs, the key difference is that the strange new world has already risen, it didn't stop and do **** all for two hundred years waiting for some pillock in a blue onesie to pick through everything first.

It's not about realism, Fallout was never realistic, the idea that this is a world where people live and do things on their own and for themselves, and the player's story happens to be taking place in it.

That's what worldbuilding is about, it's about building a world that exists outside of the highly specific focus of the player's actions. Bethesda do not do that. Not in Fallout. Especially not in Fallout 4.

[Triaxx]

Those odd Mutant things? Probably belong to a friendly group you waxed by accident. I know I did the first time around. Or missed them, which is also likely. Check in the area under the campground south of Red Rock.

I disagree. You're operating it seems under the assumption that technology has continued to function at an identically pre-war level. Frankly, given the presence of all the tractors, that means Fallout was post mechanization. So it's reached the point of moving past subsistence farming. I'm unsure if you're aware of just how big an impact that transition made. With all the horses having been removed, those farmers were reliant on those technologically powered tractors. Remove those, and you're back to the days of manual farming. IE just enough for one family to survive. And that's only working dawn to dusk the entire growing season.

Even now, it's still a difficult task with huge mechanized machines, refrigeration and sterilization techniques. And we still run into recalls for diseases that kill. Diamond City is the Jewel of the Commonwealth, because it's able to afford to buy food from all the settlements around via caravan. Estimate say 10% spoilage by the time they reach market. Plus a 5-7% percent cut off the top for the caravan to haul it. We've just reached the point of post Dark Ages London. Just before it started being threatened to drown in dead horses and fertilizer.

[Ailurus]

Fallout is in fact, realistic within it's own structure. Food does last 200+ years, houses don't collapse within a couple years, robots continue doing things forever without rusting completely away. Super Mutants should not exist in our world, but they can and do in Fallout. Same with Ghouls. Squeal about realism all you want but it doesn't make for an interesting game.

What I want is realism within it's own structure, which Fallout 3 and 4 do not have. Food lasts 200+ years? OK, sure. Why is it still on picnic tables and supermarket shelves and in abandoned houses? Want there to be a cache of cram and potato crisps in a locked safe in the middle of the ruins? Sure, that would make sense. But that same cram and potato crisps is going to be the first thing to go when it's sitting out in the open. Same with the Nuka Cola machines - why are there still Nuka Colas in the middle of vending machines sitting open and unguarded around the Commonwealth after 200 years when one of the first thing Sturges says to you in Sanctuary is "we need something to drink"? The way the world is set up means that either everyone for 2 centuries has been an idiot or the SS is the first person in 200 years to walk past the freakin red rocket truck stop.

Houses? OK, they don't collapse. Sure, let's make that assumption. But, if they don't collapse... why not have people move in? Sanctuary is a fairly intact town with access to lots of fertile land and water that is in a pretty defensible location. By all rights, it should be another Diamond City - just as much space for a farm, just as much space to build a water purifier, the only difference being that Diamond City had the wall and Sanctuary has the river. And yet, there's no evidence that a single soul set foot in it from the day the bombs fell until the day the SS returned (and yet, Trashcan Carla still heads in that direction to trade). The Abernathys are instead living in a ramshackle building with a leaky roof a very short walk away from the bridge, and the Drumlin Diner's a day's walk away. People have to know it exists - but it's just ignored, left as a pristine corner of the map so the Player can interact with it. It is a bit better than FO3 in that we hear about a couple times where people tried to settle (Quincy, University Point), and see a few intact examples (Slog, Covenant). But why do you have settlers trying to eke out a living in Oberland Station or County Cross or some other run-down, horribly vulnerable place when better places exist? Probably almost every FO4 player who did anything with the settlement system tried building up the Red Rocket at some point - but in 200 years no inhabitant of the commonwealth ever thought to try to do just that?

Then take the Raider stories. Granted, they're better than the FO3 raiders. But they're still so disconnected from the world itself. Say you rescue Preston in the first day or two, but then take a while to finally get over to the Corvega plant. Not that hard to do, especially if you go wandering or like the settlement building. Point is, the last terminal entry (assuming you haven't hit any other raider terminal locations) will be about how they just spotted Preston and Mama Murphy and are off to kill them. Dude? I killed your guy like two weeks ago. You're not curious why it's taking him a couple weeks to get up to Concord and back? And what about the Beantown raiders? They're engaging in raids on a fortified position for food... when the ration stockpile they're attacking is further away from their base than two working farms, one of which (greygarden) is one of the largest in the Commonwealth (probably second only to the farm in Diamond City)! And extorting farms for food is the main thing that FO4 raider gangs supposedly do.

And that's the realism problem. Every fictional setting ever is going to have some degree of suspension of disbelief or new rules or whatever you want to call it to go from reality to the setting. What makes the world work or not is if the setting can follow it's own rules one they are established. And the Beth fallout games don't do that. It's not a world. As soon as the PC wanders off, it's like a theatre crew shutting down the set after the audience leaves, and then scrambling to set it back up when the audience comes back. Everything is just stagnant without your direct intervention and there's no reason to suspect that if the SS plugged herself back into the Cryo tube for another 200 years the new surface would be substantially different (outside of Far Harbor - that DLC feels a lot better than the main FO4 game in terms of an actual world instead of a bunch of set pieces thrown together).

[Triaxx]

Raiders are idiots, but all most people talk about is how much better things were before the war. So naturally a prewar stockpile of food must be better than what is being grown now.

Carla isn't trading with Sanctuary until you turn up and she finds out there's something there. Presumably, she's off to Tenpines or just left Drumlin and headed to Abernathy.

But speaking of Abernathy there are good reasons for them being there instead of at Red Rocket. For one, consider that living under the giant red sign is more likely to get you spotted and attacked than hiding in plain sight under one of the many transmission towers dotting the landscape. Until you get close enough to it to see the ground level structures, it looks like all the others around.

Second there's far more arable land available at Abernathy than Red Rocket. As well as it being easier to defend since it's got more open terrain than Red Rocket. IE better line of sight. Plus Blake mentions it having been in the family for a couple of generations so it's probable that they farmed nearby pre-war, and simply moved in around the tower instead abandoning the place.

I personally assumed Sanctuary was being protected by Codsworth. Driving off 'undesirables' (settlers), and 'door-to-door salesmen' (Raiders).

[GloatingSwine]

Those odd Mutant things? Probably belong to a friendly group you waxed by accident. I know I did the first time around. Or missed them, which is also likely. Check in the area under the campground south of Red Rock.

I disagree. You're operating it seems under the assumption that technology has continued to function at an identically pre-war level. Frankly, given the presence of all the tractors, that means Fallout was post mechanization. So it's reached the point of moving past subsistence farming. I'm unsure if you're aware of just how big an impact that transition made. With all the horses having been removed, those farmers were reliant on those technologically powered tractors. Remove those, and you're back to the days of manual farming. IE just enough for one family to survive. And that's only working dawn to dusk the entire growing season.

Even now, it's still a difficult task with huge mechanized machines, refrigeration and sterilization techniques. And we still run into recalls for diseases that kill. Diamond City is the Jewel of the Commonwealth, because it's able to afford to buy food from all the settlements around via caravan. Estimate say 10% spoilage by the time they reach market. Plus a 5-7% percent cut off the top for the caravan to haul it. We've just reached the point of post Dark Ages London. Just before it started being threatened to drown in dead horses and fertilizer.

Mechanisation or Dark Ages subsistence is a false dichotomy.

Most of human history has had only manual and animal labour for farming. It produced cities vastly larger than anything in Fallout 3 or 4, over and over again. It produced civilsations capable of megascale projects like the great wall of china or the pyramids, repeatedly, in multiple places around the globe.

And in the Fallout games it produced the NCR, a civilisation well on its way back to pre-war levels of development in its heartlands.

In Bethesda's games people have apparently forgotten how to make a rudimentary yoke for their brahmin, or they haven't bothered to try in two hundred years because Bethesda don't want to think hard and make a world.

[Triaxx]

Right, that's the point I've been trying and apparently failing to make. At the point where we join into Fallout 4, the plow is lost technology. And you can't have large scale sustainable farming without it. Or at least not without several times the labor force available in Fallout 4. (All of Fallout 4.)

[GloatingSwine]

Right, that's the point I've been trying and apparently failing to make. At the point where we join into Fallout 4, the plow is lost technology. And you can't have large scale sustainable farming without it. Or at least not without several times the labor force available in Fallout 4. (All of Fallout 4.)

If you're seriously arguing that these people couldn't figure out a ****ing plow, then you're making my point about how terrible Bethesda's worldbuilding is.

A bit of metal at an angle is not viable as "lost technology" for people who can build and operate power armour, which even the damn Raiders can do, unless you have a catastrophic level of worldbuilding failure.

[VoxRationis]

Raiders are idiots, but all most people talk about is how much better things were before the war. So naturally a prewar stockpile of food must be better than what is being grown now.

I doubt that the noodle cups and vegetable soup one can make from commonly grown Commonwealth crops are that much worse than ancient pre-War junk food that it's reasonable that a raider gang would go far afield and attack a gang of equal strength, in an entrenched position to get to the stockpile.

Not to mention that again, the ration stockpile should have been picked clean ages ago. It was a publicly known area. There were riots and protests at the doorstep before the bombs fell. Countless desperate survivors during the initial stages of the War would have flocked to the area to look for food. In the following 200 years, lots of other groups would have used its resources—and there isn't even a year's worth in there for any reasonably-sized group.

[Avilan the Grey]

Let's just put it this way: I vastly prefer 3 and 4 over 1 and 2.

Now, back to the game.
I started with Automatron today and so far I am enjoying it.

Here's a hint I figured out myself:

Spoiler: Regarding Jezebel

Show

It is worth to build her tough and dangerous, because after you talk to her then yes, she is rude and you can't really interact with her. However she works just like just another settler. So put her on guard duty. Or insult her by making her pick gourds for the rest of eternity

For me she is now guarding Sanctuary.

[Ailurus]

Right, that's the point I've been trying and apparently failing to make. At the point where we join into Fallout 4, the plow is lost technology. And you can't have large scale sustainable farming without it. Or at least not without several times the labor force available in Fallout 4. (All of Fallout 4.)

Plow

Ploughs are traditionally drawn by working animals such as horses or cattle, but in modern times may be drawn by tractors. A plough may be made of wood, iron, or steel frame with an attached blade or stick used to cut the earth. It has been a basic instrument for most of recorded history

However, the domestication of oxen in Mesopotamia and the Indus valley civilization, perhaps as early as the 6th millennium BC, provided mankind with the draft power necessary to develop the larger, animal-drawn true ard (or scratch plough)

Brahmin, as seen in FO4

Brahmin are cattle found in Fallout 4, and a common sight amongst the post-War wastes of the Commonwealth.

Hoe, as seen in FO4

Big animal pulling big hoe is something humans figured out before we had writing.

[factotum]

If you're seriously arguing that these people couldn't figure out a ****ing plow, then you're making my point about how terrible Bethesda's worldbuilding is.

I have to agree here. The plough is quite possibly the most simple piece of technology that exists--there's evidence they were using simple versions in Mesopotamia eight thousand years ago. Yet no-one in the entire Commonwealth or Capital Wasteland knows how to make and use one?

[Blackhawk748]

Outside of like 2 settlemnts in FO4 i dont really see a plow as being viable, as you use it for larger areas. I mean County Crossing could be fine, maybe that one corner of Sanctuary, but most of the places are in a forest or surrounded by giant rocks, so that would make it problematic.

I do agree that we should have seen a plow in FO3 though, far more open space IIRC.

[Triaxx]

Entirely fair. Entirely fair yes.

Go build me a plow. Using only materials available within a days walking distance and only the knowledge you now possess. (Remember, you have to carry it back, unless you've got a brahmin handy. And all schools and such sources of knowledge have been utterly destroyed.)

Yeah, not as easy as it sounds is it? Especially after the first dozen times it breaks off because you didn't do it right. And now you can plow say 40 yards before the plow pops out of the ground because you didn't know enough to build in a mouldboard. And did you forge it correctly? Because they do have to be sharp to cut through the soil. Can you make a plow that can hold an edge?

[GloatingSwine]

Outside of like 2 settlemnts in FO4 i dont really see a plow as being viable, as you use it for larger areas. I mean County Crossing could be fine, maybe that one corner of Sanctuary, but most of the places are in a forest or surrounded by giant rocks, so that would make it problematic.

When you have teams of draft animals, trees are among the things you can move (after all you chopped them down for wood to make ploughs). There are large areas of the commonwealth that are not particularly obstructed by things that couldn't be moved.

And also obvs. a good sense of worldbuilding would include a world outside the immediate area of the game.

[Avilan the Grey]

So... Obviously going to replace all guards with robots in all settlements. Also... farmbots.

Now... I found something really nifty on the way to...wherever. An explosive minigun.
What is better? The unique one that burns enemies or this one fully modded? Anyone has experience with both?

Edit: as of now before the final battle, ADA is rather... boring. I modded her a bit so she is basically a standard assaultron but grey and with a cold gun for close encounters.

[Balmas]

Entirely fair. Entirely fair yes.

Go build me a plow. Using only materials available within a days walking distance and only the knowledge you now possess. (Remember, you have to carry it back, unless you've got a brahmin handy. And all schools and such sources of knowledge have been utterly destroyed.)

Yeah, not as easy as it sounds is it? Especially after the first dozen times it breaks off because you didn't do it right. And now you can plow say 40 yards before the plow pops out of the ground because you didn't know enough to build in a mouldboard. And did you forge it correctly? Because they do have to be sharp to cut through the soil. Can you make a plow that can hold an edge?

Absolutely. Go outside. A days' walk, assuming I want to do a return trip in the same day, is approximately a ten mile radius if I walk slowly and walk for only eight hours there and back. Somewhere in those ten miles, I can find a car, knock off its bumper, and drag it back. Then it's just a matter of working the fender over with a rock, and bam! Plow.

Granted, it probably won't be a good plow. You'd need to find a good solid steel fender, rather than aluminum or anything else that won't hold the shape. But it's already better than just the hoes that are prevalent in Fallout 4.

The problem with arguing that plows are lost technology two hundred years in the future is that two hundred years is a long friggin' time. 200 years ago, the musket was the primary ranged weapon in the United States. The U.S. was only on its fourth president, James Madison, and the Civil War was forty years away. In order for the Commonwealth to be in its current, subsistence farming state, you'd basically be required to say that in seven generations, nobody has done anything, that there have been no new inventions, that people have been too busy farming that they haven't come up with anything to make farming better.

Actually, that kinda highlights one of the minor complaints I have about Fallout 4's world, which is that you, the player, are the only person who's allowed to do anything in the world. The Minutemen are an organization of three people: Preston, who tells you the problems of the world; the Radio Freedom operator, who tells you the problem of the world; and you, who are responsible for solving all of them. Settlers do not settle; the only person who can build stuff is you. The Nuka World raiders do not raid until you decide it's time to take a settlement, at which point they become more useless non-settling settlers. The Nuka World gang leaders are nothing but dispensers of radiant quests, and boring ones at that; they do not appear to be actually doing anything but boasting about how they're so much better than those other gangs who also do not do anything.

[Triaxx]

Fair enough.

That I will give you. The Minutemen are kind of awful. You do start to encounter them out in the world fighting enemies later on. (They lose a lot though.)

And actually I think the status quo is maintained primarily by virtue of fear of the institute. Either them 'spiriting away' anyone smart enough to invent anything new. Or people assuming they are a synth and killing them.

@Avilan: I typically use Jezebel as a Provisioner, because she can Roflstomp anything dangerous along the route she travels, so I can walk along with her for safety if I want to, or use her as a settlement guard. She's immortal either way.

Ada... she's got some unique comments that none of the others do. Swimming across a river for example, she comments about not liking water.

[GloatingSwine]

Entirely fair. Entirely fair yes.

Go build me a plow. Using only materials available within a days walking distance and only the knowledge you now possess. (Remember, you have to carry it back, unless you've got a brahmin handy. And all schools and such sources of knowledge have been utterly destroyed.)

Yeah, not as easy as it sounds is it? Especially after the first dozen times it breaks off because you didn't do it right. And now you can plow say 40 yards before the plow pops out of the ground because you didn't know enough to build in a mouldboard. And did you forge it correctly? Because they do have to be sharp to cut through the soil. Can you make a plow that can hold an edge?

Spoiler: A functional plow is not a complicated device

Show

As for schools of knowledge, Plows existed thousands of years before the first schools. Thousands.

Fallout 4 is a world where allegedly people can build working handheld railguns but not one of the most basic farming implements ever.