Current Events > I think I'm gonna play Fallout 4 again

(+) Yeah! (+)

Shotgunnova posted...

It's inferior to New Vegas in many ways, but you can still wring some enjoyment from it, just by doing gunplay, light exploration, and (if you're up for it) settlement building. You could probably pick up the GOTY edition up cheap nowadays, I'm sure, if you wanted to test the waters. I think it has a GOTY edition, anyway.

New Vegas is really showing its date when you go back to play it now. I went back to 4 and NV recently and 4 is much more enjoyable now in comparison. The world is more lively, the quicker looting system, and sprinting for our modern ADD minds.

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doomcrusader posted...

New Vegas is really showing its date when you go back to play it now. I went back to 4 and NV recently and 4 is much more enjoyable now

https://i.imgur.com/9B3X9es.gif

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RchHomieQuanChi posted...

I can't get over how lazy Nuka World as conceptually.

Your character spends the entire game as an anti-hero AT BEST but then they suddenly have him geeking out over being a Raider out of nowhere lmao

For a story aspect, yes, it was painfully lazy even by Bethesda standards (still not quite the absolute zero fucks given by Bethesda as displayed in 'Kid in a Fridge,' but close). They clearly put all of their energy into the world design, which imo is quite good. I went into Nuka-World expecting some generic amusement park / carnival setting, but they did their homework when it came to creating a rather elaborate parody of Disney World, and they deserve props for that at least.

Nowadays I just kill the raiders after the intro sequence. It's more fun to wipe them all out, I can still explore the park at my leisure, I don't miss out on anything other than a couple perks, and removing most of the living NPCs from the exterior Nuka-Town cell makes a huge difference in game stability, at least on the XB1 (which it sorely needs, especially after the last CC patch).

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Yeah, I can understand why people get to Nuka-World and think, "Why the hell would I want to side with any raiders in the first place?" I liked the design of some of the areas, but I feel like there should've been more in general. For a planned theme park, there's a lot of unused land that feels kinda lazy.

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Shotgunnova posted...

Yeah, I can understand why people get to Nuka-World and think, "Why the hell would I want to side with any raiders in the first place?" I liked the design of some of the areas, but I feel like there should've been more in general. For a planned theme park, there's a lot of unused land that feels kinda lazy.

Like I alluded to earlier, there's stability issues to consider. With very few exceptions, the park is entirely open-world, and like Downtown Boston before it, is always teetering right on the edge of Crashville as a result; I feel that adding any more content to the Nuka-World worldspace would have plunged it right off that razor's edge. I mean, on some level I appreciate Bethesda's ambition (hubris?) in thinking their game engine can handle that type of stress on modern consoles (and I know a ton of players value immersion over stability in this regard), but so much stability could've been gained by walling some of these areas off into separate cells. Heavily-built settlements suffer greatly from being open-world too, not to mention the engine bug where hand-placed clutter oftentimes loads before the surface it's sitting on when you walk to a settlement instead of fast-traveling, causing all your carefully-placed loot to fall to the floor.

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Hmm, I don't remember too much jankiness in Nuka-World, but you're certainly right about it being a huge open-world cell. The slave market area would probably be taxing on PS4.

masterpug53 posted...

Heavily-built settlements suffer greatly from being open-world too, not to mention the engine bug where hand-placed clutter oftentimes loads before the surface it's sitting on when you walk to a settlement instead of fast-traveling, causing all your carefully-placed loot to fall to the floor.

Wow, forgot about this. Luckily, I mostly build spartan settlements, so I don't have loose junk all over.

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Shotgunnova posted...

Wow, forgot about this. Luckily, I mostly build spartan settlements, so I don't have loose junk all over.

Dunno if it's available on PS4, but for this and many other reasons, Place Anywhere is my all-time top mod; one of its functions is the ability to de-havok clutter items in your settlement, making them fixed and static. No more clutter falling to the floor if I decide to walk home, or if a settler decides to warp halfway into a shelf. I still prefer to fast-travel to settlements since it's generally smoother on loading, but at least I now have the option to walk to a decorated settlement.

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Shotgunnova posted...

Wow, forgot about this. Luckily, I mostly build spartan settlements, so I don't have loose junk all over.

Yeah, I personally tend to just slap sleeping bags in the pre-fab Large Wooden Shack and end things with that. For defense I might put turrets on the Wooden Shack Bridge to give a better vantage point, but little else is built.

It's best for performance to have as few items loaded into the engine as possible.

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Hmm, I'll have to see if there's any good settlement mods later. I'm just screwing around, so I didn't really look for anything besides the unofficial patch. Noticed a lot of jank on my cursory view of the list, like increasing Piper's bust size, etc.

DuneMan posted...

Yeah, I personally tend to just slap sleeping bags in the pre-fab Large Wooden Shack and end things with that. For defense I might put turrets on the Wooden Shack Bridge to give a better vantage point, but little else is built. It's best for performance to have as few items loaded into the engine as possible.

I hate how crappy most settlement materials are, so I mostly just build with nice, clean-looking cement. Had to use a few wooden stairsets, though, since they clip through things easily and I don't think cement ones do. (There aren't metal stairs for some reason.)

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Shotgunnova posted...

There aren't metal stairs for some reason.

Do you have the DLC? The Warehouse and Barn tilesets should share metal stairs.

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Ahh, so that's where they are. I built a barn at Longfellow's Cabin once, but like I said, I'm a cement-mixin' guy and nothing's gonna change that. I'm glad cement is so cheap in this game -- can easily buy 300 or so for the cost of a few water bottles. Pretty sure it was way more expensive when it first came out.

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Shotgunnova posted...

I hate how crappy most settlement materials are, so I mostly just build with nice, clean-looking cement. Had to use a few wooden stairsets, though, since they clip through things easily and I don't think cement ones do. (There aren't metal stairs for some reason.)

If you've got the money to burn, some of the settlement Creations have some nice stuff. Modern Furniture Workshop Pack has some very nice + clean wood floors and wood / stone walls; Coffee and Donuts*** has tile floors and brick walls that looked lived-in enough to be believable while still being nice-looking, as well as some other assorted structure options (most notably an auto-closing glass door). Home Decor Workshop Pack also gets my recommendation - not much in the way of structure options, but does add a lot of high-quality furniture and clutter (most notably nice beds and stocked, non-broken refrigerators, all with color variants), and it's only 2 bucks.

Noir Penthouse, Neon Flats, and Nuka-Cola Collector also add some very nice furniture and clutter options, in addition to the new interior-cell player homes. If you purchase any of the Creations in the first paragraph and end up liking what you get, I'd recommend checking these out as well.

*** Be warned that if you're buying Coffee and Donuts for its primary purpose - the coffee and donut consumables - the buildable settlement store / vendor usually ends up bugged and unable to sell the items. I would recommend building the store and assigning a vendor to it as soon as you unlock the workshop items in-game; if the vendor does work properly, stock up on their wares as often as you can, because they will likely bug out eventually. You can still craft all the items yourself, that feature works fine as intended - it's just nicer to throw caps at the goods rather than scour the wasteland for all the esoteric ingredients.

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Also, something I always forget is that the Warehouse structures have very nice, unbroken glass windows / walls intended for building greenhouses - I have a hard time remembering this because they're stuck in the back of the Warehouse > Walls menu, way past all the busted and broken crap.

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masterpug53 posted...

it's just nicer to throw caps at the goods rather than scour the wasteland for all the esoteric ingredients.

Well, the main one to abuse is the Sizzlin' Strawberry Donuts, because they function like Calmex, adding 2x damage to your stealth attacks. If you grow Razorgrain at your Settlements you can combine that with... the cereal, IIRC, to produce Donut Mix in groups of 4. Adding points to your Radiation Resistance isn't bad either.

There are some rare novelty donuts though, including the Lemon ones which people might not even know about since you can only get Lemonade from Deezer in Covenant.

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DuneMan posted...

Well, the main one to abuse is the Sizzlin' Strawberry Donuts, because they function like Calmex, adding 2x damage to your stealth attacks. If you grow Razorgrain at your Settlements you can combine that with... the cereal, IIRC, to produce Donut Mix in groups of 4. Adding points to your Radiation Resistance isn't bad either.

There are some rare novelty donuts though, including the Lemon ones which people might not even know about since you can only get Lemonade from Deezer in Covenant.

Yeah, the Deezer donuts stand out in particular, as I never got any the first time I DL'ed C&D (I usually put Covenant off until late-game). So I was surprised to find them in the vendor list on my current playthrough when I actually bothered to build the store and vendor (and pretty high frequency, too). I never abuse the Donut items as much as I should since the Creation is still relatively new to me - I'm bad about using consumables regularly, and went out of my way to max Chem Resistant early-on this playthrough so that I could coax myself into using chems more regularly. But Sizzlin' Strawberry is indeed the best of the bunch.

I'm a decorator / knickknack collector primarily, so in that regard Coffee and Donuts is top-notch, since all the new workshop items and edible models look really nice. I kinda consider it Fallout 4's version of Skyrim's best Creation, Rare Curios.

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Ehh, I just got to LCK6 to invest in Better Criticals, so I don't need donut power anymore. :P

Right now, I'm trying to find a good provisioner to send to Spectacle Island. I seem to remember hearing that provisioners can mess up or die due to radiation en route, so maybe I'll just make a floating robot and hope the pack brahmin with 1000 pounds of trash can tread water properly, haha.

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Shotgunnova posted...

Ehh, I just got to LCK6 to invest in Better Criticals, so I don't need donut power anymore. :P

Right now, I'm trying to find a good provisioner to send to Spectacle Island. I seem to remember hearing that provisioners can mess up or die due to radiation en route, so maybe I'll just make a floating robot and hope the pack brahmin with 1000 pounds of trash can tread water properly, haha.

Alternately, you can equip a human provisioner with a Hazmat suit.

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I do have a Hazmat Suit from that one safehouse I raided with Deacon, but I'd rather keep it.

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did you do the fort quest yet?

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The one with the Mirelurk Queen? No, I've barely bothered with the main quest. Still haven't went to fetch Nick yet, either. However, I used my crippling flamethrower to kill a Queen earlier, so I know Aida and I can handle their ilk. Right now I'm doing some Mechanist quests. IIRC, you can avoid the final confrontation with max Charisma (???) and I have that, so time for some fun.

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Shotgunnova posted...

Ehh, I just got to LCK6 to invest in Better Criticals, so I don't need donut power anymore.

Stealth bonuses should still add on top of crit bonuses. Depending on your character level, it might become mandatory to one shot the infinitely scaling enemies: e.g. a Super Mutant Warlord.

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With all Better Criticals and Mr. Sandman boosts, plus a powerful silenced sniper rifle, I think I could take out most anything. Just haven't found a really good sniper yet (outside of Reba II, but that has a lame mirelurk-related bonus).

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Awww, did somebody get addicted to incineration?



Did the Hagen satellite basement earlier, mostly to get more robot parts for Ada (I remembered Ahab's head was there). Still haven't gotten any sentrybot wheels or anything, though, so that's disappointing. Riding around with my killbot that had lasers, a fatman, missiles, and all that stuff was kickass back in the day. I used that one lighthouse area near Salem as my base and had pet robots walking all over. I'd kill for more fun like that. (MacCready: "Come to think of it, I have.")



Spent the last couple hours constructing a base out at that swampy construction site, just for the hell of it. Dreary as hell without any lighting, but it's gonna be a banger once I get people in and have tons of turrets to shoot up the mirelurks. The key is to build high above the ground, since mirelurks (IIRC) can't climb through small passages like stairwells.



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Damn, the Mechanist boss gauntlet is too hard at this level -- at least, without stocking up on .45-70 ammo (none drops in the regular wasteland? The hell, Bethesda?) for Old Reliable and maybe some missiles, etc. Going in with no explosives, a radium rifle, a .50-caliber sniper rifle, and my crippling flamer isn't getting it done...although I did make it to wave five, so maybe I just need lots of chems.

Meh, I ran back out like a wuss and'll go do some other stuff for Tinker Tom. It probably would've helped to have worn my combat helmet instead of this zero-armor Shroud hat, but eh well.

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Oh yeah, settlements only make so much water before they don't bother. Gotta harvest the water and put it in another container or something to keep generating it. Can't believe I forgot about that.

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Shotgunnova posted...

stocking up on .45-70 ammo (none drops in the regular wasteland? The hell, Bethesda?)

Yeah, unlike Fallout 3 bringing Point Lookout stuff to the Capital Wasteland, in Fallout 4 you NEVER see DLC ammo in the base game. You have to go trodding off to separate DLC zones to pick up the associated ammo. DLC ammo was never integrated into the ammo production of Contraptions either.

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I have a ton of water, so I could splurge a bit, but I need to be Lv40+ to get the "invest 500 caps" perk for merchants. Slugging around 200 bottles just to sell 20-30 at a time blows. At least I'm remembering to buy railroad spikes from merchants in anticipation of my railway rifle. =)

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Shotgunnova posted...

I do have a Hazmat Suit from that one safehouse I raided with Deacon, but I'd rather keep it.

You can buy more from Fallon's Basement in Diamond City.

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The sadist in me wants to build cages to capture Gunners, raiders, and so on, then let them flee...right into 20 heavy turrets' paths. Probably too lazy to set it up, though. I think you can capture legendaries, though...

masterpug53 posted...

You can buy more from Fallon's Basement in Diamond City.

Ahh, that's good to know.

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Shotgunnova posted...

The sadist in me wants to build cages to capture Gunners, raiders, and so on, then let them flee...right into 20 heavy turrets' paths. Probably too lazy to set it up, though.

Or set them up at the edge of the overpass areas at either Greygarden or the farm next to Saugus Ironworks...

Gunners only need Caps as bait, so it's easy to repair the cages.

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lmao @ dropping them off bridges

That might deprive my turrets of their entertainment, haha.

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Series X gets fps boost for it

Trumpo posted...

Series X gets fps boost for it

Fallout 4 is so close to broken on XB1 at this point that I'm seriously considering dropping for a Series X to see if it improves things.

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Welp, took over The Castle, well before any annoyances (let's call him Preston G...no, P. Garvey) order me to. I do like the fortification angle, but I prefer to build my cement monstrosities nowadays. I forget if the mirelurk queen respawns or not.

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WRYYYYYYYYYYYYY



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Well, you could always take... Overdrive IIRC. It allows shots outside of VATs to become critical hits, based on a percentage chance per shot.

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The more I play, the less I want to use VATS to do anything. I forget if you can respec in this game, but I'd rather move those Better Criticals perks into Ninja or Mr. Sandman. Don't really need drugs to boost sneak crit damage since that's the main reason to non-VATS targets, haha.

...I should really research the perk tree before making characters.

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Can't believe I spent all this time trying to get a silenced .50 sniper rifle for everyday use, scrimping and saving, learning perks, etc...only to find one free in the Fort Strong general's office.

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Ahh, I love going to Poseidon Energy -- lots of legendaries spawn around there. Probably a few extra chances, too, with all those Mechanist bots possibly being on the road, too.

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Super Mutant: Stupiddddd ladyyyyyyy!!!!!!

lmao

I love these guys. Almost want to use Strong as a follower. Almost.

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I really wish settler limits weren't tied to Charisma. It'd be pretty cool to have a 50-person settlement (that ran smoothly) instead of a dozen humans + robots. It just feels like, no matter what you build, you realize, "oh yeah, most of it's not going to be populated in an interesting way".

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Shotgunnova posted...

I really wish settler limits weren't tied to Charisma. It'd be pretty cool to have a 50-person settlement (that ran smoothly) instead of a dozen humans + robots. It just feels like, no matter what you build, you realize, "oh yeah, most of it's not going to be populated in an interesting way".

I actually like that Charisma is finally, genuinely useful, at least for the game features I want to access; even NV couldn't manage to make Charisma worth investing in. And while I still despise Bethesda's die-roll approach to Speech checks, it's nice that having 10 or more Charisma guarantees success on all check levels; and since I'm already maxing the stat for settler count and the Intimidation perk, it's a nice bonus.

And the sad thing is that living NPCs are among the biggest drains on stability. I can (and have) built massive, detailed settlements that, while suffering varying degrees of framerate drop depending on where my FOV is pointing, ran quite smoothly. But the instant I add even a small amount of settlers, its Freezeville and Crashburg.

On the other hand, there was a time long ago before DLC, Creations and mods where I had a pretty massive Spectacle Island complex with over 30 NPCs that rarely if ever crashed. I know people love to blame mods first and foremost for instability, but the Creations and even the DLC play a heavy hand in the overall degradation of game stability.

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Yeah, instability's one of the primary reasons I don't want a bunch of silly mods and stuff. Building on Spectacle Island again sounds fun, though. It's so big, I could probably just put a bunch of prefab crap to really spread out the settlers and have a coherent "this is a big place" feel. Normally, I'd just pick one area and build a tower for everyone to live in. I...I kinda like cement towers, if y'alls haven't guessed. :P

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Shotgunnova posted...

Yeah, instability's one of the primary reasons I don't want a bunch of silly mods and stuff. Building on Spectacle Island again sounds fun, though. It's so big, I could probably just put a bunch of prefab crap to really spread out the settlers and have a coherent "this is a big place" feel. Normally, I'd just pick one area and build a tower for everyone to live in. I...I kinda like cement towers, if y'alls haven't guessed. :P

Yeah, back when I had the aforementioned heavily-populated Spectacle settlement, the Minecraft-y concrete blocks were the classiest wall option available, lol. Spectacle is the ideal place to overbuild, mostly because of how isolated it is; there's no dense forests, buildings, settlements, or enemy camps nearby to contribute to RAM drain. Sanctuary is a surprisingly-stable place to overbuild as well, in my experience. Abernathy Farm is a decent place too, and has that insanely-high vertical cap; I remember building something like a 12-story double-towered fortress there on my second playthrough (wasn't really populated or decorated all that much, but was still pretty impressive).


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I have a file where I build concrete shells over all the ugly Sanctuary buildings and populated it with robot farmers and friendly deathclaws. Pretty great, haha. It makes me pine for wall-mounted spotlights, though. I wonder if the unofficial patch fixed the glitch where, when you fast travel to a settlement, all the wall-mounted spotlights aren't working, even if they're plugged in properly.

Rarely build at Abernathy Farm, though. I think the shell of the house can't be removed (???), so it's ugly wooden trash in the middle of my beautiful concrete murdertopia.

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Yeah, it sucks how they did the population limit. I get what they were going for, but overall that's not a good way to do it. I've made a couple of "cities" before. They wouldn't lag too bad for the most part and I'm on PS4. I still knew it wouldn't be long before they got too big, but I got the 0kb glitch anyway and lost it all. Starlight Drive In and Spectacle Island were my favorites.

I never built there until my newest file which I'm working on now just for somewhere different. There's too much of a hill, but I've been making it work.

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True, with Abernathy you're stuck with the existing farmhouse. If you want to look into mods, Scrap That Settlement and Scrap That Commonwealth are available on PS4. STS (the first one) lets you remove unsightly trash piles and most other inconveniences and eyesores the base game won't touch, and it's one of the only scrapping mods that does so without breaking precombines (i.e. it won't ruin game stability).

STS doesn't touch buildings for the most part, though, which is where STC comes in; supposedly it makes EVERYTHING in the Commonwealth scrappable. Apparently what you do is activate STC, scrap the settlement buildings you want removed, and then disable STC so that your game world doesn't become a laggy nightmare (this advice comes directly from the mod author, as best as I can recall).

I've used STS for a long time without issue, and would definitely recommend it; but never had the stones to try STC, lol. The mod author is no longer active, but was a very prolific and respected member of the console modding community who put a lot of time into tutorials for what his mods do and how to use them, all of which are linked in the mod descriptions:

https://bethesda.net/en/mods/fallout4/mod-detail/4026667
https://bethesda.net/en/mods/fallout4/mod-detail/4017526

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Hmm, the only thing I don't like having is that corpse on Spectacle Island, but I dunno if having a mod purely to get rid of it is necessary. Knowing it's stable keeps it atop the short list, though.

Anyway, pic dump time! Here's my aborted Mechanist attack. Thought I could talk my way out of the fight entirely, but maybe I'm misremembering something. Probably being able to use max hacking or something to go in the back door early into the secret basement.




This is the downside to having fat-ass robots tailing you. If you can believe it, I did a BOS mission earlier and Danse was shoved right in here alongside me. Dunno how we scrambled out of that. It's weird, too, because if you have robots and assign them to guard posts, IIRC they shrink down to accommodate.



Not bad, not bad. But a Two-Shot Missile Launcher would be way cooler. I think those exist, anyway.


Danse is annoying, but I like the BOS missions, so I put up with him.



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At first I was all, "What the hell just happened here?" because I couldn't find the source. Then I realized it was a Glowing One hidden somewhere doing a radiation AoE.



My Murkwater site ripped this queen to shreds, yo. I put up some missile launchers now, too, so it's going to go even better next time.



A villager on a pommel horse, lmao. Whatever keeps the settlers happy in their Chernobyl tombs...err, concrete housing.



Yeahhhhhhhhhh, I found Ron Staples. I've been having good luck finding LV4 merchants lately, although I missed my chance with the doctor. This site just a bit near Greygarden's water planet is gold, Jerry! Gold!



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Man, legendary glowing gulpers have been one-shotting me. =(

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