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crossover_chickAs my to-do list will make clear shortly --
Tumblr: Again, not QUITE as productive as I might have hoped here, but I got some stuff done regardless –
Victor Luvs Alice – Managed to get two of the Chill Valicer Save update posts done in full (with text, tags, and image alt text) before FO4 times, and get a decent start on a third – this week’s update is actually only five posts, not six, but as a result they all have a LOT of pictures (even if I did end up culling a couple from the first couple of posts), and alt texting all those will take some time. But it’s a start, and I hope to make some more good progress tomorrow!
Valice Multiverse – Had one thread reply – to a thread that’s all about a vicious argument between Alice and Marie’s fan-Valice-daughter Madeline, so it wasn’t exactly the most fun to write. *wince* But it’s done and in the queue, so that’s all right then.
Fallout 4: Had a good productive day in old FO4, I’m pleased to say – despite Vortex’s best efforts. Let me explain –
A) First, when I first opened Vortex (as I have to launch the game through the Script Extender widget in my mod manager to make sure all my mods load in correctly), it informed me that it had updated and had a new way of communicating with Nexus Mods, and that I had to log in again. Which, considering I’d JUST closed out of Firefox, was a bit irritating. I then also had to restart the whole application ANYWAY, because some extensions were updated. *sigh* Vortex, why you gotta be this way. . .
B) Anyway, got through all that, got the game launched, skipped past the “You’re SPECIAL!” video at the beginning, and loaded in with Victor and Ada having just woken up at the Hotel Rexford. I had the pair head out into Goodneighbor proper and visit KLE0 to shop, with Victor grabbing some weapons off Ada to sell to our favorite Murder-Assaultron Shopkeeper – I ended up selling her most of Victor’s frag mines (keeping five for emergencies), the Kneecapper Lead Pipe (because seriously), the missile launcher and all the missiles Victor had in his inventory, and a couple of mini-nukes, and buying a bunch of .308, .44, and .50 cal rounds, making a profit of 64 caps on the deal. *nods* I also used her weapon’s workbench to add a large quick-eject mag to the Mighty .50 Sniper, and a long scope to the Kneecapper Five-Crank Laser Musket, and Victor’s own portable workbench to scrap down a load of leather armor he was carrying around for the leather and other scrap (plus one bit of polymer combat armor that wasn’t as good as what he was actually wearing). Not a bad way to start the morning, I feel!
C) With Victor’s inventory lightened and cleared up a bit, I had him and Ada head out into the Financial District around 8:25 AM in-game! I could hear some sort of raider fight nearby, so I had Victor slip into sneaky mode to avoid that and instead pointed him toward County Crossing so he could clear the “Clearing The Way For County Crossing” quest from his log (this is the one that sent him to Jamaica Plain in the first place). The trip was pretty quiet, fortunately – Victor and Ada went down the heavily-rubble-strewn street to the left of Goodneighbor’s entrance to the Old Corner Bookstore, then followed the Freedom Trail right to Fanueil Hall and the USS Constitution, then hung a left and followed the road that went near Cabot House over to the bridge. There was a Mr. Handy on the bridge, so I dropped a quick save and had Victor and Ada take the route cautiously – as I suspected, the Mr. Handy was specifically a Mr. Handy Destroyer (aka a Rust Devil bot), but fortunately it was going the opposite way from Victor and Ada, so once they were across the bridge, it was easily avoided. From there, all they had to do was take the usual route right to the Weatherby Savings & Loan, go past that to the bridge by one of the game’s Nonsense Spots (aka the busted-up houses that can serve as a random encounter location), then along the road past the super-radioactive spheres to County Crossing! Victor located the ghoul who’d originally given him the quest and reported in, and got 91 bottle caps and 143 XP. Nice. :D
D) Now, while I was at County Crossing, I figured I could do a few things around the place – namely, hand out a couple of the guns I was having Ada carry, harvest some food, and see if anything needed building. As it turns out, I’d already given a couple of the settlers double-barrel shotguns, so they were pretty good (though I took a bobby cap off one guy in exchange for giving him another shotgun shell) – one of the newbies only had a pipe pistol, though, so I gave him the Compensated Calibrated Powerful 10mm and some ammo for it (trading it for the ammo he had on him – .308 or .38, can’t remember which). Another 10mm, a pipe pistol, and two laser rifles went into the workbench for the settlers to play with if they so chose, along with a decent chunk of ammo for them all – trust me, I’ve got PLENTY. I then went to harvest all the mutfruit plants and what corn, tato, and razorgrain plants were growing, checked their stats (happiness is holding well at 80), and decided to build a chem bench in the broken-down house that kind of serves as a crafting area/Victor’s “bedroom” when he visits, using it to craft a bunch of cutting fluid with all the bone they had on them and a few syringer ammo shots (a pax syringe to pacify enemies, and a radscorpion venom syringe and bleedout syringe to give them some bad days). It’s all XP, and I wanted to clear out that bone anyway!
E) And then, after a snack break, it was back along the same route I came to get back to Boston and get Victor over to Hubris Comics! This trip proved to be a little more exciting – right out of the settlement, Victor and Ada were attacked by a Protectron Devil – fortunately, one shot of Victor’s Two-Shot Combat Rifle took it right out (blasting the armor right off it). Then, when they’d gotten over the first bridge and past Weatherby’s again over to the second bridge, I found that the game had spawned a trio of frag mines across the center – fortunately, Victor was able to creep up on them without setting them off and disarm them. Whew – no exploding for Victor today! They crossed over the bridge and started into Boston, with me checking the Pip-Boy map for the best way to reach Hubris –
F) When nearby, I heard the telltale sound of a vertibird fighting something. Now, the weather had gone from fog to rain, so it took me a little while to find the source of the sound – but it turned out to be a BOS vertibird (with an initiate on it) fighting some raiders down near Cabot House. And one of the raiders just so happened to be Legendary! The Raiders took out the vertibird shortly after I spotted them, and then I took out the raiders – poor Victor got set on fire a couple of times thanks to the little gang having molotovs, but they were all pretty low-level and died in a single hit (except the Legendary, who got murdered in two – I think his second health bar had already been triggered by the vertibird, which was handy). I had Victor go and search the bodies – the Legendary had a Hunter’s 10mm pistol on him, which does 50% more damage to animals – not great, but Victor can sell that or pass it onto a settler if he wishes. I had him loot and then scrap some more leather armor, scrap down a couple more spare guns he had on him for parts, do a little bit of cooking, then rearranged his inventory with Ada again to give her a bunch of stuff and get some more room for carrying shit. He’s almost got 100 lbs of carry weight free again, yaaay~ :p
G) With that done, I checked the Pip-Boy and realized the pair could actually just keep on going this way to get to where they wanted to be, so I had them proceed past the busted vertibird and around the corner to the left (where they found a dead glowing radroach – I wonder if the raiders killed that and that got the attention of the vertibird?), and then down the road, past the Boston Bugle building – nice bit of discovery XP there! (Plus some caps from the newsstands outside.) They kept going straight, down the road (past an intersection by the Mass Fusion building), then went left and then right to get to the Massachusetts State House, past a BOS patrol that happened to be hanging out there (maybe they were dropped off by the vertibird?). I dropped Victor into sneaky-beaky mode and had him crawl along the edge of the common, past Prost Bar (tempted to explode, but forced myself to stay on-task), around Swan’s Pond, and then over to Hubris Comics in Back Bay! As it was just past 3:30 PM in the real world, though, and I fully expected Victor to start feeling fatigued at any moment, I had him and Ada park themselves outside by the front door, saved, and quit, ready to get my afternoon snack and do my write-up –
H) And then I saw, on the taskbar on the bottom of my screen – Fallout 4. Apparently still running. Confused and baffled, I opened it up –
And found another instance of the game. With a bad exitsave. . .and the save just before it being BACK IN THE FINANCIAL DISTRICT – aka back in or around Goodneighbor. I was utterly BAFFLED and quickly quit out of the second game without opening anything, then – fearing that everything I’d done today had been wiped or corrupted or something – quickly reopened the game to check.
I) Fortunately, when I opened FO4 again, I found that my last saves were in Back Bay – aka, right by Hubris Comics. Relieved, I had Victor wander around the general area a little so I could make a new save – and lo and behold, as I had him cross the street and then go back, I got the “you’re starting to feel a little tired” message! So I had him go back over to Hubris, drop his tent by the front door, and hit the sack at 7:45 PM exactly in-game, letting him sleep for 8 hours and awaken just before 4 AM in a thunderstorm. XD THERE I saved and quit again, and was relieved to find no other extra copies of FO4 running when I closed out this time. I think my stupid mouse’s occasional habit of double-clicking may have somehow opened the game twice when I initially clicked on the F4SE launcher, and naturally I didn’t notice, because how would I (I play these games in fullscreen mode)? I’m just glad that it didn’t completely screw over my progress!
So yeah – nearly had a rage attack at the end there, but it’s all good, and I accomplished exactly what I meant to this Sunday. *nods* Next week – we clear out Hubris Comics and get ourselves a nice shiny Silver Shroud costume! :D Should be fun.
Writing: Took me a little longer than expected, but I did update the old FO4 Playthrough Progression doc with the events of today’s playsession (minus all the bullshit with Vortex, obviously), with Victor, Ada, and Alice heading off to County Crossing to let them know Jamaica Plain is all set, and then back to Boston to park themselves outside Hubris Comics. Again, only minor changes from the above write-up – such the ghoul who gave Victor the quest getting a name (Carl) and also asking about the treasure (he too was excited to learn a bat from the 2076 World Series was in the giant time capsule); the County Crossing settlers being the ones who wanted a chem bench (their intention is to use it as a still for mutfruit wine) and Victor not making any syringer ammo (as I don’t think he’d be thinking about using the syringer at this time – I just made it because it’s good XP and it might be useful later, if he does end up using it); the mines on the bridge back into Boston being implied to be from the Mr. Handy Destroyer they saw earlier (having tried to set up a trap after they left); and the gang actually talking to the BOS patrol they encountered by the State House for a bit (convincing them that they’re not raiders and letting them know about the crashed vertibird, with the knight confirming that’s what dropped them off and leading his team back to go clean up the wreckage and secure the body of their fallen comrade). But yeah, left it in the fanfic universe pretty much at the same place in game – Victor and company getting ready to head into Hubris Comics! And I already know one change that’s going to be made to next week’s playsession write-up, because I think it would be nice if Alice got a dress to go with Victor’s new Silver Shroud look. . . ;)
YouTube: The evening unfortunately got away from me in a few respects (mostly because it took me longer than expected to finish writing up the Playthrough Progression and the section on my workout), so I started my official YouTubing late and ended up only being able to fit in one video – The Spiffing Brit and “Can I Survive 7 Days? - I Turned Fallout 4 Into A Zombie Apocalypse Game!” Because, as it turns out, Jon of Many A True Nerd did NOT do the next “Tale of Two Wastelands” episode today – instead he had a birthday livestream in Fallout 4! And I ended up watching a chunk of that with my workout (see below), so I decided to watch Spiff this evening instead! :D As indicated by the title, he’d turned FO4 into a zombie apocalypse survival game with the liberal help of mods, and his goal was to survive a week in that world with Jwayne Dohnson (yes, THAT Jwayne Dohnson XD). Spiff set up him with 1 Strength, 8 Perception, 7 Endurance, 1 Charisma, 5 Intelligence, 5 Agility, and 1 Luck (figuring that the most important stats in a zombie survival game are the ones that help with shooting guns accurately, learning survival skills, dodging zombies, and enduring being gnawed on by zombies), had him spawn into the abandoned house on the edge of Concord with the help of an alternate start mod, changed as many NPCs into ravenous zombies as possible, and set to work surviving!
. . .he was almost immediately overrun and killed by a horde who noticed his presence inside the house because he stood at the windows looking out at them and didn’t realize they could get in through his back door. XD Spiff reloaded and restarted the count, and did much better on his second go –
A) Day 1 saw him successfully get over to the nearby Red Rocket, clear out the zombies there, and set up a junk fence barricade and a settler recruitment beacon to try and attract some friends
B) Day 2 saw him go exploring a little bit in Concord to loot some goodies, killing both the raiders and all the zombie Minutemen they were fighting around the Museum of Freedom (and somehow confusing Preston Garvey and Paladin Danse as he went to clear out the zombie “settlers” – Spiff, HOW)
C) Day 3 saw him learn of an excellent gun while exploring his immediate environs held in the Federal Reserve Stockpile (very important, as currently his arsenal consisted of relatively awful pipe weaponry and a halfway-decent 10mm he’d modded to hell and back, plus a baseball bat that was doing the work in keeping him alive by taking down zombies with two bonks to the head), and Day 4 saw him venture into the Stockpile to get it (a tricky proposition given there were both raiders AND zombies to fight, and if you didn’t blow the heads of the raiders, they would then get up AS zombies – he did indeed secure “That Machine,” a lovely Kneecapper gun, in the end, though! And then came up through the Forgotten Chapel and had to run like hell to avoid being overwhelmed by the horde)
D) Day 5 saw the arrival of some settlers in the Red Rocket, Spiff making the place a little nicer for his new assistants (including setting up proper watchtowers and such), doing some weapon modding (like turning his bat into a full-on axe and calling it “Barry The Despoiler) and clearing out some more enemies while exploring the nearby area looking for goodies
E) Day 6 saw him TRY to go out and make friends with the people of Covenant so he could use their town as a secondary base – however, breaching the walls without doing the all-important test while fighting some zombies on the road led to everyone become hostile and Spiff having to kill them all. And when he tried building a recruitment beacon, the very first people who arrived ended up the victims of a combination of zombies and friendly fire as Spiff tried to save them from the zombies. So Spiff left the settlement empty and ready for a new group of people and instead slunk off in shame
F) And Day 7 saw him prepare for the boss “mega horde” that was coming that evening, building a giant sniping tower atop the Red Rocket and loads of spiky spring traps outside the walls. . .and then going outside while trying to stop his settlers opening the gates to the zombies and, as one commenter put it, Leeroy Jenkins-ing the whole thing with his guns and his axe. XD To be fair, this DID work, and he and three of his four settlers DID make it through the night! It just wasn’t especially pretty, let’s say. XD
So the answer to the question in the title was “yes, if I take some time to think and don’t get myself overrun by zombies in the first couple of minutes.” XD It was a very fun video – AND Spiff has expressed an interest in maybe doing a sequel and trying to survive a whole MONTH. Wouldn’t THAT be interesting. . .we’ll see if he does it!
Workout: Back on the bike – and, as indicated above, I ended up watching some of “Fallout 4: The Birthday Livestream Special - Jon vs You” by Jon of Many a True Nerd! Jon does these livestreams every year for, well, his birthday (though I don’t know exactly WHEN that is – we can at least be reasonably sure it’s on or around 8/20, I suppose!), and this year, the theme was Jon trying to play Fallout 4 while running the “Crowd Control” mod, which allowed the people watching him in the livestream to use the related website to spend virtual coins (a number of which were given out for free periodically on the website – if you wanted more you could buy them with real money, with all the proceeds going to the charity World Central Kitchen) to alter Jon’s game as he played – changing his stats, changing the weather, putting him in different outfits and power armor, giving him new weapons, taking away weapons, and spawning any number of things straight out of his body. As you might imagine, the “vs” part of the title was kind of an understatement – Jon’s viewers tried to make things as hard as humanly possible for him as he desperately attempted to complete the main quest. XD I ended up watching three discrete chunklets of it while it was going on, in fact – two before getting on the bike, and obviously the longest bit while I was actually pedaling –
I. First few minutes I saw was while I was doing my write-ups for my own FO4 playthrough and decided to quickly check YouTube to see if I could find the latest TTW video – of course, I instead found the Livestream. Clicked into it to see John desperately trying to get away from a steady stream of tatos bursting out of his body and a whole bunch of enemies by running into the nearest body of water and swimming for his life, all while everyone tried to put him into power armor constantly. XD
II. Then I watched a few MORE minutes after we played beanbags but before going down to do my workout – by this point, Jon had actually made it most of the way through “Getting A Clue” and gotten the San Francisco Sunlight cigars out of Kellogg’s hidden room, causing Nick to say that his “partner” (Dogmeat) would be able to use those to track him. He fought his way through the massive amount of brahmin the crowd had spawned in to get back outside and meet Dogmeat. . .only to find Diamond City full of charred feral ghouls, Nick refusing to talk to him until they were cleared, and the Crowd Control mod acting up because nobody could spawn in anything else. And his attempts to clear all those ghouls with constant use of a Spray-N-Pray machine gun ended up hitting the mayor and making Nick hostile to him (fortunately he’d saved recently and could just reload instead of waiting the required three days for everyone to cool down). I left him a little note then wishing him a happy birthday and all the best of luck with clearing Diamond City before heading downstairs to work out. . .
III. Where I was like “you know what, let’s just watch it with my bike ride, it’ll be fun.” XD And so I resumed the livestream after hopping on the bike, getting to watch as Jon finally cleared the ghouls enough that he was able to complete “Getting A Clue” and move onto “Reunions;” reset the Crowd Control mod; regretted resetting the Crowd Control mod as everyone began spawning in ALL the nonsense, including tons of melons, sentry bots, and Super Mutant Suiciders; got ragdolled a few times and died once trying to get away from the nonsense so he could fast-travel to Fort Hagen (previously cleared) and get to Kellogg; FINALLY managed to achieve fast travel to Hagen and get inside, despite everyone’s best attempts; worked his way through the dozens of ghouls, brahmin, robots, and super mutants everyone kept spawning into the building down to where Kellogg was waiting (discovering in the process that, yes, it is possible to spawn enemies into elevators); managed to kill Kellogg with the Big Boy nuke launcher someone gave him (though it took a little while to do, given all the enemies that were spawning in); ended up in an elevator full of cows in an invisible suit of power armor trying to get to the roof; got to the roof and told the Brotherhood to fuck off because he had his own problems; suffered a game crash and had to REDO going up to the roof in an elevator full of cows in an invisible suit of power armor (he made sure to save again AFTER getting back up there); had ANOTHER game crash; and finally escaped Fort Hagen and started making his way to the Boston Airport and the Brotherhood for some help with all his enemies, spewing melons out of his body and receiving like twenty copies of Grognak’s Axe and The Wastelander’s Friend all the while. XD It was just – pure chaos for a good cause, and it was a lot of fun to watch. :) Happy birthday, Jon! I suspect you’re going to be VERY HAPPY to get back to the less chaotic FO3/F:NV combined wastelands next week! XD
Other: Another nice day (even if it did end up getting hotter and more humid by the afternoon, meh), another five rounds of beanbags out in the yard this afternoon! And damn, I don’t know what it was, but I just DOMINATED the game today. :D Total champ with the most wins AND no actual losses! Though, happily, both Mom and Dad managed a win each, so we all got to win once, hooray. Final scores were me W-W-2-W-2; Dad 3-2-W-2-3; Mom 2-3-3-3-W.
So yeah, not a bad day overall, but there was a few somewhat upsetting moments. Didn't help that dinner was kind of tense because Mom managed to knock a glass of water all over the table for apparently the THIRD time today and was really upset about that, and the heat and humidity coming back this even meaning it was uncomfortably warm until I turned my AC on. . .meh. Well, I'm just gonna head to bed and try to get some sleep 'cause tomorrow might be good for something. :p At the very least, I need to be rested for another week of work. Night all!
Tumblr: Again, not QUITE as productive as I might have hoped here, but I got some stuff done regardless –
Victor Luvs Alice – Managed to get two of the Chill Valicer Save update posts done in full (with text, tags, and image alt text) before FO4 times, and get a decent start on a third – this week’s update is actually only five posts, not six, but as a result they all have a LOT of pictures (even if I did end up culling a couple from the first couple of posts), and alt texting all those will take some time. But it’s a start, and I hope to make some more good progress tomorrow!
Valice Multiverse – Had one thread reply – to a thread that’s all about a vicious argument between Alice and Marie’s fan-Valice-daughter Madeline, so it wasn’t exactly the most fun to write. *wince* But it’s done and in the queue, so that’s all right then.
Fallout 4: Had a good productive day in old FO4, I’m pleased to say – despite Vortex’s best efforts. Let me explain –
A) First, when I first opened Vortex (as I have to launch the game through the Script Extender widget in my mod manager to make sure all my mods load in correctly), it informed me that it had updated and had a new way of communicating with Nexus Mods, and that I had to log in again. Which, considering I’d JUST closed out of Firefox, was a bit irritating. I then also had to restart the whole application ANYWAY, because some extensions were updated. *sigh* Vortex, why you gotta be this way. . .
B) Anyway, got through all that, got the game launched, skipped past the “You’re SPECIAL!” video at the beginning, and loaded in with Victor and Ada having just woken up at the Hotel Rexford. I had the pair head out into Goodneighbor proper and visit KLE0 to shop, with Victor grabbing some weapons off Ada to sell to our favorite Murder-Assaultron Shopkeeper – I ended up selling her most of Victor’s frag mines (keeping five for emergencies), the Kneecapper Lead Pipe (because seriously), the missile launcher and all the missiles Victor had in his inventory, and a couple of mini-nukes, and buying a bunch of .308, .44, and .50 cal rounds, making a profit of 64 caps on the deal. *nods* I also used her weapon’s workbench to add a large quick-eject mag to the Mighty .50 Sniper, and a long scope to the Kneecapper Five-Crank Laser Musket, and Victor’s own portable workbench to scrap down a load of leather armor he was carrying around for the leather and other scrap (plus one bit of polymer combat armor that wasn’t as good as what he was actually wearing). Not a bad way to start the morning, I feel!
C) With Victor’s inventory lightened and cleared up a bit, I had him and Ada head out into the Financial District around 8:25 AM in-game! I could hear some sort of raider fight nearby, so I had Victor slip into sneaky mode to avoid that and instead pointed him toward County Crossing so he could clear the “Clearing The Way For County Crossing” quest from his log (this is the one that sent him to Jamaica Plain in the first place). The trip was pretty quiet, fortunately – Victor and Ada went down the heavily-rubble-strewn street to the left of Goodneighbor’s entrance to the Old Corner Bookstore, then followed the Freedom Trail right to Fanueil Hall and the USS Constitution, then hung a left and followed the road that went near Cabot House over to the bridge. There was a Mr. Handy on the bridge, so I dropped a quick save and had Victor and Ada take the route cautiously – as I suspected, the Mr. Handy was specifically a Mr. Handy Destroyer (aka a Rust Devil bot), but fortunately it was going the opposite way from Victor and Ada, so once they were across the bridge, it was easily avoided. From there, all they had to do was take the usual route right to the Weatherby Savings & Loan, go past that to the bridge by one of the game’s Nonsense Spots (aka the busted-up houses that can serve as a random encounter location), then along the road past the super-radioactive spheres to County Crossing! Victor located the ghoul who’d originally given him the quest and reported in, and got 91 bottle caps and 143 XP. Nice. :D
D) Now, while I was at County Crossing, I figured I could do a few things around the place – namely, hand out a couple of the guns I was having Ada carry, harvest some food, and see if anything needed building. As it turns out, I’d already given a couple of the settlers double-barrel shotguns, so they were pretty good (though I took a bobby cap off one guy in exchange for giving him another shotgun shell) – one of the newbies only had a pipe pistol, though, so I gave him the Compensated Calibrated Powerful 10mm and some ammo for it (trading it for the ammo he had on him – .308 or .38, can’t remember which). Another 10mm, a pipe pistol, and two laser rifles went into the workbench for the settlers to play with if they so chose, along with a decent chunk of ammo for them all – trust me, I’ve got PLENTY. I then went to harvest all the mutfruit plants and what corn, tato, and razorgrain plants were growing, checked their stats (happiness is holding well at 80), and decided to build a chem bench in the broken-down house that kind of serves as a crafting area/Victor’s “bedroom” when he visits, using it to craft a bunch of cutting fluid with all the bone they had on them and a few syringer ammo shots (a pax syringe to pacify enemies, and a radscorpion venom syringe and bleedout syringe to give them some bad days). It’s all XP, and I wanted to clear out that bone anyway!
E) And then, after a snack break, it was back along the same route I came to get back to Boston and get Victor over to Hubris Comics! This trip proved to be a little more exciting – right out of the settlement, Victor and Ada were attacked by a Protectron Devil – fortunately, one shot of Victor’s Two-Shot Combat Rifle took it right out (blasting the armor right off it). Then, when they’d gotten over the first bridge and past Weatherby’s again over to the second bridge, I found that the game had spawned a trio of frag mines across the center – fortunately, Victor was able to creep up on them without setting them off and disarm them. Whew – no exploding for Victor today! They crossed over the bridge and started into Boston, with me checking the Pip-Boy map for the best way to reach Hubris –
F) When nearby, I heard the telltale sound of a vertibird fighting something. Now, the weather had gone from fog to rain, so it took me a little while to find the source of the sound – but it turned out to be a BOS vertibird (with an initiate on it) fighting some raiders down near Cabot House. And one of the raiders just so happened to be Legendary! The Raiders took out the vertibird shortly after I spotted them, and then I took out the raiders – poor Victor got set on fire a couple of times thanks to the little gang having molotovs, but they were all pretty low-level and died in a single hit (except the Legendary, who got murdered in two – I think his second health bar had already been triggered by the vertibird, which was handy). I had Victor go and search the bodies – the Legendary had a Hunter’s 10mm pistol on him, which does 50% more damage to animals – not great, but Victor can sell that or pass it onto a settler if he wishes. I had him loot and then scrap some more leather armor, scrap down a couple more spare guns he had on him for parts, do a little bit of cooking, then rearranged his inventory with Ada again to give her a bunch of stuff and get some more room for carrying shit. He’s almost got 100 lbs of carry weight free again, yaaay~ :p
G) With that done, I checked the Pip-Boy and realized the pair could actually just keep on going this way to get to where they wanted to be, so I had them proceed past the busted vertibird and around the corner to the left (where they found a dead glowing radroach – I wonder if the raiders killed that and that got the attention of the vertibird?), and then down the road, past the Boston Bugle building – nice bit of discovery XP there! (Plus some caps from the newsstands outside.) They kept going straight, down the road (past an intersection by the Mass Fusion building), then went left and then right to get to the Massachusetts State House, past a BOS patrol that happened to be hanging out there (maybe they were dropped off by the vertibird?). I dropped Victor into sneaky-beaky mode and had him crawl along the edge of the common, past Prost Bar (tempted to explode, but forced myself to stay on-task), around Swan’s Pond, and then over to Hubris Comics in Back Bay! As it was just past 3:30 PM in the real world, though, and I fully expected Victor to start feeling fatigued at any moment, I had him and Ada park themselves outside by the front door, saved, and quit, ready to get my afternoon snack and do my write-up –
H) And then I saw, on the taskbar on the bottom of my screen – Fallout 4. Apparently still running. Confused and baffled, I opened it up –
And found another instance of the game. With a bad exitsave. . .and the save just before it being BACK IN THE FINANCIAL DISTRICT – aka back in or around Goodneighbor. I was utterly BAFFLED and quickly quit out of the second game without opening anything, then – fearing that everything I’d done today had been wiped or corrupted or something – quickly reopened the game to check.
I) Fortunately, when I opened FO4 again, I found that my last saves were in Back Bay – aka, right by Hubris Comics. Relieved, I had Victor wander around the general area a little so I could make a new save – and lo and behold, as I had him cross the street and then go back, I got the “you’re starting to feel a little tired” message! So I had him go back over to Hubris, drop his tent by the front door, and hit the sack at 7:45 PM exactly in-game, letting him sleep for 8 hours and awaken just before 4 AM in a thunderstorm. XD THERE I saved and quit again, and was relieved to find no other extra copies of FO4 running when I closed out this time. I think my stupid mouse’s occasional habit of double-clicking may have somehow opened the game twice when I initially clicked on the F4SE launcher, and naturally I didn’t notice, because how would I (I play these games in fullscreen mode)? I’m just glad that it didn’t completely screw over my progress!
So yeah – nearly had a rage attack at the end there, but it’s all good, and I accomplished exactly what I meant to this Sunday. *nods* Next week – we clear out Hubris Comics and get ourselves a nice shiny Silver Shroud costume! :D Should be fun.
Writing: Took me a little longer than expected, but I did update the old FO4 Playthrough Progression doc with the events of today’s playsession (minus all the bullshit with Vortex, obviously), with Victor, Ada, and Alice heading off to County Crossing to let them know Jamaica Plain is all set, and then back to Boston to park themselves outside Hubris Comics. Again, only minor changes from the above write-up – such the ghoul who gave Victor the quest getting a name (Carl) and also asking about the treasure (he too was excited to learn a bat from the 2076 World Series was in the giant time capsule); the County Crossing settlers being the ones who wanted a chem bench (their intention is to use it as a still for mutfruit wine) and Victor not making any syringer ammo (as I don’t think he’d be thinking about using the syringer at this time – I just made it because it’s good XP and it might be useful later, if he does end up using it); the mines on the bridge back into Boston being implied to be from the Mr. Handy Destroyer they saw earlier (having tried to set up a trap after they left); and the gang actually talking to the BOS patrol they encountered by the State House for a bit (convincing them that they’re not raiders and letting them know about the crashed vertibird, with the knight confirming that’s what dropped them off and leading his team back to go clean up the wreckage and secure the body of their fallen comrade). But yeah, left it in the fanfic universe pretty much at the same place in game – Victor and company getting ready to head into Hubris Comics! And I already know one change that’s going to be made to next week’s playsession write-up, because I think it would be nice if Alice got a dress to go with Victor’s new Silver Shroud look. . . ;)
YouTube: The evening unfortunately got away from me in a few respects (mostly because it took me longer than expected to finish writing up the Playthrough Progression and the section on my workout), so I started my official YouTubing late and ended up only being able to fit in one video – The Spiffing Brit and “Can I Survive 7 Days? - I Turned Fallout 4 Into A Zombie Apocalypse Game!” Because, as it turns out, Jon of Many A True Nerd did NOT do the next “Tale of Two Wastelands” episode today – instead he had a birthday livestream in Fallout 4! And I ended up watching a chunk of that with my workout (see below), so I decided to watch Spiff this evening instead! :D As indicated by the title, he’d turned FO4 into a zombie apocalypse survival game with the liberal help of mods, and his goal was to survive a week in that world with Jwayne Dohnson (yes, THAT Jwayne Dohnson XD). Spiff set up him with 1 Strength, 8 Perception, 7 Endurance, 1 Charisma, 5 Intelligence, 5 Agility, and 1 Luck (figuring that the most important stats in a zombie survival game are the ones that help with shooting guns accurately, learning survival skills, dodging zombies, and enduring being gnawed on by zombies), had him spawn into the abandoned house on the edge of Concord with the help of an alternate start mod, changed as many NPCs into ravenous zombies as possible, and set to work surviving!
. . .he was almost immediately overrun and killed by a horde who noticed his presence inside the house because he stood at the windows looking out at them and didn’t realize they could get in through his back door. XD Spiff reloaded and restarted the count, and did much better on his second go –
A) Day 1 saw him successfully get over to the nearby Red Rocket, clear out the zombies there, and set up a junk fence barricade and a settler recruitment beacon to try and attract some friends
B) Day 2 saw him go exploring a little bit in Concord to loot some goodies, killing both the raiders and all the zombie Minutemen they were fighting around the Museum of Freedom (and somehow confusing Preston Garvey and Paladin Danse as he went to clear out the zombie “settlers” – Spiff, HOW)
C) Day 3 saw him learn of an excellent gun while exploring his immediate environs held in the Federal Reserve Stockpile (very important, as currently his arsenal consisted of relatively awful pipe weaponry and a halfway-decent 10mm he’d modded to hell and back, plus a baseball bat that was doing the work in keeping him alive by taking down zombies with two bonks to the head), and Day 4 saw him venture into the Stockpile to get it (a tricky proposition given there were both raiders AND zombies to fight, and if you didn’t blow the heads of the raiders, they would then get up AS zombies – he did indeed secure “That Machine,” a lovely Kneecapper gun, in the end, though! And then came up through the Forgotten Chapel and had to run like hell to avoid being overwhelmed by the horde)
D) Day 5 saw the arrival of some settlers in the Red Rocket, Spiff making the place a little nicer for his new assistants (including setting up proper watchtowers and such), doing some weapon modding (like turning his bat into a full-on axe and calling it “Barry The Despoiler) and clearing out some more enemies while exploring the nearby area looking for goodies
E) Day 6 saw him TRY to go out and make friends with the people of Covenant so he could use their town as a secondary base – however, breaching the walls without doing the all-important test while fighting some zombies on the road led to everyone become hostile and Spiff having to kill them all. And when he tried building a recruitment beacon, the very first people who arrived ended up the victims of a combination of zombies and friendly fire as Spiff tried to save them from the zombies. So Spiff left the settlement empty and ready for a new group of people and instead slunk off in shame
F) And Day 7 saw him prepare for the boss “mega horde” that was coming that evening, building a giant sniping tower atop the Red Rocket and loads of spiky spring traps outside the walls. . .and then going outside while trying to stop his settlers opening the gates to the zombies and, as one commenter put it, Leeroy Jenkins-ing the whole thing with his guns and his axe. XD To be fair, this DID work, and he and three of his four settlers DID make it through the night! It just wasn’t especially pretty, let’s say. XD
So the answer to the question in the title was “yes, if I take some time to think and don’t get myself overrun by zombies in the first couple of minutes.” XD It was a very fun video – AND Spiff has expressed an interest in maybe doing a sequel and trying to survive a whole MONTH. Wouldn’t THAT be interesting. . .we’ll see if he does it!
Workout: Back on the bike – and, as indicated above, I ended up watching some of “Fallout 4: The Birthday Livestream Special - Jon vs You” by Jon of Many a True Nerd! Jon does these livestreams every year for, well, his birthday (though I don’t know exactly WHEN that is – we can at least be reasonably sure it’s on or around 8/20, I suppose!), and this year, the theme was Jon trying to play Fallout 4 while running the “Crowd Control” mod, which allowed the people watching him in the livestream to use the related website to spend virtual coins (a number of which were given out for free periodically on the website – if you wanted more you could buy them with real money, with all the proceeds going to the charity World Central Kitchen) to alter Jon’s game as he played – changing his stats, changing the weather, putting him in different outfits and power armor, giving him new weapons, taking away weapons, and spawning any number of things straight out of his body. As you might imagine, the “vs” part of the title was kind of an understatement – Jon’s viewers tried to make things as hard as humanly possible for him as he desperately attempted to complete the main quest. XD I ended up watching three discrete chunklets of it while it was going on, in fact – two before getting on the bike, and obviously the longest bit while I was actually pedaling –
I. First few minutes I saw was while I was doing my write-ups for my own FO4 playthrough and decided to quickly check YouTube to see if I could find the latest TTW video – of course, I instead found the Livestream. Clicked into it to see John desperately trying to get away from a steady stream of tatos bursting out of his body and a whole bunch of enemies by running into the nearest body of water and swimming for his life, all while everyone tried to put him into power armor constantly. XD
II. Then I watched a few MORE minutes after we played beanbags but before going down to do my workout – by this point, Jon had actually made it most of the way through “Getting A Clue” and gotten the San Francisco Sunlight cigars out of Kellogg’s hidden room, causing Nick to say that his “partner” (Dogmeat) would be able to use those to track him. He fought his way through the massive amount of brahmin the crowd had spawned in to get back outside and meet Dogmeat. . .only to find Diamond City full of charred feral ghouls, Nick refusing to talk to him until they were cleared, and the Crowd Control mod acting up because nobody could spawn in anything else. And his attempts to clear all those ghouls with constant use of a Spray-N-Pray machine gun ended up hitting the mayor and making Nick hostile to him (fortunately he’d saved recently and could just reload instead of waiting the required three days for everyone to cool down). I left him a little note then wishing him a happy birthday and all the best of luck with clearing Diamond City before heading downstairs to work out. . .
III. Where I was like “you know what, let’s just watch it with my bike ride, it’ll be fun.” XD And so I resumed the livestream after hopping on the bike, getting to watch as Jon finally cleared the ghouls enough that he was able to complete “Getting A Clue” and move onto “Reunions;” reset the Crowd Control mod; regretted resetting the Crowd Control mod as everyone began spawning in ALL the nonsense, including tons of melons, sentry bots, and Super Mutant Suiciders; got ragdolled a few times and died once trying to get away from the nonsense so he could fast-travel to Fort Hagen (previously cleared) and get to Kellogg; FINALLY managed to achieve fast travel to Hagen and get inside, despite everyone’s best attempts; worked his way through the dozens of ghouls, brahmin, robots, and super mutants everyone kept spawning into the building down to where Kellogg was waiting (discovering in the process that, yes, it is possible to spawn enemies into elevators); managed to kill Kellogg with the Big Boy nuke launcher someone gave him (though it took a little while to do, given all the enemies that were spawning in); ended up in an elevator full of cows in an invisible suit of power armor trying to get to the roof; got to the roof and told the Brotherhood to fuck off because he had his own problems; suffered a game crash and had to REDO going up to the roof in an elevator full of cows in an invisible suit of power armor (he made sure to save again AFTER getting back up there); had ANOTHER game crash; and finally escaped Fort Hagen and started making his way to the Boston Airport and the Brotherhood for some help with all his enemies, spewing melons out of his body and receiving like twenty copies of Grognak’s Axe and The Wastelander’s Friend all the while. XD It was just – pure chaos for a good cause, and it was a lot of fun to watch. :) Happy birthday, Jon! I suspect you’re going to be VERY HAPPY to get back to the less chaotic FO3/F:NV combined wastelands next week! XD
Other: Another nice day (even if it did end up getting hotter and more humid by the afternoon, meh), another five rounds of beanbags out in the yard this afternoon! And damn, I don’t know what it was, but I just DOMINATED the game today. :D Total champ with the most wins AND no actual losses! Though, happily, both Mom and Dad managed a win each, so we all got to win once, hooray. Final scores were me W-W-2-W-2; Dad 3-2-W-2-3; Mom 2-3-3-3-W.
So yeah, not a bad day overall, but there was a few somewhat upsetting moments. Didn't help that dinner was kind of tense because Mom managed to knock a glass of water all over the table for apparently the THIRD time today and was really upset about that, and the heat and humidity coming back this even meaning it was uncomfortably warm until I turned my AC on. . .meh. Well, I'm just gonna head to bed and try to get some sleep 'cause tomorrow might be good for something. :p At the very least, I need to be rested for another week of work. Night all!
