Sunday Lovely Sunday
Jul. 23rd, 2023 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickAnother beautiful summer's day with low humidity, meaning I could have my windows open and enjoy the fresh air. :) Seriously, this has been such a nice weekend just because the weather's been gorgeous -- hot, but not OPPRESSIVELY hot, you know? But it's all supposed to go downhill this week, sadly, with heat and humidity ramping up each day until we're back in the sticky 90s on Friday. Meeh. *sigh* It was nice while it lasted! And I did have a very nice Sunday indeed --
Tumblr: Pretty simple day over here, mostly because I am still largely avoiding Valice Multiverse and its icky dash update – I caught up on the Victor Luvs Alice dash and tracked tags and completed one more Chill Valicer Save update post before lunch, and an additional post after lunch. So now I have three out of five Chill Valicer Save update posts completely sorted, yay. :) Should be able to finish up the other two tomorrow, and all shall be good!
Fallout 4: Well, Victor’s left Jamaica Plain, but he’s not on his way back to Goodneighbor JUST yet – you see –
A) I started off with Victor fresh and ready to leave Jamaica Plain to head back toward the Shamrock Taphouse, Hubris Comics, and Goodneighbor – but before I left, I wanted to make sure I had all the junk and such I needed from the workbench. Discovered in the process that Victor was, once again, not wearing his Champion metal left arm piece (the one that bumps up his Endurance and Strength by a point, meaning he can carry more and take more hits), and so put that back on. *sigh* Dunno WHY it keeps coming off every time Victor changes clothes or drops off junk or whatever. . . Though, speaking of dropping off junk, I also had a brainwave regarding some of the burnt books and magazines I’d accidentally picked up on my travels while checking my “Misc” items, and dropped them off by the bookshelf I’d set up in the “reading area” nook by the bedroom. “shrug” They’re not doing ME any good sitting in my inventory! With that sorted, I had Victor take a few potentially-useful junk items out of the workbench, eat some melon flambe to satisfy his need for food and drink, and set off –
B) Toward Milton General Hospital! Because I made the mistake of looking through Victor’s quest list, checking out the “Miscellaneous” section, and discovered that said hospital, as per a note Victor found earlier, has a nice hunting rifle in it! So I figured I might as well pick it up while I was in the area – it IS sort of going in the general direction of Goodneighbor! Or, at the very least, I’ll be able to very easily swing my way back around…
C) Anyway – Victor and Ada set off, rounding the pond around the back of the town hall (and just avoiding a frag mine left on the road, I am happy to say), only to come across another raider camp with some butchered settlers by the side of said road. The two took them out pretty easily (though poor Victor did get a little molotoved) and took all their goodies while Ada commented on how her data banks indicated raiders are generally low on common sense and personal hygiene. XD From there it was up to the more metropolitan area nearby – I snuck up to the back of what I THOUGHT was the hospital, only for the game to tell me it was in fact Shaw High School! Curious, I went around the front, only to find it decorated with meat bags – a super mutant base then! Not interested in tangling with them just yet, I just had Victor raid all the meat bags outside and explore the wrecked buildings nearby – nothing interesting in the buildings themselves, though Victor did spot a BOS patrol pass by and head down the road while he was looking around. Gotta remember to talk to Danse and formally introduce myself to the BOS at some point too...so many faction things to do, so little time…
D) With all easily-snatched goodies snatched, Victor and Ada proceeded up the road in the opposite direction of the BOS patrol, toward the actual hospital – only to have to freeze in their tracks when I spotted a Super Mutant Suicider at the intersection up ahead. O.O Fortunately the bastard ran further up the road, so I had Victor and Ada proceed forward with caution, tagging the hospital and heading up to the entrance –
Only to hear super mutant shouts and a horrible familiar beeping. Unfortunately for Victor and Ada, I could not place said beeping in time, and they got blown up by the suicider, who had apparently come back around while I wasn’t looking. *sigh*
E) Fortunately for all, I’d quicksaved right after seeing the BOS patrol, so it was just a matter of getting back up the road to the hospital to get back to where we’d left off. Victor and Ada didn’t see any suiciders running around immediately as they headed for the hospital entrance, but I had Victor get out his Mighty Sniper, just in case –
Good thing too, as it turns out the super mutants were all across the street at the intersection, and there were TWO suiciders among them! O.O Fortunately Victor’s excellent (if VERY loud – I’d put a suppressor on this thing, but it kind of defeats the purpose of it being long-range) sniper took them both out without incident, along with the brute that was with them – but as I started finagling him into position to kill the final super mutant (at the entrance of another building behind a bus), a car near him exploded! Because there was a THIRD suicider in the area, and Victor NARROWLY avoided being exploded by the asshole. *whew* Fortunately, Victor was able to get into a good position to kill the final mutant that I could see, and after waiting a moment, things calmed down, allowing him to actually take a look at where they had come from. Turns out they were holed up in West Roxbury Station and Fallon Department Store! I checked out West Roxbury for a bit – killed one more mutant brute who’d been hiding in there (I KNEW I had heard more “barks”), raided all the meat bags in the main lobby for bullets and meat and whatnot, and picked up a few other odds and ends too. Not a bad haul!
F) With that taken care of, and the day waning on, I had Victor and Ada cut past Fallon’s and back over to the hospital – passing a parking garage that had a lot of arrows pointing toward one door in particular. Hmm...but I was determined to get to that damn hunting rifle, and so it was straight into the hospital, beloved Two-Shot Combat Rifle in hand! The lobby was clear, fortunately – just some skeletons waiting for the doctor that would never arrive, a few vases to collect, and – because Fallout is faux-50s culture – a cigarette machine with four packs still inside. *shakehead* There were also two doors leading out of said lobby – I opened the one at the back first, to find a “Nurse Handy” in there. They hadn’t noticed Victor yet, though, so he was able to sneak attack them with the Two-Shot, no problem. :) The door proved to lead to the hallway with the bathrooms – Victor was able to get into the ladies’ room by the door, then sneak into the men’s through a stall whose back had been busted open at some point (as the hallway past the ladies’ room was just straight-up collapsed). Fortunately there were no traps in any of the stalls – I try to look out for those nowadays! Victor scooped up what goodies he could, filled up all his empty bottles at the water fountain just outside (easy source of dirty water for cooking), drank a Nuka-Cola to ward off tiredness for a bit, then cut back through the lobby to the other door on the left. This opened onto an area with some elevators and another Nurse Handy – Victor took ‘em out with another Two-Shot blast, then headed past them to find a shower and changing room with some drugs, medical supplies, and other necessities. Nice. :)
G) Okay, there was nowhere else to go that I could see – time to try the elevator! Victor and Ada hopped inside and pressed the button, and ended up going to the basement, finding themselves by a skeleton on a gurney and an advanced-locked door. Victor picked the lock and found a storage closet behind it with a few useful things – and an expert-locked safe. That too was easily picked, for more goodies like a 10mm pistol and ammo, plus pre-War cash. :D Hooray for being able to pick locks!
H) With the storeroom thoroughly raided, it was time to go to the left, down the slope and into the basement – well, I’m not entirely sure, but after having looked around it a bit, I’m going to say Victor and Ada ended up in the morgue (it looked like some sort of surgery room at first, with X-Rays on the wall and fridges with blood packs in them nearby, but there were more skeletons stacked on shelves against the wall, so…). There was a protectron roaming around, but fortunately it wasn’t hostile to Victor or Ada – the two Nurse Handys in the morgue room itself WERE, however. Victor and Ada easily took them down, however, along with the Protectron that appeared a few moments later (I don’t think it was the friendly one from before, but I can’t be 100% sure). Victor did some more raiding, then had to stop and drop a few things off on Ada because he was overweight again. XD No matter HOW much I try to improve his carry capacity, it is never enough… Around this time, though, he started getting the “you’re feeling kinda tired” messages again, and it was getting late in-game, so I had him poke his head up the stairs in the room – and, upon finding nothing more interesting than a small computer room overlooking the morgue/surgery area and another short set of stairs leading up to an elevator, had him bunk down in the middle of the morgue-surgery for the night. No place safer to sleep than surrounded by pre-War skeletons! XD
I) Victor was up shortly after 5 AM the next morning, with me determined to at least find this damn hunting rifle before I quit for the day. Victor and Ada headed upstairs to the elevator I’d found, which took them all the way up to the second floor. After taking a quick look around the main hallway, I opened a door near the quest marker to find a patient ward, with skeletons, duct tape, and a couple of novice-locked suitcases to pop open and raid. :p Going around the corner revealed another room with its floor caved in – as the quest marker was on the floor below me, I had Victor and Ada drop down into the room below, then work their way out of that room and back into the hall, where I found the quest marker on the other side of an advanced-locked door. Victor picked it with little trouble –
And there, in a chem lab, stowed away in a desk, was the Bayoneted Heavy Hunting Rifle that I’d come here to find! :) Along with a Syringer rifle too, nice. I had Victor grab both and hit the nearby chemistry station to make some cutting fluid from all the bone he’d found, a few bits of syringer ammo (Pax syringes and one Radscorpion Venom syringe as he had the stinger), some Buffjet, and some Grape Mentats. Hooray for new guns and combining drugs! XD
And, with that, I saved and quit! I mean, I got the gun, so I could do that now. XD Next time, we’ll leave the hospital, hit that parking garage I saw with all those arrows indicating for people to go in (because I am pretty sure that is an unmarked death maze you can complete for goodies), THEN start heading back toward Goodneighbor. :p Look, I want to get the Miscellaneous quests done too, and this one was easy and right by where I started for the day, so you can’t complain about me getting distracted again this time. XD
Writing: Updated the FO4 Playthrough Progression document with Victor choosing to head to Milton General Hospital to get that hunting rifle he’d found a note about earlier instead of going straight back to Goodneighbor as he recalled Milton being close to Jamaica Plain! Things pretty much went the same as above, with a few little variations – I had Victor think to add all his burnt books and magazines to the little sitting area WHILE he and Preston were making it last time (aka just before I started this playsession – I also added in that said books and magazines still had readable bits, thus justifying their inclusion); all the Nurse Handys noticing Victor BEFORE he shoots them (while I’m fine with sneak-attacking enemies in the game, I sometimes feel it’s bad form for Victor to shoot someone before they attack him, and given I’ve already made him someone who considers robots people, I wanted to give him the chance to talk a Nurse Handy down before realizing no, they’re just gonna keep coming at him with their buzzsaws); Alice calling out a warning to make sure Victor didn’t get too close to that one exploding Suicider; and Victor found the hunting rifle not by following a quest marker, but by having Alice let him know Wonderland had marked the door it was behind with a Shrink Sense crayon arrow. ...so he did follow a quest marker, just not the in-game one. XD But yeah, same hit on the raider camp, same fight with the super mutants in front of West Roxbury Station and Fallon’s, and same creep through the hospital fending off Nurse Handys. Next time, we’ll see how he handles the potential parking lot death maze!
YouTube: Check – covered both my usual Sunday two without issue, yay –
A) From GrayStillPlays, “When you dodge 5,698,012 hornets” – aka Gray plays Murder Hornet! This is a silly mobile game in which you play as a murder hornet (or a space bee, or a mosquito, or a hornet with extra stingers on its two front limbs), and you are tasked with going around and stinging (or biting, if a mosquito) various humans in various situations, from hanging around the neighborhood to chilling in the depths of hell to dancing on suspended sky-ruins. Along the way, you can upgrade your speed and your launch power (to fling people farther) and unlock new skins and upgrade your hive. Oh, and occasionally break open beehives like C4. Gray, wanting to glitch out the game as much as possible, focused exclusively on upgrading his launch power, getting to the point where he could sting people and send them flying both fully across and right THROUGH the map. His delight when someone finally fell through the ground and started falling forever in the skybox was adorable. XD A very simple concept inspired by a very scary event back when the pandemic was at its height, but Gray made it a hell of a lot of fun. Sting all the dancing hot dog men, Gray! Bounce them off those subway trains and through the bowels of the earth! XD
B) And from Jon of Many A True Nerd, “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 39 - The New Enclave!” Having covered the water situation in the Broken Steel Capitol Wasteland last week (which mainly consisted of “everyone wants to get their hands on the new Aqua Pura for some reason or another, unaware that my character just straight-up poisoned it to keep herself neutral in all matters”), Jon decided to cover the faction situation! As you might guess from the title, this did indeed involve checking in on the Enclave, but it also involved checking in on ANOTHER faction you might not have thought about much...depending on your morality, anyway –
I. The Situation With The Enclave – Roughly the first half of the episode was all about the Enclave and what was going on with that, via the medium of completing the quest “Death From Above.” You get this quest by talking to one Scribe Rothchild about the situation with the Enclave, where he tells you that, after the purifier was secured and Raven Rock destroyed, the Brotherhood of Steel found that the Enclave troops were still doing quite well, fighting strong and communicating with help from another remote location – a military instillation over by Rockland. In order to stop the Enclave from coordinating and wipe their presence from the Capitol Wasteland once and for all, they’ve sent a team ahead to a nearby car tunnel to hang out and assess the place until Liberty Prime can come and literally punch a way inside for them. Of course, as you’re the protagonist, nothing can happen until you go to that car tunnel and help out. However, Jon had a bit of a problem with Rothchild’s description of events –
Namely, that they do NOT match up with the reality of what’s happening out in the overworld. First of all, his map markers of certain Enclave bases they’ve found do not match up with previous Enclave bases found in the overworld (one doesn’t even EXIST, it’s just a random stretch of wasteland); and second of all, if you actually go out and hunt down some specific random encounters, you’ll see that the Enclave are not doing well at ALL. By the Nuka-Cola Plant, you can find a trio of Enclave soldiers who do NOT attack you on sight (though they’re not eager to chat either – possibly because they only have one voice line between them, a fact Jon manipulated to make his own little song by talking to them all rapidly in turn) – in fact, as you learn shortly thereafter when a Brotherhood patrol comes by and encounters them, they have killed their commanding officer so they can surrender and ask the BOS for water. They just have the unfortunate luck of running into an BOS OUTCAST patrol, who simply gun them down. And over by Springvale Elementary, there’s another Enclave camp where an officer is executing her own men (possibly because they tried to pull the same thing, possibly because SHE wants to surrender and THEY won’t let her this time) – or, at least, there’s supposed to be. In Jon’s game, the soldiers decided they would much rather do push-ups for eternity, meaning the officer couldn’t actually kill them as she kept aiming at where they SHOULD be. They didn’t even stop working out when Jon came up and started shooting them too. Now that is DEDICATION to your workout routine. XD But yes, the Enclave’s situation is rather more scattered than Rothchild makes it out to be – and even weirder, when you DO meet up with the team in the car tunnel by Rockland and speak to Paladin Tristan about what’s going on (he’s the one who saves you from the purifier, btw), Tristan’s description of events – the Enclave struggling and the BOS makings sure to keep hitting them while they’re down – matches up much better with the things you see in the overworld. Jon has no idea why Scribe Rothchild has such wrong information when you speak to him to start off the quest. My best guess is that someone wrote his bit in the quest early on, then the story changed a little and nobody updated his dialogue to reflect the stuff they actually coded in. *shrug*
II. “Death From Above” – speaking of the quest (which sees you bust your way into the Rockland installation to secure the data from the Enclave Satellite Uplink there, and also sees the death of Liberty Prime via orbital strike (at least until he’s rebuilt in Fallout 4)), there’s a couple fun little details about it that are worth mentioning. First off, the very first part of the mission – going up the road to the back of the Enclave base at Rockland and doing what you can to destroy the Enclave while Liberty Prime smashes his way in – actually takes place in its own tiny sub-map. You exit into the regular map once you get through the internals of the base, but the road there is its own world, technically. Jon has NO idea why this one bit of road needed its own miniature worldspace, but he suspects it has something to do with this mission being Liberty Prime heavy, given that Prime is held together largely by string and hope. XD Second, that orbital strike that takes out Prime? Well, Prime warns you about it shortly before it happens, and if you don’t get out of the way in time, you are obliterated right along with Prime – as Jon found out the hard way. XD (We’ll call that a little karma for all the evil shit Wanda’s done in the name of staying neutral. :p) And third, after Prime is taken down by the laser, his head comes off – but you can still speak to said head, and it will still spout all of his ridiculous ‘MERICA catchphrases, just in a distorted, warbly voice. Which honestly feels like a good metaphor for the state of America right before the bombs dropped, if you think about it – still desperately patriotic, but everything was clearly falling apart…
III. The Situation With Talon Company – And figuring out what was going on with THIS faction was the focus of the second half of the episode, once Jon brought back the data from raiding Rockland to Rothchild (who was probably going to butcher it somehow). Because, as it turns out, while the bulk of the Brotherhood of Steel’s ire is reserved for the Enclave, they do have some bad blood with good old Talon Company as well. Reason? Well, as evidenced by another event you can find by the Nuka-Cola Plant (a firefight between some raiders and Talon mercs over a crate of Aqua Pura – Jon’s version involved a merc getting knocked unconscious by one raider’s cattle prod and then stuck in a concrete barrier), they’ve been stealing water from the water caravans. And if you head over to Seward Square in the North Metro to take a look at the Talon Company camp over there, you can find a special holotape that only appears in Broken Steel, where a particular merc comments on how they’ve been told to fortify all their camps in preparation for seizing as much water as they can from the caravans, in order to use it as a bargaining chip to gain more influence and power in the region. Not a good thing when you consider that they’re a very unethical group of killers for hire…
Which is why, if you head up in the direction of Fort Bannister, you can help the Brotherhood of Steel wage war upon them! Yes, as it turns out, there’s an unmarked quest there if you find two BOS soldiers in the scrub outside the fort and chat with them. They’ll tell you that they’ve identified this place as the headquarters of Talon Company in the region, and that they’re just waiting for their leader, Jensen, to come back from scouting the place before storming it. Your options here are to leave them to it; try to find Jensen yourself; or tell them to just go ahead and storm the place anyway without waiting for Jensen to return. Jon went with storming the place with the BOS, as that’s probably the most fun option, makes it all look like a proper war against Talon, and gives Jensen a SLIGHTLY better chance of survival than if you go in to look for him (as it turns out, he’s been captured by the mercs and tied up in the camp outside the main base – if you look for him yourself, by the time he calls in his reinforcements, he’s likely to be overwhelmed by the other enemies and die. He’s still likely to die if you just storm the place, but his odds are a little better – though if you REALLY want to keep him alive, your best bet is to not talk to his soldiers outside and just go in and kill all the enemies yourself. :p). The fighting doesn’t stop until the leader, Commander Jabsco, is taken out – though it’s worth noting that, while this allows the BOS to take Fort Bannister as a base for themselves after the battle, this DOESN’T stop Talon Company mercs from spawning in the Wasteland. Possibly because Jabsco’s men have no respect for him – according to the strategy guide, he’s supposed to be rather cowardly, hiding in the base to avoid combat and having picked up the nickname “Jetting Jabsco” for his tendency to run away from danger. Jon felt like this was slagging him off, as he fights pretty hard when you encounter him in the game; I personally feel like maybe the guy felt empowered by having a missile launcher to start. XD Didn’t help him with Wanda’s amazing ability to disarm people, though! Oh, and he also has a unique weapon – a reasonably decent combat knife called Occam’s Razor. As per Jon, the name is better than the stats. XD
And that all sums up this week’s episode, with Jon wrapping up right after the Brotherhood Of Steel kicked Talon Company ass. Next week, he’s actually on holiday, so we’re going to have a special “vacation” episode of Fallout, and then the week after that, mystery, as he decides what he wants to show us next. :p I’m eager to see what his “vacation” episode is gonna be – something probably very silly, I bet. :p
Workout: Back on the bike this Sunday, with the following trio of “easy to summarize” videos given this is Fallout Sunday and thus we have the Long TTW Video to cap things off tonight –
A) “I built the tiny home of the year!” by James Turner – a building video from six months ago where he promised to build the tiny home of the year in honor of the new year! Specifically, he built a tiny house in the shape of the number 2023. XD As you might expect, this was a very tricky build, involving curved walls, odd-shaped rooms, and little tricks to help seal in the spaces between the numbers without actually turning them into rooms (like copy-pasting walls into spots instead of drawing them there). But he made it work, and actually made an at least semi-decent house – first 2 was entrance, master bedroom, and bathroom; 0 was a single bedroom and bathroom, with a courtyard in the middle; second 2 was kitchen and dining; and 3 was a tiny living room and an office space! All connected by further little courtyard areas with lots of decorative plants and skylights. It looked a little goofy, but he got it all to work (complete with a self-Sim playtesting some of the more awkwardly-placed objects), and he did keep as a tiny home (95 out of 100 tiles for the max size of tiny house). It’s fun to see builders, especially experienced builders like James, take on goofy challenges like this every once in a while! XD
B) “Weight In The Sims 4 Works Differently To How You’d Expect” by Petey Plays It – a video showing off some experiments Petey did with a sim and her various clones to see how weight gain, weight loss, and muscle gain work in The Sims 4! One clone served as both control group and chef, and the others did experiments centering around which foods caused the most weight gain, do Sims generally only gain weight if they eat when already full, can you starve a Sim thin, and what exercises are best for having Sims lose weight and gain muscle. The results pretty much proved that Sims have no internal metabolism, and no matter if they’re full or starving, if they eat, they will gain weight (with the weight gained depending on the food – as you might expect, salads barely cause any weight gain, while cakes cause a lot while also not filling Sims up). They also will not lose weight if you let them starve, since they have no internal mechanism for burning calories. As for exercise, only cardio-related activities help Sims lose weight, such as running on the treadmill – if your Sim lifts weights, they’re only going to add muscle. That being said, Petey did discover there was one activity that both adds muscle and slims Sims down, and that is, for some reason, juggling the soccer ball that came with Discover University. You let them play with this thing for a while, and your Sims will end up RIPPED. O.o How bizarre. . .but yes, if you want thin Sims, have them eat salads and run a lot; if you want thick Sims, have them eat cake and only lift weights for exercise. And if you want realism, get a mod that gives Sims a metabolism. :p
C) “Complete Guide To Roommates | The Sims 4 Discover University” also by Petey Plays It – a quick guide as to how the “roommates” system works in that expansion! Covering how to find roommates (either asking Sims in person or advertising on the computer and vetting candidates), what roommates need (their own bed and access to bathrooms and kitchens, essentially), how they work (they’re autonomous Sims doing their own thing in your house and occasionally leaving passive-aggressive notes), what you get from them (rent, mainly, though it’s not exactly the BEST money-making scheme as you get less rent per roommate the more roommates you have), and how to get rid of them (just kick ‘em out on the street if they annoy you). Good simple stuff!
Other:
-->We did indeed play another round of beanbags today – Dad had a slightly better game today, while Mom and I had slightly worse ones, with Dad winning three times and Mom only clawing second away from me twice. Final scores were me 3-W-W-2-3; Dad W-2-2-W-W; and Mom 2-3-3-3-2. Ah well, better luck next time Mom – whenever that may be, as I don’t know the humidity situation for tomorrow…
-->Got my comment done on Chapter 7 of “This Isn’t Goodbye,” the RE4 Remake fix-it fic by my friend Cas and their friend Hope that I’ve been trying to complete for some time now! Sheesh...hopefully I can finish off with Chapter 8 this week and thus finally be done, yay~
*nods* Not bad at all -- wish I could have gotten in my comment on "Beneath A Broken Sky" Chapter 5, but that one's a lot longer, and will require a longer comment as well. Maybe tomorrow -- that or answering Moose's latest messages. Or hopefully both, we'll see how much time I actually have in the evening. :p As it stands, I'm out of time tonight, given it's a full week of work this week -- night all!
Tumblr: Pretty simple day over here, mostly because I am still largely avoiding Valice Multiverse and its icky dash update – I caught up on the Victor Luvs Alice dash and tracked tags and completed one more Chill Valicer Save update post before lunch, and an additional post after lunch. So now I have three out of five Chill Valicer Save update posts completely sorted, yay. :) Should be able to finish up the other two tomorrow, and all shall be good!
Fallout 4: Well, Victor’s left Jamaica Plain, but he’s not on his way back to Goodneighbor JUST yet – you see –
A) I started off with Victor fresh and ready to leave Jamaica Plain to head back toward the Shamrock Taphouse, Hubris Comics, and Goodneighbor – but before I left, I wanted to make sure I had all the junk and such I needed from the workbench. Discovered in the process that Victor was, once again, not wearing his Champion metal left arm piece (the one that bumps up his Endurance and Strength by a point, meaning he can carry more and take more hits), and so put that back on. *sigh* Dunno WHY it keeps coming off every time Victor changes clothes or drops off junk or whatever. . . Though, speaking of dropping off junk, I also had a brainwave regarding some of the burnt books and magazines I’d accidentally picked up on my travels while checking my “Misc” items, and dropped them off by the bookshelf I’d set up in the “reading area” nook by the bedroom. “shrug” They’re not doing ME any good sitting in my inventory! With that sorted, I had Victor take a few potentially-useful junk items out of the workbench, eat some melon flambe to satisfy his need for food and drink, and set off –
B) Toward Milton General Hospital! Because I made the mistake of looking through Victor’s quest list, checking out the “Miscellaneous” section, and discovered that said hospital, as per a note Victor found earlier, has a nice hunting rifle in it! So I figured I might as well pick it up while I was in the area – it IS sort of going in the general direction of Goodneighbor! Or, at the very least, I’ll be able to very easily swing my way back around…
C) Anyway – Victor and Ada set off, rounding the pond around the back of the town hall (and just avoiding a frag mine left on the road, I am happy to say), only to come across another raider camp with some butchered settlers by the side of said road. The two took them out pretty easily (though poor Victor did get a little molotoved) and took all their goodies while Ada commented on how her data banks indicated raiders are generally low on common sense and personal hygiene. XD From there it was up to the more metropolitan area nearby – I snuck up to the back of what I THOUGHT was the hospital, only for the game to tell me it was in fact Shaw High School! Curious, I went around the front, only to find it decorated with meat bags – a super mutant base then! Not interested in tangling with them just yet, I just had Victor raid all the meat bags outside and explore the wrecked buildings nearby – nothing interesting in the buildings themselves, though Victor did spot a BOS patrol pass by and head down the road while he was looking around. Gotta remember to talk to Danse and formally introduce myself to the BOS at some point too...so many faction things to do, so little time…
D) With all easily-snatched goodies snatched, Victor and Ada proceeded up the road in the opposite direction of the BOS patrol, toward the actual hospital – only to have to freeze in their tracks when I spotted a Super Mutant Suicider at the intersection up ahead. O.O Fortunately the bastard ran further up the road, so I had Victor and Ada proceed forward with caution, tagging the hospital and heading up to the entrance –
Only to hear super mutant shouts and a horrible familiar beeping. Unfortunately for Victor and Ada, I could not place said beeping in time, and they got blown up by the suicider, who had apparently come back around while I wasn’t looking. *sigh*
E) Fortunately for all, I’d quicksaved right after seeing the BOS patrol, so it was just a matter of getting back up the road to the hospital to get back to where we’d left off. Victor and Ada didn’t see any suiciders running around immediately as they headed for the hospital entrance, but I had Victor get out his Mighty Sniper, just in case –
Good thing too, as it turns out the super mutants were all across the street at the intersection, and there were TWO suiciders among them! O.O Fortunately Victor’s excellent (if VERY loud – I’d put a suppressor on this thing, but it kind of defeats the purpose of it being long-range) sniper took them both out without incident, along with the brute that was with them – but as I started finagling him into position to kill the final super mutant (at the entrance of another building behind a bus), a car near him exploded! Because there was a THIRD suicider in the area, and Victor NARROWLY avoided being exploded by the asshole. *whew* Fortunately, Victor was able to get into a good position to kill the final mutant that I could see, and after waiting a moment, things calmed down, allowing him to actually take a look at where they had come from. Turns out they were holed up in West Roxbury Station and Fallon Department Store! I checked out West Roxbury for a bit – killed one more mutant brute who’d been hiding in there (I KNEW I had heard more “barks”), raided all the meat bags in the main lobby for bullets and meat and whatnot, and picked up a few other odds and ends too. Not a bad haul!
F) With that taken care of, and the day waning on, I had Victor and Ada cut past Fallon’s and back over to the hospital – passing a parking garage that had a lot of arrows pointing toward one door in particular. Hmm...but I was determined to get to that damn hunting rifle, and so it was straight into the hospital, beloved Two-Shot Combat Rifle in hand! The lobby was clear, fortunately – just some skeletons waiting for the doctor that would never arrive, a few vases to collect, and – because Fallout is faux-50s culture – a cigarette machine with four packs still inside. *shakehead* There were also two doors leading out of said lobby – I opened the one at the back first, to find a “Nurse Handy” in there. They hadn’t noticed Victor yet, though, so he was able to sneak attack them with the Two-Shot, no problem. :) The door proved to lead to the hallway with the bathrooms – Victor was able to get into the ladies’ room by the door, then sneak into the men’s through a stall whose back had been busted open at some point (as the hallway past the ladies’ room was just straight-up collapsed). Fortunately there were no traps in any of the stalls – I try to look out for those nowadays! Victor scooped up what goodies he could, filled up all his empty bottles at the water fountain just outside (easy source of dirty water for cooking), drank a Nuka-Cola to ward off tiredness for a bit, then cut back through the lobby to the other door on the left. This opened onto an area with some elevators and another Nurse Handy – Victor took ‘em out with another Two-Shot blast, then headed past them to find a shower and changing room with some drugs, medical supplies, and other necessities. Nice. :)
G) Okay, there was nowhere else to go that I could see – time to try the elevator! Victor and Ada hopped inside and pressed the button, and ended up going to the basement, finding themselves by a skeleton on a gurney and an advanced-locked door. Victor picked the lock and found a storage closet behind it with a few useful things – and an expert-locked safe. That too was easily picked, for more goodies like a 10mm pistol and ammo, plus pre-War cash. :D Hooray for being able to pick locks!
H) With the storeroom thoroughly raided, it was time to go to the left, down the slope and into the basement – well, I’m not entirely sure, but after having looked around it a bit, I’m going to say Victor and Ada ended up in the morgue (it looked like some sort of surgery room at first, with X-Rays on the wall and fridges with blood packs in them nearby, but there were more skeletons stacked on shelves against the wall, so…). There was a protectron roaming around, but fortunately it wasn’t hostile to Victor or Ada – the two Nurse Handys in the morgue room itself WERE, however. Victor and Ada easily took them down, however, along with the Protectron that appeared a few moments later (I don’t think it was the friendly one from before, but I can’t be 100% sure). Victor did some more raiding, then had to stop and drop a few things off on Ada because he was overweight again. XD No matter HOW much I try to improve his carry capacity, it is never enough… Around this time, though, he started getting the “you’re feeling kinda tired” messages again, and it was getting late in-game, so I had him poke his head up the stairs in the room – and, upon finding nothing more interesting than a small computer room overlooking the morgue/surgery area and another short set of stairs leading up to an elevator, had him bunk down in the middle of the morgue-surgery for the night. No place safer to sleep than surrounded by pre-War skeletons! XD
I) Victor was up shortly after 5 AM the next morning, with me determined to at least find this damn hunting rifle before I quit for the day. Victor and Ada headed upstairs to the elevator I’d found, which took them all the way up to the second floor. After taking a quick look around the main hallway, I opened a door near the quest marker to find a patient ward, with skeletons, duct tape, and a couple of novice-locked suitcases to pop open and raid. :p Going around the corner revealed another room with its floor caved in – as the quest marker was on the floor below me, I had Victor and Ada drop down into the room below, then work their way out of that room and back into the hall, where I found the quest marker on the other side of an advanced-locked door. Victor picked it with little trouble –
And there, in a chem lab, stowed away in a desk, was the Bayoneted Heavy Hunting Rifle that I’d come here to find! :) Along with a Syringer rifle too, nice. I had Victor grab both and hit the nearby chemistry station to make some cutting fluid from all the bone he’d found, a few bits of syringer ammo (Pax syringes and one Radscorpion Venom syringe as he had the stinger), some Buffjet, and some Grape Mentats. Hooray for new guns and combining drugs! XD
And, with that, I saved and quit! I mean, I got the gun, so I could do that now. XD Next time, we’ll leave the hospital, hit that parking garage I saw with all those arrows indicating for people to go in (because I am pretty sure that is an unmarked death maze you can complete for goodies), THEN start heading back toward Goodneighbor. :p Look, I want to get the Miscellaneous quests done too, and this one was easy and right by where I started for the day, so you can’t complain about me getting distracted again this time. XD
Writing: Updated the FO4 Playthrough Progression document with Victor choosing to head to Milton General Hospital to get that hunting rifle he’d found a note about earlier instead of going straight back to Goodneighbor as he recalled Milton being close to Jamaica Plain! Things pretty much went the same as above, with a few little variations – I had Victor think to add all his burnt books and magazines to the little sitting area WHILE he and Preston were making it last time (aka just before I started this playsession – I also added in that said books and magazines still had readable bits, thus justifying their inclusion); all the Nurse Handys noticing Victor BEFORE he shoots them (while I’m fine with sneak-attacking enemies in the game, I sometimes feel it’s bad form for Victor to shoot someone before they attack him, and given I’ve already made him someone who considers robots people, I wanted to give him the chance to talk a Nurse Handy down before realizing no, they’re just gonna keep coming at him with their buzzsaws); Alice calling out a warning to make sure Victor didn’t get too close to that one exploding Suicider; and Victor found the hunting rifle not by following a quest marker, but by having Alice let him know Wonderland had marked the door it was behind with a Shrink Sense crayon arrow. ...so he did follow a quest marker, just not the in-game one. XD But yeah, same hit on the raider camp, same fight with the super mutants in front of West Roxbury Station and Fallon’s, and same creep through the hospital fending off Nurse Handys. Next time, we’ll see how he handles the potential parking lot death maze!
YouTube: Check – covered both my usual Sunday two without issue, yay –
A) From GrayStillPlays, “When you dodge 5,698,012 hornets” – aka Gray plays Murder Hornet! This is a silly mobile game in which you play as a murder hornet (or a space bee, or a mosquito, or a hornet with extra stingers on its two front limbs), and you are tasked with going around and stinging (or biting, if a mosquito) various humans in various situations, from hanging around the neighborhood to chilling in the depths of hell to dancing on suspended sky-ruins. Along the way, you can upgrade your speed and your launch power (to fling people farther) and unlock new skins and upgrade your hive. Oh, and occasionally break open beehives like C4. Gray, wanting to glitch out the game as much as possible, focused exclusively on upgrading his launch power, getting to the point where he could sting people and send them flying both fully across and right THROUGH the map. His delight when someone finally fell through the ground and started falling forever in the skybox was adorable. XD A very simple concept inspired by a very scary event back when the pandemic was at its height, but Gray made it a hell of a lot of fun. Sting all the dancing hot dog men, Gray! Bounce them off those subway trains and through the bowels of the earth! XD
B) And from Jon of Many A True Nerd, “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 39 - The New Enclave!” Having covered the water situation in the Broken Steel Capitol Wasteland last week (which mainly consisted of “everyone wants to get their hands on the new Aqua Pura for some reason or another, unaware that my character just straight-up poisoned it to keep herself neutral in all matters”), Jon decided to cover the faction situation! As you might guess from the title, this did indeed involve checking in on the Enclave, but it also involved checking in on ANOTHER faction you might not have thought about much...depending on your morality, anyway –
I. The Situation With The Enclave – Roughly the first half of the episode was all about the Enclave and what was going on with that, via the medium of completing the quest “Death From Above.” You get this quest by talking to one Scribe Rothchild about the situation with the Enclave, where he tells you that, after the purifier was secured and Raven Rock destroyed, the Brotherhood of Steel found that the Enclave troops were still doing quite well, fighting strong and communicating with help from another remote location – a military instillation over by Rockland. In order to stop the Enclave from coordinating and wipe their presence from the Capitol Wasteland once and for all, they’ve sent a team ahead to a nearby car tunnel to hang out and assess the place until Liberty Prime can come and literally punch a way inside for them. Of course, as you’re the protagonist, nothing can happen until you go to that car tunnel and help out. However, Jon had a bit of a problem with Rothchild’s description of events –
Namely, that they do NOT match up with the reality of what’s happening out in the overworld. First of all, his map markers of certain Enclave bases they’ve found do not match up with previous Enclave bases found in the overworld (one doesn’t even EXIST, it’s just a random stretch of wasteland); and second of all, if you actually go out and hunt down some specific random encounters, you’ll see that the Enclave are not doing well at ALL. By the Nuka-Cola Plant, you can find a trio of Enclave soldiers who do NOT attack you on sight (though they’re not eager to chat either – possibly because they only have one voice line between them, a fact Jon manipulated to make his own little song by talking to them all rapidly in turn) – in fact, as you learn shortly thereafter when a Brotherhood patrol comes by and encounters them, they have killed their commanding officer so they can surrender and ask the BOS for water. They just have the unfortunate luck of running into an BOS OUTCAST patrol, who simply gun them down. And over by Springvale Elementary, there’s another Enclave camp where an officer is executing her own men (possibly because they tried to pull the same thing, possibly because SHE wants to surrender and THEY won’t let her this time) – or, at least, there’s supposed to be. In Jon’s game, the soldiers decided they would much rather do push-ups for eternity, meaning the officer couldn’t actually kill them as she kept aiming at where they SHOULD be. They didn’t even stop working out when Jon came up and started shooting them too. Now that is DEDICATION to your workout routine. XD But yes, the Enclave’s situation is rather more scattered than Rothchild makes it out to be – and even weirder, when you DO meet up with the team in the car tunnel by Rockland and speak to Paladin Tristan about what’s going on (he’s the one who saves you from the purifier, btw), Tristan’s description of events – the Enclave struggling and the BOS makings sure to keep hitting them while they’re down – matches up much better with the things you see in the overworld. Jon has no idea why Scribe Rothchild has such wrong information when you speak to him to start off the quest. My best guess is that someone wrote his bit in the quest early on, then the story changed a little and nobody updated his dialogue to reflect the stuff they actually coded in. *shrug*
II. “Death From Above” – speaking of the quest (which sees you bust your way into the Rockland installation to secure the data from the Enclave Satellite Uplink there, and also sees the death of Liberty Prime via orbital strike (at least until he’s rebuilt in Fallout 4)), there’s a couple fun little details about it that are worth mentioning. First off, the very first part of the mission – going up the road to the back of the Enclave base at Rockland and doing what you can to destroy the Enclave while Liberty Prime smashes his way in – actually takes place in its own tiny sub-map. You exit into the regular map once you get through the internals of the base, but the road there is its own world, technically. Jon has NO idea why this one bit of road needed its own miniature worldspace, but he suspects it has something to do with this mission being Liberty Prime heavy, given that Prime is held together largely by string and hope. XD Second, that orbital strike that takes out Prime? Well, Prime warns you about it shortly before it happens, and if you don’t get out of the way in time, you are obliterated right along with Prime – as Jon found out the hard way. XD (We’ll call that a little karma for all the evil shit Wanda’s done in the name of staying neutral. :p) And third, after Prime is taken down by the laser, his head comes off – but you can still speak to said head, and it will still spout all of his ridiculous ‘MERICA catchphrases, just in a distorted, warbly voice. Which honestly feels like a good metaphor for the state of America right before the bombs dropped, if you think about it – still desperately patriotic, but everything was clearly falling apart…
III. The Situation With Talon Company – And figuring out what was going on with THIS faction was the focus of the second half of the episode, once Jon brought back the data from raiding Rockland to Rothchild (who was probably going to butcher it somehow). Because, as it turns out, while the bulk of the Brotherhood of Steel’s ire is reserved for the Enclave, they do have some bad blood with good old Talon Company as well. Reason? Well, as evidenced by another event you can find by the Nuka-Cola Plant (a firefight between some raiders and Talon mercs over a crate of Aqua Pura – Jon’s version involved a merc getting knocked unconscious by one raider’s cattle prod and then stuck in a concrete barrier), they’ve been stealing water from the water caravans. And if you head over to Seward Square in the North Metro to take a look at the Talon Company camp over there, you can find a special holotape that only appears in Broken Steel, where a particular merc comments on how they’ve been told to fortify all their camps in preparation for seizing as much water as they can from the caravans, in order to use it as a bargaining chip to gain more influence and power in the region. Not a good thing when you consider that they’re a very unethical group of killers for hire…
Which is why, if you head up in the direction of Fort Bannister, you can help the Brotherhood of Steel wage war upon them! Yes, as it turns out, there’s an unmarked quest there if you find two BOS soldiers in the scrub outside the fort and chat with them. They’ll tell you that they’ve identified this place as the headquarters of Talon Company in the region, and that they’re just waiting for their leader, Jensen, to come back from scouting the place before storming it. Your options here are to leave them to it; try to find Jensen yourself; or tell them to just go ahead and storm the place anyway without waiting for Jensen to return. Jon went with storming the place with the BOS, as that’s probably the most fun option, makes it all look like a proper war against Talon, and gives Jensen a SLIGHTLY better chance of survival than if you go in to look for him (as it turns out, he’s been captured by the mercs and tied up in the camp outside the main base – if you look for him yourself, by the time he calls in his reinforcements, he’s likely to be overwhelmed by the other enemies and die. He’s still likely to die if you just storm the place, but his odds are a little better – though if you REALLY want to keep him alive, your best bet is to not talk to his soldiers outside and just go in and kill all the enemies yourself. :p). The fighting doesn’t stop until the leader, Commander Jabsco, is taken out – though it’s worth noting that, while this allows the BOS to take Fort Bannister as a base for themselves after the battle, this DOESN’T stop Talon Company mercs from spawning in the Wasteland. Possibly because Jabsco’s men have no respect for him – according to the strategy guide, he’s supposed to be rather cowardly, hiding in the base to avoid combat and having picked up the nickname “Jetting Jabsco” for his tendency to run away from danger. Jon felt like this was slagging him off, as he fights pretty hard when you encounter him in the game; I personally feel like maybe the guy felt empowered by having a missile launcher to start. XD Didn’t help him with Wanda’s amazing ability to disarm people, though! Oh, and he also has a unique weapon – a reasonably decent combat knife called Occam’s Razor. As per Jon, the name is better than the stats. XD
And that all sums up this week’s episode, with Jon wrapping up right after the Brotherhood Of Steel kicked Talon Company ass. Next week, he’s actually on holiday, so we’re going to have a special “vacation” episode of Fallout, and then the week after that, mystery, as he decides what he wants to show us next. :p I’m eager to see what his “vacation” episode is gonna be – something probably very silly, I bet. :p
Workout: Back on the bike this Sunday, with the following trio of “easy to summarize” videos given this is Fallout Sunday and thus we have the Long TTW Video to cap things off tonight –
A) “I built the tiny home of the year!” by James Turner – a building video from six months ago where he promised to build the tiny home of the year in honor of the new year! Specifically, he built a tiny house in the shape of the number 2023. XD As you might expect, this was a very tricky build, involving curved walls, odd-shaped rooms, and little tricks to help seal in the spaces between the numbers without actually turning them into rooms (like copy-pasting walls into spots instead of drawing them there). But he made it work, and actually made an at least semi-decent house – first 2 was entrance, master bedroom, and bathroom; 0 was a single bedroom and bathroom, with a courtyard in the middle; second 2 was kitchen and dining; and 3 was a tiny living room and an office space! All connected by further little courtyard areas with lots of decorative plants and skylights. It looked a little goofy, but he got it all to work (complete with a self-Sim playtesting some of the more awkwardly-placed objects), and he did keep as a tiny home (95 out of 100 tiles for the max size of tiny house). It’s fun to see builders, especially experienced builders like James, take on goofy challenges like this every once in a while! XD
B) “Weight In The Sims 4 Works Differently To How You’d Expect” by Petey Plays It – a video showing off some experiments Petey did with a sim and her various clones to see how weight gain, weight loss, and muscle gain work in The Sims 4! One clone served as both control group and chef, and the others did experiments centering around which foods caused the most weight gain, do Sims generally only gain weight if they eat when already full, can you starve a Sim thin, and what exercises are best for having Sims lose weight and gain muscle. The results pretty much proved that Sims have no internal metabolism, and no matter if they’re full or starving, if they eat, they will gain weight (with the weight gained depending on the food – as you might expect, salads barely cause any weight gain, while cakes cause a lot while also not filling Sims up). They also will not lose weight if you let them starve, since they have no internal mechanism for burning calories. As for exercise, only cardio-related activities help Sims lose weight, such as running on the treadmill – if your Sim lifts weights, they’re only going to add muscle. That being said, Petey did discover there was one activity that both adds muscle and slims Sims down, and that is, for some reason, juggling the soccer ball that came with Discover University. You let them play with this thing for a while, and your Sims will end up RIPPED. O.o How bizarre. . .but yes, if you want thin Sims, have them eat salads and run a lot; if you want thick Sims, have them eat cake and only lift weights for exercise. And if you want realism, get a mod that gives Sims a metabolism. :p
C) “Complete Guide To Roommates | The Sims 4 Discover University” also by Petey Plays It – a quick guide as to how the “roommates” system works in that expansion! Covering how to find roommates (either asking Sims in person or advertising on the computer and vetting candidates), what roommates need (their own bed and access to bathrooms and kitchens, essentially), how they work (they’re autonomous Sims doing their own thing in your house and occasionally leaving passive-aggressive notes), what you get from them (rent, mainly, though it’s not exactly the BEST money-making scheme as you get less rent per roommate the more roommates you have), and how to get rid of them (just kick ‘em out on the street if they annoy you). Good simple stuff!
Other:
-->We did indeed play another round of beanbags today – Dad had a slightly better game today, while Mom and I had slightly worse ones, with Dad winning three times and Mom only clawing second away from me twice. Final scores were me 3-W-W-2-3; Dad W-2-2-W-W; and Mom 2-3-3-3-2. Ah well, better luck next time Mom – whenever that may be, as I don’t know the humidity situation for tomorrow…
-->Got my comment done on Chapter 7 of “This Isn’t Goodbye,” the RE4 Remake fix-it fic by my friend Cas and their friend Hope that I’ve been trying to complete for some time now! Sheesh...hopefully I can finish off with Chapter 8 this week and thus finally be done, yay~
*nods* Not bad at all -- wish I could have gotten in my comment on "Beneath A Broken Sky" Chapter 5, but that one's a lot longer, and will require a longer comment as well. Maybe tomorrow -- that or answering Moose's latest messages. Or hopefully both, we'll see how much time I actually have in the evening. :p As it stands, I'm out of time tonight, given it's a full week of work this week -- night all!
