Fallout 4

I use Mod Organizer 2 - the game hasn't crashed any more than it did when I tried out the Vortex launcher, and MO2 is better at displaying information even if it doesn't look very slick.

What I really want for a companion-friendly settlement is a combination of the Lucky 38 and Home Plate - someplace centralized and private, i.e. behind a load screen so I don't hear shootouts or vertibirds in the background, but customizable. And, you know, big enough for about ten NPCs to sandbox in and not feel packed. I'm looking at some mods like "Diamond City Rooftop Settlement" and "Press Box Suite," but neither are quite what I'm wanting.

Sim Settlements update - if you want to try a combined approach, putting down crops instead of agricultural plots and beds instead of residential lots, make sure you pop in that city manager holotape and disable the options that assign settlers away from beds and previous tasks. What was happening in Sanctuary was that the Longs kept running from the fields to man a coffee stand or open a mine, because those jobs were more interesting than mutfruit, and since I'd deleted the agricultural plots, the other settlers thought there was no way to produce food. When I turned Abernathy Farm over to the Abernathy family, all the tato fields were scrapped, so I gave up and put down agricultural plots in their place. But I was able to remind them that they already had beds! With a lot of coaxing. And fast-traveling in and out of the settlement.

the best source of Nuclear material is so weird.

"See you later honey, I have to go hunt glowing deathclaws and radscorpions so I can build nuclear reactors!"

It's like, the single most valuable resource for a science/tech minded Sole Survivor, and yet it's the one item nobody sells in bulk.

I usually make my settlements self-sufficient for food/water so they don't collapse when the caravaneers are being dumb, but specialize after that point.

Also, I always build a huge arcology/castle around the ruined house in the Murkwater Construction Site.

Also, a few settlements got harassed so much even with heavy defenses that I built a wall all around them. In particular, the one by the train tracks and the greenhouse.

That's the only one I have that's never been raided.

Covenant was hit by the Brotherhood. Sanctuary by gunners, raiders, and Rust Devils.

Kingsport lighthouse has been attacked by mutants, ghouls, and Rust Devils.

Oberland is perpetually under attack.

All my other ones have been attacked by something or other.

But Graygarden never seems to ever come under attack!

It's not just event attacks, it's also that big raider base half a stone's throw from the settlement (I think it might be the other greenhouse one - the one without robots). The Forged would sometimes wander over while I was doing something there. Or everyone would rush to fight the event threat and run right into the Forged. Very annoying to deal with. Even just by making the route in/out longer, most of the problem goes away because the turrets can do their job before things go tato-shaped.

Edited by Balmung on Feb 28th 2019 at 4:51:24 AM

Even after I got tired of the event attacks and turned them off via a mod, it seems like Red Rocket gets Rust Devils'd whenever I'm in the middle of crafting something there. But what's fun is having that interact with using Sentry Bots as Provisioners, so sometimes I'm crafting in Red Rocket while gatling lasers are tearing through a pack of enemies. Or I'm visiting the Slog or Finch Farm and hearing explosions from the ironworks because the Forged have respawned, and I gave that particular bot a cluster missile launcher.

Eh, just grab your plasma weapon of choice, bring along a follower with one of their own, and harvest the stuff from the goop piles you make from a bunch of radroaches or raiders. Call it a date!

Edited by Tacitus on Mar 1st 2019 at 11:40:44 AM

My main base is so heavily defended I have gotten to the point I ignore sporadic weapons fire.

-hears heavy weapons turrets lighting up something- " My dear would go check and see if another raider band has wandered into the yard again? Last time they messed up my land mine pattern and got shot to shit all over the place."

Seriously though you beef it up enough you can sit and happily much about if you know where the enemies are likely to come from. Even more fun with modded turrets.

Using pimped out Automatron-robots as provisioners is hilarious. In my last playthrough I went so far to give everyone at least a nuke launcher and an explosive gattling gun. Eventually I grew completely desensitized to suddenly hearing nukes go off in the distance or running into one of my provisioners soloing a Raider camp.

Mechanized couriers are hilarious and hilariously badass.

Welp, lost two hours of progress because I broke a save. I used a mod that required the "Art Connoisseur System" to add some paintings to the game, decided I didn't want them after all, and then disabled both mods instead of uninstalling ACS in-game as the mod description page warns. This wiped out the entire "Decoration" category in the workshop right before I was going to make Home Plate a sweet bachelor recently-widowed father of a kidnapped son pad.

Good news is that "Transfer Settlements" works and I was able to salvage the improvements I'd made to Red Rocket in the interval between me breaking the save and finding out I'd broken it, which means I only really lost about an hour's playtime. It's wonky though - the blueprints only transferred about 97% successfully for whatever reason, and the concrete curb around the gas station disappeared during a few attempts, for another whatever reason. And for some third reason the blueprint requires the backpacks and pouches mod I'm using? For a settlement?

Edited by Tacitus on Mar 1st 2019 at 11:55:13 AM

How is it that there are no ghouls among the Children of Atom? They're constantly bathed in radiation, and they worship feral ghouls.

Most ghouls probably find the Children creepy and/or naive, and if they're old enough, worshipping the bombs that destroyed the world and turned them into ghouls is probably about the last thing they want.

Or maybe the Bright Brotherhood scooped up the ones with tendencies in that direction a while ago. I'm not sure how many ghouls there really are, how long the Brights have been around, or how much wandering they did before they came across REPCONN. It's one theory, anyway.

Edited by Unsung on Mar 6th 2019 at 10:55:35 AM

I'm wondering why they don't turn. They're already immune to radiation given that they're thriving in the Glowing Sea.

Maybe they are ghouls, but their flesh hasn't flaked off yet for whatever reason. The game treated them as little more than a random group of bandits, but there could have been a lot of interesting stuff done with them.

Ahh, right, my bad. I could imagine, being the Children of the Atom, they just have super-high rad resistance and a ton of Rad-X/RadAway that they pop constantly. Maybe some perk where it works better and lasts longer. I know they don't, statistically, but Gameplay and Story Segregation etc.

Edited by Unsung on Mar 6th 2019 at 12:58:18 PM

One of these days I need to make a Mechanist build that makes settlements full of robots to protect the commoners living there.

It's mentioned in Far Harbor that most Children of Atom have the "blessing of Atom," presumably a mutation that leaves them immune or highly resistant to radiation. The ones who don't require a regular diet of chems just to survive in the church's holy sites. Ghouls on the other hand are pre-apocalyptic mutates rendered "necrotic post-humans" by exposure to radiation, potentially triggered by simultaneous exposure to an airborne version of FEV. There is only one generation of ghouls - in the post-apocalyptic world, humans either have mutations that let them survive high levels of radiation, or die from it.

Or at least that's the simple answer, but then we have Eddie Winter the pre-War ghoul, Moria getting ghoulified if you detonate Megaton's bomb in Fallout 3, and a camp of NCR soldiers turning into ghouls at Camp Searchlight after the Legion unleashes some nuclear waste in New Vegas. So who the hell knows. Maybe sitting in the Glowing Sea or Nucleus just isn't a drastic enough exposure to radiation to trigger Ghoulification.

Wait... the Sole Survivor is a pre-war human. And the main quest ends in a nuclear explosion for three of the factions. Heh. You don't turn into a Ghoul right away, you know, it takes a while for the skin to start to slough off...

......

I....

Hancock is a ghoul, and is less than a century old.

I'm not sure your information is correct there.

Where do the new ferals keep coming from? There's also a neighborhood you can look at where the terminals written by settlers describe becoming ghouls after a while.

My personal theory is that the tainted airborne FEV is a factor in ghoulification as well as levels of radiation exposure, my thoughs are that an instant high level burst of radiation like a nuclear explosion will typically (but not always) result in someone becoming a feral ghoul right away while more gradual will allow you to keep your intelligence but if you are repeatedly exposed to more radiation afterwards than you greatly increase the risk of going feral even if it doesn't appear to do any damage.

Oh good, need to add Mr. "All of the Drugs!" to the list of counter-examples. Look, the whole thing is wonky, even the game's pre-Bethesda creators have gone back and forth over whether FEV has to be involved in ghoulification or just radiation. The whole "first and last generation" line is from Fallout 2, for what it's worth.

New Vegas had a NCR private who became ghoulified too. i think they just quietly retconned that little bit about all ghouls being pre war.

Camp Searchlight. And, of course, Moira.

Not really quietly, it's just that Bethesda wasn't overly concerned with sticking by whatever rules Black Isle had put in place, which were never entirely consistent anyway, especially regarding FEV, mutation, radiation, and science and technology in general, were never entirely consistent anyway, so fair enough, really. I had less of an issue with new generations of ghouls and supermutants than I did (at the time) with the Enclave being back as the villains again. But that's an old, old complaint at this point. I'm over it.

Edited by Unsung on Mar 6th 2019 at 9:00:44 AM

An...interesting question to ask would be if there were any Ghouls created during the atomic bombings of Japan or the Chernobyl incident. By Fallout-logic, the probably would have.

My head-canon though is that Fallout's advanced technology is based off of reverse-engineered alien tech (which is part of why the setting has schizo-tech), and something like the Roswell Incident being the point of divergence (with some alien tech possibly crash-landing in China as well).

If this head-canon is true, then it's possible that radiation in Fallout is weird because there's some sort of freaky alien tech half-haphazardly combined with nuclear technology (which would mean the atom bombs dropped on Japan before the Po D were completely normal). However, this is improbable even if my head-canon is true.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Mar 6th 2019 at 4:11:04 AM

I think it's implied (in some of the games at least) that the tainted airborne FEV (released into the air after a nuclear missle hit West Tek) is partially responsible for ghoulification and the other mutants in the wasteland with the radiation being the catalyst.

Edited by Kaiseror on Mar 6th 2019 at 8:34:42 AM

No one knew about ghouls before War, implying that it took more than just radiation exposure to do it. FEV is the common catalyst agent mentioned. So yes, presumably Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Chernobyl didn't cause any ghouls.

This reminds me that I wish we could someday get a Fallout game set in China, but that's never going to happen. Besides the fact that Bethesda doesn't seem interested in setting the games outside America at all, China's censorship policies mean a post-apocalyptic game set there wouldn't be allowed to be sold there.