Busy Busy Sunday
Jun. 25th, 2023 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickI'm running low on time, as per usual, as I'm finishing up answering Moose's messages as well as finishing my write-ups on stuff and getting ready to head to bed for work tomorrow, so let's just throw up the to-do list and be done with it, okay?
Tumblr: Had a good day on the old Victor Luvs Alice tumblr – caught up on the dash and a few new posts in my tracked tags before lunch (including saving a cool post of Smiler “stamp” gifs to my drafts for later), then drafted out this week’s Sims 4-related post – featuring some new Smiler, Victor, and Alice looks I did when I saved the all-human Valicer trio to my library the week before last – doing roughly half before lunch, half after lunch! So that’ll go up this Wednesday. :) And then I made a point to reblog some stuff I saw during my dash catch-up (a funny song parody and a meme about grabbing all the stuff and then having to deal with the inventory management in video games) because I’m trying to get out of the mindset of “I can only draft these certain things to save for later.” Trying to be more proactive, you know?
As for Valice Multiverse – nothing happening on that, and I didn’t really have time this evening to go looking for stuff to queue, as I’m already way late in updating this. *wince* We’ll see what happens on Tuesday evening!
Fallout 4: Did another hour in the Commonwealth, and made some good progress in my chosen goals for the session –
A) Picked up in the middle of the General Atomics factory, where I’d left off after having Victor hack open the door to the next room and then retreat to avoid being noticed by the robots inside. I had him and Ada cut through the little control area that I’d had them hide in previously, back around to the stairs at the back of the room so Victor could take a look on the second and third floors. Not a lot up there, though there was some good junk and an ammo box, so I had him head back down –
B) And then realized “hey, wait a minute, that conveyor belt gives a decent view over into the next room – why don’t I send him along that and take a peek inside to see if he can get a bead on any of the robots from above?” So that’s what I did, scattering bits and pieces all over the place. It turned out not to give as good a view as I’d hoped, and there wasn’t a lot of spots for Victor to jump to or climb over – but I DID spot a swarmbot passing by in gun range! I had Victor line up a couple of shots in VATS. . .
C) Two misses – he hit the railing in front of him both times. *grumbles* Fortunately the robots didn’t immediately twig where he was, allowing me to retreat a little bit and get some space – and when they DID figure out where the shots had come from, the bots almost all came through the BOTTOM door, allowing me the aerial view to shoot them that I had wanted in the first place! Victor took them all out pretty quickly with his Two-Shot Combat Rifle – including that one junkbot with a sentry machine gun arm that killed him the first time he tried to enter the factory. Hmph – screw you, asshole!
D) With THAT sorted (and the one junkbot on a higher level shot down), Victor and Ada proceeded back to ground level to reap the spoils of their victory (and watch a previously-downed robot suddenly start flailing and juttering for no reason – oh Bethesda). Lots of good loot and robot mods on the corpses, nice. :) Victor then proceeded into the next room to look for goodies and more enemies – he didn’t find any of the latter (though he could hear the robobrain he needed to kill above him), but he did find a heck of a lot of Wonderglue and duct tape. :D There was also a heavily irradiated corner, and near that, a security door with a “QA” terminal beside it. I recalled that being for the Miss Nanny Quality Assurance/refresher course. . .
E) And after a moment’s indecision, decided, “Hell, let’s do it, it’s some free XP and goodies.” And so Victor and Ada proceeded into the course that had been set up for unit 761, covering some basic Miss Handy situations. One – Timmy has been naughty and broken a vase throwing a ball around inside. How do we punish his skeleton sitting on the couch? By turning off the radio in the room! Two – what does the crying teddy bear baby want? No, not a rattle – his bottle, because that’s the “I’m hungry” cry! Three – childproof this kitchen/dining area so the children don’t get their hands on anything dangerous. This is the one that I struggled with, as I found the threat right away – a freaking machete in the fridge – but I didn’t realize that just picking it up was sufficient – you had to put it in the trash can to pass. So I ended up basically picking up everything that wasn’t bolted down in that room and having to eat one of my modded apple pies to increase Victor’s carry weight to the point where he could carry it all. XD But I figured it out eventually, and Victor was allowed to reward himself from the safe in the hallway, which carried, among other things, three fusion cores! Nice. :D
F) Anyway – with that diversion over with, Victor and Ada proceeded onward, looping back around and heading up the stairs in the back up to the second floor, into a janitor’s/cleaning closet. Victor picked up a bunch of good junk, then cracked open a side room where a skeleton with a suitcase had apparently been planning to flee the apocalypse, with yet more good junk. It was about this time that exhaustion started getting the better of Victor, but while the room looked like a good place to sleep, I figured the game wouldn’t let him set up his tent and take a nap because of the enemies nearby (never mind they were currently in green “not currently hostile” mode). So I had him chug a Nuka-Cola and continue on. . .
G) And there, just out in the hallway, behind a couple of tightly-locked security doors, was the Quantum Robobrain and its two buddies! They promptly started firing on Victor and Ada, though they didn’t have too much luck hitting them thanks to the doors. Unfortunately, the doors also prevented Victor and Ada from getting a good angle on them back. . .
H) But. I had an idea, remembered from old Jon of Many A True Nerd playthroughs. While Ada kept the group distracted with her laser, I had Victor run back to the stairs, head up, and go into a particular room just above the Robobrain’s “holding cell” –
With holes in the floor. Specifically, a nice big hole just perfect for shooting robots through! And they all very nicely lined themselves up for me – a junkbot, a eyebot, and finally the Robobrain themselves, who had a skull next to their name indicating they were a tough enemy, yet went down in a mere two blasts from the Two-Shot. Seriously, that gun takes care of EVERYTHING. :D
I) With the Quantum Robobrain defeated, Victor took a moment to loot the upstairs a bit (cracking another crate for the stuff inside), then headed back down and opened the security doors to investigate the dead robots (popping a Rad-X after discovering it was rather radioactive in one spot). The Robobrain proved to have a strange Mechanist device on them, which when Victor handed it over to Ada, was discovered to be a radar beacon. Ada suggested attaching it to her to help track the Mechanist and their other robots – Victor was like “are you sure?” with Ada responding that she had a 78.3% chance of being right, and besides they had no other leads. Victor acquiesced and went to play on the armor bench for a little bit, before returning to the lobby and setting up camp as the tired was setting in again (I mean, it WAS past midnight in-game at this point).
J) Victor had a nice seven hours sleep, getting up at 7:30 AM refreshed – but with his carry weight bonus gone because he’d slept through the last of it. >( I promptly had him do a little bit of cooking and a whole lot of custom scrapping on his portable workbench – scrapping a bunch of heavier objects brought him down to EXACTLY carryweight, which was about the best I could hope for under the circumstances. I decided he REALLY needed a spot to store all this junk –
K) And hey, the County Crossing settlers HAD told me to go and take the workshop at Jamaica Plain, had they not? And that actually was not far from the factory. . .so, with that in mind, I had Victor and Ada exit the factory, check Victor’s Pip-Boy, watch the Brotherhood of Steel vertibird buzzing overhead (firing at SOMETHING, though I’m not sure what) for a minute , and then proceed out past the Gwinnett Brewery and nearby liquor store, over to to the South Boston Police Station, then through some slightly flooded streets to the previously-cleared raider camp, then past that and under the broken elevated highway past the South Boston Checkpoint over to the OTHER raider camp that Victor had cleared (the one with the campfire and the weapons workbench), and finally from there over to the rocks overlooking Jamaica Plain itself! Victor spotted and killed one feral outside a house on the outskirts while getting close enough to actually tag the place, then I had him sneak around the edges, avoiding notice, so I could get him as close to the workbench as possible before having to kill any more. This worked out beautifully (even though, at one part, the game was insistent that I could pickpocket some ghoul that was either invisible or was prompting me to do so through the wall of the church), and Victor made it all the way around to the workbench at the other end of town without being spotted. He took out the ghouls clustered around it with the Two-Shot and Ada’s laser, then went to “search” the workbench –
L) Hmmm. Still more enemies nearby that Victor needed to kill. Well, no worries – while Victor couldn’t drop off anything at the workbench, there WAS a tool chest nearby, where he could drop off all his heaviest stuff – namely, all the other guns he doesn’t use because the Two-Shot takes care of everything and I have fifty million tons of ammo for it. XD With THAT sorted, I had him follow the markers on the map to – what I PRESUME was the mayoral office? I know it’s the place where you actually FIND the treasures of Jamaica Plain. . .anyway, Victor took care of the ghouls in there – one or two managed to get a hit on him on the lower floors, but they were easily taken out by the Two-Shot and Ada’s laser. And then, going up, the three in the office upstairs, where you find Sal’s corpse, didn’t have a chance – the Two-Shot felled each of them in a single shot. XD And one of them was a LEGENDARY, I might tell you – a Reaver carrying, of all things, a LUCKY MISSILE LAUNCHER. “Lucky” is the one that gets crits to refill 15% faster, I might tell you – it’s not something you really need on a MISSILE LAUNCHER. XD I also had Victor loot Sal’s corpse for her holotape and other useful goodies (though I didn’t yet take the mayor’s password – I may want to disable some of these traps manually for the XP). After all, he’s going to want to figure out the mystery of the treasure of Jamaica Plain himself!
M) However, clearing the ghouls out of that building as well as the area immediately surrounding the workbench meant that the workbench was safe and ready to be stocked! So I had Victor head back over there and dump all of his junk into it, yay. XD Carryweight restored, w00!
And that’s where I left it – next time, I think I’ll have him make the robot workbench and install the beacon onto Ada, then finish clearing out Jamaica Plain and find the treasure. Then we’ll head back toward Goodneighbor, getting the Silver Shroud costume and Drinkin’ Buddy along the way, and make a quick stop at County Crossing to finish off THAT quest. *nods* Sounds like a plan!
Writing: Another Sunday, another day with the FO4 Playthrough Progression, writing up Victor’s, Alice’s, and Ada’s adventures in the Commonwealth! This one was essentially identical to what happened up above – the gang exploring and clearing General Atomics, with Victor shooting the robobrain from above, then sneaking into Jamaica Plain to claim the workbench and clear it on their terms – with just a few little tweaks like Victor using the hole in the ceiling to enter the robobrain room and open the doors from the inside instead of backtracking to the stairs, Alice suggesting Jamaica Plain as a good place to try attaching the beacon to Ada should something go wrong, and the gang sneaking around Jamaica Plain specifically looking for a good spot for settlers to use as their “base” rather than just magically knowing that the workbench is the place to start (also Victor got to drop off his junk there BEFORE finishing off the ghouls in the TOWN HALL, that’s what it’s called). So yeah, that was easy. :p Next time, though, the Playthrough Progression and the actual playthrough should differ some, as I’m planning on having Victor invite Preston and, if he can find a way, Piper to check out the treasures of Jamaica Plain with him while he clears out the rest of the town. What, it’s a momentous occasion – and he knows Piper would KILL for the story. Possibly literally if she comes in while there’s still ghouls around. XD
YouTube: Managed two-thirds of what I was hoping to do – I decided it was better to start Jon’s nearly hour-long video a little earlier than watch both GrayStillPlays videos in my Subs, to stop me getting too stressed out while I did the write-up. I shall have opportunities to catch up on Gray as the week goes on! So here’s what I did manage –
A) “Testing Sonic Cars vs MASSIVE Potholes in GTA 5” – yesterday’s GrayStillPlays offering, featuring another Alex Torture Board with a Sonic The Hedgehog theme because apparently someone sent Gray Sonic-themed modded cars and Alex was like “let’s create a pothole challenge for them!” XD The challenges Gray had to make it across were “Florida Potholes Be Like” (two pits filled with rubble, because apparently that’s what Alex thinks Floridian roads are); “Rapid Potholes” (basically an uneven checkboard of platforms and potholes that Gray had to work his way across); “Chinese Takeout Potholes” (two potholes that were actually takeout boxes – one with static chopsticks, one with slowly rotating ones); the “Lung Cancer Pothole” (just a giant gap in the road with a huge cloud of smoke and lots of pipes in front of it, so Gray couldn’t tell exactly where the pothole was); the “Spread The Love Pothole” (a heart-shaped pothole with a little teleporter in the middle so Gray could go to an aerial view to look upon his failures); and “Can You Count From 4 to 1 Potholes” (potholes made from various targets, with the 4 pothole being the smallest and the 1 pothole being the biggest), and the cars ran the gamut from Amy (a Scramjet without any of the nice features, didn’t even make it past Florida), to Tails (a nice speedy block of American Cheese that couldn’t get over the Lung Cancer), to Sanic (a blue meme car that also could not make it past Florida because meme car), to Robotnik (a monster truck that did really well but just could not make it past the Love), to TWO Shadows (Gray tried out the big rig version, which did better than expected but couldn’t make it to the end), to Sonic himself – and, as you might imagine, the speed of Sonic (plus a little wall-riding on the bigger potholes) won the day. A very weird challenge, but a fun one, not gonna lie. :)
B) “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 35 - The Scientific Method” by Jon of Many A True Nerd, featuring Wanda extending her Legendary Game Hunting vacation to New Vegas with a trip to Big M-T and Old World Blues! Because not only did the final Legendary creature she needed to take out live in that area, Jon wanted to show off a certain bit of the world and do some scientific experiments involving movement speed, and the Think Tank’s little scientific horrortorium was the perfect place to start –
I. Item One – after starting the DLC and getting ready to do a little bit of speed-running (as you can do that if you want with OWB – apparently all you have to do is get past the first conversation with the Think Tank, go to the three buildings they ask you to visit to get their things, pick up any loot you want along the way and do any boss fights that need to be done, and then you can leave), Jon headed off to the Securiton Deconstruction Plant! Why? Well, firstly, it provided a convenient waypoint for a later trip regarding his movement speed experiments; secondly, it allowed him to show off how pretty much everything with an antenna can be frenzied if you can cripple said antenna by turning a securitron against its buddies by doing just that; thirdly, it allowed him to introduce us to the boss securitron 010011110110111001100101, whose name is a nerd joke in that it is “One” once you translate it from binary (and apparently is also a Red Dwarf reference? Or maybe that’s in the thing you can loot from him, the “Muggy Upgrades: Parts Production” thingamabob) –
And fourthly, and most importantly, allowed him to actually show off how the layout of the whole place was functionally a copy-paste of the Robot Repair Plant from FO3, which he’d visited earlier in the game. I mean, seriously, it’s damn near IDENTICAL in layout, with just a few minor changes (slightly different doors, a few assets moved around, and the terminal that turns off all the robots in the Repair Plant removed). Jon just considers it so bizarre that, for this one dungeon in this one DLC, they chose to do that, when everything else is unique or at least must better disguised as being reused. :p
II. Item Two – after a quick swing by Elijah’s Lookout (the camp of one of the previous people to be stuck here) and a look at his Jury-Rigged Tesla Cannon (a very nice weapon with no sway – IF you have 100 in the Energy Weapons skill and 8 strength – and if you pick it up, it spawns securitrons, so Jon left it where it was), Jon brought Wanda around and under the camp to the Mysterious Cave! The home of the final Legendary Creature she needed to kill – the Legendary Bloatfly! Now, upon hearing that, you MAY think that Jon had just set us up for a joke and this was the easiest thing in the world to kill.
YOU WOULD BE WRONG. Jon was DEAD SERIOUS about this one freaking Legendary Bloatfly being the hardest thing in the game. I’m used to bloatflies being a pain in the ass in FO4 (they fly really erratically and of course squirt you with their own maggots – seriously, it’s GROSS), but apparently in F:NV they’re the weakest enemies in the game – except for this one, which has TWO THOUSAND HP and can hit you for melee attacks of 450 damage, and plasma-like maggot blasts of 300 damage. Jon thought it got that hardcore from eating all the glowing cave fungus in its mysterious cave, but after creeping up on it from above (using the path that goes to the top of the chamber that its in, rather than the bottom), managing to get it to frenzy and attack its friends via hollow point rounds in Lincoln’s Repeater, and scoring a FANTASTIC crit to finish it off with Pacienca, he looted the corpse and discovered that, actually, it was completely hopped up on Buffout and Psycho. Given there’s a scientist camp nearby, he believe that a bloatfly got into the syringes of drugs one day, hoovered them up, and thus became the scariest thing in the game. Damn – just when you think you’ve found a silly meme enemy. . .
III. Item Three – with the big game hunting portion of her vacation over with, Wanda turned her attention to SCIENCE! Specifically, the science of improving her movement speed while crouching. Because Jon is a big believer in being faster than your enemies being an EXCELLENT way to stay alive in these games. He even had a way to scientifically test how fast his movement speed while standing/running normally was versus his movement speed while crouching – the fast travel system! Because, as he discovered in testing the game before this episode, the game calculates how much time should pass during your fast travel from point A to point B based on your stance and what your movement speed is for that stance. An early test of that system showed that it took ten minutes longer for Wanda to get from the Think Tank to Elijah’s Lookout crouching than it did while she was standing, which is just really interesting and fun information! (Makes me wonder if Fallout 4 works the same way, in fact. . .) But yes, this is what Jon did to improve Wanda’s movement speed, both generally and specifically while crouching –
a. Early on, he took the perk “Travel Light” for her after boosting up her Survival skill, allowing her to run 10% faster in general so long as she was wearing light armor or no armor at all. Which – is not GREAT for survival, given you want to have plenty of armor, but it’s something!
b. He took the time to fix the sink auto-doc by heading to the Y-17 Medical Facility and getting the auto-doc personality tapes there (going by the X-8 Research facility along the way and learning that any form of cyberdog is actually officially classed by the game as a ROBOT – they’re not affected by “Animal Friend,” and they’re extra-weak to pulse rounds), then headed over to the Z-14 DNA Splicing Lab (by the Securitron Deconstruction Center) to fight the cazadors in there (including the famous Specimen 73, who proved to be pretty easy because Jon had been piling up the perks that made him better at killing cazadors by killing the previous ones, and because it got stuck on the scenery trying to get at him, allowing him to kill it at his leisure XD) and picked up the M-5 implant there that massively improved his crouch speed (he had to cheat 8,000 caps into his pocket to be able to afford it, but he’s promised to give away the equivalent amount of caps later in the LP to make it right :p). This is where he did his little fast travel test and found he was about ten minutes slower crouch-walking places than he was straight-up running. Not too shabby!
c. He went over to the X-13 training facility to start doing some of the plot-important stuff to actually escape OWB, got the AI-enhanced stealth suit MKII (which is surprisingly chatty for a stealth suit), and showed off how to cheat all the various missions to get the rewards for pretty much no effort. Basically, with the first three infiltration missions, you can just activate the test, go up the nearby stairs into the observation area, pick the hard-locked door, head straight over to the office at the end, and drop into it from above to get the document you’re supposed to steal easy-peasy; with the final robot compliance mission, you can use the third-person camera to avoid line-of-sight, and/or burn a stealth boy to become truly invisible and deactivate the roaming robobrains no problem. The first mission, which is the plot-important mission and thus fulfills a quest, gets you over three thousand XP; the others get you other goodies, such as multiple copies of the lockpicking skill magazine or multiple STEALTH BOYS depending on how many times you run those missions. Each mission also upgrades the suit, and the final upgrade is +20% to your crouching speed! Which – doesn’t always work in the vanilla game, but sure as hell did in the mod, as Jon demonstrated by doing the fast travel comparison again – the difference in times between standing fast travel versus crouching fast travel dropped from ten minutes to TWO. Quite the improvement!
But Jon isn’t done yet – he has more ways in mind to improve Wanda’s movement speed! But they all involve him returning to New Vegas proper, so next week, we finish up Old World Blues, and he continues his quest to make Wanda the speediest person in the Wastelands! I for one am looking forward to it. :)
Workout: Back on the bike today (in the nice cool basement), and back with another one-off James Turner video to start the week – “Can you become a level 10 chef without cooking?” AKA James takes another crack at the “Unlucky Chef” scenario, where a Sim who dreams of becoming a Celebrity Chef is hampered by the fact that they basically cause fires pretty much every time they cook. The scenario DOES allow them to turn their talents to Mixology and gain fame that way as the safe option, but James wanted to give the Celebrity Chef career path a shot with a Sim who never, ever cooks, instead using various bonuses (like the Micro Home skill boosts from Tiny Living, various lot traits designed to boost skill gains, and the special emotional boosting lamps you got if you had Sims 3 installed on the same account when you got Sims 4 to allow his Semaj of the challenge to gain the necessary skills and succeed. Did he make it without ever cooking?
The answer – sort of. While James was able to leverage all his bonuses into skilling up super-fast just from reading the various skill books and suchlike, and complete his early daily tasks by just mixing drinks (and feed himself via the use of quick meals and ordering a bunch of prepared plates from Zoomers), once he actually got into the Celebrity Chef career track, his daily task changed to be “prepare food.” So he had to do SOME of what the game considers cooking. HOWEVER, it was perfectly acceptable for him to fulfill this daily task by making things like salads and yogurt parfaits and the like. So he never cooked in the sense of actually using a stove/oven – in fact, James just straight-up deleted it from the house after learning about the “prepare food” thing so he’d never actually make a dish that required one. So yeah – he “cooked,” but he never really COOKED, you know? XD And yes, he did in fact make Celebrity Chef on the strength of his yogurt parfaits and his sushi alone – honestly, the toughest part for poor James was just wading through all the days the dude had off work, waiting for the next promotion. That and dealing with the dust building up in the house, as for some reason he’d forgot to turn off the Bust The Dust Kit. :p But he did it, and he even became a real celebrity in the process – admittedly through his PAINTING side-hustle that James had him complete to earn aspiration points to help him get promoted faster, but still. And it only took 22 days, as opposed to the 27 from the first time James tried the challenge. XD We are optimizing “becoming a Celebrity Chef while never cooking,” people!
Whew -- and now I REALLY have to go to bed, as I have stayed up later than I should have. ^^; At least I've got a nice long weekend to look forward to after this week -- night all!
Tumblr: Had a good day on the old Victor Luvs Alice tumblr – caught up on the dash and a few new posts in my tracked tags before lunch (including saving a cool post of Smiler “stamp” gifs to my drafts for later), then drafted out this week’s Sims 4-related post – featuring some new Smiler, Victor, and Alice looks I did when I saved the all-human Valicer trio to my library the week before last – doing roughly half before lunch, half after lunch! So that’ll go up this Wednesday. :) And then I made a point to reblog some stuff I saw during my dash catch-up (a funny song parody and a meme about grabbing all the stuff and then having to deal with the inventory management in video games) because I’m trying to get out of the mindset of “I can only draft these certain things to save for later.” Trying to be more proactive, you know?
As for Valice Multiverse – nothing happening on that, and I didn’t really have time this evening to go looking for stuff to queue, as I’m already way late in updating this. *wince* We’ll see what happens on Tuesday evening!
Fallout 4: Did another hour in the Commonwealth, and made some good progress in my chosen goals for the session –
A) Picked up in the middle of the General Atomics factory, where I’d left off after having Victor hack open the door to the next room and then retreat to avoid being noticed by the robots inside. I had him and Ada cut through the little control area that I’d had them hide in previously, back around to the stairs at the back of the room so Victor could take a look on the second and third floors. Not a lot up there, though there was some good junk and an ammo box, so I had him head back down –
B) And then realized “hey, wait a minute, that conveyor belt gives a decent view over into the next room – why don’t I send him along that and take a peek inside to see if he can get a bead on any of the robots from above?” So that’s what I did, scattering bits and pieces all over the place. It turned out not to give as good a view as I’d hoped, and there wasn’t a lot of spots for Victor to jump to or climb over – but I DID spot a swarmbot passing by in gun range! I had Victor line up a couple of shots in VATS. . .
C) Two misses – he hit the railing in front of him both times. *grumbles* Fortunately the robots didn’t immediately twig where he was, allowing me to retreat a little bit and get some space – and when they DID figure out where the shots had come from, the bots almost all came through the BOTTOM door, allowing me the aerial view to shoot them that I had wanted in the first place! Victor took them all out pretty quickly with his Two-Shot Combat Rifle – including that one junkbot with a sentry machine gun arm that killed him the first time he tried to enter the factory. Hmph – screw you, asshole!
D) With THAT sorted (and the one junkbot on a higher level shot down), Victor and Ada proceeded back to ground level to reap the spoils of their victory (and watch a previously-downed robot suddenly start flailing and juttering for no reason – oh Bethesda). Lots of good loot and robot mods on the corpses, nice. :) Victor then proceeded into the next room to look for goodies and more enemies – he didn’t find any of the latter (though he could hear the robobrain he needed to kill above him), but he did find a heck of a lot of Wonderglue and duct tape. :D There was also a heavily irradiated corner, and near that, a security door with a “QA” terminal beside it. I recalled that being for the Miss Nanny Quality Assurance/refresher course. . .
E) And after a moment’s indecision, decided, “Hell, let’s do it, it’s some free XP and goodies.” And so Victor and Ada proceeded into the course that had been set up for unit 761, covering some basic Miss Handy situations. One – Timmy has been naughty and broken a vase throwing a ball around inside. How do we punish his skeleton sitting on the couch? By turning off the radio in the room! Two – what does the crying teddy bear baby want? No, not a rattle – his bottle, because that’s the “I’m hungry” cry! Three – childproof this kitchen/dining area so the children don’t get their hands on anything dangerous. This is the one that I struggled with, as I found the threat right away – a freaking machete in the fridge – but I didn’t realize that just picking it up was sufficient – you had to put it in the trash can to pass. So I ended up basically picking up everything that wasn’t bolted down in that room and having to eat one of my modded apple pies to increase Victor’s carry weight to the point where he could carry it all. XD But I figured it out eventually, and Victor was allowed to reward himself from the safe in the hallway, which carried, among other things, three fusion cores! Nice. :D
F) Anyway – with that diversion over with, Victor and Ada proceeded onward, looping back around and heading up the stairs in the back up to the second floor, into a janitor’s/cleaning closet. Victor picked up a bunch of good junk, then cracked open a side room where a skeleton with a suitcase had apparently been planning to flee the apocalypse, with yet more good junk. It was about this time that exhaustion started getting the better of Victor, but while the room looked like a good place to sleep, I figured the game wouldn’t let him set up his tent and take a nap because of the enemies nearby (never mind they were currently in green “not currently hostile” mode). So I had him chug a Nuka-Cola and continue on. . .
G) And there, just out in the hallway, behind a couple of tightly-locked security doors, was the Quantum Robobrain and its two buddies! They promptly started firing on Victor and Ada, though they didn’t have too much luck hitting them thanks to the doors. Unfortunately, the doors also prevented Victor and Ada from getting a good angle on them back. . .
H) But. I had an idea, remembered from old Jon of Many A True Nerd playthroughs. While Ada kept the group distracted with her laser, I had Victor run back to the stairs, head up, and go into a particular room just above the Robobrain’s “holding cell” –
With holes in the floor. Specifically, a nice big hole just perfect for shooting robots through! And they all very nicely lined themselves up for me – a junkbot, a eyebot, and finally the Robobrain themselves, who had a skull next to their name indicating they were a tough enemy, yet went down in a mere two blasts from the Two-Shot. Seriously, that gun takes care of EVERYTHING. :D
I) With the Quantum Robobrain defeated, Victor took a moment to loot the upstairs a bit (cracking another crate for the stuff inside), then headed back down and opened the security doors to investigate the dead robots (popping a Rad-X after discovering it was rather radioactive in one spot). The Robobrain proved to have a strange Mechanist device on them, which when Victor handed it over to Ada, was discovered to be a radar beacon. Ada suggested attaching it to her to help track the Mechanist and their other robots – Victor was like “are you sure?” with Ada responding that she had a 78.3% chance of being right, and besides they had no other leads. Victor acquiesced and went to play on the armor bench for a little bit, before returning to the lobby and setting up camp as the tired was setting in again (I mean, it WAS past midnight in-game at this point).
J) Victor had a nice seven hours sleep, getting up at 7:30 AM refreshed – but with his carry weight bonus gone because he’d slept through the last of it. >( I promptly had him do a little bit of cooking and a whole lot of custom scrapping on his portable workbench – scrapping a bunch of heavier objects brought him down to EXACTLY carryweight, which was about the best I could hope for under the circumstances. I decided he REALLY needed a spot to store all this junk –
K) And hey, the County Crossing settlers HAD told me to go and take the workshop at Jamaica Plain, had they not? And that actually was not far from the factory. . .so, with that in mind, I had Victor and Ada exit the factory, check Victor’s Pip-Boy, watch the Brotherhood of Steel vertibird buzzing overhead (firing at SOMETHING, though I’m not sure what) for a minute , and then proceed out past the Gwinnett Brewery and nearby liquor store, over to to the South Boston Police Station, then through some slightly flooded streets to the previously-cleared raider camp, then past that and under the broken elevated highway past the South Boston Checkpoint over to the OTHER raider camp that Victor had cleared (the one with the campfire and the weapons workbench), and finally from there over to the rocks overlooking Jamaica Plain itself! Victor spotted and killed one feral outside a house on the outskirts while getting close enough to actually tag the place, then I had him sneak around the edges, avoiding notice, so I could get him as close to the workbench as possible before having to kill any more. This worked out beautifully (even though, at one part, the game was insistent that I could pickpocket some ghoul that was either invisible or was prompting me to do so through the wall of the church), and Victor made it all the way around to the workbench at the other end of town without being spotted. He took out the ghouls clustered around it with the Two-Shot and Ada’s laser, then went to “search” the workbench –
L) Hmmm. Still more enemies nearby that Victor needed to kill. Well, no worries – while Victor couldn’t drop off anything at the workbench, there WAS a tool chest nearby, where he could drop off all his heaviest stuff – namely, all the other guns he doesn’t use because the Two-Shot takes care of everything and I have fifty million tons of ammo for it. XD With THAT sorted, I had him follow the markers on the map to – what I PRESUME was the mayoral office? I know it’s the place where you actually FIND the treasures of Jamaica Plain. . .anyway, Victor took care of the ghouls in there – one or two managed to get a hit on him on the lower floors, but they were easily taken out by the Two-Shot and Ada’s laser. And then, going up, the three in the office upstairs, where you find Sal’s corpse, didn’t have a chance – the Two-Shot felled each of them in a single shot. XD And one of them was a LEGENDARY, I might tell you – a Reaver carrying, of all things, a LUCKY MISSILE LAUNCHER. “Lucky” is the one that gets crits to refill 15% faster, I might tell you – it’s not something you really need on a MISSILE LAUNCHER. XD I also had Victor loot Sal’s corpse for her holotape and other useful goodies (though I didn’t yet take the mayor’s password – I may want to disable some of these traps manually for the XP). After all, he’s going to want to figure out the mystery of the treasure of Jamaica Plain himself!
M) However, clearing the ghouls out of that building as well as the area immediately surrounding the workbench meant that the workbench was safe and ready to be stocked! So I had Victor head back over there and dump all of his junk into it, yay. XD Carryweight restored, w00!
And that’s where I left it – next time, I think I’ll have him make the robot workbench and install the beacon onto Ada, then finish clearing out Jamaica Plain and find the treasure. Then we’ll head back toward Goodneighbor, getting the Silver Shroud costume and Drinkin’ Buddy along the way, and make a quick stop at County Crossing to finish off THAT quest. *nods* Sounds like a plan!
Writing: Another Sunday, another day with the FO4 Playthrough Progression, writing up Victor’s, Alice’s, and Ada’s adventures in the Commonwealth! This one was essentially identical to what happened up above – the gang exploring and clearing General Atomics, with Victor shooting the robobrain from above, then sneaking into Jamaica Plain to claim the workbench and clear it on their terms – with just a few little tweaks like Victor using the hole in the ceiling to enter the robobrain room and open the doors from the inside instead of backtracking to the stairs, Alice suggesting Jamaica Plain as a good place to try attaching the beacon to Ada should something go wrong, and the gang sneaking around Jamaica Plain specifically looking for a good spot for settlers to use as their “base” rather than just magically knowing that the workbench is the place to start (also Victor got to drop off his junk there BEFORE finishing off the ghouls in the TOWN HALL, that’s what it’s called). So yeah, that was easy. :p Next time, though, the Playthrough Progression and the actual playthrough should differ some, as I’m planning on having Victor invite Preston and, if he can find a way, Piper to check out the treasures of Jamaica Plain with him while he clears out the rest of the town. What, it’s a momentous occasion – and he knows Piper would KILL for the story. Possibly literally if she comes in while there’s still ghouls around. XD
YouTube: Managed two-thirds of what I was hoping to do – I decided it was better to start Jon’s nearly hour-long video a little earlier than watch both GrayStillPlays videos in my Subs, to stop me getting too stressed out while I did the write-up. I shall have opportunities to catch up on Gray as the week goes on! So here’s what I did manage –
A) “Testing Sonic Cars vs MASSIVE Potholes in GTA 5” – yesterday’s GrayStillPlays offering, featuring another Alex Torture Board with a Sonic The Hedgehog theme because apparently someone sent Gray Sonic-themed modded cars and Alex was like “let’s create a pothole challenge for them!” XD The challenges Gray had to make it across were “Florida Potholes Be Like” (two pits filled with rubble, because apparently that’s what Alex thinks Floridian roads are); “Rapid Potholes” (basically an uneven checkboard of platforms and potholes that Gray had to work his way across); “Chinese Takeout Potholes” (two potholes that were actually takeout boxes – one with static chopsticks, one with slowly rotating ones); the “Lung Cancer Pothole” (just a giant gap in the road with a huge cloud of smoke and lots of pipes in front of it, so Gray couldn’t tell exactly where the pothole was); the “Spread The Love Pothole” (a heart-shaped pothole with a little teleporter in the middle so Gray could go to an aerial view to look upon his failures); and “Can You Count From 4 to 1 Potholes” (potholes made from various targets, with the 4 pothole being the smallest and the 1 pothole being the biggest), and the cars ran the gamut from Amy (a Scramjet without any of the nice features, didn’t even make it past Florida), to Tails (a nice speedy block of American Cheese that couldn’t get over the Lung Cancer), to Sanic (a blue meme car that also could not make it past Florida because meme car), to Robotnik (a monster truck that did really well but just could not make it past the Love), to TWO Shadows (Gray tried out the big rig version, which did better than expected but couldn’t make it to the end), to Sonic himself – and, as you might imagine, the speed of Sonic (plus a little wall-riding on the bigger potholes) won the day. A very weird challenge, but a fun one, not gonna lie. :)
B) “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 35 - The Scientific Method” by Jon of Many A True Nerd, featuring Wanda extending her Legendary Game Hunting vacation to New Vegas with a trip to Big M-T and Old World Blues! Because not only did the final Legendary creature she needed to take out live in that area, Jon wanted to show off a certain bit of the world and do some scientific experiments involving movement speed, and the Think Tank’s little scientific horrortorium was the perfect place to start –
I. Item One – after starting the DLC and getting ready to do a little bit of speed-running (as you can do that if you want with OWB – apparently all you have to do is get past the first conversation with the Think Tank, go to the three buildings they ask you to visit to get their things, pick up any loot you want along the way and do any boss fights that need to be done, and then you can leave), Jon headed off to the Securiton Deconstruction Plant! Why? Well, firstly, it provided a convenient waypoint for a later trip regarding his movement speed experiments; secondly, it allowed him to show off how pretty much everything with an antenna can be frenzied if you can cripple said antenna by turning a securitron against its buddies by doing just that; thirdly, it allowed him to introduce us to the boss securitron 010011110110111001100101, whose name is a nerd joke in that it is “One” once you translate it from binary (and apparently is also a Red Dwarf reference? Or maybe that’s in the thing you can loot from him, the “Muggy Upgrades: Parts Production” thingamabob) –
And fourthly, and most importantly, allowed him to actually show off how the layout of the whole place was functionally a copy-paste of the Robot Repair Plant from FO3, which he’d visited earlier in the game. I mean, seriously, it’s damn near IDENTICAL in layout, with just a few minor changes (slightly different doors, a few assets moved around, and the terminal that turns off all the robots in the Repair Plant removed). Jon just considers it so bizarre that, for this one dungeon in this one DLC, they chose to do that, when everything else is unique or at least must better disguised as being reused. :p
II. Item Two – after a quick swing by Elijah’s Lookout (the camp of one of the previous people to be stuck here) and a look at his Jury-Rigged Tesla Cannon (a very nice weapon with no sway – IF you have 100 in the Energy Weapons skill and 8 strength – and if you pick it up, it spawns securitrons, so Jon left it where it was), Jon brought Wanda around and under the camp to the Mysterious Cave! The home of the final Legendary Creature she needed to kill – the Legendary Bloatfly! Now, upon hearing that, you MAY think that Jon had just set us up for a joke and this was the easiest thing in the world to kill.
YOU WOULD BE WRONG. Jon was DEAD SERIOUS about this one freaking Legendary Bloatfly being the hardest thing in the game. I’m used to bloatflies being a pain in the ass in FO4 (they fly really erratically and of course squirt you with their own maggots – seriously, it’s GROSS), but apparently in F:NV they’re the weakest enemies in the game – except for this one, which has TWO THOUSAND HP and can hit you for melee attacks of 450 damage, and plasma-like maggot blasts of 300 damage. Jon thought it got that hardcore from eating all the glowing cave fungus in its mysterious cave, but after creeping up on it from above (using the path that goes to the top of the chamber that its in, rather than the bottom), managing to get it to frenzy and attack its friends via hollow point rounds in Lincoln’s Repeater, and scoring a FANTASTIC crit to finish it off with Pacienca, he looted the corpse and discovered that, actually, it was completely hopped up on Buffout and Psycho. Given there’s a scientist camp nearby, he believe that a bloatfly got into the syringes of drugs one day, hoovered them up, and thus became the scariest thing in the game. Damn – just when you think you’ve found a silly meme enemy. . .
III. Item Three – with the big game hunting portion of her vacation over with, Wanda turned her attention to SCIENCE! Specifically, the science of improving her movement speed while crouching. Because Jon is a big believer in being faster than your enemies being an EXCELLENT way to stay alive in these games. He even had a way to scientifically test how fast his movement speed while standing/running normally was versus his movement speed while crouching – the fast travel system! Because, as he discovered in testing the game before this episode, the game calculates how much time should pass during your fast travel from point A to point B based on your stance and what your movement speed is for that stance. An early test of that system showed that it took ten minutes longer for Wanda to get from the Think Tank to Elijah’s Lookout crouching than it did while she was standing, which is just really interesting and fun information! (Makes me wonder if Fallout 4 works the same way, in fact. . .) But yes, this is what Jon did to improve Wanda’s movement speed, both generally and specifically while crouching –
a. Early on, he took the perk “Travel Light” for her after boosting up her Survival skill, allowing her to run 10% faster in general so long as she was wearing light armor or no armor at all. Which – is not GREAT for survival, given you want to have plenty of armor, but it’s something!
b. He took the time to fix the sink auto-doc by heading to the Y-17 Medical Facility and getting the auto-doc personality tapes there (going by the X-8 Research facility along the way and learning that any form of cyberdog is actually officially classed by the game as a ROBOT – they’re not affected by “Animal Friend,” and they’re extra-weak to pulse rounds), then headed over to the Z-14 DNA Splicing Lab (by the Securitron Deconstruction Center) to fight the cazadors in there (including the famous Specimen 73, who proved to be pretty easy because Jon had been piling up the perks that made him better at killing cazadors by killing the previous ones, and because it got stuck on the scenery trying to get at him, allowing him to kill it at his leisure XD) and picked up the M-5 implant there that massively improved his crouch speed (he had to cheat 8,000 caps into his pocket to be able to afford it, but he’s promised to give away the equivalent amount of caps later in the LP to make it right :p). This is where he did his little fast travel test and found he was about ten minutes slower crouch-walking places than he was straight-up running. Not too shabby!
c. He went over to the X-13 training facility to start doing some of the plot-important stuff to actually escape OWB, got the AI-enhanced stealth suit MKII (which is surprisingly chatty for a stealth suit), and showed off how to cheat all the various missions to get the rewards for pretty much no effort. Basically, with the first three infiltration missions, you can just activate the test, go up the nearby stairs into the observation area, pick the hard-locked door, head straight over to the office at the end, and drop into it from above to get the document you’re supposed to steal easy-peasy; with the final robot compliance mission, you can use the third-person camera to avoid line-of-sight, and/or burn a stealth boy to become truly invisible and deactivate the roaming robobrains no problem. The first mission, which is the plot-important mission and thus fulfills a quest, gets you over three thousand XP; the others get you other goodies, such as multiple copies of the lockpicking skill magazine or multiple STEALTH BOYS depending on how many times you run those missions. Each mission also upgrades the suit, and the final upgrade is +20% to your crouching speed! Which – doesn’t always work in the vanilla game, but sure as hell did in the mod, as Jon demonstrated by doing the fast travel comparison again – the difference in times between standing fast travel versus crouching fast travel dropped from ten minutes to TWO. Quite the improvement!
But Jon isn’t done yet – he has more ways in mind to improve Wanda’s movement speed! But they all involve him returning to New Vegas proper, so next week, we finish up Old World Blues, and he continues his quest to make Wanda the speediest person in the Wastelands! I for one am looking forward to it. :)
Workout: Back on the bike today (in the nice cool basement), and back with another one-off James Turner video to start the week – “Can you become a level 10 chef without cooking?” AKA James takes another crack at the “Unlucky Chef” scenario, where a Sim who dreams of becoming a Celebrity Chef is hampered by the fact that they basically cause fires pretty much every time they cook. The scenario DOES allow them to turn their talents to Mixology and gain fame that way as the safe option, but James wanted to give the Celebrity Chef career path a shot with a Sim who never, ever cooks, instead using various bonuses (like the Micro Home skill boosts from Tiny Living, various lot traits designed to boost skill gains, and the special emotional boosting lamps you got if you had Sims 3 installed on the same account when you got Sims 4 to allow his Semaj of the challenge to gain the necessary skills and succeed. Did he make it without ever cooking?
The answer – sort of. While James was able to leverage all his bonuses into skilling up super-fast just from reading the various skill books and suchlike, and complete his early daily tasks by just mixing drinks (and feed himself via the use of quick meals and ordering a bunch of prepared plates from Zoomers), once he actually got into the Celebrity Chef career track, his daily task changed to be “prepare food.” So he had to do SOME of what the game considers cooking. HOWEVER, it was perfectly acceptable for him to fulfill this daily task by making things like salads and yogurt parfaits and the like. So he never cooked in the sense of actually using a stove/oven – in fact, James just straight-up deleted it from the house after learning about the “prepare food” thing so he’d never actually make a dish that required one. So yeah – he “cooked,” but he never really COOKED, you know? XD And yes, he did in fact make Celebrity Chef on the strength of his yogurt parfaits and his sushi alone – honestly, the toughest part for poor James was just wading through all the days the dude had off work, waiting for the next promotion. That and dealing with the dust building up in the house, as for some reason he’d forgot to turn off the Bust The Dust Kit. :p But he did it, and he even became a real celebrity in the process – admittedly through his PAINTING side-hustle that James had him complete to earn aspiration points to help him get promoted faster, but still. And it only took 22 days, as opposed to the 27 from the first time James tried the challenge. XD We are optimizing “becoming a Celebrity Chef while never cooking,” people!
Whew -- and now I REALLY have to go to bed, as I have stayed up later than I should have. ^^; At least I've got a nice long weekend to look forward to after this week -- night all!
