Busy Taxes Sunday
Feb. 26th, 2023 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickThough at least it wasn't as cold as yesterday -- the snow has all melted away, at least for the moment. We're due some wild weather tomorrow night, though -- we'll see if it's rain, snow, or some weird mix! And if it's enough to keep me out of work for a bit. . .even a delay would be nice! :p
But enough about the weather -- how'd the rest of my day go?
Taxes: All sorted – decided to get them done right away once I’d finished my breakfast smoothie and made my bed and all that jazz. Not a GREAT refund, but then again I never get anything amazing for my taxes, so. . .at least it’s done, and didn’t take more than an hour!
Tumblr: I got a small head start on the Chill Valicer Save Ultimate Winterfest Update for Victor Luvs Alice this week last night by making sure to upload all eighty pictures and do some starter text for each of the resultant eight posts before bed. Then, after finishing up the FO4 Playthrough Progression (below), I dove pretty much straight into getting the text and tags for the first four of those posts done – I figured, as long as I had half of the drafts ready to go by this evening, I’d be in good shape. And, happily, I got those four posts all sorted before my workout, yay! :) Never got a chance to properly catch up on the dash or tags, though, unfortunately. . .or that thread I was having with Stretch-Time about the Phantom Valicer AU. Hopefully I can do some catching up after work this week instead!
As for Valice Multiverse, another quiet night, with just one ask reply. *shrug* I’ll take it!
Fallout 4: Did this shortly after lunch, and had a productive couple of hours in the game – the Warwick Homestead is now safe and allied with the Minutemen! And it only took two reloads to get there! XD Granted, though, said reloads were NOT the fault of the Warwick quest. . .let me explain –
A) Started out on the Warwick farm, where I had Victor say hi to the strangely-attired Roger Warwick (the guy was wearing pants and a harness and nothing else – enjoying showing your pecs off, Roger?). Roger said he was glad to see him and told him about his farm, explaining that the place used to be an old sewage plant, so they have some of the richest soil in the Commonwealth! The trade-off, of course, being the smell. I had Victor be polite and ask what kind of crops they grew – mostly mutfruit and tatos. That transitioned in Roger explaining about how super mutants came along and wrecked their last crop, and how he didn’t think he could turn to the Minutemen because he’d heard about all the infighting. Victor assured him those days were over with and said he’d take care of the super mutants, and Roger marked the place on his map. Fortunately, it wasn’t too far away – the Wilson Atomatoys Factory, almost a straight shot west from the Poseidon Energy plant! Nice! I had Victor pick a few crops (a bit of mutfruit and a LOT of tatos) and head out, following the road back down past the wrecked ship and the bug-filled beach to Poseidon Energy. . .
B) And this is where I realized, “Oh shit. Wilson Atomatoys is in QUINCY.” AKA, the ruins VERY MUCH controlled by the Gunners. Lead by multiple people in power armor. *wince* It didn’t look to be in the thick of their base, though, and I figured if I was sneaky and avoided the main elevated highway, I could make it.
And so Victor and Nick began their creeping, tracing a path along the edge of some nearby marshland (where I did a quick save after picking up some bloodleaf – need that for teas!). I made it safely across the chunk of collapsed highway I considered the “border” and over to a house that looked like it had people in it. . .
C) And when I got up to it, the game rewarded me for finding the Peabody House! :D AKA where the parents of a certain “Kid In A Fridge” live. I had Victor go in and say hello to the inhabitants (whom, to my shock and amusement, were named Matt and Carol, aka the same names I chose for my Smiler’s parents), but Matt just told him to back off and that they didn’t have anything worth stealing. I decided not to pester them further and had Victor head back out, creeping some more along the edges of the swampland to a broken-down house nearby which had some Jet in it. From there it was up closer to the edges of Quincy itself. . .
D) And that is when I fell victim to hubris, because I happened to note that, very nearby, was the Quincy police station, aka one of the police stations I have to hit for Nick’s companion quest “Long Time Coming” to get more Eddie Winter holotapes. I was like “Hmmm, maybe I can sneak in to grab the tape without attracting attention?” and had Victor crabwalk around the side of a factory with some garbage squirrels nipping at his heels. . .
Only to get the attention of the giant Gunner camp DIRECTLY BEHIND the police station. Including their power armored leader, Tessa. Yeah, fuck that noise – reload!
E) Back at the lake where I was gathering bloodleaf, I directed Victor to the Peabody place, then over to the wrecked house nearby to pick up the Jet (and a blood pack I’d missed), figuring that maybe I could pop a Stealth Boy instead to get into the police station –
Nope. Suddenly set upon by some Gunner privates. No freaking clue where they came from. I SAID, FUCK THAT NOISE, RELOAD!
F) Okay, obviously going CLOSER to Quincy is not working – back at the waterside, I had Victor pick up his bloodleaf, tag the Peabody place, then go the OTHER way and start taking the LONG way around to the Atomatoys factory, avoiding the wrecked house and the town altogether by skirting the far edge of the swamp.
NO DICE, STILL SET UPON BY SOME GUNNER PRIVATES LURKING IN THE WEEDS. They weren’t particularly high level, though, and it was only like three or four of them, armed with things like batons. Plus Victor and Nick ended up having some surprise help in the form of a random encounter – Clinton, who is roaming the Commonwealth with his daughter Charlie and had stopped at a nearby campsite. Charlie was nowhere to be seen (I am concerned, but – you can’t actually kill kids in this particular Fallout entry, right?), but Clinton was only too happy to use his laser pistol to help take down the final Gunner Private that was pestering Victor and Nick. *huffs* Damn Gunners. . .I have to get Preston back at some point and bring him here for a nice cathartic clear-out.
G) Anyway, once that was all sorted, Victor and Nick continued across the swamp toward the Atomatoys factory – only for me to spot a mysterious little house tucked away down a slope. A house with some nasty ghouls in it. Fortunately, Victor and his Two-Shot were able to easily pick off the first couple wandering around, and VATS let Victor know about a couple more lying in wait inside, allow him to just shoot them before they could get up. He found some dead settlers (including their dead cat :( ) and a bit of useful junk in the main room, then started down the hallway to the second room, where he encountered some more ghouls –
Including a Legendary Putrid Glowing One. I consider it VERY lucky that Victor was able to pull off a sneak attack against this thing, as it looked BAD. O.O But he managed to kill it without taking a hit! And got a Bolstering Shadowed Leather Left Arm for his trouble. *grumbles* Can you possibly throw me some better items, game? There was also another dead settler, and an Expert-locked safe that Victor wasn’t able to pick just yet – maybe next level! To that end, I had him stop for a second to use their cookpot to cook some stuff up, then (after a food break) use his portable workbench to scrap some of the spare weapons he’d picked up. And rearrange his inventory with Nick, because he needs fiber optics if he’s going to improve some of these laser weapons, damn it.
H) With that sorted, the boys left the house and headed up the hill, following the quest marker to Wilson Atomatoys! Victor and Nick were able to get around the side without being spotted, but while Victor was trying to clear out some of the frag mines scattered around the front of the building, the super mutants caught wind of them and started attacking. Fortunately, I’d had Victor pull out Righteous Authority before arrival, and he was able to take care of most of them pretty easily. The Super Mutant Master shooting from the doorway proved to be a bit harder. . .as did Big Mack, the dude I presume to be the leader of the clan as he had an actual name AND A FREAKING MINIGUN. (Though, hilariously, he was not the super mutant I was SUPPOSED to kill to complete the quest – that was the Master. Who, yes, was hard, but didn’t have A MINIGUN.) Victor and Nick managed to take them all out without dying, though (in Victor’s case, with the help of some hastily-consumed steaks and tea), and after clearing out the frag mines, made it into the building and took out the remaining two mutants inside. Victor went around looting whatever seemed useful, including an ID card off the Master’s ashes that let him into a back store room. Not that much to find except Giddyup Buttercup mechanical horse toys, though – which, granted, are GREAT if you need gears and screws, I gotta say. I also had Victor chow down on some “Noah’s Ark Upper Deck” (a mix of high-quality meats like Yao Gaui, Radstag, and Deathclaw) to get his health back up and increase his carry capacity – for some reason, this made him scream like he was on Psycho. o.O Which I know is NOT part of that meal, so. . . Anyway, after exploring all the levels (including the roof) and getting everything useful, I had Victor head to the second floor and cook a bunch of meat (including more of his mirelurk meat) until he was exhausted, then dropped the tent and had him hit the sack.
I) He woke up the next morning in-game around 5 AM, and I decided that I wanted to have him head back to the Warwick Homestead to turn in the quest first-thing. After packing up all their stuff, he and Nick headed out and into the swamplands, keeping low and cutting through the actual water as much as possible to avoid detection. This worked VERY well, and they were able to make it all the way across the border and back behind Poseidon Energy without any trouble. Victor took a moment to get some more bloodleaf from the water behind Poseidon, then spotted some ghouls hiding under the road in a storm drain kinda thing and shot them both with the Two-Shot before they could even get up. And then it was back on the road and back to the Homestead, where he tracked down Warwick to let him know the good news. Roger thanked him, gave him 100 caps, and became an allied settlement, w00!
And so the playsession ended with me setting up a few preliminary turrets for defense and planting a few extra crops around the place (one corn, a couple of melons and carrots, that sort of thing). Next time, I’ll probably make the settlement look a little nicer, set up some toilets and such, then see if just MAYBE I can make it to Nordhagen to try and do their radiant quest. And maybe try again with the Quincy police station, just because I DO have some Stealth Boys, and I don’t think that was necessarily a bad idea. Fingers crossed!
Writing: Naturally it was another Sunday spent updating the FO4 Playthrough Progression with the latest adventures of Victor, Nick, and Alice. Their adventures were much like those described above, with a couple of key differences –
A) Victor actually spoke a little more to the Peabodys and was warned about the dangerous people in the swamp, meaning he decided to take the long way around from the start and not risk getting close to the police station (you’re smarter than I am, Victor) – they also backtracked to Poseidon Energy to drop off Alice in her sleeping bag, as it was sunny weather and Victor didn’t think she’d be comfortable being dragged through the swamp and getting all wet;
B) Clinton had his daughter Charlie with him (unlike in the game), and they were being harassed by the Gunners instead of them just popping out of the scenery, to my annoyance – and once the Gunners were taken out, Victor recruited them and sent them to the Warwick Homestead, figuring Roger wasn’t going to say no to some extra hands after he previously mentioned needing some to grow more crops. There IS actually a mod that can let you do this on the Nexus (made by the same modder who made the “adopt the wounded mongrel” mod I used to get Mutt to the Red Rocket), and not gonna lie, I am now a bit tempted to get it. . .
Other than that, though, and “Big Mack” being explicitly the leader and the guy Victor needed to kill in the super mutant clan, things went pretty much how they did above, with Victor and Nick sneaking across the Quincy swamps, taking out that hidden house full of ghouls, and clearing the super mutants from the factory before sleeping overnight there and heading back to Warwick’s in the morning. Pretty easy stuff!
YouTube: Got the two necessary videos watched this evening – mostly because I was smart and got to them a bit earlier than usual, giving myself plenty of time to view them. :) Occasionally I have something resembling time management!
A) First up, from the Subs, we had GrayStillPlays and “When you turn worms into weapons,” aka Gray playing goofy browser game Effing Worms 2! This is a game where you control a strange mutant, possibly alien worm with bat wings, and you must consume more and more “enemies” (people, cows, chickens, and nyan cats) to increase your size and your speed and find ways to evolve (like being able to absorb nutrients from the ground, so whenever you’re underground you take no damage, or getting shredder teeth to take out tanks and planes and have them heal you). Gray quickly found the exact set of combos that worked for him (a bunch of health increases paired with flaming jets and the ability to vacuum in tasty tasty humans on a rampage), took out a bunch of airliners, and eventually made his worm so powerful that it grew in size to cover the entire screen. He sounded like a kid in a candy store when he managed THAT feat. XD I’m kind of hoping there’s more in the series, because him playing these kinds of games is often really good fun (like his Duck Life series).
B) And second up, as per usual every Sunday, we had Jon of Many A True Nerd and his Fallout content – “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 18 - Ant That A Kick In The Head!” This episode was all about exploring the northwest corner of the Fallout 3 map, a lonely place with many strange and unusual locations, created when the devs last-minute decided the map was far too small and expanded it out. The enemies here are really tough, the ground is really rocky and uneven making it hard to traverse, and there is apparently just ONE mission that might take you to this corner of the map, to one of the strangest locations in the game. Jon wasn’t doing that mission yet (that might in fact be part of next week’s episode) – instead, he and Wanda took us on a tour of the following –
I. Five Axles Rest Stop – A location given to Wanda by the people of Arefu (before Jon got desperate to even out her karma via murder spree after doing too many good things to people), this is a simple ring of four trucks where a bunch of raiders are camped out. Jon was easily able to take them out with Wanda’s amazing crit capabilities and That Gun, and collected the game’s shortest holotape, a trucker calling out to other truckers on his CB radio. The reason this is interesting is, beside it being the shortest holotape, the voice on said tape is in fact that of lead designer Emil Pagliarulo, who happened to have the Boston accent they wanted. Jon informed us that there was supposed to be another, longer tape that contained the actual conversation between him and another trucker that led to the trucks being turned into a rest stop ring in the wake of the apocalypse, but for some reason the full version never made it out of the data files and into the game itself. Still, fun little Easter egg and interesting location!
II. Shalebridge – what looks like an empty stretch of land with perhaps a few giant ants on it is in fact the site of a brave colony being terrorized by invaders. Just, neither the colony or the invaders are human. Go down the giant ant hill surrounded by nice little glowing mushrooms, and you’ll find a colony of friendly little mutated forager ants being attacked by bigger, meaner invader ants trying to destroy their eggs. If you like, you can help the forager ants – killing the immediate invaders; healing their injured eggs with a stimpack (if your Medicine skill is high enough); and then attacking the other ant colony in the area and killing all the invaders and their queen (who has some worrying physics glitches if you hit her just right, as Jon found out). The reward for doing so is getting access to a certain mound in the forager ant colony that has Ant Nectar stored in it, a potent drug that will boost your Strength stat by FOUR POINTS (in return for -2 Charisma and -2 Intelligence, mind). Even Buffout only boosts it by two points! And the more you help the forager ants, the faster the mound respawns the Ant Nectar. Jon feels like the entire little unmarked ant question is a gentle joke regarding how the player character in an RPG usually deals with a town that’s in trouble – swooping in, murdering the threat all on their own, and providing medical assistance as necessary. All that’s changed is that the grateful recipients of your help aren’t even human. XD It’s very fun!
III. Satcom Array NW-07C – one of a trio of satcom arrays in this area of the world, this one actually changes depending on when you visit it. If you’ve done “The Waters Of Life” in the main quest and gotten the Enclave to spawn in properly, this place will be a proper Enclave stronghold. Jon HASN’T done that quest, however (I don’t think he’s even LOOKED at the main quest since the first few episodes), so the place is in good condition, but empty. Jon’s intent in coming to the place was to see if he could get an Enclave soldier or two to spawn in early, because sometimes they will do so if you explore the place thoroughly enough. Sadly, though, that was a no-go today, awww. There are also two items of interest on the elevated highway beside it – the first one being a truck full of skeletons, with a holotape showing that they were Chinese-Americans who had been rounded up to be taken to some sort of internment camp (because pre-War America was horrible); the second one being an unfortunate scientist being exploded out of the red truck he was working in, because he was fiddling around with energy weapons and mini-nukes without really knowing what he was doing. Get the corpse and you do get a skill book, though!
IV. Dickerson Tabernacle Chapel – another location given to Wanda by the citizens of Arefu before she killed them seeking neutral karma, this chapel is the home of a (very glitchy and physics-defying) drifter who used to be part of Oasis but was kicked out for unknown reasons (you can’t ask the people there why) and instead holed up in the remains of this chapel. Jon killed him for his gun, the Reservist Rifle, which is a unique variant of the sniper rifle. It does pretty much the exact same damage, but it has a smaller clip (three bullets versus five), with the trade-off being it fires faster. So if you need to get off a trio of quick shots, this is your gun. Also worth noting that there is a shovel and a lot of graves (fresh and not so fresh) around that you can loot if you are feeling so inclined, which Jon was.
V. WKML Broadcast Station – a radio station that Jon called kind of the “boss” of the random radio signals you can find dotted around the Capital Wasteland (there are a few more standard ones, but none of them lead anywhere particularly interesting according to him). This one cannot be activated directly on any of the towers outside – instead, you have to nip into the radio station itself and activate it from there. Follow the signal under an outcropping of rock to find the “sealed cistern,” and you find the final resting place of at least one of the employees, along with some water and the Explosives Bobblehead! So that’s nice. :) Jon also said that there was a “Deathclaw Sanctuary” nearby, but that he wasn’t going THERE until the Enclave had spawned in because – well, I presume because he wants the backup to shoot the damn deathclaws I believe are there. XD
VI. Satcom Array NW-05A – the second of the satcom arrays, this one is held by Talon Company, the mercenaries whom Jon is trying to avoid pissing off by having Wanda keep neutral karma. Jon’s first assault on the tower was stymied by being attacked by a bear before being blown up by one of the guards outside and his missile launcher; his SECOND assault, however, got Wanda a level-up! Her second in the episode – and while the first level-up netted her the “Action Girl” perk, this one allowed her to get her Lockpick skill almost maxed out. Which allowed her to take a quick detour back to the shack that overlooks Rockbreaker’s Last Gas with its Very Hard locked locker and break it open for the Victory Rifle! Again, a unique sniper variant with pretty much the same damage as the standard – but a KNOCKBACK effect on the bullets. Meaning Wanda now had essentially the sniper version of her “And Stay Back!” perk for shotguns. Jon was VERY pleased. :D
Anyway, that side trip over with, Jon was able to go back to NW-05A, and get inside to clear out the interior (which was – tricky, thanks to some VERY MEAN turrets). His target was a ghoul scientist who was also living in the tower, and had the “Highwater Trousers” activation code on her. What’s Highwater Trousers, you ask?
An orbital nuclear weapons platform that she found with the actual satellite array and was studying. The thing is parked above them and, if activated, will rain down nuclear death upon the area right next to you (as Jon demonstrated with the control terminal) – you can’t move it because you have no coordinates it will accept. It’s a good way to clear out a certain area of enemies, and Jon considers it a great reminder of just how awful the pre-War world was – there was essentially Nuclear Armageddon around every corner, and now all of these weapons are just sitting there, waiting for the wrong idiot to find them. . .
VII. Satcom Array NN-03d – the final satcom array, three full towers worth of raiders! This one is notable for being the most complex of the three arrays (having three accessible towers with stuff in, though you can only get into Tower B through the basement in Tower C, or across a homemade skybridge stretching from Tower A), and having the most last-minute in-jokes crammed in because this was one of the last areas to be designed and the people making it decided to have some fun. :P There are objects balanced in strange ways (like three missiles standing up perfectly atop of a door, or a bunch of sporks on a railing inside Tower B); an attempt at dominoes in Tower C involving beer bottles stacked along the side of a staircase and a toy car at the top to trigger it; a drug lab that seems to indicate that if you give teddy bears enough drugs, they will become giant teddy bears which must then be boarded up in a separate room; a whole chess set made from miniaturized assets (with various booze bottles, ammo packs, and garden gnomes standing in for the various pieces); and the most famous Easter egg of all – a door hidden in the rocky landscape around the back of the place that LOOKS like it’s going to be a secret entrance. . .but when you open it, all you see is a concrete wall with “FUCK YOU” written on it in green paint. There are two notable things about this door – one, its existence is because it was SUPPOSED to be an actual back entrance into a secret basement, but the developers forgot to actually, you know, make the basement it led to, and only discovered this weeks before the game was supposed to be completed. So they decided to make it a joke instead, and hence the wall and its message was born. Two, the actual font of the “FUCK YOU” is the handwriting of one Nathan Purkeypile, a developer on all three Bethesda Fallout games (3 & 4 as a world artist, 76 as lead artist), who turned it into a font to use for the graffiti. Which means that pretty much all the graffiti across the three Bethesda Fallout games is in his handwriting! Now that’s an interesting legacy!
So yeah, lot of strange and unusual places this Sunday! I thoroughly enjoyed it – Jon really does make the Fallout franchise more fun. :) Looking forward to whichever quest he’s starting next week!
Workout: Back on the bike tonight, and as I indicated yesterday, my video of choice was the GrayStillPlays compilation I nearly forgot about – “I spent the last 3 years finding the most painful games,” aka clips from some of his favorite games for breaking bones and getting points. As per usual with these videos, the first section was in fact some new content – Gray playing Bonebreaker Tycoon, where you send various people down various mountains and can “spectate” them in turns, dragging them into the scenery to smash up their bones and earn money to buy different mountains, more people to fling down said mountains, and – well, I guess DOWNGRADES for those people so they get injured and earn you money way more easily. Gray was deeply impressed by how SPECIFIC the report on the bone-breaking was (it actually goes into detail about what body parts get smashed), and refused to quit until he’d given one of his unfortunate “employees” (named things like “Plz No,” “iloveturkey,” and “Vanessa”) brain damage. As you might imagine, he wracked up quite a lot of cash in this quest. XD The rest of the video is clips from past bone-breaking triumphs – I’ve already watched one of his favorite “super hero stick figure bone-breaking game” clips, and am in the middle of his very first Skate 3 video, where he is looking to get the permanent high score on the “Hall of Meat.” And find a way to send his middle-aged doofus player character to space. XD Ahhh, good times, good times. . .
Other: And I JUST finished answering Moose’s messages, w00!
w00! While I didn't get to everything I would have LIKED to get to, at least I wrapped up all the most important stuff successfully. Hopefully this week I can find a way to get to some of the stuff I missed, like properly catching up on tumblr. *nods* But for now, gotta head to bed, because I definitely have no chance of getting tomorrow off due to weather -- the storm, in whatever form, isn't hitting until Monday night. Night all!
But enough about the weather -- how'd the rest of my day go?
Taxes: All sorted – decided to get them done right away once I’d finished my breakfast smoothie and made my bed and all that jazz. Not a GREAT refund, but then again I never get anything amazing for my taxes, so. . .at least it’s done, and didn’t take more than an hour!
Tumblr: I got a small head start on the Chill Valicer Save Ultimate Winterfest Update for Victor Luvs Alice this week last night by making sure to upload all eighty pictures and do some starter text for each of the resultant eight posts before bed. Then, after finishing up the FO4 Playthrough Progression (below), I dove pretty much straight into getting the text and tags for the first four of those posts done – I figured, as long as I had half of the drafts ready to go by this evening, I’d be in good shape. And, happily, I got those four posts all sorted before my workout, yay! :) Never got a chance to properly catch up on the dash or tags, though, unfortunately. . .or that thread I was having with Stretch-Time about the Phantom Valicer AU. Hopefully I can do some catching up after work this week instead!
As for Valice Multiverse, another quiet night, with just one ask reply. *shrug* I’ll take it!
Fallout 4: Did this shortly after lunch, and had a productive couple of hours in the game – the Warwick Homestead is now safe and allied with the Minutemen! And it only took two reloads to get there! XD Granted, though, said reloads were NOT the fault of the Warwick quest. . .let me explain –
A) Started out on the Warwick farm, where I had Victor say hi to the strangely-attired Roger Warwick (the guy was wearing pants and a harness and nothing else – enjoying showing your pecs off, Roger?). Roger said he was glad to see him and told him about his farm, explaining that the place used to be an old sewage plant, so they have some of the richest soil in the Commonwealth! The trade-off, of course, being the smell. I had Victor be polite and ask what kind of crops they grew – mostly mutfruit and tatos. That transitioned in Roger explaining about how super mutants came along and wrecked their last crop, and how he didn’t think he could turn to the Minutemen because he’d heard about all the infighting. Victor assured him those days were over with and said he’d take care of the super mutants, and Roger marked the place on his map. Fortunately, it wasn’t too far away – the Wilson Atomatoys Factory, almost a straight shot west from the Poseidon Energy plant! Nice! I had Victor pick a few crops (a bit of mutfruit and a LOT of tatos) and head out, following the road back down past the wrecked ship and the bug-filled beach to Poseidon Energy. . .
B) And this is where I realized, “Oh shit. Wilson Atomatoys is in QUINCY.” AKA, the ruins VERY MUCH controlled by the Gunners. Lead by multiple people in power armor. *wince* It didn’t look to be in the thick of their base, though, and I figured if I was sneaky and avoided the main elevated highway, I could make it.
And so Victor and Nick began their creeping, tracing a path along the edge of some nearby marshland (where I did a quick save after picking up some bloodleaf – need that for teas!). I made it safely across the chunk of collapsed highway I considered the “border” and over to a house that looked like it had people in it. . .
C) And when I got up to it, the game rewarded me for finding the Peabody House! :D AKA where the parents of a certain “Kid In A Fridge” live. I had Victor go in and say hello to the inhabitants (whom, to my shock and amusement, were named Matt and Carol, aka the same names I chose for my Smiler’s parents), but Matt just told him to back off and that they didn’t have anything worth stealing. I decided not to pester them further and had Victor head back out, creeping some more along the edges of the swampland to a broken-down house nearby which had some Jet in it. From there it was up closer to the edges of Quincy itself. . .
D) And that is when I fell victim to hubris, because I happened to note that, very nearby, was the Quincy police station, aka one of the police stations I have to hit for Nick’s companion quest “Long Time Coming” to get more Eddie Winter holotapes. I was like “Hmmm, maybe I can sneak in to grab the tape without attracting attention?” and had Victor crabwalk around the side of a factory with some garbage squirrels nipping at his heels. . .
Only to get the attention of the giant Gunner camp DIRECTLY BEHIND the police station. Including their power armored leader, Tessa. Yeah, fuck that noise – reload!
E) Back at the lake where I was gathering bloodleaf, I directed Victor to the Peabody place, then over to the wrecked house nearby to pick up the Jet (and a blood pack I’d missed), figuring that maybe I could pop a Stealth Boy instead to get into the police station –
Nope. Suddenly set upon by some Gunner privates. No freaking clue where they came from. I SAID, FUCK THAT NOISE, RELOAD!
F) Okay, obviously going CLOSER to Quincy is not working – back at the waterside, I had Victor pick up his bloodleaf, tag the Peabody place, then go the OTHER way and start taking the LONG way around to the Atomatoys factory, avoiding the wrecked house and the town altogether by skirting the far edge of the swamp.
NO DICE, STILL SET UPON BY SOME GUNNER PRIVATES LURKING IN THE WEEDS. They weren’t particularly high level, though, and it was only like three or four of them, armed with things like batons. Plus Victor and Nick ended up having some surprise help in the form of a random encounter – Clinton, who is roaming the Commonwealth with his daughter Charlie and had stopped at a nearby campsite. Charlie was nowhere to be seen (I am concerned, but – you can’t actually kill kids in this particular Fallout entry, right?), but Clinton was only too happy to use his laser pistol to help take down the final Gunner Private that was pestering Victor and Nick. *huffs* Damn Gunners. . .I have to get Preston back at some point and bring him here for a nice cathartic clear-out.
G) Anyway, once that was all sorted, Victor and Nick continued across the swamp toward the Atomatoys factory – only for me to spot a mysterious little house tucked away down a slope. A house with some nasty ghouls in it. Fortunately, Victor and his Two-Shot were able to easily pick off the first couple wandering around, and VATS let Victor know about a couple more lying in wait inside, allow him to just shoot them before they could get up. He found some dead settlers (including their dead cat :( ) and a bit of useful junk in the main room, then started down the hallway to the second room, where he encountered some more ghouls –
Including a Legendary Putrid Glowing One. I consider it VERY lucky that Victor was able to pull off a sneak attack against this thing, as it looked BAD. O.O But he managed to kill it without taking a hit! And got a Bolstering Shadowed Leather Left Arm for his trouble. *grumbles* Can you possibly throw me some better items, game? There was also another dead settler, and an Expert-locked safe that Victor wasn’t able to pick just yet – maybe next level! To that end, I had him stop for a second to use their cookpot to cook some stuff up, then (after a food break) use his portable workbench to scrap some of the spare weapons he’d picked up. And rearrange his inventory with Nick, because he needs fiber optics if he’s going to improve some of these laser weapons, damn it.
H) With that sorted, the boys left the house and headed up the hill, following the quest marker to Wilson Atomatoys! Victor and Nick were able to get around the side without being spotted, but while Victor was trying to clear out some of the frag mines scattered around the front of the building, the super mutants caught wind of them and started attacking. Fortunately, I’d had Victor pull out Righteous Authority before arrival, and he was able to take care of most of them pretty easily. The Super Mutant Master shooting from the doorway proved to be a bit harder. . .as did Big Mack, the dude I presume to be the leader of the clan as he had an actual name AND A FREAKING MINIGUN. (Though, hilariously, he was not the super mutant I was SUPPOSED to kill to complete the quest – that was the Master. Who, yes, was hard, but didn’t have A MINIGUN.) Victor and Nick managed to take them all out without dying, though (in Victor’s case, with the help of some hastily-consumed steaks and tea), and after clearing out the frag mines, made it into the building and took out the remaining two mutants inside. Victor went around looting whatever seemed useful, including an ID card off the Master’s ashes that let him into a back store room. Not that much to find except Giddyup Buttercup mechanical horse toys, though – which, granted, are GREAT if you need gears and screws, I gotta say. I also had Victor chow down on some “Noah’s Ark Upper Deck” (a mix of high-quality meats like Yao Gaui, Radstag, and Deathclaw) to get his health back up and increase his carry capacity – for some reason, this made him scream like he was on Psycho. o.O Which I know is NOT part of that meal, so. . . Anyway, after exploring all the levels (including the roof) and getting everything useful, I had Victor head to the second floor and cook a bunch of meat (including more of his mirelurk meat) until he was exhausted, then dropped the tent and had him hit the sack.
I) He woke up the next morning in-game around 5 AM, and I decided that I wanted to have him head back to the Warwick Homestead to turn in the quest first-thing. After packing up all their stuff, he and Nick headed out and into the swamplands, keeping low and cutting through the actual water as much as possible to avoid detection. This worked VERY well, and they were able to make it all the way across the border and back behind Poseidon Energy without any trouble. Victor took a moment to get some more bloodleaf from the water behind Poseidon, then spotted some ghouls hiding under the road in a storm drain kinda thing and shot them both with the Two-Shot before they could even get up. And then it was back on the road and back to the Homestead, where he tracked down Warwick to let him know the good news. Roger thanked him, gave him 100 caps, and became an allied settlement, w00!
And so the playsession ended with me setting up a few preliminary turrets for defense and planting a few extra crops around the place (one corn, a couple of melons and carrots, that sort of thing). Next time, I’ll probably make the settlement look a little nicer, set up some toilets and such, then see if just MAYBE I can make it to Nordhagen to try and do their radiant quest. And maybe try again with the Quincy police station, just because I DO have some Stealth Boys, and I don’t think that was necessarily a bad idea. Fingers crossed!
Writing: Naturally it was another Sunday spent updating the FO4 Playthrough Progression with the latest adventures of Victor, Nick, and Alice. Their adventures were much like those described above, with a couple of key differences –
A) Victor actually spoke a little more to the Peabodys and was warned about the dangerous people in the swamp, meaning he decided to take the long way around from the start and not risk getting close to the police station (you’re smarter than I am, Victor) – they also backtracked to Poseidon Energy to drop off Alice in her sleeping bag, as it was sunny weather and Victor didn’t think she’d be comfortable being dragged through the swamp and getting all wet;
B) Clinton had his daughter Charlie with him (unlike in the game), and they were being harassed by the Gunners instead of them just popping out of the scenery, to my annoyance – and once the Gunners were taken out, Victor recruited them and sent them to the Warwick Homestead, figuring Roger wasn’t going to say no to some extra hands after he previously mentioned needing some to grow more crops. There IS actually a mod that can let you do this on the Nexus (made by the same modder who made the “adopt the wounded mongrel” mod I used to get Mutt to the Red Rocket), and not gonna lie, I am now a bit tempted to get it. . .
Other than that, though, and “Big Mack” being explicitly the leader and the guy Victor needed to kill in the super mutant clan, things went pretty much how they did above, with Victor and Nick sneaking across the Quincy swamps, taking out that hidden house full of ghouls, and clearing the super mutants from the factory before sleeping overnight there and heading back to Warwick’s in the morning. Pretty easy stuff!
YouTube: Got the two necessary videos watched this evening – mostly because I was smart and got to them a bit earlier than usual, giving myself plenty of time to view them. :) Occasionally I have something resembling time management!
A) First up, from the Subs, we had GrayStillPlays and “When you turn worms into weapons,” aka Gray playing goofy browser game Effing Worms 2! This is a game where you control a strange mutant, possibly alien worm with bat wings, and you must consume more and more “enemies” (people, cows, chickens, and nyan cats) to increase your size and your speed and find ways to evolve (like being able to absorb nutrients from the ground, so whenever you’re underground you take no damage, or getting shredder teeth to take out tanks and planes and have them heal you). Gray quickly found the exact set of combos that worked for him (a bunch of health increases paired with flaming jets and the ability to vacuum in tasty tasty humans on a rampage), took out a bunch of airliners, and eventually made his worm so powerful that it grew in size to cover the entire screen. He sounded like a kid in a candy store when he managed THAT feat. XD I’m kind of hoping there’s more in the series, because him playing these kinds of games is often really good fun (like his Duck Life series).
B) And second up, as per usual every Sunday, we had Jon of Many A True Nerd and his Fallout content – “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 18 - Ant That A Kick In The Head!” This episode was all about exploring the northwest corner of the Fallout 3 map, a lonely place with many strange and unusual locations, created when the devs last-minute decided the map was far too small and expanded it out. The enemies here are really tough, the ground is really rocky and uneven making it hard to traverse, and there is apparently just ONE mission that might take you to this corner of the map, to one of the strangest locations in the game. Jon wasn’t doing that mission yet (that might in fact be part of next week’s episode) – instead, he and Wanda took us on a tour of the following –
I. Five Axles Rest Stop – A location given to Wanda by the people of Arefu (before Jon got desperate to even out her karma via murder spree after doing too many good things to people), this is a simple ring of four trucks where a bunch of raiders are camped out. Jon was easily able to take them out with Wanda’s amazing crit capabilities and That Gun, and collected the game’s shortest holotape, a trucker calling out to other truckers on his CB radio. The reason this is interesting is, beside it being the shortest holotape, the voice on said tape is in fact that of lead designer Emil Pagliarulo, who happened to have the Boston accent they wanted. Jon informed us that there was supposed to be another, longer tape that contained the actual conversation between him and another trucker that led to the trucks being turned into a rest stop ring in the wake of the apocalypse, but for some reason the full version never made it out of the data files and into the game itself. Still, fun little Easter egg and interesting location!
II. Shalebridge – what looks like an empty stretch of land with perhaps a few giant ants on it is in fact the site of a brave colony being terrorized by invaders. Just, neither the colony or the invaders are human. Go down the giant ant hill surrounded by nice little glowing mushrooms, and you’ll find a colony of friendly little mutated forager ants being attacked by bigger, meaner invader ants trying to destroy their eggs. If you like, you can help the forager ants – killing the immediate invaders; healing their injured eggs with a stimpack (if your Medicine skill is high enough); and then attacking the other ant colony in the area and killing all the invaders and their queen (who has some worrying physics glitches if you hit her just right, as Jon found out). The reward for doing so is getting access to a certain mound in the forager ant colony that has Ant Nectar stored in it, a potent drug that will boost your Strength stat by FOUR POINTS (in return for -2 Charisma and -2 Intelligence, mind). Even Buffout only boosts it by two points! And the more you help the forager ants, the faster the mound respawns the Ant Nectar. Jon feels like the entire little unmarked ant question is a gentle joke regarding how the player character in an RPG usually deals with a town that’s in trouble – swooping in, murdering the threat all on their own, and providing medical assistance as necessary. All that’s changed is that the grateful recipients of your help aren’t even human. XD It’s very fun!
III. Satcom Array NW-07C – one of a trio of satcom arrays in this area of the world, this one actually changes depending on when you visit it. If you’ve done “The Waters Of Life” in the main quest and gotten the Enclave to spawn in properly, this place will be a proper Enclave stronghold. Jon HASN’T done that quest, however (I don’t think he’s even LOOKED at the main quest since the first few episodes), so the place is in good condition, but empty. Jon’s intent in coming to the place was to see if he could get an Enclave soldier or two to spawn in early, because sometimes they will do so if you explore the place thoroughly enough. Sadly, though, that was a no-go today, awww. There are also two items of interest on the elevated highway beside it – the first one being a truck full of skeletons, with a holotape showing that they were Chinese-Americans who had been rounded up to be taken to some sort of internment camp (because pre-War America was horrible); the second one being an unfortunate scientist being exploded out of the red truck he was working in, because he was fiddling around with energy weapons and mini-nukes without really knowing what he was doing. Get the corpse and you do get a skill book, though!
IV. Dickerson Tabernacle Chapel – another location given to Wanda by the citizens of Arefu before she killed them seeking neutral karma, this chapel is the home of a (very glitchy and physics-defying) drifter who used to be part of Oasis but was kicked out for unknown reasons (you can’t ask the people there why) and instead holed up in the remains of this chapel. Jon killed him for his gun, the Reservist Rifle, which is a unique variant of the sniper rifle. It does pretty much the exact same damage, but it has a smaller clip (three bullets versus five), with the trade-off being it fires faster. So if you need to get off a trio of quick shots, this is your gun. Also worth noting that there is a shovel and a lot of graves (fresh and not so fresh) around that you can loot if you are feeling so inclined, which Jon was.
V. WKML Broadcast Station – a radio station that Jon called kind of the “boss” of the random radio signals you can find dotted around the Capital Wasteland (there are a few more standard ones, but none of them lead anywhere particularly interesting according to him). This one cannot be activated directly on any of the towers outside – instead, you have to nip into the radio station itself and activate it from there. Follow the signal under an outcropping of rock to find the “sealed cistern,” and you find the final resting place of at least one of the employees, along with some water and the Explosives Bobblehead! So that’s nice. :) Jon also said that there was a “Deathclaw Sanctuary” nearby, but that he wasn’t going THERE until the Enclave had spawned in because – well, I presume because he wants the backup to shoot the damn deathclaws I believe are there. XD
VI. Satcom Array NW-05A – the second of the satcom arrays, this one is held by Talon Company, the mercenaries whom Jon is trying to avoid pissing off by having Wanda keep neutral karma. Jon’s first assault on the tower was stymied by being attacked by a bear before being blown up by one of the guards outside and his missile launcher; his SECOND assault, however, got Wanda a level-up! Her second in the episode – and while the first level-up netted her the “Action Girl” perk, this one allowed her to get her Lockpick skill almost maxed out. Which allowed her to take a quick detour back to the shack that overlooks Rockbreaker’s Last Gas with its Very Hard locked locker and break it open for the Victory Rifle! Again, a unique sniper variant with pretty much the same damage as the standard – but a KNOCKBACK effect on the bullets. Meaning Wanda now had essentially the sniper version of her “And Stay Back!” perk for shotguns. Jon was VERY pleased. :D
Anyway, that side trip over with, Jon was able to go back to NW-05A, and get inside to clear out the interior (which was – tricky, thanks to some VERY MEAN turrets). His target was a ghoul scientist who was also living in the tower, and had the “Highwater Trousers” activation code on her. What’s Highwater Trousers, you ask?
An orbital nuclear weapons platform that she found with the actual satellite array and was studying. The thing is parked above them and, if activated, will rain down nuclear death upon the area right next to you (as Jon demonstrated with the control terminal) – you can’t move it because you have no coordinates it will accept. It’s a good way to clear out a certain area of enemies, and Jon considers it a great reminder of just how awful the pre-War world was – there was essentially Nuclear Armageddon around every corner, and now all of these weapons are just sitting there, waiting for the wrong idiot to find them. . .
VII. Satcom Array NN-03d – the final satcom array, three full towers worth of raiders! This one is notable for being the most complex of the three arrays (having three accessible towers with stuff in, though you can only get into Tower B through the basement in Tower C, or across a homemade skybridge stretching from Tower A), and having the most last-minute in-jokes crammed in because this was one of the last areas to be designed and the people making it decided to have some fun. :P There are objects balanced in strange ways (like three missiles standing up perfectly atop of a door, or a bunch of sporks on a railing inside Tower B); an attempt at dominoes in Tower C involving beer bottles stacked along the side of a staircase and a toy car at the top to trigger it; a drug lab that seems to indicate that if you give teddy bears enough drugs, they will become giant teddy bears which must then be boarded up in a separate room; a whole chess set made from miniaturized assets (with various booze bottles, ammo packs, and garden gnomes standing in for the various pieces); and the most famous Easter egg of all – a door hidden in the rocky landscape around the back of the place that LOOKS like it’s going to be a secret entrance. . .but when you open it, all you see is a concrete wall with “FUCK YOU” written on it in green paint. There are two notable things about this door – one, its existence is because it was SUPPOSED to be an actual back entrance into a secret basement, but the developers forgot to actually, you know, make the basement it led to, and only discovered this weeks before the game was supposed to be completed. So they decided to make it a joke instead, and hence the wall and its message was born. Two, the actual font of the “FUCK YOU” is the handwriting of one Nathan Purkeypile, a developer on all three Bethesda Fallout games (3 & 4 as a world artist, 76 as lead artist), who turned it into a font to use for the graffiti. Which means that pretty much all the graffiti across the three Bethesda Fallout games is in his handwriting! Now that’s an interesting legacy!
So yeah, lot of strange and unusual places this Sunday! I thoroughly enjoyed it – Jon really does make the Fallout franchise more fun. :) Looking forward to whichever quest he’s starting next week!
Workout: Back on the bike tonight, and as I indicated yesterday, my video of choice was the GrayStillPlays compilation I nearly forgot about – “I spent the last 3 years finding the most painful games,” aka clips from some of his favorite games for breaking bones and getting points. As per usual with these videos, the first section was in fact some new content – Gray playing Bonebreaker Tycoon, where you send various people down various mountains and can “spectate” them in turns, dragging them into the scenery to smash up their bones and earn money to buy different mountains, more people to fling down said mountains, and – well, I guess DOWNGRADES for those people so they get injured and earn you money way more easily. Gray was deeply impressed by how SPECIFIC the report on the bone-breaking was (it actually goes into detail about what body parts get smashed), and refused to quit until he’d given one of his unfortunate “employees” (named things like “Plz No,” “iloveturkey,” and “Vanessa”) brain damage. As you might imagine, he wracked up quite a lot of cash in this quest. XD The rest of the video is clips from past bone-breaking triumphs – I’ve already watched one of his favorite “super hero stick figure bone-breaking game” clips, and am in the middle of his very first Skate 3 video, where he is looking to get the permanent high score on the “Hall of Meat.” And find a way to send his middle-aged doofus player character to space. XD Ahhh, good times, good times. . .
Other: And I JUST finished answering Moose’s messages, w00!
w00! While I didn't get to everything I would have LIKED to get to, at least I wrapped up all the most important stuff successfully. Hopefully this week I can find a way to get to some of the stuff I missed, like properly catching up on tumblr. *nods* But for now, gotta head to bed, because I definitely have no chance of getting tomorrow off due to weather -- the storm, in whatever form, isn't hitting until Monday night. Night all!
