Fallout VIII: Another Thread Needs Your Help General

[Triaxx]

Yes, modded, but not anything that should have affected drop rates, or spawn rates.

I spent most of the game (I LP'd it.) running around with a combat rifle modded to have a flamer attached, but other than that, it was all vanilla weapons until nearly the end.

That said, I usually stick with a selection of weapons and only bring special case gear if I know I'm going to be facing a certain thing. The fact that the character was completely built around power armor meant I could bring some heavier gear. (Of course I also halved the weight of missiles so the launcher wasn't totally useless anymore.)

[Brookshw]

So I watched some let's play Frost and it's looking pretty fun (though some let's players really suck at games).

Anyone who's tried it have experiences w/ it crashing or conflicting w/ other mods? I really don't want to have to remove a lot of mods to get it to work.

[Jonzac]

I downloaded and installed it with NMM and started a separate profile for it. Loaded just Frost and alternate starts and it worked fine.

No idea about other mods, but I'd guess that many wont work due to the change in items from their vanilla F4 names and uses to the new ones in Frost.

No confirmed information on that though.

[Brookshw]

I downloaded and installed it with NMM and started a separate profile for it. Loaded just Frost and alternate starts and it worked fine.

Hmmmm, never tried using different profiles on games, sounds like an easy solution.

[Brookshw]

Started Frost, shippedwreck path. Probably died a dozen times so far and am only level 2. Love it, this is exactly the game I want to play (though w/o the story I can't say it's really Fallout). Amazing job by the team.

[Triaxx]

There's some story, just not the silly default one.

[Spore]

Frost? Alternate Start? I am not accidentally in the Skyrim thread, am I?

[Mando Knight]

Frost? Alternate Start? I am not accidentally in the Skyrim thread, am I?

FROST is a mod for Fallout 4 that (like New Vegas's DUST) is a total conversion of the game into a hardcore survival horrible death simulator. It has three choices for your starting location, since all of the vanilla quests have been removed (including the original start of the game).

[Brookshw]

FROST is a mod for Fallout 4 that (like New Vegas's DUST) is a total conversion of the game into a hardcore survival horrible death simulator. It has three choices for your starting location, since all of the vanilla quests have been removed (including the original start of the game).

I think the only criticism I have is that losing bottles constantly whenever you drink water or boil it is absurd and you run out of them so dang quickly. I may install a mod for that (and maybe snapable junk fences, forgot how annoying that was).

[The_Jackal]

I think the only criticism I have is that losing bottles constantly whenever you drink water or boil it is absurd and you run out of them so dang quickly. I may install a mod for that (and maybe snapable junk fences, forgot how annoying that was).

Yeah, that one is dumb. You can get a bottle from a drink of nuka-cola, but if you drink water, it apparently involves eating the bottle.

[Anteros]

FROST is a mod for Fallout 4 that (like New Vegas's DUST) is a total conversion of the game into a hardcore survival horrible death simulator. It has three choices for your starting location, since all of the vanilla quests have been removed (including the original start of the game).

So wait...what do you do if there's no quests? It's just a survival mode? Doesn't that get boring quickly?

[Brookshw]

Yeah, that one is dumb. You can get a bottle from a drink of nuka-cola, but if you drink water, it apparently involves eating the bottle.

Not to mention the several bottles of dirty water than disappear once you boil the water. I just throw out two bottles everytime? Eh?

So wait...what do you do if there's no quests? It's just a survival mode? Doesn't that get boring quickly?

Eh, it's a different type of challenge. Dying is REAL easy and the worlds changed from vanilla, saying resources are sparse is a bit of an understatement. Make up your own quests if you like.

[Triaxx]

Many a true nerd has been playing it on YouTube if you want a glimpse.

[Anteros]

Make up your own quests if you like.

Look, if I had the imagination to do things like that I wouldn't be playing in the first place.

[Brookshw]

Look, if I had the imagination to do things like that I wouldn't be playing in the first place.

Eh, it's easy enough. I've decided my current character was a fisherman out of Gloucester, living in Salem. When the bombs fell his ship was blown out to sea a'la tidal waves, after all electronics got knocked out. After two years he finally made it back to the commonwealth but shipwrecked on Spectacle Island (one of the Frost starts). Now he's trying to make it home to Salem to find his wife and daughter, but it's going to be a long trip. If (when) they're not there, then it's off to Bar Harbor where she had family to see if she's there. I skipped a lot of details I made up in my head (about having to kill his first mate). I'll give myself extra quests along the way as I decide to check multiple places and look for records of where they may have gotten (admittedly it's all for naught).

[Driderman]

Eh, it's easy enough. I've decided my current character was a fisherman out of Gloucester, living in Salem. When the bombs fell his ship was blown out to sea a'la tidal waves, after all electronics got knocked out. After two years he finally made it back to the commonwealth but shipwrecked on Spectacle Island (one of the Frost starts). Now he's trying to make it home to Salem to find his wife and daughter, but it's going to be a long trip. If (when) they're not there, then it's off to Bar Harbor where she had family to see if she's there. I skipped a lot of details I made up in my head (about having to kill his first mate). I'll give myself extra quests along the way as I decide to check multiple places and look for records of where they may have gotten (admittedly it's all for naught).

Sounds a bit like reading The Road. You know it's not going to end well but you keep on all the same...

[Triaxx]

The same reason I'm on my 50th New Vegas Character and 40th Skyrim one. (That and mods break the game before I finish, so I start over.)

[Brookshw]

Sounds a bit like reading The Road. You know it's not going to end well but you keep on all the same...

Pretty much, nope a happy period in the Fallout universe. I figure the best anyone can hope for is something like the Survivalist in Honest Hearts.

Which brings us to another topic of conversation, what is the range of reasonable expectations in the Fallout-verse. So no " hold out for a decade and the earth will be peachy" real world science, we're playing by lore/pulp rules!

[Mutazoia]

Which brings us to another topic of conversation, what is the range of reasonable expectations in the Fallout-verse. So no " hold out for a decade and the earth will be peachy" real world science, we're playing by lore/pulp rules!

Well, if we are going by lore/pulp rules, then the world is never going to be fine. One bomb crater is still super radio active after 400 years, the entire ocean is radio active, which means all the rain is going to be radio active.... it's a wonder anything still lives in the FO universe.

[Brookshw]

Well, if we are going by lore/pulp rules, then the world is never going to be fine. One bomb crater is still super radio active after 400 years, the entire ocean is radio active, which means all the rain is going to be radio active.... it's a wonder anything still lives in the FO universe.

How about for individuals though, constrained by the world's perpetual post-apoc state. We see a spectrum of survivor stories across the games for the immediate aftermath of the bombs dropping from cannibalism, ghoulification, slavery, maybe tribalism. Not many people got a "good" ending but there were some.

So with that clarification, what are reasonable expectations for survivors in the immediate aftermath of the bombs? What is a "good" ending at that time and that still coincides with the lore?

[Anteros]

Go into a vault and hope it's one of the not crazy ones? I guess a lot of people must have survived in regular shelters too. All those raiders had to come from somewhere.

[The_Jackal]

Well, if we are going by lore/pulp rules, then the world is never going to be fine. One bomb crater is still super radio active after 400 years, the entire ocean is radio active, which means all the rain is going to be radio active.... it's a wonder anything still lives in the FO universe.

Well, that really depends on the efficiency of the reaction, and how much of the radioactive material from the war was from the uncontrolled reaction of civil reactors (like those in cars and households). It's entirely possible that a massive amount of the radiation in the environment is from those sources, rather than the bombs themselves. But let's be honest for a moment: Fallout is not a hard-science setting. It's a post-apocalyptic fantasy with a high degree of social and political satire. The if the six-foot-tall horseshoe crabs and immortal zombies didn't give that away, the little-green men and robots with personality disorders should do the trick.

[Balmas]

So, here's a quick question for all y'all: How many synths do you think the Institute has?

If you look at the Robotics lab in the Institute, you'll see that they're capable of turning out a Gen3 synth roughly once every 25 minutes, and that this process continues 24-7. That means that, even if we assume that they have only one robotics lab producing synths, they can produce 57.6 Gen3 Synths per day.

We don't know how long they've been pumping out synths at this rate, but I'd suggest a number of clues that might give us some clues. We know that the key for making Gen3 synths was Shaun's arrival at the institute in 2227, 60 years ago as of the time of Fallout 4. They were able to make and field-test human-like synths since 2229, since that's when the Broken Mask incident occurred. For 58 years, they've had that capacity. We know they've had coursers for at least 10 years, since Harkness had escaped and made his way to Rivet City by 2077, and Zimmer's position as director of the SRB says that runaway Gen3s were enough of a problem for them to have an entire bureau dedicated to their reclamation. I would suggest, then, that they've had at least ten years of producing at that rate.

Ten years, at the very least. 3650 days, not counting leap years, at a rate of 57.6 synths per day, is an army 0f 210,240 synths. And that's with the assumption that they haven't produced any synths for the 48 years previous to that. Even if we were to say that they've only been producing synths at that rate for the past year, that would still be at least 21K synths. And this is only the Gen3 synths, not Gen1 or Gen2.

I'll just remind you that the current population of the Commonwealth is something like 500 named NPCs, plus however many settlers join your settlements (which, at a maximum of 21 per, means you could add up to 800ish to this number. Even if we assume there are 10 raiders/gunners/mutants for every person who's not one of the above, that would mean that the commonwealth has a population of around 14.5K people. Which means that the Institute would have the power to create an army that is 44-1449% larger than every other group in the Commonwealth combined.

In conclusion, the only reason the Institute isn't the least competent group in the Commonwealth is because the Railroad exists.

[Brookshw]

snip

Nicely researched. I'd suggest there may be material issues but with teleportation I can't see that being a big problem (begging the question when they developed that). They sure could have flooded most of the commonwealth.

I suspect they have to have a fall back facility somewhere, synths continue to pop up on missions after you destroy the institute, both on scavenging runs or assaulting places, so baring standing orders they're still fulfilling someone has to be calling the shots and they presumably need somewhere to be returning their salvaged tech to. Someone has to be left still, and possibly still producing more....

[Triaxx]

House was a graduate, so they probably have a bunker full of them, waiting for an army of historically inaccurate enemies to camp out on top.

[Anteros]

You're forgetting the seemingly infinite numbers of raiders or super mutants. Regardless, I'm pretty sure that the NPCs of these cities are meant to be simply representative and a lot more people actually live there than what we see.

[factotum]

Nicely researched. I'd suggest there may be material issues but with teleportation I can't see that being a big problem (begging the question when they developed that).

I don't see why it *wouldn't* be a problem? They still have to obtain and process the materials regardless of how easy it is to transport them back to home base. They can't be using scavenged materials because we know that every building in Boston still has all the stuff in it that it did when the bombs dropped.

Also, Gen-3 synths presumably require a lot of organic material to make--where does the Institute get that from? It might be able to build a synth in 25 minutes when all materials are ready and waiting, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can build them at that rate ad infinitum.

[The_Jackal]

I don't see why it *wouldn't* be a problem? They still have to obtain and process the materials regardless of how easy it is to transport them back to home base. They can't be using scavenged materials because we know that every building in Boston still has all the stuff in it that it did when the bombs dropped.

Also, Gen-3 synths presumably require a lot of organic material to make--where does the Institute get that from? It might be able to build a synth in 25 minutes when all materials are ready and waiting, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can build them at that rate ad infinitum.

99% of the human body is composed of six elements: Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium, and Phosphorus, all of which are quite abundant. It also has trace amounts of potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, an magnesium (less than 10 grams in a normal human). Other elements are present, but in even more miniscule quantities.

[Anteros]

99% of the human body is composed of six elements: Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium, and Phosphorus, all of which are quite abundant. It also has trace amounts of potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, an magnesium (less than 10 grams in a normal human). Other elements are present, but in even more miniscule quantities.

There's quite a leap between "we can make robots who look and act human" and "we can forge people whole from their component elements". If the latter were true synths wouldn't need to have mechanical parts at all.

[Triaxx]

Why do you think they're kidnapping people if not to dissolve them for resources?