*skids in later than she expected*
Jun. 4th, 2023 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickDarn it, I started Jon's video early tonight and everything! Where the hell does the time go. . .but on the plus side, at least my to-do list is looking good:
Tumblr: Well, didn’t get a chance to catch up on my tracked tags, but I did get all the most important stuff done on both blogs –
Victor Luvs Alice – Got all the latest Chill Valicer Save Update posts drafted right before lunch, then did the full text-and-tags on the first three posts after lunch! So I’m roughly halfway through, yay. :) And given I get to come home slightly early tomorrow, I shouldn’t have much trouble finishing up the rest!
Valice Multiverse – One new thread reply (which tumblr didn’t tell me about yesterday) and one ask reply in the queue, w00! Which is good because I’m almost out of Not-Incorrect Valicer quotes to reblog. XD
Fallout 4: Had a reasonably productive day in the Commonwealth – at the very least, I got out of East Boston Prepatory School! Here’s what happened –
A) Started with Victor awake very bright and early in East Boston Prep’s auditorium – promptly had him head back upstairs to the third floor to poke around for any goodies he missed (scored some military grade duct tape, which was VERY nice), including that issue of Astoundingly Awesome Tales in the computer lab I nearly missed – “Rise of the Radiated,” which makes Rad-Away heal +5% rad damage, nice. :D Another handy little perk to have!
B) With that sorted, I had Victor and Ada exit the building through the doors on the third floor and explore the rubble around the chunk of broken plane a bit – nothing of interest there, so I sent them back into the building through the front doors. My goal there was to see if anything about the building would reset if I came in the “proper” way – namely, if the leader of the gang would actually spawn in. From what I could see, nothing happened, but I still had a little bit of exploring left to do. . .
C) Mainly, getting into the other chained room on the first floor, where the raiders had been dumping settlers/recruits who died from all the torture! That was easily accomplished, though – I just went up to the second floor and found one of the convenient holes in the first floor to drop down. The room proved to be bigger than I expected (well, it proved to be two rooms linked through a gap in the wall; I’d expected there to be two separate rooms I’d have to drop down into through two separate holes), and had some decent goodies in it – lots of ammo, that’s for sure, and bottle caps on the corpses. (You really gotta wonder why the raiders would leave those. . .then again, this particular gang seems to be more about torturing people than making money.) There was also a book return machine in there – I had Victor poke at it briefly, but ultimately decided to leave it alone in favor of waiting to return any books I had at the Boston Public Library. One of THOSE has a magazine in it, and I don’t want to miss out!
D) With that room cleared (as much as my carry weight would allow, anyway), I had Victor unchain the door, and then do one last sweep of the building, looking for raiders and the Judge boss (stopping along the way to do a little chem combining in the chemistry lab, and a bit of cooking at the bathroom cooking pot – Victor has fresh popcorn now! Yes, bathroom popcorn, sue me). I couldn’t find anyone anywhere, though, and both Victor and Ada were just about at their limits carry capacity wise, so I decided “well, I will eventually be coming back this way to visit the Brotherhood, and I’ve killed MOST of the raiders – maybe if I leave the cell and come back, any missing enemies will spawn back in.”
E) And so Victor and Ada finally left East Boston Prep and headed back out onto the road! Specifically, they headed back to County Crossing, the nearest settlement, so Victor could finally drop off a bunch of junk. Upon arrival, I discovered that Doc Weathers was visiting and decided to trade with him – Victor took a flip lighter and a microscope off the guy in exchange for all the Buffjet he’d recently made (which actually got Victor caps BACK, nice). Right after that, one of the settlers asked Victor if he could give them some help (explaining why Victor kept having glitchy “I just want to trade” voice lines playing whenever he passed by said settler), saying something nasty was parked up nearby that they wanted clearing out. Turned out to be one of those “go to this settlement and clear out the baddies infesting it” missions that current settlers occasionally give you to help you get new settlements going – and, kind of amusingly, the ghoul who gave it to Victor pointed him toward Jamaica Plain! Apparently the game REALLY WANTS me to find that damn treasure already. XD
F) With that sorted, I had Victor drop off his junk (after dropping off his port-a-potty separately in the broken-down house foundation nearby), then do some building in the settlement! Namely, he set up some proper foundation for the new shack that’s been half-floating on the slope nearby and moved it it on top of that; moved the dining area to a better spot between the cooking spit and the caravan campfire; and (after a few false starts) adjusted the placement of the outhouse and the bathtub and gave the whole spot a little more privacy by putting it behind some metal walls with a door (using another bit of shack foundation to “prop up” a floating wall). This took him to 9 PM in the evening – I had him eat some vegetable soup for supper, then hit his sleeping back to get the appropriate amount of zzzs.
G) Up bright and early at 5 AM the next morning, Victor finished up his “chores” around the settlement – making “shower” and “lavatory” signs for the new pooping-and-bathing area, harvesting a bunch of crops from the little farm, and retrieving his port-a-potty and some useful junk (including all of his adhesive) from the workbench. I then had him check his map and take a look at his route going forward – looks like the best thing for him to do is head from County Crossing to Goodneighbor and sell some of the spare armor and such Ada is carrying, then go to the General Atomics factory, then hit Jamaica Plain. *nods* And going to Goodneighbor will ALSO allow me to start the “Silver Shroud” quests with Kent and make sure Victor has the costume for his confrontation with The Mechanist! Yeah, that’ll work. :D
And so that that is where I stopped for the day, with Victor ready to hit the road and get lost looking for the entrance to Goodneighbor again. XD Maybe I didn’t get a hell of a lot done today, but it was fun nonetheless – and I’m VERY glad to have discovered the wonder of shack foundations. So many settlements in this game have uneven ground, and it annoys me to see stuff too blatantly floating. We’ll see how everything progresses next week! I swear to God one day I will continue the plot and get Victor into the Glowing Sea. . .just not anytime soon. XD
Writing: Updated the FO4 Playthrough Progression with the events of my playsession today – pretty much identical to what happened up-top beyond Victor calling in a Minutemen patrol to keep an eye on East Boston Prep after not being able to find the Judge (I figure he’d want SOMEONE to off the asshole, even if it’s not him), and Victor encountering and trading with Doc Weathers AFTER getting the “Clearing the Way” quest to clear out Jamaica Plain instead of before (it worked better narratively). Oh, and of course some character stuff, like Alice and Ada comforting a disturbed Victor about what he’d seen in the EBP raider base (which, let’s be honest, it’s VERY understandable to be disturbed by that place). But yeah, other than that, same deal of Victor and companions doing one last sweep of the school, then heading to County Crossing and helping them fix up some stuff before getting ready to head out toward Goodneighbor the next day. We’ll see if I get to put down anything more exciting next week!
YouTube: Happily, thanks to keeping Fallout 4 short and simple, I was able to watch everything I wanted to watch today, no problem –
A) First up (separated by my workout and dinner), we had a couple of GrayStillPlays videos –
I. “Every Vehicle vs Dangerous Roads in GTA 5” – the Alex Torture Board that I wasn’t able to watch yesterday due to the OXBox RE4 Remake Marathon! The latest course was a combination of different “speed bumps” and “potholes” that Alex set up on his elevated road, and it was Gray’s job to find the correct car that could get through all of them. We had Geometry Speedbumps (various weird shapes made out of rectangles that got higher and higher as Gray progressed over them); Plugged Potholes (two pits with bridges made out of fragile cacti and giant poppers respectively); Tasty Speedbumps (a bunch of speed bumps made out of food, including a ramp made out of corn chips, a giant pretzel, a wall of donut burgers topped with soda cups, a burger patty, a burger patty with top bun, and a can of chips firing chips out the side); “Jumping Guys Potholes” (two pits with guys of various beefiness jumping into them – I have no idea what the actual name of this section was because Gray saw it and was like “I can’t say that on YouTube!” XD); Rock Hard Speedbumps (a bunch of speed bumps made out of various rock formations to climb over); Spasming Potholes (a pit made out of two teleporting chunks of road that kept going back and forth, and a pit made out of two SLIDING chunks of road that kept going back and forth); and finally Speedbumps + Potholes (two increasingly large pits (one with a Wastelander inside it to show how big it was) that had a whole bunch of stop sticks right in front of them – the only way to get over them was to do it backwards, since the stop sticks don’t activate if you go over them in reverse). Gray tried a few different cars – his starting orange number immediately got stuck on the Geometric Speedbumps; the dump truck surprisingly made it over the collapsing cacti bridge but couldn’t make it past the poppers in Plugged Potholes (ditto for the tank); and the Liberator JUST made it over the burger patty with the help of another car, only to fail on the chip can) – but in the end, the winner was a yellow-and-purple number with the ability to climb just about ANYTHING and a top speed going backwards JUUUST good enough to make the jumps beyond the stop sticks. w00!
II. “This cute game has a dark secret” – Gray plays Pineapple On Pizza! This is a very short little game where you are an invisible person on a tropical island, going around looking at all the happy people dancing, doing calisthenics, playing games, holding babies, chilling out on a bench (and getting achievements for the lot) – and then you go up to the local volcano, jump inside, and cause a massacre. XD The entire game is just an excuse to show all these adorable little smiley people getting murdered by lava or sharks. Or, if you figure out how to escape (hint: there are boats on one bit of the beach), volcanic rock smashing down upon you. Gray found the whole thing darkly hilarious, apologizing to everyone as they died horribly. It is exceedingly rare for Gray to be sorry about a massacre, but – well, he was only looking to kill HIMSELF by flinging himself into the volcano. The much-too-happy villagers were just collateral damage. XD (Oh, and if you’re wondering about the name – get the “escape” ending and it’ll show the island covered in lava from above. . .)
B) And then, as it is every Sunday, it was time for Jon and “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 32 - Vault in the Wound!” Which was Wanda finishing off her vault-diving adventures by visiting the only two vaults left on the list in the Vault-Tec terminal in the BOS citadel – Vault 106, which had most of its information redacted by its overseer and actually has the distinct honor of being one of two vaults that was first CONCEPTUALIZED by the original Black Isle Studios team (it’s mentioned in their Fallout Bible) but didn’t actually make it into a game until the Bethesda-era stuff (the other is Vault 34 in New Vegas), and Vault 87, aka the Plot-Important Vault which is the whole reason you have to make nice with Little Lamplight. Here’s how Wanda’s adventures finishing off the vaults went –
I. First up, on the way to visit Vault 106 (in fact, literally outside its front door), Wanda ran into probably the best-placed random encounter in the game – Amata encountering a group of Enclave soldiers! This is something that only happens if, like Wanda, you choose to side with Butch and blow Vault 101 to force a mass evacuation, and it involves Amata asking for help from the Enclave soldiers – only for the Enclave to coax the location of her vault from her and then open fire. Wanda attempted to save her old friend, but was unsuccessful the first time because, well, nasty Enclave soldiers in their nasty Enclave power armor. *wince* Rewinding time and massively dropping the difficulty allowed Wanda to save Amata, but her attempts to reconnect just led to Amata angrily accusing this of being all Wanda’s fault – confusing when you recall that Jon managed to successfully lie to Amata that her dad, the overseer, set the vault to blow, but Jon figured that Amata’s smart enough to perhaps figure out that her very morally neutral friend was fibbing about it all. :p
II. Anyway, with that sorted, Jon had Wanda venture inside Vault 106 and show off the experiment – namely, hallucinatory gas! Which was still going after 200 years somehow and thus affected Wanda at key points, causing her vision to shade purple and giving her hallucinations of her father (in triplicate), a fleeing Amata (in triplicate), and an attack by Butch and his old Tunnel Snakes gang (not in triplicate for some reason). Jon showed off that it also allows you to interact with otherwise-broken terminals and get messages from your brain, talking about how awesome the vault is in the purple haze and arguing with you about how you should just give up on the awful wasteland above and live down here. It’s very amusing. XD
. . .For you, anyway. Because while you don’t get a clear picture of what exactly happened, you DO run across some “insane survivors” in the vault, who all attack you with things like bats and axes and suchlike. Along with one regular “survivor” near the back (who still tries to attack you, mid-Tunnel Snakes hallucination), who was apparently trying to tunnel out? Or blast his way out with mini-nukes? It’s very unclear. But yes, while the Overseer’s terminal indicates that they were at least following better scientific method with this particular experiment (doing smaller tests using one particular room before shunting the weird gas inside the entire vault, and preparing for the worst with the security team when that happened) and that the victims of this presumably mind-control gas had a better time than the musicians subjected to the white noise in Vault 92 (the scribbled notes you find are of people who are acting mostly like stoned hippies, saying that the walls need love, man), clearly SOMETHING happened when the gas was released on the residents en masse that turned at least some of them violent and caused them to murder all their fellows. And also apparently made them immortal, because, as a reminder, you come across this vault two hundred years after the bombs dropped and this experiment started. Out of universe, Jon thinks this is an artifact of Fallout 3 timeline’s being changed – originally it would have been a prequel of sorts, set much closer to the date of the actual bomb drops (like Fallout 76 ended up being), instead of being set after Fallout 2. In-universe? Uh. . .well, the people who attack you have raider haircuts, so they might actually be raiders who, upon exposure to the gas, came to believe they were vault residents? But then again, the door isn’t open when you first arrive, so. . . I dunno. This vault is just very weird. Enjoy the weird trippy purple gas and try not to think about it too hard.
III. Anyway, after showing off the weirdness of Vault 106, it was time for Jon and Wanda to take on the final vault – Vault 87, the Plot-Important Vault! AKA the one with the GECK, and the one that’s the reason you have to make good with the kids of Little Lamplight. Because let Jon tell you, you AIN’T getting in through the front – not only is it swarming with super mutants, even if you get past them, you’ll find that the whole area is HEAVILY bathed in radiation (the TTW version is just about survivable with enough Rad-Away and Rad-X, but the vanilla version is one of the most heavily irradiated areas in the entire Fallout franchise AND the front door is unpickable – you need a key, which you simply do not have. So yeah, you need the kids’ help to get in a side entrance. You can go in through Murder Alley or get Jason the schoolteacher’s help in activating and cracking a terminal that will let you in a side door into the reactor room (provided you have enough Science). Jon, as you might imagine, picked hacking the terminal, and recommends everyone else do too, because – well. MURDER ALLEY. Yeah, uh, unless you are COMMITTED to the destruction of all monsters, maybe make sure you have enough Science to hack mid-level computers and save yourself the trouble, okay?
IV. Anyway – once inside the vault, Jon’s first thought was to track down the final piece of the puzzle as to why Little Lamplight ended up a society of only children. You may remember from earlier episodes that Jon was able to find holotapes from the first days of Little Lamplight, where he revealed that at least part of why the kids decided adults were not to be trusted was because, after their guardians all disappeared (venturing out into the Wasteland to look for help, ending up killed, and making the kids believe they’d been abandoned), they tried knocking on the door to the nearby Vault 87 asking for admittance, only for a vault dweller inside to yell back at them to go away, they were dead. At the time, it was easy to assume that this was just somebody on the inside being an asshole.
Nope, it’s actually much more tragic than that. It seems that the kids had the bad luck to ask for help from one Peter Stevens. . .who, as revealed when you find his terminal, had recently lost his son Jason and was taking it badly. He could hear the kids in the tunnels outside, but nobody else could, and they all thought he was going crazy from grief. I’m guessing Peter himself started to believe it was a hallucination, or simply couldn’t bear being around children, and when the kids asked for entrance. . .yeah. Cue him insisting they were dead because he wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t the product of him missing his son. :( It’s all very sad and makes me want to give everyone involved a hug.
V. And that is not the only tragedy lurking on the terminals in this vault! Down in Engineering, Jon made a point to look at the terminal of the engineering staff and their notes. Some of the early ones are just standard stuff, but then things start to get weird with entries talking about the “EEP” that have been partially redacted. . .and ending with a note from one Daniel Koster, where he rants about how the EEP ended up killing his wife, Mercia, after she was diagnosed with some unknown disease, how he’s discovered loads of people have gone missing or died in this vault, and how he is going to get his revenge, letting anyone who might read the note after him that doing so unlocks a nearby safe and to use what’s inside (some grenades and a magnum) to save themselves. Now, Daniel was entirely right to be suspicious – a little poking around the vault and looking at the various stasis chamber labs and whatnot reveals that this vault was the one that was playing around with FEV – aka the thing that makes super mutants. Hell, it’s STILL full of super mutants, as they’ve been using it as a base – up until recently, this is where they brought kidnapped humans to turn them into more super mutants. The reason you find super mutants trying to break into other vaults, hospitals, and similar places is because the vats went dry a little while ago, and they’re desperately trying to find more “green stuff” to refill them and keep making more of themselves. But yes, this vault’s experiments and the “EEP” was all about mutating humans with FEV, which accounted for most of the disappearances and deaths –
But not Mercia’s. Because there’s a terminal nearby with the medical records, and all the codes for various deaths. Any “unexplained/undefined death” (aka “person was selected for the FEV experiments”) are coded “UD000,” and there’s LOADS of them in the list of people who have died. . .but Mercia Koster is listed as “N009.” Which is a CANCER diagnosis. And, as there is no explicit note anywhere stating when the experiments with FEV in these labs went wrong, allowing the super mutants to take over and start mutating everybody under much less controlled conditions, Jon’s theory is that someone not realizing Mercia was a cancer death and instead fobbing off her husband Daniel with the standard “don’t tell them it’s super mutants bullshit” caused Daniel to take bloody revenge – and that bloody revenge started off a chain reaction that led to the super mutants taking over. He has no proof, obviously, but it feels plausible, at least!
VI. There is one happy thing to find in this vault of mutant horrors, though – Fawkes! The super mutant companion of FO3, and one of the few to mutate and NOT lose his intelligence in the process. (Well, on the East Coast – West Coast super mutants tend to contain more erudite members. Must be differences in the various batches of FEV.) Wanda found him locked in a room for being different than the others, and with her high Intelligence, was able to immediately connect with him about the irony about being a mutant among mutants, and get him to agree to a bargain – she helps him get free of his prison, and he helps her retrieve the GECK, which is in a radiation-high area. Wanda was more than open to this, though unfortunately she was unable to use the terminal right outside of his door (you can hack it, but it’ll just throw up an error message). Jon explained there were two ways to open up Fawkes’s door – the Fire Controls mainframe (which simulates a fire and opens ALL of the doors at once), or the Medical Wing terminal right behind it (which allows you to specifically blow any door you want). Jon strongly recommended using the latter, as the former will release any number of hostile creatures –
VII. Along with Sid! Sid is a fellow human trapped in a room, running in constant circles. If you release him via the terminal outside of his room or the Fire Controls, he will immediately turn hostile and attack you. . .but if you simply pick his door’s lock, he will remain neutral. Not that he thanks you for your help or anything – he simply spews out panicked dialogue about how this is all his fault and how it’s all over him. Jon believes that the guy was with two other humans you can find dead in a different room, and a combination of being locked up by super mutants and seeing his friends die has driven the poor guy around the bend. :( It’s a shame, it really is.
VIII. Anyway – Wanda freed Fawkes, and the two fought their way to the area where the GECK was located (taking on some Overlords along the way because Jon is WAY overleveled for all of this – he actually recommends people do all this super mutant stuff around level ten or so, so they can fight decently well and only have to deal with Brutes spawning in). Now, how this is SUPPOSED to go is that Fawkes goes into the heavily irradiated corridors and gets the box with the GECK for the player character – BUT, Jon wanted to do things the stupid way, and so he had Wanda follow Fawkes (who was begrudgingly impressed with her guts, even if he thought it was a stupid thing to do), popping as much Rad-X and Rad-Away as she could to deal with the radiation. And why did he want to do that?
Why, because there are special options for interacting with the GECK if you encounter it on its little plinth! You can pick it up, leave it alone – or activate it. Choosing “activate” gets you a special little message about how the GECK will convert all the matter around it into lush grass and fertile soil to encourage life to begin again, and are you sure you want to do this from close range? And if you select “yes” –
Well, your character gets bio-nuked and dies and the game reloads from the last save. XD Jon does not know WHY this happens (as what the GECK does and what it is changes from game to game – at one point it was just a box full of seeds), but he does enjoy doing it just for the shits and giggles. XD
And so the episode ended with Jon getting the GECK the “correct” way (aka, still following Fawkes into the radiation but just picking it up instead of turning it on), temporarily parting ways with Fawkes, and deciding to stop before leaving the vault because plot-important stuff was happening! Next week, it seems like we’ll be visiting an Enclave base, and seeking out more secrets in the Wasteland now that we’ve progressed the actual plot-important missions a bit further. Should be fun! :D
Workout: Back on the bike today – but NOT back to Oxventure quite yet, because I know it takes me a while to summarize/recap those episodes after the fact, and with the Jon TTW video looming (which is pretty much always on the longer side), I decided I wanted to watch some stuff that wouldn’t take very long at all to cover. So this is what I watched instead today –
A) “Trying the same Rags to Riches challenge 9 years later” by James Turner! Inspired by a “reaction video” he did for his channel members regarding the very first Rags To Riches challenge he did a month after The Sims 4 came out (where he created a Sim, set them on an empty lot, reduced their money to $0, and set them the goal to earn $10,000), he decided to recreate that challenge in the modern Sims 4 base game, to see how improvements and updates to said base game over the past nine years had made that particular goal easier! And so he resurrected Duke Silver, a wanna-be painter who moved to an empty lot in Willow Creek, went fishing in Oasis Springs to earn some capital for an easel (and meeting the updated Katrina Caliente along the way), came back to Willow Creek to start painting, painted until he could afford the Digitalistic Sketchpad item (yes, that is a base game thing! I could have sworn it came with Moschino Stuff, but maybe it came in a patch around the release of that pack), and then used that to “sketch” his way to $10K! Buying only a single toilet, a cheap bed, and another easel (after James, trying to complete bits of his aspiration to earn points for Moodlet Solver potions, discovered that you can’t do emotional paintings on the sketchpad), and surviving off scavenged produce, welcome wagon fruitcake, and the aforementioned Moodlet Solvers. XD It took the original version of Duke a whole eleven-part series to earn his $10K – here? About twenty-four unedited minutes. James was quite pleased and considered the whole experience quite fun. XD Now if only this didn’t make me want to make that save file where I try out the “Makin’ Money” scenario. . .
B) “What EVERY Introduction Does In The Sims 4” by Petey Plays It! A list of all the various introduction (and introduction-adjacent – as it turns out, mermaids can kiss Sims and ghosts can scare them before ever properly introducing themselves for some reason; makes sense for the ghosts but less for the mermaids) interactions and how they affect Sim relationships in the game. Most of them are pretty standard “small bit of relationship gain, gets the Sim in your ‘known Sims panel’” effect, though certain ones will also change the type of conversation (a “Hilarious Icebreaker” will immediately make the conversation a Hilarious Repartee if it goes off, while an “Enchanting Introduction” makes the conversation Steamy and the recipient very flirty) or occasionally prompt other effects (if you have Growing Together, using the “Respectful Greeting” a lot can trigger a Self Discovery Moment where your Sim can gain the “Proper” trait). Nothing life-changing in this video, but it was a fun watch nonetheless!
*thumbs up* Nice. Feeling semi-on-top of things for once. :p And now I have to rush off to bed and get some sleep, as while I do have a shorter day of work tomorrow, it's only shorter by a half hour in the afternoon, soo -- yeah. Night all!
Tumblr: Well, didn’t get a chance to catch up on my tracked tags, but I did get all the most important stuff done on both blogs –
Victor Luvs Alice – Got all the latest Chill Valicer Save Update posts drafted right before lunch, then did the full text-and-tags on the first three posts after lunch! So I’m roughly halfway through, yay. :) And given I get to come home slightly early tomorrow, I shouldn’t have much trouble finishing up the rest!
Valice Multiverse – One new thread reply (which tumblr didn’t tell me about yesterday) and one ask reply in the queue, w00! Which is good because I’m almost out of Not-Incorrect Valicer quotes to reblog. XD
Fallout 4: Had a reasonably productive day in the Commonwealth – at the very least, I got out of East Boston Prepatory School! Here’s what happened –
A) Started with Victor awake very bright and early in East Boston Prep’s auditorium – promptly had him head back upstairs to the third floor to poke around for any goodies he missed (scored some military grade duct tape, which was VERY nice), including that issue of Astoundingly Awesome Tales in the computer lab I nearly missed – “Rise of the Radiated,” which makes Rad-Away heal +5% rad damage, nice. :D Another handy little perk to have!
B) With that sorted, I had Victor and Ada exit the building through the doors on the third floor and explore the rubble around the chunk of broken plane a bit – nothing of interest there, so I sent them back into the building through the front doors. My goal there was to see if anything about the building would reset if I came in the “proper” way – namely, if the leader of the gang would actually spawn in. From what I could see, nothing happened, but I still had a little bit of exploring left to do. . .
C) Mainly, getting into the other chained room on the first floor, where the raiders had been dumping settlers/recruits who died from all the torture! That was easily accomplished, though – I just went up to the second floor and found one of the convenient holes in the first floor to drop down. The room proved to be bigger than I expected (well, it proved to be two rooms linked through a gap in the wall; I’d expected there to be two separate rooms I’d have to drop down into through two separate holes), and had some decent goodies in it – lots of ammo, that’s for sure, and bottle caps on the corpses. (You really gotta wonder why the raiders would leave those. . .then again, this particular gang seems to be more about torturing people than making money.) There was also a book return machine in there – I had Victor poke at it briefly, but ultimately decided to leave it alone in favor of waiting to return any books I had at the Boston Public Library. One of THOSE has a magazine in it, and I don’t want to miss out!
D) With that room cleared (as much as my carry weight would allow, anyway), I had Victor unchain the door, and then do one last sweep of the building, looking for raiders and the Judge boss (stopping along the way to do a little chem combining in the chemistry lab, and a bit of cooking at the bathroom cooking pot – Victor has fresh popcorn now! Yes, bathroom popcorn, sue me). I couldn’t find anyone anywhere, though, and both Victor and Ada were just about at their limits carry capacity wise, so I decided “well, I will eventually be coming back this way to visit the Brotherhood, and I’ve killed MOST of the raiders – maybe if I leave the cell and come back, any missing enemies will spawn back in.”
E) And so Victor and Ada finally left East Boston Prep and headed back out onto the road! Specifically, they headed back to County Crossing, the nearest settlement, so Victor could finally drop off a bunch of junk. Upon arrival, I discovered that Doc Weathers was visiting and decided to trade with him – Victor took a flip lighter and a microscope off the guy in exchange for all the Buffjet he’d recently made (which actually got Victor caps BACK, nice). Right after that, one of the settlers asked Victor if he could give them some help (explaining why Victor kept having glitchy “I just want to trade” voice lines playing whenever he passed by said settler), saying something nasty was parked up nearby that they wanted clearing out. Turned out to be one of those “go to this settlement and clear out the baddies infesting it” missions that current settlers occasionally give you to help you get new settlements going – and, kind of amusingly, the ghoul who gave it to Victor pointed him toward Jamaica Plain! Apparently the game REALLY WANTS me to find that damn treasure already. XD
F) With that sorted, I had Victor drop off his junk (after dropping off his port-a-potty separately in the broken-down house foundation nearby), then do some building in the settlement! Namely, he set up some proper foundation for the new shack that’s been half-floating on the slope nearby and moved it it on top of that; moved the dining area to a better spot between the cooking spit and the caravan campfire; and (after a few false starts) adjusted the placement of the outhouse and the bathtub and gave the whole spot a little more privacy by putting it behind some metal walls with a door (using another bit of shack foundation to “prop up” a floating wall). This took him to 9 PM in the evening – I had him eat some vegetable soup for supper, then hit his sleeping back to get the appropriate amount of zzzs.
G) Up bright and early at 5 AM the next morning, Victor finished up his “chores” around the settlement – making “shower” and “lavatory” signs for the new pooping-and-bathing area, harvesting a bunch of crops from the little farm, and retrieving his port-a-potty and some useful junk (including all of his adhesive) from the workbench. I then had him check his map and take a look at his route going forward – looks like the best thing for him to do is head from County Crossing to Goodneighbor and sell some of the spare armor and such Ada is carrying, then go to the General Atomics factory, then hit Jamaica Plain. *nods* And going to Goodneighbor will ALSO allow me to start the “Silver Shroud” quests with Kent and make sure Victor has the costume for his confrontation with The Mechanist! Yeah, that’ll work. :D
And so that that is where I stopped for the day, with Victor ready to hit the road and get lost looking for the entrance to Goodneighbor again. XD Maybe I didn’t get a hell of a lot done today, but it was fun nonetheless – and I’m VERY glad to have discovered the wonder of shack foundations. So many settlements in this game have uneven ground, and it annoys me to see stuff too blatantly floating. We’ll see how everything progresses next week! I swear to God one day I will continue the plot and get Victor into the Glowing Sea. . .just not anytime soon. XD
Writing: Updated the FO4 Playthrough Progression with the events of my playsession today – pretty much identical to what happened up-top beyond Victor calling in a Minutemen patrol to keep an eye on East Boston Prep after not being able to find the Judge (I figure he’d want SOMEONE to off the asshole, even if it’s not him), and Victor encountering and trading with Doc Weathers AFTER getting the “Clearing the Way” quest to clear out Jamaica Plain instead of before (it worked better narratively). Oh, and of course some character stuff, like Alice and Ada comforting a disturbed Victor about what he’d seen in the EBP raider base (which, let’s be honest, it’s VERY understandable to be disturbed by that place). But yeah, other than that, same deal of Victor and companions doing one last sweep of the school, then heading to County Crossing and helping them fix up some stuff before getting ready to head out toward Goodneighbor the next day. We’ll see if I get to put down anything more exciting next week!
YouTube: Happily, thanks to keeping Fallout 4 short and simple, I was able to watch everything I wanted to watch today, no problem –
A) First up (separated by my workout and dinner), we had a couple of GrayStillPlays videos –
I. “Every Vehicle vs Dangerous Roads in GTA 5” – the Alex Torture Board that I wasn’t able to watch yesterday due to the OXBox RE4 Remake Marathon! The latest course was a combination of different “speed bumps” and “potholes” that Alex set up on his elevated road, and it was Gray’s job to find the correct car that could get through all of them. We had Geometry Speedbumps (various weird shapes made out of rectangles that got higher and higher as Gray progressed over them); Plugged Potholes (two pits with bridges made out of fragile cacti and giant poppers respectively); Tasty Speedbumps (a bunch of speed bumps made out of food, including a ramp made out of corn chips, a giant pretzel, a wall of donut burgers topped with soda cups, a burger patty, a burger patty with top bun, and a can of chips firing chips out the side); “Jumping Guys Potholes” (two pits with guys of various beefiness jumping into them – I have no idea what the actual name of this section was because Gray saw it and was like “I can’t say that on YouTube!” XD); Rock Hard Speedbumps (a bunch of speed bumps made out of various rock formations to climb over); Spasming Potholes (a pit made out of two teleporting chunks of road that kept going back and forth, and a pit made out of two SLIDING chunks of road that kept going back and forth); and finally Speedbumps + Potholes (two increasingly large pits (one with a Wastelander inside it to show how big it was) that had a whole bunch of stop sticks right in front of them – the only way to get over them was to do it backwards, since the stop sticks don’t activate if you go over them in reverse). Gray tried a few different cars – his starting orange number immediately got stuck on the Geometric Speedbumps; the dump truck surprisingly made it over the collapsing cacti bridge but couldn’t make it past the poppers in Plugged Potholes (ditto for the tank); and the Liberator JUST made it over the burger patty with the help of another car, only to fail on the chip can) – but in the end, the winner was a yellow-and-purple number with the ability to climb just about ANYTHING and a top speed going backwards JUUUST good enough to make the jumps beyond the stop sticks. w00!
II. “This cute game has a dark secret” – Gray plays Pineapple On Pizza! This is a very short little game where you are an invisible person on a tropical island, going around looking at all the happy people dancing, doing calisthenics, playing games, holding babies, chilling out on a bench (and getting achievements for the lot) – and then you go up to the local volcano, jump inside, and cause a massacre. XD The entire game is just an excuse to show all these adorable little smiley people getting murdered by lava or sharks. Or, if you figure out how to escape (hint: there are boats on one bit of the beach), volcanic rock smashing down upon you. Gray found the whole thing darkly hilarious, apologizing to everyone as they died horribly. It is exceedingly rare for Gray to be sorry about a massacre, but – well, he was only looking to kill HIMSELF by flinging himself into the volcano. The much-too-happy villagers were just collateral damage. XD (Oh, and if you’re wondering about the name – get the “escape” ending and it’ll show the island covered in lava from above. . .)
B) And then, as it is every Sunday, it was time for Jon and “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 32 - Vault in the Wound!” Which was Wanda finishing off her vault-diving adventures by visiting the only two vaults left on the list in the Vault-Tec terminal in the BOS citadel – Vault 106, which had most of its information redacted by its overseer and actually has the distinct honor of being one of two vaults that was first CONCEPTUALIZED by the original Black Isle Studios team (it’s mentioned in their Fallout Bible) but didn’t actually make it into a game until the Bethesda-era stuff (the other is Vault 34 in New Vegas), and Vault 87, aka the Plot-Important Vault which is the whole reason you have to make nice with Little Lamplight. Here’s how Wanda’s adventures finishing off the vaults went –
I. First up, on the way to visit Vault 106 (in fact, literally outside its front door), Wanda ran into probably the best-placed random encounter in the game – Amata encountering a group of Enclave soldiers! This is something that only happens if, like Wanda, you choose to side with Butch and blow Vault 101 to force a mass evacuation, and it involves Amata asking for help from the Enclave soldiers – only for the Enclave to coax the location of her vault from her and then open fire. Wanda attempted to save her old friend, but was unsuccessful the first time because, well, nasty Enclave soldiers in their nasty Enclave power armor. *wince* Rewinding time and massively dropping the difficulty allowed Wanda to save Amata, but her attempts to reconnect just led to Amata angrily accusing this of being all Wanda’s fault – confusing when you recall that Jon managed to successfully lie to Amata that her dad, the overseer, set the vault to blow, but Jon figured that Amata’s smart enough to perhaps figure out that her very morally neutral friend was fibbing about it all. :p
II. Anyway, with that sorted, Jon had Wanda venture inside Vault 106 and show off the experiment – namely, hallucinatory gas! Which was still going after 200 years somehow and thus affected Wanda at key points, causing her vision to shade purple and giving her hallucinations of her father (in triplicate), a fleeing Amata (in triplicate), and an attack by Butch and his old Tunnel Snakes gang (not in triplicate for some reason). Jon showed off that it also allows you to interact with otherwise-broken terminals and get messages from your brain, talking about how awesome the vault is in the purple haze and arguing with you about how you should just give up on the awful wasteland above and live down here. It’s very amusing. XD
. . .For you, anyway. Because while you don’t get a clear picture of what exactly happened, you DO run across some “insane survivors” in the vault, who all attack you with things like bats and axes and suchlike. Along with one regular “survivor” near the back (who still tries to attack you, mid-Tunnel Snakes hallucination), who was apparently trying to tunnel out? Or blast his way out with mini-nukes? It’s very unclear. But yes, while the Overseer’s terminal indicates that they were at least following better scientific method with this particular experiment (doing smaller tests using one particular room before shunting the weird gas inside the entire vault, and preparing for the worst with the security team when that happened) and that the victims of this presumably mind-control gas had a better time than the musicians subjected to the white noise in Vault 92 (the scribbled notes you find are of people who are acting mostly like stoned hippies, saying that the walls need love, man), clearly SOMETHING happened when the gas was released on the residents en masse that turned at least some of them violent and caused them to murder all their fellows. And also apparently made them immortal, because, as a reminder, you come across this vault two hundred years after the bombs dropped and this experiment started. Out of universe, Jon thinks this is an artifact of Fallout 3 timeline’s being changed – originally it would have been a prequel of sorts, set much closer to the date of the actual bomb drops (like Fallout 76 ended up being), instead of being set after Fallout 2. In-universe? Uh. . .well, the people who attack you have raider haircuts, so they might actually be raiders who, upon exposure to the gas, came to believe they were vault residents? But then again, the door isn’t open when you first arrive, so. . . I dunno. This vault is just very weird. Enjoy the weird trippy purple gas and try not to think about it too hard.
III. Anyway, after showing off the weirdness of Vault 106, it was time for Jon and Wanda to take on the final vault – Vault 87, the Plot-Important Vault! AKA the one with the GECK, and the one that’s the reason you have to make good with the kids of Little Lamplight. Because let Jon tell you, you AIN’T getting in through the front – not only is it swarming with super mutants, even if you get past them, you’ll find that the whole area is HEAVILY bathed in radiation (the TTW version is just about survivable with enough Rad-Away and Rad-X, but the vanilla version is one of the most heavily irradiated areas in the entire Fallout franchise AND the front door is unpickable – you need a key, which you simply do not have. So yeah, you need the kids’ help to get in a side entrance. You can go in through Murder Alley or get Jason the schoolteacher’s help in activating and cracking a terminal that will let you in a side door into the reactor room (provided you have enough Science). Jon, as you might imagine, picked hacking the terminal, and recommends everyone else do too, because – well. MURDER ALLEY. Yeah, uh, unless you are COMMITTED to the destruction of all monsters, maybe make sure you have enough Science to hack mid-level computers and save yourself the trouble, okay?
IV. Anyway – once inside the vault, Jon’s first thought was to track down the final piece of the puzzle as to why Little Lamplight ended up a society of only children. You may remember from earlier episodes that Jon was able to find holotapes from the first days of Little Lamplight, where he revealed that at least part of why the kids decided adults were not to be trusted was because, after their guardians all disappeared (venturing out into the Wasteland to look for help, ending up killed, and making the kids believe they’d been abandoned), they tried knocking on the door to the nearby Vault 87 asking for admittance, only for a vault dweller inside to yell back at them to go away, they were dead. At the time, it was easy to assume that this was just somebody on the inside being an asshole.
Nope, it’s actually much more tragic than that. It seems that the kids had the bad luck to ask for help from one Peter Stevens. . .who, as revealed when you find his terminal, had recently lost his son Jason and was taking it badly. He could hear the kids in the tunnels outside, but nobody else could, and they all thought he was going crazy from grief. I’m guessing Peter himself started to believe it was a hallucination, or simply couldn’t bear being around children, and when the kids asked for entrance. . .yeah. Cue him insisting they were dead because he wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t the product of him missing his son. :( It’s all very sad and makes me want to give everyone involved a hug.
V. And that is not the only tragedy lurking on the terminals in this vault! Down in Engineering, Jon made a point to look at the terminal of the engineering staff and their notes. Some of the early ones are just standard stuff, but then things start to get weird with entries talking about the “EEP” that have been partially redacted. . .and ending with a note from one Daniel Koster, where he rants about how the EEP ended up killing his wife, Mercia, after she was diagnosed with some unknown disease, how he’s discovered loads of people have gone missing or died in this vault, and how he is going to get his revenge, letting anyone who might read the note after him that doing so unlocks a nearby safe and to use what’s inside (some grenades and a magnum) to save themselves. Now, Daniel was entirely right to be suspicious – a little poking around the vault and looking at the various stasis chamber labs and whatnot reveals that this vault was the one that was playing around with FEV – aka the thing that makes super mutants. Hell, it’s STILL full of super mutants, as they’ve been using it as a base – up until recently, this is where they brought kidnapped humans to turn them into more super mutants. The reason you find super mutants trying to break into other vaults, hospitals, and similar places is because the vats went dry a little while ago, and they’re desperately trying to find more “green stuff” to refill them and keep making more of themselves. But yes, this vault’s experiments and the “EEP” was all about mutating humans with FEV, which accounted for most of the disappearances and deaths –
But not Mercia’s. Because there’s a terminal nearby with the medical records, and all the codes for various deaths. Any “unexplained/undefined death” (aka “person was selected for the FEV experiments”) are coded “UD000,” and there’s LOADS of them in the list of people who have died. . .but Mercia Koster is listed as “N009.” Which is a CANCER diagnosis. And, as there is no explicit note anywhere stating when the experiments with FEV in these labs went wrong, allowing the super mutants to take over and start mutating everybody under much less controlled conditions, Jon’s theory is that someone not realizing Mercia was a cancer death and instead fobbing off her husband Daniel with the standard “don’t tell them it’s super mutants bullshit” caused Daniel to take bloody revenge – and that bloody revenge started off a chain reaction that led to the super mutants taking over. He has no proof, obviously, but it feels plausible, at least!
VI. There is one happy thing to find in this vault of mutant horrors, though – Fawkes! The super mutant companion of FO3, and one of the few to mutate and NOT lose his intelligence in the process. (Well, on the East Coast – West Coast super mutants tend to contain more erudite members. Must be differences in the various batches of FEV.) Wanda found him locked in a room for being different than the others, and with her high Intelligence, was able to immediately connect with him about the irony about being a mutant among mutants, and get him to agree to a bargain – she helps him get free of his prison, and he helps her retrieve the GECK, which is in a radiation-high area. Wanda was more than open to this, though unfortunately she was unable to use the terminal right outside of his door (you can hack it, but it’ll just throw up an error message). Jon explained there were two ways to open up Fawkes’s door – the Fire Controls mainframe (which simulates a fire and opens ALL of the doors at once), or the Medical Wing terminal right behind it (which allows you to specifically blow any door you want). Jon strongly recommended using the latter, as the former will release any number of hostile creatures –
VII. Along with Sid! Sid is a fellow human trapped in a room, running in constant circles. If you release him via the terminal outside of his room or the Fire Controls, he will immediately turn hostile and attack you. . .but if you simply pick his door’s lock, he will remain neutral. Not that he thanks you for your help or anything – he simply spews out panicked dialogue about how this is all his fault and how it’s all over him. Jon believes that the guy was with two other humans you can find dead in a different room, and a combination of being locked up by super mutants and seeing his friends die has driven the poor guy around the bend. :( It’s a shame, it really is.
VIII. Anyway – Wanda freed Fawkes, and the two fought their way to the area where the GECK was located (taking on some Overlords along the way because Jon is WAY overleveled for all of this – he actually recommends people do all this super mutant stuff around level ten or so, so they can fight decently well and only have to deal with Brutes spawning in). Now, how this is SUPPOSED to go is that Fawkes goes into the heavily irradiated corridors and gets the box with the GECK for the player character – BUT, Jon wanted to do things the stupid way, and so he had Wanda follow Fawkes (who was begrudgingly impressed with her guts, even if he thought it was a stupid thing to do), popping as much Rad-X and Rad-Away as she could to deal with the radiation. And why did he want to do that?
Why, because there are special options for interacting with the GECK if you encounter it on its little plinth! You can pick it up, leave it alone – or activate it. Choosing “activate” gets you a special little message about how the GECK will convert all the matter around it into lush grass and fertile soil to encourage life to begin again, and are you sure you want to do this from close range? And if you select “yes” –
Well, your character gets bio-nuked and dies and the game reloads from the last save. XD Jon does not know WHY this happens (as what the GECK does and what it is changes from game to game – at one point it was just a box full of seeds), but he does enjoy doing it just for the shits and giggles. XD
And so the episode ended with Jon getting the GECK the “correct” way (aka, still following Fawkes into the radiation but just picking it up instead of turning it on), temporarily parting ways with Fawkes, and deciding to stop before leaving the vault because plot-important stuff was happening! Next week, it seems like we’ll be visiting an Enclave base, and seeking out more secrets in the Wasteland now that we’ve progressed the actual plot-important missions a bit further. Should be fun! :D
Workout: Back on the bike today – but NOT back to Oxventure quite yet, because I know it takes me a while to summarize/recap those episodes after the fact, and with the Jon TTW video looming (which is pretty much always on the longer side), I decided I wanted to watch some stuff that wouldn’t take very long at all to cover. So this is what I watched instead today –
A) “Trying the same Rags to Riches challenge 9 years later” by James Turner! Inspired by a “reaction video” he did for his channel members regarding the very first Rags To Riches challenge he did a month after The Sims 4 came out (where he created a Sim, set them on an empty lot, reduced their money to $0, and set them the goal to earn $10,000), he decided to recreate that challenge in the modern Sims 4 base game, to see how improvements and updates to said base game over the past nine years had made that particular goal easier! And so he resurrected Duke Silver, a wanna-be painter who moved to an empty lot in Willow Creek, went fishing in Oasis Springs to earn some capital for an easel (and meeting the updated Katrina Caliente along the way), came back to Willow Creek to start painting, painted until he could afford the Digitalistic Sketchpad item (yes, that is a base game thing! I could have sworn it came with Moschino Stuff, but maybe it came in a patch around the release of that pack), and then used that to “sketch” his way to $10K! Buying only a single toilet, a cheap bed, and another easel (after James, trying to complete bits of his aspiration to earn points for Moodlet Solver potions, discovered that you can’t do emotional paintings on the sketchpad), and surviving off scavenged produce, welcome wagon fruitcake, and the aforementioned Moodlet Solvers. XD It took the original version of Duke a whole eleven-part series to earn his $10K – here? About twenty-four unedited minutes. James was quite pleased and considered the whole experience quite fun. XD Now if only this didn’t make me want to make that save file where I try out the “Makin’ Money” scenario. . .
B) “What EVERY Introduction Does In The Sims 4” by Petey Plays It! A list of all the various introduction (and introduction-adjacent – as it turns out, mermaids can kiss Sims and ghosts can scare them before ever properly introducing themselves for some reason; makes sense for the ghosts but less for the mermaids) interactions and how they affect Sim relationships in the game. Most of them are pretty standard “small bit of relationship gain, gets the Sim in your ‘known Sims panel’” effect, though certain ones will also change the type of conversation (a “Hilarious Icebreaker” will immediately make the conversation a Hilarious Repartee if it goes off, while an “Enchanting Introduction” makes the conversation Steamy and the recipient very flirty) or occasionally prompt other effects (if you have Growing Together, using the “Respectful Greeting” a lot can trigger a Self Discovery Moment where your Sim can gain the “Proper” trait). Nothing life-changing in this video, but it was a fun watch nonetheless!
*thumbs up* Nice. Feeling semi-on-top of things for once. :p And now I have to rush off to bed and get some sleep, as while I do have a shorter day of work tomorrow, it's only shorter by a half hour in the afternoon, soo -- yeah. Night all!
