Fallout VIII: Another Thread Needs Your Help General

[Brookshw]

Anyone checked out the new fallout minis game? I'm very curious, half tempted to pick it up just to paint.

[Balmas]

So, I just started playing around with the FROST mod for Fallout 4, and wanted to get some thoughts down.

*ahem*

Screw this mod.

No, really. It's presented as a hardcore survival mod. It's designed around Survival Mode, which is already a negative in my mind, given that vanilla Survival mode is so tedious and bass-ackwards as to be virtually unplayable unmodded. Then FROST takes everything that's tedious about Survival mode, and blows it up to eleven.

Survival makes you sleep, eat, and drink. Naturally, that means that FROST makes all three of those so difficult to find as to be impossible. Water is actually the easiest to find; all you have to do to get purified water is to get three dirty water (irradiated and buggy), boil it at a cooking station (irradiated but no longer buggy), and then find a one-use water filter to finally turn your boiled water into purified water. Naturally, water filters are ultra rare; I've found two in four hours of looting. Finding food requires you to either take a perk so you're able to loot meat from corpses, or subsist from what you can scavenge. Good luck finding a clean bed, since the ones available are bug-infested and dirty.

Oh, and your needs feel like they're double what you have in Vanilla. And damage taken is at least double normal values. And stimpaks and radaway are about as common as winged pigs. So, just to stay alive, you get into this cycle of scavenging for food, finding enough bottles to make dirty water, finding a cooking station so you can boil it, looking for a bed so you can save, and losing all your progress because the increased needs mean you have exactly two HP and will die from a faint breeze.

Oh, and you have approximately sixty carry weight to use, so either you're wearing no armor or carrying virtually no guns.

But Balmas, you may say! You're doing it wrong! All those petty issues can be solved if you just build settlements! Except no, Naugrim has decided that building settlements is too lenient. You can take over a spot, if you're willing to take the sanity loss from slaughtering everyone there, since nobody will offer you quests to get them to ally with you. However, once you do that, you're unable to build anything technical until you go out and find the accompanying diagrams scattered around the world. Oh, and planting seeds is beyond you. The only food you can plant is glowing fungus or brain mold, to which you cannot assign settlers and which doesn't produce any food anyway. Not that you'll have settlers anyway, given that Local Leader, which allows you to build the radio beacon to repopulate the settlements, requires Charisma 10. So you have settlements that are only good for building furniture, and which lock you out of Lone Wanderer's X300% experience gain.

Ugh. At least Useful Crank means I can have a primary that never runs out of ammo.

[Triaxx]

Yeah, that water filtration thing made me quit. I had been enjoying the extreme challenge, but... Yeah.

[DigoDragon]

Yeah, that water filtration thing made me quit. I had been enjoying the extreme challenge, but... Yeah.

I think real life has a more rewarding survival mode. O.o

[Triaxx]

I suppose, but I have yet to find anyone willing to pay me to kill giant mutant crabs.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

So, I just started playing around with the FROST mod for Fallout 4, and wanted to get some thoughts down.

*ahem*

Screw this mod.

No, really. It's presented as a hardcore survival mod. It's designed around Survival Mode, which is already a negative in my mind, given that vanilla Survival mode is so tedious and bass-ackwards as to be virtually unplayable unmodded. Then FROST takes everything that's tedious about Survival mode, and blows it up to eleven.

Survival makes you sleep, eat, and drink. Naturally, that means that FROST makes all three of those so difficult to find as to be impossible. Water is actually the easiest to find; all you have to do to get purified water is to get three dirty water (irradiated and buggy), boil it at a cooking station (irradiated but no longer buggy), and then find a one-use water filter to finally turn your boiled water into purified water. Naturally, water filters are ultra rare; I've found two in four hours of looting. Finding food requires you to either take a perk so you're able to loot meat from corpses, or subsist from what you can scavenge. Good luck finding a clean bed, since the ones available are bug-infested and dirty.

Oh, and your needs feel like they're double what you have in Vanilla. And damage taken is at least double normal values. And stimpaks and radaway are about as common as winged pigs. So, just to stay alive, you get into this cycle of scavenging for food, finding enough bottles to make dirty water, finding a cooking station so you can boil it, looking for a bed so you can save, and losing all your progress because the increased needs mean you have exactly two HP and will die from a faint breeze.

Oh, and you have approximately sixty carry weight to use, so either you're wearing no armor or carrying virtually no guns.

But Balmas, you may say! You're doing it wrong! All those petty issues can be solved if you just build settlements! Except no, Naugrim has decided that building settlements is too lenient. You can take over a spot, if you're willing to take the sanity loss from slaughtering everyone there, since nobody will offer you quests to get them to ally with you. However, once you do that, you're unable to build anything technical until you go out and find the accompanying diagrams scattered around the world. Oh, and planting seeds is beyond you. The only food you can plant is glowing fungus or brain mold, to which you cannot assign settlers and which doesn't produce any food anyway. Not that you'll have settlers anyway, given that Local Leader, which allows you to build the radio beacon to repopulate the settlements, requires Charisma 10. So you have settlements that are only good for building furniture, and which lock you out of Lone Wanderer's X300% experience gain.

Ugh. At least Useful Crank means I can have a primary that never runs out of ammo.

From what I was given to understand, FROST was basically someone going "Hey, remember DUST for F:NV? Yea, they were a bunch of pansies. Let's actually get serious with this one."

[Anteros]

Random question, but should I bother putting FO4 on my SSD? I don't remember load times ever being a thing in 3 or NV anyway, but I haven't played 4 yet.

[Triaxx]

It can't hurt. I'm getting slightly longer loads than I'd like, but speed is rarely a bad thing, as long as you have the room.

[Anteros]

I have plenty of room, but I try not to put things on there unless it makes a significant difference so that I don't fill it up with useless junk.

[Anteros]

So I've played for a few hours and man...this is just a frustratingly designed game. The Field of View is far too low, so you have to change that in the console. It uses mouse acceleration for some reason, so you have to edit that out in the ini file. While you're in there, you may as well fix the strange design decision to make horizontal mouse sensitivity doubly as sensitive as vertical sensitivity. I haven't figured out how to disable the annoying head bob yet, but that's next on my checklist to make the game actually playable.

It's like the people who designed this game deliberately set out to make things as intuitive as possible at every turn. Want to leave a crafting table? Press Tab and then Enter on the other side of the keyboard to confirm. Want to use a computer? Be prepared to sit through a strange meaningless delay every time you want to select something. Melee and throw grenade are the same button...who thought that was a good idea??? It's like everything was designed by a group of idiots. I'm barely out of the tutorial and I already had to stop to vent.

The saddest thing is that it seems like there might actually be a decent game underneath all this annoying stuff, but I'm not sure I have the patience to get to it. I know this game is a little older and you've all probably beat this topic to death, but I just needed to vent.

[factotum]

It's like the people who designed this game deliberately set out to make things as intuitive as possible at every turn. Want to leave a crafting table? Press Tab and then Enter on the other side of the keyboard to confirm. Want to use a computer? Be prepared to sit through a strange meaningless delay every time you want to select something. Melee and throw grenade are the same button...who thought that was a good idea??? It's like everything was designed by a group of idiots. I'm barely out of the tutorial and I already had to stop to vent.

I think you meant "unintuitive"? Anyway, the problems you mention with the controls are always the sort of compromises you get when they design the UI to work with a controller and then just directly transpose the controller buttons onto the keyboard, so it's not that they're a group of idiots--they're just a group of people too lazy to have a properly different control scheme on mouse and keyboard as you get on the controller.

Having said that, they at least put a bit more effort into making the FO4 UI work on mouse and keyboard than they did with the Skyrim one, which is still an awkward broken mess even on the Special Edition. Click on an item in a menu to select it? I'll just assume you mean "activate the currently selected item even if that isn't actually the item I clicked on".

[Triaxx]

What head bob? I keep seeing comments about it, but don't understand the problem.

Anyone tried one Acrobat's leg and cushioned on both sides? In theory it should add up to 100% but well, Bethesda.

[Anteros]

I think you meant "unintuitive"? Anyway, the problems you mention with the controls are always the sort of compromises you get when they design the UI to work with a controller and then just directly transpose the controller buttons onto the keyboard, so it's not that they're a group of idiots--they're just a group of people too lazy to have a properly different control scheme on mouse and keyboard as you get on the controller.

Having said that, they at least put a bit more effort into making the FO4 UI work on mouse and keyboard than they did with the Skyrim one, which is still an awkward broken mess even on the Special Edition. Click on an item in a menu to select it? I'll just assume you mean "activate the currently selected item even if that isn't actually the item I clicked on".

I actually meant "counter intuitive". Maybe it got auto corrected away or something.

[Mando Knight]

Press Tab and then Enter on the other side of the keyboard to confirm.

E will usually do most of the same things that Enter does (except obviously text entry fields).

[Anteros]

What head bob? I keep seeing comments about it, but don't understand the problem.

Anyone tried one Acrobat's leg and cushioned on both sides? In theory it should add up to 100% but well, Bethesda.

You've never noticed that your head bobs dramatically up and down every time you move? Especially when you run in power armor. Lucky you.

This game actually legitimately gave me motion sickness. I can play every other first person game in existence just fine, but some combination of the mouse acceleration, the head bob, and the low FOV makes me physically ill.

E will usually do most of the same things that Enter does (except obviously text entry fields).

I'll try that. Thanks. Still unintuitive, but not quite as annoying.

[Balmas]

You've never noticed that your head bobs dramatically up and down every time you move? Especially when you run in power armor. Lucky you.

This game actually legitimately gave me motion sickness. I can play every other first person game in existence just fine, but some combination of the mouse acceleration, the head bob, and the low FOV makes me physically ill.

There's a mod for that.

[Anteros]

There's a mod for that.

Thanks. I haven't quite sat down long enough to figure out modding for FO4 yet, but I'll probably install that sometime soon.

[Triaxx]

Ah. It wasn't significant on foot for me, and in power armor I expected it, so I'd have been disappointed if it wasn't there. But I can see why you'd want it gone.

[ArlEammon]

Any tips on how to level up?

[Triaxx]

Take thee forth into the wide world and slay thine foes for theyr juice of knowledge!

Unless you're in New Vegas where quests give much better rewards of XP than enemies do. But you can still kill enemies, you just need to kill a lot more of them. I don't remember which game you're in so...

[factotum]

Of course, the question "how do I level up?" might also mean "what stats and perks do I want to go for?", and it's even more important to know which game he's playing to answer that one!

[ArlEammon]

Of course, the question "how do I level up?" might also mean "what stats and perks do I want to go for?", and it's even more important to know which game he's playing to answer that one!

I'm doing Fallout 4

[Triaxx]

Ah, then what are you looking for? Stealthy builds? Melee builds? Gun builds? Power Armor builds? What did you like to play in previous games in the series?

[ArlEammon]

Ah, then what are you looking for? Stealthy builds? Melee builds? Gun builds? Power Armor builds? What did you like to play in previous games in the series?

I have an int score of 10 but my agility is pisspoor. I'm trying to build a gun's heavy character. ((I can move agility from 4 to 5 if I go up another level)

[Triaxx]

AGI 4 already gives you all the good perks. Any more are just bonus AP. Better to use the perks elsewhere. Are you using Gunslinger or Commando?

[ArlEammon]

AGI 4 already gives you all the good perks. Any more are just bonus AP. Better to use the perks elsewhere. Are you using Gunslinger or Commando?

Gunslinger

[Triaxx]

The only really good one then is Gun Fu who's rank 3 syncs very well with pistols. Ninja is useful for a stealth build, but with AGI that low I don't think that was what you had in mind.

Better to focus on weapon and armor modifying perks instead I'd say.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Gunslinger

In addition to the above, see if you can get your hands on a laser (NOT an Institute version). Laser Pistols are pretty awesome for Gunslingers, although you're going to want Science! 2 or 3 for the build.

With only Science! 2, you can get the following weapon:

Laser Gun: Base damage of 24

Maximized Capacitor (+13 dam)
Improved Sniper Barrel (+33 dam)
Sharpshooter's Grip (makes it a pistol compatible with Gunslinger)
Either Reflex Sight or Night Vision Scope, depending on your preference for scoped sniping or hip-fire
Fine Tuned Beam Focuser

Total damage per shot: 70 before perks

You would need Gun Nut 3 and a 44 pistol (you can get the snubnose outside of Goodsprings) to match that damage with combustion pistols. Or both Gun Nut and Gunslinger 4-5 for the Western Revolver.

[Triaxx]

Best thing I think is that you can have a pistol energy shotgun, but not a normal one I don't think. (Unless the double barrel with the shortest stock counts.) I like plasma weapons as my shotguns, but that's a later game concern.

I'd recommend seeing Arturo in Diamond City, because he sells a legendary laser weapon which does double damage to full health targets. Old Faithful is my choice for a weapon base.

[Mando Knight]

Lasers also let you have your pick of guaranteed legendary effects: besides Old Faithful's Instigating effect, there's Danse's Righteous Authority (Lucky), Prototype UP77 "Limitless Potential" (Never-Ending), Paladin Brandis's Survivor's Special (Bloodied), and the Mechanist's Protectron's Gaze (Rapid).