Usual Very Late Sunday Update
May. 14th, 2023 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickYeah, just gonna throw the to-do list at you and head to bed, as I am running way behind my time --
Tumblr: After some distraction this morning (slow start with more Merge Dragons – got everything I wanted from the event, though – and learning from Mom how to make my homemade granola), I made it a point to get Squid’s birthday fic for Tuesday and the initial drafts for all seven of the Chill Valicer Save update posts this week into the Victor Luvs Alice drafts right after lunch, completing the full text-and-tags for the first of the latter before Fallout 4 times. I was hoping to get more done after my gaming, but no dice – I swear, my time management on Sundays is genuinely the absolute WORST lately. >( At least I’m in a good spot to get more done tomorrow, though. . .and for what it’s worth, my old friend Red on tumblr posted some very cute Valice fanart today, which they kindly sent me a message about: Shall we dance? :) Reblogged that to Victor Luvs Alice this evening AND put it in the queue for Valice Multiverse, so yeah, that worked. :D
Fallout 4: Today proved to be an all building, all the time day at Nordhagen Beach – mostly because I wanted to give them a better house, but finding proper flat ground on this beach is ROUGH. *grumbles* But here’s what I accomplished –
A) Cleaned up the remaining scrappable items on the beach (mostly driftwood and an old rowboat)
B) Built them an additional small shack, which I ended up putting on the right side of the gourd farm after not finding any better spots for it. Attempted to hide the fact that bits of it were floating over the dunes with crates and junk fencing, then built some concrete floors for it to sit on, before finally locating a proper FOUNDATION in the wood flooring section and managing to get THAT under it, creating a sort of “deck” off to the side
C) Set up a Desalinator 3000 with a generator at the edge of the beach in the water; put the junk fences I’d built to cover the floating bits of the shack next to that as a sort of protective “wall”
D) Built a garden plot and planted some corn, razorgrain, and tatos in it beside the gourd farm so the family had some variety to their diet. Realized that I should have built it INSIDE the fenced area and decided to scrap their old fence and build a nicer new wire one around the entire little farm area. Took some time, but I finally got something I was mostly happy with. The damn fence is floating in the front, but there’s not really much I can do about that (except maybe slot another foundation in, I guess? Didn’t think of that at the time. . .)
E) Realized that I couldn’t move the family’s beds from the tiny hut they were using as a bedroom to the new shack, so decided to turn that into a dining/living shack instead. Moved the cookpot over next to it, put a desk I found amongst the rubble against one wall by the windows, put in a kitchen table and some chairs, and TRIED to move the kids’ toys in there – only for a couple of them to drop through the floor onto the sand below. And then I nearly lost the toy truck entirely when it sank straight through a sand dune while I was retrieving it. Fortunately it Bethesda-ed back up to the top a little while later, so I was able to retrieve it and put it and the two blocks on the palette by the sleeping hut’s front door
F) Sent Victor to bed once his exhaustion got bad enough at 9:46 PM. . .only for him to wake up starving and dehydrated because I sent him to bed hungry and thirsty. Fortunately a glug of purified water and a bowl of vegetable soup got him back to full condition, whew. Sorry about that, buddy!
G) Got the shack properly on the foundation, fixed up the furnishings inside (putting the kitchen table in the opposite corner to the desk and making sure all the chairs were right), then built the outhouse on one side (just in time for Victor to use it) and the shower on the other, with appropriate accessories (though I had to scoot the shower over slightly when I realized I’d accidentally put it a little too far over the edge of the “deck” that the foundation and two concrete floors had formed). Everyone may poop and be clean!
H) Having previously put it in the sleeping shack to keep it out of the way while I built, I tried to put my port-a-potty in the workbench for easy retrieval, only not to see it listed among the junk options. Grumpily built another – though it occurs to me that I may have just placed my original down again properly depending on how it was stored. Either way, Victor still has his poopin’ bucket, so we’re good XD
I) Finally got around to building more than one turret for defense – and then realized that I’d used up all my oil on other things, and that the only turrets that didn’t need oil – the laser ones – needed power. Fortunately I thought to hit up Ada for what she was carrying first, and she had a few oil cans and such on her, which I used to build some regular turrets to cover key areas. Didn’t QUITE get all the defense I wanted, but I got enough!
And that’s pretty much where I left it for today! Nordhagen Beach is at least a more functional settlement now – and is properly marked with a Minutemen flag, of course. :) Next time, I’ll actually start looking at what quests I want to do next (probably hunt down that first robobrain with Ada) and get back on the move! And possibly clear out Easy City Downs just so I don’t have to keep sneaking past it. XD
Writing: Updated the FO4 Playthrough Progression with today’s “building episode” – as per the above, Victor spent about a day and a half helping the family living on Nordhagen Beach build themselves a new shack to use as a “dining room” (complete with setting up a foundation so it would have a solid place to sit on in the sand); helping the husband repair a desalination machine he’d found and plop it down on the shoreline with a generator (“protected,” or at least hidden from immediate view, by some junk walls); building a garden plot with proper dirt and giving them some corn, tatos, and razorgrain to grow in there (so they could have some variety in their diet/trading); scrapping their old, falling-down garden fence and making a new, bigger, better wire one (NOT floating in this reality); and setting up a handful of turrets for defense (after raiding Ada’s supplies to make sure he had enough oil and steel). Oh, and yes, he did end up collapsing into his sleeping bag midway through due to exhaustion, and then woke up the next morning feeling like shit because all he’d had to eat was a handful of blueberries and a single can of water the previous day. Alice gave him an earful for that, let me tell you. XD Girl just wants the people she cares about to care about THEMSELVES, damn it. At least some veggie soup helped fix him up! We’ll see where he’s going and what he’s doing next time – though I have set it up that he MIGHT go and take out Easy City Downs. . .as stated above, it would be nice not to have to sneak past it again.
YouTube: Well, no OXBoxtra stuff from the Watch Later, sadly, but I did keep up on my Gray and my Jon –
A) First up, from GrayStillPlays, we had “i created the fowlest army ever,” aka Gray plays Mob Control! (Or possibly Brawl Stars, as per YouTube’s attempt at matching the game a title.) This is a game where you fire various mobs out of cannons through various moving multiplier screens to battle other people (or more likely bots), overwhelm their mobs, wreck their bases, and steal all their gems and money to build up your own base and improve your own mobs. Also you can get special “big guys” by charging up your cannons, ranging from regular old punchy dudes who can also get multiplied by the screens to big-brained aliens throwing around mind orbs to decimate all in their path. Gray accidentally bought a triple-cannon early in the video, and soon enough he was DOMINATING the game with his extra mobs of people swarming through pushable blocks and breakable barriers to defeat the unfortunate bots/possibly real humans, who knows. Though things didn’t get TRULY out of hand until he unlocked the chickens. . .and then started leveling them up. By buying lots and lots of money to dump into them. Turns out if you put in the effort (and the coins) to get the chickens to Level 50, they will do like one thousand damage per moblet. It’s just – Gray was just utterly DESTROYING everyone in his path to becoming the most ridiculous Mob Control player ever. To the point of lagging the game with all of his little guys. XD All hail the army of little blue Reginalds and their alien overlords! XD
B) And then it was over to Jon and “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 29 - Who Are We Having For Dinner?” Yes, as you might imagine with a title like that, there was some cannibalism in this particular episode – not from Wanda, but from some of the people she met. There were also giant ants and bad scientists, and a surprise tiny Brotherhood quest! Let’s take them in order –
I. The Secret Of Andale – no, not the obvious “they’re all horrible cannibals” secret that the game pushes you to discover. No, Jon was after a DIFFERENT secret – namely, the identity of one of the poor people murdered by the cannibals. Basically, after poking around at Old Man Harris’s suggestion and discovering the murder basement and/or the murder shed, you’ll be confronted by James Smith, one of Andale’s leading citizens, and presented with a speech check. This is a very hard speech check, and you may be tempted to bypass it – either by just killing the residents (for anyone wanting to be straight-up good) or by playing coy, going around and talking to everyone, and getting a much easier speech check later to keep them all friendly and get access to Linda’s special meat pies (for anyone flirting with the cannibal lifestyle – I mean, if you ARE already a Cannibal via perks, you can just talk them down right away). BUT, if you pass it (as Jon did through the power of reloads), you actually get a bit more information out of them than if you go for the easier one by playing coy. Namely, you get some last words, such as someone telling them they had a kid in Rivet City. And Jon knows there are exactly two children in Rivet City in-game, and only ONE doesn’t have a father around – James Hargreaves. Speaking to his mother Tammy confirms that her husband left one day and got himself killed, forcing her to raise “his brat” alone, meaning that – to Jon’s mind at least – there’s a very good chance that one of the people fairly recently eaten by the Andale citizens is James Hargreaves’s dad. Sadly, you can’t actually float this theory by Tammy or James, but Jon still considers it pretty interesting regardless.
Oh, and bonus Child At Heart interaction with James – if you have the perk, you can dare James to steal ammo for you, and then report back to him for a few bullets (nothing major or super high quality) every twenty-four hours. Nice.
II. Those! – Jon does the quest that’s at least partially a reference to the sci-fi horror movie Them!, clearing the giant fire-breathing ants out of Grayditch! After, uh, apparently starting it ages ago, because he already had the quest objective to find Bryan Wilkes’s father in his quest log (the comments suggested Wanda ran into Bryan while he was running around and screaming for help in the first couple of episodes, as Grayditch is NOT far from Megaton, and Jon just forgot about the entire encounter). The quest itself is simple (find Bryan’s dead dad, locate the missing Dr. Lesko in the nearby subway tunnels – the same place where you get the Naughty Nightwear, in fact, discover he’s the idiot who created the ants, either help Dr. Lesko reach his terminal to continue experimenting with his mutagen to create SMALLER ants instead of FIRE-BREATHING ants or just murder the lot of them, figure out what to do with Bryan and where he should live), easy enough to be done by low-level characters just starting out, but Jon wanted to show off a few special bits and pieces people might miss if they hurry through the quest too fast. Namely:
-->When questioned, Bryan mentions that there were seven people living in Grayditch, but only describes six if you push him for more details – himself and his dad, the Brandice family (Will and his parents), and Dr. Lesko. The seventh, as it turns out, is a random encounter you may or may not run into in the wasteland, who will tell you about what happened in Grayditch (and possibly point you toward the quest if you haven’t started it already). Jon considers it pretty neat that they bothered to program in this person, given it’s entirely luck of the draw whether or not any given player will meet them. They even have a place to live – there’s two abandoned houses in Grayditch, and one of them shows signs of having been abandoned much more recently than the other, with a gun left behind and everything. A simple but effective little detail!
-->Will Brandice’s dad is in fact an escaped Enclave soldier! Yes, if you go inside the Brandice house, you will discover that, not only are there weapons out the wazoo in there, you will find W. Brandice’s personal terminal, where he will mention having fled to DC from the opposite coast, and his horror at finding a radio playing the same patriotic nonsense that played whenever Richardson (the old President) made a speech. He also has a laser gun on him when you find his corpse in the subway tunnels on the way to find Dr. Lesko, which – being an Enclave guy – he would have some familiarity with. Jon thinks he’s the earliest mention of the Enclave most people will find in the game, given most people will do this quest pretty early in their playthroughs.
-->If you want to steal Dr. Lesko’s stuff from his shack, you’d better do it before going into the nearby subway tunnels – when you first enter his house, fully believing that he’s dead, everything in there is in green and thus okay to take. Once you meet him and confirm he’s alive, everything turns red, meaning it’s stealing and thus a loss of karma because there is a living person using that stuff. Jon just thought that was a nice touch.
-->Before heading into the subway after Dr. Lesko, if you go up the road just outside Grayditch and turn right, you’ll find a little unmarked location called the Outpost. Inside the outpost are three very unfriendly ghoul wastelanders – and a random super mutant they’ve got locked up in their basement. There is no explanation for how they managed this, or why they managed it – the terminal nearby is a trap and will explode in your face if you try to use it. They’re just three randos with a captive super mutant. Fallout 3 everyone!
-->It is possible to out-science Dr. Lesko if you have the right stats – namely, if you have enough Intelligence (7 will do, though Jon gamed that with a few Mentats before speaking to the guy), enough Science skill (Jon had 98 out of 100), and the Entomologist perk (Jon added that in with console commands just for the purposes of showing off how it worked, because the perk just gives you 50% extra damage against insects and arachnid enemies (like radscorpions) and this isn’t really popular). Having all of these opens up new dialogue options, allows you to converse with him like a regular scientist, and get him to confess that he wasn’t really following proper scientific rigor with his experiments – not only did he alter a whole brood at once in the wild, he used FEV to do it – you know, that stuff that makes super mutants? He was trying to use that to make the ants SMALLER again. Yeah, Lesko is not a good scientist. Even better, if you have all of these requirements, when you go to open up the path to Lesko’s terminal so he can continue his work, you can kill the ant queen and destroy the mutagen, then tell Lesko that you had to do it since his scientific work was so sloppy, leading him to end up agreeing and saying he’ll start again from first principles (and allowing you to still get his reward, a bio-enhancer that either increases your Strength or Perception depending on which version you pick). Not bad!
-->And when you wrap up the quest by figuring out what to do about Bryan, most people might think there’s only three options – you tell him to stay in Grayditch and survive on his own; you sell him to Paradise Falls; or you send him to live with a relative, Vera, in Rivet City. However, if you’ve been to Little Lamplight already, you can talk to MacCready and convince him to let Bryan come and live with them (either through a speech check or the Child At Heart perk giving you new dialogue). Bryan is not OVERLY enthused about living there, mentioning he would have PREFERRED to go live with Vera (aka the “good” option), but he will go and will be at least a bit excited about being around other kids. And it is the morally “neutral” option, allowing Wanda to keep her beloved neutrality. XD
III. Saving Initiate Pek – and, to wrap up the episode, Jon showed us how the same subway tunnels that lead to Dr. Lesko and the Naughty Nightwear also lead, down a different bend, to another bubble of the DC Ruins – Falls Church! Where you can encounter Paladin Hoss, fighting super mutants, and help him to rescue Initiate Pek, trapped in an office building with more mutants. Hoss is the only member of the Brotherhood to not be a total dick to you before Madison Li gets you into the club, being genuinely grateful for your help in rescuing him from the super mutants he was fighting and asking for your aid in saving his initiate, so it’s a real shame he can die really easily if you don’t know what you’re doing. The mission itself is pretty simple – travel with Hoss through the ruins of this bubble and kill a bunch of super mutants; locate the CORRECT office building of two to find Initiate Pek hiding behind a door from the super mutants inside (Jon was very sour that there were two office buildings so close together with the same entrance and everything, confusing where you were supposed to go – for reference, the other office building has only dead super mutants and dead initiates inside, suggesting both sides managed to kill each other at the same time); and get him out, having either killed the super mutants beforehand or (if you have enough Small Guns or Repair skill) helping him unjam his gun and getting his help to take out the bastards. Your reward is either 100 caps or Hoss and Pek helping you clear out more super mutants in the area – Jon took the money as Wanda can MORE than take care of herself, and because his next destination was one of the roughest dungeons in the game. . .
But that is, in fact, for next week. :p Good stuff as always, and I’m quite intrigued to see what this dungeon is all about and where Wanda will go next Sunday!
Workout: Another night on the bike, this time with the first of Oxventure’s One-Shot Wonders – a short series of done-in-one games, featuring various guest stars playing with various members of the crew! This first one was all OXBoxtra, though, with Luke, Andy, Mike, and Ellen playing the horror TTRPG “Dread” for a 2022 Hallowstream! “Dread’s” gimmick is that, instead of rolling dice to pull off difficult and dangerous actions, you instead pull blocks from a Jenga tower – the more pulls you have to do, the more difficult the action. If the tower topples during your turn, your character dies – no take-backs. You may abandon a pull to fail the action if you’re worried about it toppling, or you can DELIBERATELY knock the tower over to make a heroic sacrifice, killing your character in the achievement of their aims. Luke was the GM in charge of the whole thing, while Andy played Killian, a poetry-obsessed dork looking to remove himself from the capitalistic hellscape; Ellen played Madison, a technology-loving woman who didn’t know why she was here but was determined to take charge nonetheless; and Mike played Brad, an asshole football quarterback at Gregg U who couldn’t believe he was stuck with these nerds. XD The three of them had been on a “physical and digital detox” in the Grand Canyon during Spring Break, going hiking, rafting, and climbing all around the canyon and its forests (I was initially like “uh, Luke, the Grand Canyon’s in a DESERT if I recall correctly,” but a quick look on Wikipedia DOES confirm that there are forests on the rims, so okay then), and they were down to the final few days before heading back to civilization. Luke explained that they’d been camping with three other college students, but now they were splitting the party –
Cue Ellen asking him to clarify that he meant the party itself was splitting and not the people within it, and Luke telling her to “pull” to remain intact. XD She managed to get her Jenga piece out without too much difficulty and avoided being cut in half by some sharp tree branches during a minor stumble. XD Anyway, the party did indeed split, with the other three students going with one guide to have a final climbing adventure, while Madison, Killian, and Brad went with guide Eric to have a final rafting adventure. The quartet made camp about an hour’s hike away from the river and the rafts, and settled in for a final snooze under the stars –
Only to be awoken by quite a lot of screaming at about 3 AM. Brad was very upset about having his dream about throwing the game-winning touchdown in the Super Bowl interrupted. XD The trio investigated, and found Eric’s tent savaged, and Eric himself in a very dire state a little bit away, bleeding massively from numerous wounds. Killian did what he could to stop the bleeding, while Madison tried pulling out the phone she’d snuck into the detox to call for help – after Luke informed her it would be three pulls on the tower to do that, though, she walked it back to she had her phone, but she’d smashed it during her hurry to get out of her tent after hearing the screams. So yeah, no phone, no help there. Madison instead went to look at the wreckage of the tent with her flashlight while Killian continued trying to help Eric and Brad –
Spun a football on his finger. Which he had to pull for. XD Killian was not happy about this callous attitude toward a dying man. Fortunately, while the guys were arguing, Madison was able to make a full inventory of what was left in Eric’s wrecked tent, which included water, some food, a two-way radio, a hatchet, and a first aid kit. The gang managed to bandage Eric up as he urged them to get to the ranch (their final destination, which they were not expected to reach until late Saturday night) and handed over his silver peace sign pendant to Brad (who did put it on). He passed out, and the gang began wondering what to do. Brad managed to find a bloodstained map in the wreckage of Eric’s tent, allowing the trio to figure out their route – Madison decided the smartest thing to do would be to wait until sunrise to make for the river, since then they wouldn’t be stumbling around blindly in the dark. Brad promptly went back to sleep while she and Killian stayed up packing all the necessary things and – in Killian’s case – trying to whittle some wooden spikes before deciding they weren’t worth the effort (aka, he did not want to have to pull to make them). XD Brad at least did wake up with the dawn (he’s used to starting early when it comes to football practice), and the trio started out through the woods – Killian carrying Eric after being guilted into it by the guy begging him not to leave him. XD At least he succeeded on the pull to bring him along!
They’d made it about halfway when, while going up and over a small hill, the radio Madison was carrying (as she’d put herself in charge of all the stuff, and thus in charge of everything else too) had a little blip in the static coming from the speaker, like it was almost but not QUITE able to get a signal. Madison decided to try and climb a tree to get higher and see if she could tune something in, with Brad and Killian giving her a boost before tending to Eric (who was at least semi-lucid and able to confirm to them that they were about halfway to the river). Madison made it up a good-sized tree, and was able to just BARELY hail a park ranger service, explaining that they had someone in DESPERATE need of medical attention and to send someone to meet them at the river (managing to wrestle the map out of her jacket with her teeth to give them an exact name when they requested it). The rangers on the other side seemed to confirm they’d send someone, but said SOMETHING about “keep moving” and “stay put” that was partially obscured by static – like, it was impossible to tell if the guy was telling them “you have to keep moving, don’t stay put” or the opposite. And before Madison could get any clarification, the radio itself went dead. She climbed back down to the guys to report, and after some talk, they decided that they probably SHOULD keep moving, because it felt like he’d be giving them the instruction on what to do FIRST.
And so they proceeded to the river, with Brad taking a turn carrying Eric – a turn that left that Jenga tower looking very wobbly. They’ve made it to the river bank without incident so far, but it’s only a matter of time before the tower falls. . .also, calling it now – based on the fact that Eric looked like he was savaged by a terrible beast, the bite marks on his throat weren’t that deep, and he was wearing a silver pendant – werewolves. The gang’s dealing with Grand Canyon werewolves. This should be fun. XD
Other:
-->Mother’s Day beanbags happened, and I’m pleased to announce that we each won at least once! I had a shaky beginning but a strong end; Dad was pretty consistently good until the last game; and Mom had three bad games, one really good game, and one decently good game. Final scores were me 2-3-W-2-W; Dad W-2-2-W-3; Mom 3-W-3-3-2. I think that’s a pretty good result!
*nods* Not too shabby, though I really wish I'd had better focus for tumblr. . .then again, learning how to make my own granola is a good thing, and probably counts as a Mother's Day present to Mom. :p (She did like her card by the way, which made me happy.) And now I have to hit the sheets, as I do have three days of work to get through before another day off. :p Night all!
Tumblr: After some distraction this morning (slow start with more Merge Dragons – got everything I wanted from the event, though – and learning from Mom how to make my homemade granola), I made it a point to get Squid’s birthday fic for Tuesday and the initial drafts for all seven of the Chill Valicer Save update posts this week into the Victor Luvs Alice drafts right after lunch, completing the full text-and-tags for the first of the latter before Fallout 4 times. I was hoping to get more done after my gaming, but no dice – I swear, my time management on Sundays is genuinely the absolute WORST lately. >( At least I’m in a good spot to get more done tomorrow, though. . .and for what it’s worth, my old friend Red on tumblr posted some very cute Valice fanart today, which they kindly sent me a message about: Shall we dance? :) Reblogged that to Victor Luvs Alice this evening AND put it in the queue for Valice Multiverse, so yeah, that worked. :D
Fallout 4: Today proved to be an all building, all the time day at Nordhagen Beach – mostly because I wanted to give them a better house, but finding proper flat ground on this beach is ROUGH. *grumbles* But here’s what I accomplished –
A) Cleaned up the remaining scrappable items on the beach (mostly driftwood and an old rowboat)
B) Built them an additional small shack, which I ended up putting on the right side of the gourd farm after not finding any better spots for it. Attempted to hide the fact that bits of it were floating over the dunes with crates and junk fencing, then built some concrete floors for it to sit on, before finally locating a proper FOUNDATION in the wood flooring section and managing to get THAT under it, creating a sort of “deck” off to the side
C) Set up a Desalinator 3000 with a generator at the edge of the beach in the water; put the junk fences I’d built to cover the floating bits of the shack next to that as a sort of protective “wall”
D) Built a garden plot and planted some corn, razorgrain, and tatos in it beside the gourd farm so the family had some variety to their diet. Realized that I should have built it INSIDE the fenced area and decided to scrap their old fence and build a nicer new wire one around the entire little farm area. Took some time, but I finally got something I was mostly happy with. The damn fence is floating in the front, but there’s not really much I can do about that (except maybe slot another foundation in, I guess? Didn’t think of that at the time. . .)
E) Realized that I couldn’t move the family’s beds from the tiny hut they were using as a bedroom to the new shack, so decided to turn that into a dining/living shack instead. Moved the cookpot over next to it, put a desk I found amongst the rubble against one wall by the windows, put in a kitchen table and some chairs, and TRIED to move the kids’ toys in there – only for a couple of them to drop through the floor onto the sand below. And then I nearly lost the toy truck entirely when it sank straight through a sand dune while I was retrieving it. Fortunately it Bethesda-ed back up to the top a little while later, so I was able to retrieve it and put it and the two blocks on the palette by the sleeping hut’s front door
F) Sent Victor to bed once his exhaustion got bad enough at 9:46 PM. . .only for him to wake up starving and dehydrated because I sent him to bed hungry and thirsty. Fortunately a glug of purified water and a bowl of vegetable soup got him back to full condition, whew. Sorry about that, buddy!
G) Got the shack properly on the foundation, fixed up the furnishings inside (putting the kitchen table in the opposite corner to the desk and making sure all the chairs were right), then built the outhouse on one side (just in time for Victor to use it) and the shower on the other, with appropriate accessories (though I had to scoot the shower over slightly when I realized I’d accidentally put it a little too far over the edge of the “deck” that the foundation and two concrete floors had formed). Everyone may poop and be clean!
H) Having previously put it in the sleeping shack to keep it out of the way while I built, I tried to put my port-a-potty in the workbench for easy retrieval, only not to see it listed among the junk options. Grumpily built another – though it occurs to me that I may have just placed my original down again properly depending on how it was stored. Either way, Victor still has his poopin’ bucket, so we’re good XD
I) Finally got around to building more than one turret for defense – and then realized that I’d used up all my oil on other things, and that the only turrets that didn’t need oil – the laser ones – needed power. Fortunately I thought to hit up Ada for what she was carrying first, and she had a few oil cans and such on her, which I used to build some regular turrets to cover key areas. Didn’t QUITE get all the defense I wanted, but I got enough!
And that’s pretty much where I left it for today! Nordhagen Beach is at least a more functional settlement now – and is properly marked with a Minutemen flag, of course. :) Next time, I’ll actually start looking at what quests I want to do next (probably hunt down that first robobrain with Ada) and get back on the move! And possibly clear out Easy City Downs just so I don’t have to keep sneaking past it. XD
Writing: Updated the FO4 Playthrough Progression with today’s “building episode” – as per the above, Victor spent about a day and a half helping the family living on Nordhagen Beach build themselves a new shack to use as a “dining room” (complete with setting up a foundation so it would have a solid place to sit on in the sand); helping the husband repair a desalination machine he’d found and plop it down on the shoreline with a generator (“protected,” or at least hidden from immediate view, by some junk walls); building a garden plot with proper dirt and giving them some corn, tatos, and razorgrain to grow in there (so they could have some variety in their diet/trading); scrapping their old, falling-down garden fence and making a new, bigger, better wire one (NOT floating in this reality); and setting up a handful of turrets for defense (after raiding Ada’s supplies to make sure he had enough oil and steel). Oh, and yes, he did end up collapsing into his sleeping bag midway through due to exhaustion, and then woke up the next morning feeling like shit because all he’d had to eat was a handful of blueberries and a single can of water the previous day. Alice gave him an earful for that, let me tell you. XD Girl just wants the people she cares about to care about THEMSELVES, damn it. At least some veggie soup helped fix him up! We’ll see where he’s going and what he’s doing next time – though I have set it up that he MIGHT go and take out Easy City Downs. . .as stated above, it would be nice not to have to sneak past it again.
YouTube: Well, no OXBoxtra stuff from the Watch Later, sadly, but I did keep up on my Gray and my Jon –
A) First up, from GrayStillPlays, we had “i created the fowlest army ever,” aka Gray plays Mob Control! (Or possibly Brawl Stars, as per YouTube’s attempt at matching the game a title.) This is a game where you fire various mobs out of cannons through various moving multiplier screens to battle other people (or more likely bots), overwhelm their mobs, wreck their bases, and steal all their gems and money to build up your own base and improve your own mobs. Also you can get special “big guys” by charging up your cannons, ranging from regular old punchy dudes who can also get multiplied by the screens to big-brained aliens throwing around mind orbs to decimate all in their path. Gray accidentally bought a triple-cannon early in the video, and soon enough he was DOMINATING the game with his extra mobs of people swarming through pushable blocks and breakable barriers to defeat the unfortunate bots/possibly real humans, who knows. Though things didn’t get TRULY out of hand until he unlocked the chickens. . .and then started leveling them up. By buying lots and lots of money to dump into them. Turns out if you put in the effort (and the coins) to get the chickens to Level 50, they will do like one thousand damage per moblet. It’s just – Gray was just utterly DESTROYING everyone in his path to becoming the most ridiculous Mob Control player ever. To the point of lagging the game with all of his little guys. XD All hail the army of little blue Reginalds and their alien overlords! XD
B) And then it was over to Jon and “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 29 - Who Are We Having For Dinner?” Yes, as you might imagine with a title like that, there was some cannibalism in this particular episode – not from Wanda, but from some of the people she met. There were also giant ants and bad scientists, and a surprise tiny Brotherhood quest! Let’s take them in order –
I. The Secret Of Andale – no, not the obvious “they’re all horrible cannibals” secret that the game pushes you to discover. No, Jon was after a DIFFERENT secret – namely, the identity of one of the poor people murdered by the cannibals. Basically, after poking around at Old Man Harris’s suggestion and discovering the murder basement and/or the murder shed, you’ll be confronted by James Smith, one of Andale’s leading citizens, and presented with a speech check. This is a very hard speech check, and you may be tempted to bypass it – either by just killing the residents (for anyone wanting to be straight-up good) or by playing coy, going around and talking to everyone, and getting a much easier speech check later to keep them all friendly and get access to Linda’s special meat pies (for anyone flirting with the cannibal lifestyle – I mean, if you ARE already a Cannibal via perks, you can just talk them down right away). BUT, if you pass it (as Jon did through the power of reloads), you actually get a bit more information out of them than if you go for the easier one by playing coy. Namely, you get some last words, such as someone telling them they had a kid in Rivet City. And Jon knows there are exactly two children in Rivet City in-game, and only ONE doesn’t have a father around – James Hargreaves. Speaking to his mother Tammy confirms that her husband left one day and got himself killed, forcing her to raise “his brat” alone, meaning that – to Jon’s mind at least – there’s a very good chance that one of the people fairly recently eaten by the Andale citizens is James Hargreaves’s dad. Sadly, you can’t actually float this theory by Tammy or James, but Jon still considers it pretty interesting regardless.
Oh, and bonus Child At Heart interaction with James – if you have the perk, you can dare James to steal ammo for you, and then report back to him for a few bullets (nothing major or super high quality) every twenty-four hours. Nice.
II. Those! – Jon does the quest that’s at least partially a reference to the sci-fi horror movie Them!, clearing the giant fire-breathing ants out of Grayditch! After, uh, apparently starting it ages ago, because he already had the quest objective to find Bryan Wilkes’s father in his quest log (the comments suggested Wanda ran into Bryan while he was running around and screaming for help in the first couple of episodes, as Grayditch is NOT far from Megaton, and Jon just forgot about the entire encounter). The quest itself is simple (find Bryan’s dead dad, locate the missing Dr. Lesko in the nearby subway tunnels – the same place where you get the Naughty Nightwear, in fact, discover he’s the idiot who created the ants, either help Dr. Lesko reach his terminal to continue experimenting with his mutagen to create SMALLER ants instead of FIRE-BREATHING ants or just murder the lot of them, figure out what to do with Bryan and where he should live), easy enough to be done by low-level characters just starting out, but Jon wanted to show off a few special bits and pieces people might miss if they hurry through the quest too fast. Namely:
-->When questioned, Bryan mentions that there were seven people living in Grayditch, but only describes six if you push him for more details – himself and his dad, the Brandice family (Will and his parents), and Dr. Lesko. The seventh, as it turns out, is a random encounter you may or may not run into in the wasteland, who will tell you about what happened in Grayditch (and possibly point you toward the quest if you haven’t started it already). Jon considers it pretty neat that they bothered to program in this person, given it’s entirely luck of the draw whether or not any given player will meet them. They even have a place to live – there’s two abandoned houses in Grayditch, and one of them shows signs of having been abandoned much more recently than the other, with a gun left behind and everything. A simple but effective little detail!
-->Will Brandice’s dad is in fact an escaped Enclave soldier! Yes, if you go inside the Brandice house, you will discover that, not only are there weapons out the wazoo in there, you will find W. Brandice’s personal terminal, where he will mention having fled to DC from the opposite coast, and his horror at finding a radio playing the same patriotic nonsense that played whenever Richardson (the old President) made a speech. He also has a laser gun on him when you find his corpse in the subway tunnels on the way to find Dr. Lesko, which – being an Enclave guy – he would have some familiarity with. Jon thinks he’s the earliest mention of the Enclave most people will find in the game, given most people will do this quest pretty early in their playthroughs.
-->If you want to steal Dr. Lesko’s stuff from his shack, you’d better do it before going into the nearby subway tunnels – when you first enter his house, fully believing that he’s dead, everything in there is in green and thus okay to take. Once you meet him and confirm he’s alive, everything turns red, meaning it’s stealing and thus a loss of karma because there is a living person using that stuff. Jon just thought that was a nice touch.
-->Before heading into the subway after Dr. Lesko, if you go up the road just outside Grayditch and turn right, you’ll find a little unmarked location called the Outpost. Inside the outpost are three very unfriendly ghoul wastelanders – and a random super mutant they’ve got locked up in their basement. There is no explanation for how they managed this, or why they managed it – the terminal nearby is a trap and will explode in your face if you try to use it. They’re just three randos with a captive super mutant. Fallout 3 everyone!
-->It is possible to out-science Dr. Lesko if you have the right stats – namely, if you have enough Intelligence (7 will do, though Jon gamed that with a few Mentats before speaking to the guy), enough Science skill (Jon had 98 out of 100), and the Entomologist perk (Jon added that in with console commands just for the purposes of showing off how it worked, because the perk just gives you 50% extra damage against insects and arachnid enemies (like radscorpions) and this isn’t really popular). Having all of these opens up new dialogue options, allows you to converse with him like a regular scientist, and get him to confess that he wasn’t really following proper scientific rigor with his experiments – not only did he alter a whole brood at once in the wild, he used FEV to do it – you know, that stuff that makes super mutants? He was trying to use that to make the ants SMALLER again. Yeah, Lesko is not a good scientist. Even better, if you have all of these requirements, when you go to open up the path to Lesko’s terminal so he can continue his work, you can kill the ant queen and destroy the mutagen, then tell Lesko that you had to do it since his scientific work was so sloppy, leading him to end up agreeing and saying he’ll start again from first principles (and allowing you to still get his reward, a bio-enhancer that either increases your Strength or Perception depending on which version you pick). Not bad!
-->And when you wrap up the quest by figuring out what to do about Bryan, most people might think there’s only three options – you tell him to stay in Grayditch and survive on his own; you sell him to Paradise Falls; or you send him to live with a relative, Vera, in Rivet City. However, if you’ve been to Little Lamplight already, you can talk to MacCready and convince him to let Bryan come and live with them (either through a speech check or the Child At Heart perk giving you new dialogue). Bryan is not OVERLY enthused about living there, mentioning he would have PREFERRED to go live with Vera (aka the “good” option), but he will go and will be at least a bit excited about being around other kids. And it is the morally “neutral” option, allowing Wanda to keep her beloved neutrality. XD
III. Saving Initiate Pek – and, to wrap up the episode, Jon showed us how the same subway tunnels that lead to Dr. Lesko and the Naughty Nightwear also lead, down a different bend, to another bubble of the DC Ruins – Falls Church! Where you can encounter Paladin Hoss, fighting super mutants, and help him to rescue Initiate Pek, trapped in an office building with more mutants. Hoss is the only member of the Brotherhood to not be a total dick to you before Madison Li gets you into the club, being genuinely grateful for your help in rescuing him from the super mutants he was fighting and asking for your aid in saving his initiate, so it’s a real shame he can die really easily if you don’t know what you’re doing. The mission itself is pretty simple – travel with Hoss through the ruins of this bubble and kill a bunch of super mutants; locate the CORRECT office building of two to find Initiate Pek hiding behind a door from the super mutants inside (Jon was very sour that there were two office buildings so close together with the same entrance and everything, confusing where you were supposed to go – for reference, the other office building has only dead super mutants and dead initiates inside, suggesting both sides managed to kill each other at the same time); and get him out, having either killed the super mutants beforehand or (if you have enough Small Guns or Repair skill) helping him unjam his gun and getting his help to take out the bastards. Your reward is either 100 caps or Hoss and Pek helping you clear out more super mutants in the area – Jon took the money as Wanda can MORE than take care of herself, and because his next destination was one of the roughest dungeons in the game. . .
But that is, in fact, for next week. :p Good stuff as always, and I’m quite intrigued to see what this dungeon is all about and where Wanda will go next Sunday!
Workout: Another night on the bike, this time with the first of Oxventure’s One-Shot Wonders – a short series of done-in-one games, featuring various guest stars playing with various members of the crew! This first one was all OXBoxtra, though, with Luke, Andy, Mike, and Ellen playing the horror TTRPG “Dread” for a 2022 Hallowstream! “Dread’s” gimmick is that, instead of rolling dice to pull off difficult and dangerous actions, you instead pull blocks from a Jenga tower – the more pulls you have to do, the more difficult the action. If the tower topples during your turn, your character dies – no take-backs. You may abandon a pull to fail the action if you’re worried about it toppling, or you can DELIBERATELY knock the tower over to make a heroic sacrifice, killing your character in the achievement of their aims. Luke was the GM in charge of the whole thing, while Andy played Killian, a poetry-obsessed dork looking to remove himself from the capitalistic hellscape; Ellen played Madison, a technology-loving woman who didn’t know why she was here but was determined to take charge nonetheless; and Mike played Brad, an asshole football quarterback at Gregg U who couldn’t believe he was stuck with these nerds. XD The three of them had been on a “physical and digital detox” in the Grand Canyon during Spring Break, going hiking, rafting, and climbing all around the canyon and its forests (I was initially like “uh, Luke, the Grand Canyon’s in a DESERT if I recall correctly,” but a quick look on Wikipedia DOES confirm that there are forests on the rims, so okay then), and they were down to the final few days before heading back to civilization. Luke explained that they’d been camping with three other college students, but now they were splitting the party –
Cue Ellen asking him to clarify that he meant the party itself was splitting and not the people within it, and Luke telling her to “pull” to remain intact. XD She managed to get her Jenga piece out without too much difficulty and avoided being cut in half by some sharp tree branches during a minor stumble. XD Anyway, the party did indeed split, with the other three students going with one guide to have a final climbing adventure, while Madison, Killian, and Brad went with guide Eric to have a final rafting adventure. The quartet made camp about an hour’s hike away from the river and the rafts, and settled in for a final snooze under the stars –
Only to be awoken by quite a lot of screaming at about 3 AM. Brad was very upset about having his dream about throwing the game-winning touchdown in the Super Bowl interrupted. XD The trio investigated, and found Eric’s tent savaged, and Eric himself in a very dire state a little bit away, bleeding massively from numerous wounds. Killian did what he could to stop the bleeding, while Madison tried pulling out the phone she’d snuck into the detox to call for help – after Luke informed her it would be three pulls on the tower to do that, though, she walked it back to she had her phone, but she’d smashed it during her hurry to get out of her tent after hearing the screams. So yeah, no phone, no help there. Madison instead went to look at the wreckage of the tent with her flashlight while Killian continued trying to help Eric and Brad –
Spun a football on his finger. Which he had to pull for. XD Killian was not happy about this callous attitude toward a dying man. Fortunately, while the guys were arguing, Madison was able to make a full inventory of what was left in Eric’s wrecked tent, which included water, some food, a two-way radio, a hatchet, and a first aid kit. The gang managed to bandage Eric up as he urged them to get to the ranch (their final destination, which they were not expected to reach until late Saturday night) and handed over his silver peace sign pendant to Brad (who did put it on). He passed out, and the gang began wondering what to do. Brad managed to find a bloodstained map in the wreckage of Eric’s tent, allowing the trio to figure out their route – Madison decided the smartest thing to do would be to wait until sunrise to make for the river, since then they wouldn’t be stumbling around blindly in the dark. Brad promptly went back to sleep while she and Killian stayed up packing all the necessary things and – in Killian’s case – trying to whittle some wooden spikes before deciding they weren’t worth the effort (aka, he did not want to have to pull to make them). XD Brad at least did wake up with the dawn (he’s used to starting early when it comes to football practice), and the trio started out through the woods – Killian carrying Eric after being guilted into it by the guy begging him not to leave him. XD At least he succeeded on the pull to bring him along!
They’d made it about halfway when, while going up and over a small hill, the radio Madison was carrying (as she’d put herself in charge of all the stuff, and thus in charge of everything else too) had a little blip in the static coming from the speaker, like it was almost but not QUITE able to get a signal. Madison decided to try and climb a tree to get higher and see if she could tune something in, with Brad and Killian giving her a boost before tending to Eric (who was at least semi-lucid and able to confirm to them that they were about halfway to the river). Madison made it up a good-sized tree, and was able to just BARELY hail a park ranger service, explaining that they had someone in DESPERATE need of medical attention and to send someone to meet them at the river (managing to wrestle the map out of her jacket with her teeth to give them an exact name when they requested it). The rangers on the other side seemed to confirm they’d send someone, but said SOMETHING about “keep moving” and “stay put” that was partially obscured by static – like, it was impossible to tell if the guy was telling them “you have to keep moving, don’t stay put” or the opposite. And before Madison could get any clarification, the radio itself went dead. She climbed back down to the guys to report, and after some talk, they decided that they probably SHOULD keep moving, because it felt like he’d be giving them the instruction on what to do FIRST.
And so they proceeded to the river, with Brad taking a turn carrying Eric – a turn that left that Jenga tower looking very wobbly. They’ve made it to the river bank without incident so far, but it’s only a matter of time before the tower falls. . .also, calling it now – based on the fact that Eric looked like he was savaged by a terrible beast, the bite marks on his throat weren’t that deep, and he was wearing a silver pendant – werewolves. The gang’s dealing with Grand Canyon werewolves. This should be fun. XD
Other:
-->Mother’s Day beanbags happened, and I’m pleased to announce that we each won at least once! I had a shaky beginning but a strong end; Dad was pretty consistently good until the last game; and Mom had three bad games, one really good game, and one decently good game. Final scores were me 2-3-W-2-W; Dad W-2-2-W-3; Mom 3-W-3-3-2. I think that’s a pretty good result!
*nods* Not too shabby, though I really wish I'd had better focus for tumblr. . .then again, learning how to make my own granola is a good thing, and probably counts as a Mother's Day present to Mom. :p (She did like her card by the way, which made me happy.) And now I have to hit the sheets, as I do have three days of work to get through before another day off. :p Night all!
