Usual Late Sunday

You know the drill by now. :p But I had a good chill day, which hopefully my to-do list will illustrate:

Tumblr: Good day on here today – did the dash-and-tags catch-up on Victor Luvs Alice around lunch (did most of the dash catch-up before lunch, then finished that off and did the tags catch-up after lunch), then did two of my six Chill Valicer Save Update posts for this week before starting Fallout 4. *thumbs up* Nothing to report on Valice Multiverse, though – not that surprised since my one regular partner is still recovering from COVID.

Fallout 4: Simple but productive playsession in the Commonwealth today –

A) Started out by putting my port-a-potty in a safe place, then storing all of Victor’s junk (both the stuff on him and on Nick) in the work bench before sending Victor on a tour of the Warwick Homestead to see what was what and where certain things could possibly go (and pick up useful items, like turpentine and Wonderglue – I left Wally’s toys and other personal-looking effects alone, though). Found a couple of cute set-ups in tucked-away corners – a teddy bear in a captain’s hat riding a Giddyup Buttercup mechanical horse (also in a captain’s hat), and a little alien toy against a rocket sitting by some flowers and wooden blocks spelling out “BYE.” :D Then, once I had a feel for the place and where everyone slept and stuff, it was time to start building!

B) . . .and time to start raining, apparently, as pretty much the entire rest of the day, and thus my entire build session, was one long thunderstorm. *rolls eyes* I like my improved weather mods, but it does rain a LOT in the Commonwealth. . .anyway, the main stuff I accomplished was:

I. Scrapping most of the interior fence bits (made it harder to move around the settlement) and various wood palettes and suchlike

II. Setting up a desalination machine in the little patch of accessible water by the front “gate” for water and salt, and building a pair of windmill turbines to power it (it needed five power, and two windmills gets you six – I couldn’t build any of the other generators, not enough rubber)

III. Moving the bloodleaf that I’d tried planting in one of the old sewage tanks (and subsequently couldn’t find because it had sunk down too low below the water) into the same little patch of water by the desalinator

IV. Spotting a nice little nook near the front door of the living quarters and realizing it would be perfect for a shower, and the space next to it for toilets – after some searching through my CWSS stuff, I found a good homemade shower with a water-gathering bucket atop it; a soap tray, towel rack, and even a little shaving station I could attach to the walls; a nice premade outhouse shell I could slot an outhouse toilet into (I build two, complete with doors for a change!); some toilet paper; and even a bit of “toilet poetry” for the wall of one (about how it stank so bad in there the person could barely finish their sandwich XD). Hell, I even put up some nice signs! It’s fun to do this kind of thing, make the place look more like a livable settlement that takes care of people’s needs. And also lucrative to me personally XP wise, as the next item shows –

V. Finding all this building had gotten me to Level 32! After a little poke around the perk chart, I just went with Lockpicking level 2, which will allow Victor to open Expert-level locks (most of the stuff I really want, like maxing out Armorsmith and Gun Nut, is still a few levels ahead of him, sadly).

VI. Building lots more defense turrets – the desalinator provides 20 units of water as well as salt, and the Warwick Homestead already has a LOT of food with its tatoes and mutfruit, meaning that it’s a prime target for enemy raids! So I went around and build heavy machine gun turrets wherever I felt was appropriate (generally around the border of the settlement), plus one regular turret up on the roof of the entrance to the living quarters. This brought their defense all the way up to fifty, and should allow them to survive any attacks just a little bit better!

VII. Giving Victor his own personal bed in the settlement – well, his own personal sleeping bag, tucked into a corner previously occupied by some paint cans. He doesn’t live here, after all, so he can have something more temporary for his purposes. I built this kind of just in time too, as after finishing up the turrets, Victor was utterly WIPED. I let him bunk down at 10:16 PM for a full eight hours, content in a job well done.

C) Next morning, he was up at 6:16 AM and out into the fog, where I had him complete his farm improvements – mainly, planting a few more crops (a couple things of razorgrain, a few carrots, that sort of thing) and building a bell next to the trader campfire to summon everyone should he need them. After that, he pulled out the old portable workbench to look at what junk he and Nick needed to take back with them so he could continue improving his guns on the go (and scrapped a spare laser gun he’d picked up), then grabbed what he needed and took a moment to give his Staggering Automatic laser rifle the Beam Splitter attachment (which I figure makes more sense, as this thing has a chance to stagger upon hit, so you want it to hit as often as possible, right?). Couldn’t give it any more upgrades, though – not enough gold, unfortunately. Or fiber optics – need to look out for both of those!

D) With that sorted, and Nick carrying all the heavy shit Victor wouldn’t immediately need, it was back out into the wasteland! I had them sneak around and even into the wreck of the ruined ship to properly tag it on the map (it’s the wreck of the FMS Northern Star!), then headed out again by the bug-infested beach –

E) Where I decided I’d had enough of those bugs and decided to have Victor try to clear them out with Righteous Authority. This worked – well enough, basically. The Glowing and Black Bloatflies were a bit of a pain, but the latter one actually focused its attentions on Nick, allowing Victor to kill the Glowing one and then take out the Black one after it was already injured. Ended up disintegrating both bloodbugs (an Infected Bloodbug and a Red Widow) too, with the Red Widow for some reason already halfway out to sea when Victor finally killed her. *shrug* Honestly, the most damage Victor took was accidentally stepping on a hidden mine while looking for goodies among the (very creepy) dolphin corpses and breaking his leg. And even then he’s got about 143 stimpacks and plenty of stuff to drink – he was fine.

And so the playsession ended with Victor back on the road! That is, on the road itself, because next time I have to decide whether he spends the rest of his day taking out the mirelurks and ghoulified crew in the FMS Northern Star, or if he goes straight up the coast to get to Nordhagen Beach and maybe solve their kidnapping before the timer on that radiant quest runs out. (Though I just did some research, and I may have quite a bit of time to do that one – apparently these quests give you 15 days to get to the settlement, and then 15 days to solve the problem? Though you only get 15 in-game hours for defending settlements you own. . .) I mean, that Agility Bobblehead is tempting, and the wreck is right there. . .we’ll see how I feel next Sunday!

Writing: Pretty simple update to the old FO4 Playthrough Progression today, seeing as it was mainly a building day in old Fallout 4. The main differences between the fanfic version and the game version are that Roger and his family already had the plans for the desalination machine Victor built for them, they just couldn’t build it because none of THEM are engineers (unlike Victor – it’s part of his backstory for this universe); and rather than Victor doing all the building work, it was very much a group project – hell, Alice and Nick actually took over on the “night shift” (as neither of them need to sleep) to finish up the shower and as much as they could of the outhouses, and to make most of the turrets protecting the property (helped by Alice being pretty damn good at Celerity by now and thus being able to speed up her portion of the building process). Also Victor didn’t actually go near the FMS Northern Star because he didn’t need to mark it on his map. But yeah, as in game, Victor and his friends got the Warwick Homestead some more crops, a desalination machine for water and salt, loads of protective turrets, and some proper bathroom facilities, then killed some bugs nearby to stop them being gross. :p Solid stuff, if short!

YouTube: No double-dose of Hitman!Jon and Fallout!Jon today – just didn’t have the time to watch both. But I did still fit in both Gray and Fallout!Jon, plus one quick bonus video –

A) Started after all my Fallout 4-related activities with “Testing Cars vs MASSIVE SLINGSHOT” – aka Gray Plays Slingshot Stunt Driver & Sport! Another one of those goofy “fling the car to the target and get bonuses for flips and barrel rolls along the way” mobile games, only this time the theme was “you are a little kid playing with your Hot Wheels by slingshotting them across cardboard race tracks you have set up in your house.” Only the game showed what the kid was imagining for each track – like forested lanes along mountains, sand dunes in Egypt, and heavily-trafficked roads in the middle of a small town in winter. You earned money by picking up coins on the tracks and used that to upgrade your slingshot, your car’s imaginary engine, and of course your bonuses, and you could cycle through a variety of miniature cars to use in these imaginary courses, including a yellow car that looked like a taxi, an old-timey race car, a couple of different sporty super-cars, a fire truck, and my personal favorite, the flying BTTF II DeLorean. :D Gray had heard that the game got a little ridiculous with the slingshots after a certain point, and boy did it – not only can you go up past LEVEL 600 in this game with your upgrades, after about Level 150, you start yeeting your car absolutely bonkers distances if you use the full force of your slingshot. Occasionally you may even clip through the level! And don’t get me started about the amount of bonuses you can get from front flips and barrel rolls, or how far any given car can slide on their roof because apparently that’s totally frictionless in this game. . . The later stages became mostly about Gray trying to figure out the right combination of slingshot force, engine upgrades, and things to possibly bounce off of to actually reach each winning area without either undershooting or overshooting it. XD It was very fun, especially since the game itself looked like it was made with a bit of care for a change. Always nice to see Gray get to yeet Hot Wheels to their doom, front-flipping all the way! XD

B) Then, this evening, I started with a quick update video from Simmer Erin – “New Growing Together Details... And More to Analyze (Sims 4 2023)!” This contained some new information she’d found on Twitter clarifying certain things about Growing Together and the Infant Update and their new features. Things like “no, you can’t go stay over with another sim using the Temporary Stay event – however, you can control how long guests stay, and you can still have other events while a temporary stay is running in the background;” “certain infant and toddler quirks are more likely if they’re the appropriate occult, like Destructive for werewolf babies;” “no bird-watching hobby, sorry, that Sim was just admiring the scenery while on a walk in San Sequoia;” and “work rivals are a thing and there’s unique write-ups for every career if you try to sabotage them!” It’s good to have some more information, even if some of the information can be a little disappointing. Still, the pack is so far looking pretty solid – and to my absolute shock, one of the commenters said something about Sims being able to have up to SIX personality traits in this pack?! When and where was THAT said?! Give me the deets, anonymous YouTuber!

C) And finally, as we always do on Sundays, we ended with Jon of Many A True Nerd and “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 19 - Electile Dysfunction!” He does love his awful puns. XD As promised last week, today’s episode was him following up on his adventures in the Northwest corner of the map – a desolate, dangerous place that many people would not go because there is exactly ONE mission in the game that prompts you in that direction. Jon did his general exploring last week, but today he wanted to do that mission with Wanda! That mission being “You Gotta Shoot ‘Em In The Head,” given to you by Mr. Crowley of the ghoul city of The Underworld! It’s an interesting mission that takes you to some interesting places, and how complicated it gets depends on how deep you dig. Here’s how Wanda handled it –

I. After popping down to Underworld, going shopping for some more ammo (and discovering in the process that she’d breezed through almost all of her caps despite getting a huge payout for books from the Brotherhood after her New Vegas vacation – good thing she had lots of drugs to trade!), and visiting Quinn, a traveling ghoul trader who has been to The Commonwealth (location of Fallout 4), the Pitt (location of future Fallout 3 DLC at the time he first said it), and Crater Banks (unknown location, apparently in North Carolina according to the comments, that Jon kind of hopes is the location for any future mainstream Fallout game), Wanda located Mr. Crowley to ask him what his deal was. His deal was annoyance over ghoul bigotry, hating how non-feral ghouls were lumped in with ferals and discriminated against by others, being called things like “zombies” and subject to normal zombie-hunting rules – like, you gotta shoot ‘em in the head. And so he’d put together a nice little hit-list of a few key people he wanted shot in the head in response to their ghoul bigotry! He’d already worked his way down from eleven to four, and he was willing to hire Wanda to take out the remaining few – Ted Strayer, Dukov, Dave of the Republic of Dave, and Alistair Tenpenny. 100 caps for a death by headshot, 25 for a death any other way – and he wants a specific memento from Ted, Dukov, and Dave to prove they’re dead (for Tenpenny, he knows the news would just get around). Now, Alistair is already dead in Wanda’s playthrough, thanks to her helping Roy Phillips and his ghouls get into the tower earlier – Wanda told Crowley this, and got her 25 caps, leaving her with just three targets. Easy quest, right?

II. EXCEPT, if you start asking around Underworld, you slowly learn that this is some sort of scam – the person renting Crowley his room mentions that, when he’s drunk, he’s talked about getting some wastelander to do his dirty work for him so he can make his fortune; the local repair guy says that Crowley’s talked to him before about cracking security systems; and Quinn remarks that at least one of the people on his list, Dave, ISN’T actually a ghoul bigot (as far as Quinn knows). Add in that Crowley specifically mentioned “keys” as a potential memento, and it becomes rapidly clear that what Crowley is actually after is the keys to unlock something.

III. However, Wanda knew she can work with that, especially since Crowley was willing to pay. So, she paid a quick trip to Rivet City to pick up the first key from Ted! Said visit revealed that Ted’s late father, Jerry, went on a trip to some mysterious fort with Crowley in the past, on an expedition funded by Tenpenny. He doesn’t know what it was about, but the results of the trip set his dad up for life. He was willing to sell the key to her, but Wanda’s speech was high enough to just straight up intimidate him into handing it over. And, with key in hand, she went over to Crowley and asked him what his real deal was.

IV. Real deal was that – okay, for Ted, Dukov, and Dave, he did indeed just want the keys so he could go on an expedition to get the treasure they unlock. For Tenpenny, he did seriously just want the guy dead for his ghoul bigotry, which, fair. And, as it turned out, he was more than willing to sweeten the deal for Wanda to get those keys, paying her the 100 caps for each key AND giving her a 100 cap bonus. As Wanda was hurting for caps at the moment, she was MORE than happy to take that deal! Especially as she already had one key in hand.

V. And so it was off to collect the other two keys, starting with Dukov! Dukov being a sleazy bastard who has two women, Fantasia and Cherry, staying with him as personal, ah, “assistants.” He is handy with a gun, though, as he shows whenever he wanders outside for target practice. Being a sleazy old bastard, he welcomed Wanda warmly when she showed up, and was only too happy to tell Wanda a bit more about the expedition that he, Ted’s dad Jerry, Crowley, and someone named Tara went on – it was a trip to Fort Constantine, to pick up some fancy gun for Tenpenny. Tara died on the trip, and Dukov was under the impression Crowley had died as well (feral ghouls tearing his nuts off). He was surprised to hear the guy was alive, but was willing to sell his key if Wanda had the caps. Now, Wanda COULD have Black Widowed him into just giving it up at this point, but the wounds of Mr. Burke were too fresh, and besides Jon had another plan to get the key without giving up any caps or passing a tough speech check.

VI. That plan involved Cherry, one of Dukov’s “assistants.” Fantasia was apparently happy to stay with Dukov, but Cherry didn’t like the handsy bastard and only stayed because he was a good shot and helped keep her safe. Wanda proposed stealing the key to her, and Cherry agreed to do it if Wanda took her to Rivet City. Wanda agreed, Cherry pickpocketed the key off Dukov by pretending to whine about shopping, and Wanda used the magic of fast travel to get them to Rivet City without any trouble (because, you know, Cherry’s only clothes at the time were Naughty Nightwear and she didn’t have a weapon). Wanda’s good deed for the day! :) (That being said, Jon did briefly slip into an alternate universe so Evil Jon could show a quirk of the game’s programming – that is, while Cherry will eventually don proper clothing, get a bed on the ship, and develop a routine, the game never actually marks her as a citizen of Rivet City. Meaning if you kill her, nobody cares. But that was only a brief digression, and Jon let her live in the main universe.)

VII. And then it was over to Dave of the Republic of Dave, one of the most hilarious settlements in the Fallout Universe. XD This is a town that has gone down through various families (or perhaps one single family line), being passed from parent to child and being renamed such things like the Billysylvania and The Kingdom of Tom before becoming the current Republic of Dave. Dave is – something of an egotist, to be underwhelmingly blunt – he insists that even his own young children call him “Mr. President,” makes his young daughter Flower guard the gate, forced his wife Rosie to allow him to marry a second woman, Jessica, and has so thoroughly brainwashed the local schoolteacher (his other daughter Shawna) into believing he is the best human being ever that she runs a whole tour of a museum of his stuff, telling people things like his baby shit never stunk and that he’s been to China, which his where he got all his Chinese rifles and such. (And you can convince her to buy shit from you by saying they’re real Dave artifacts from his time in the Wasteland, which Wanda did to offload more of her drugs onto her.) Fortunately, he is also easy to manipulate if you’ve got high enough Speech, like Wanda. She convinced him that she was an Ambassador from the Wasteland, here to learn more about his Republic and all the people in it. . .

VIII. And in doing so, learned that election day was nigh! Yes, in an attempt to at least LOOK like this is a democracy, Dave allows people to vote for new presidents every so often – mostly because he knows that everyone will just vote for him. XD And he was happy enough to get Wanda’s help in getting people to go to the ballot box so they could do their voting. However, Wanda was less interested in a fair election –

And more in causing DRAMA. Because, you see, there are two people you can turn against Dave and have vote for themselves for president instead – his first wife, Rosie (a former caravan leader who met Dave when he was exiled by his dad into the wasteland; it’s implied he was a mercenary she hired to protect herself on the road), and his older son, Bob. Wanda successfully speech-checked Rosie, who wasn’t exactly happy with her lot as the “first wife” and who wanted to open up the Republic to more trading with the outside world, to put herself on the ballot in order to facilitate change; she WASN’T able to convince Bob to run early with the actual Speech check (his is a lot harder, mostly because he’s sure his father will just hand over control to him eventually anyway) – fortunately, she was able to needle him by saying “okay, fine, yeah, you’re too young” and get him to spitefully put his name forward anyway. Ha.

IX. Now, unfortunately, there is no way to engineer a legitimate win for either Rosie or Bob – the other two eligible voters in town, Jessica and Shawna, will ALWAYS vote for Dave because they love him so much. There’s no way to convince them to throw their votes behind anyone else, which Jon considers a major missed opportunity. The only way to get either Rosie or Bob to win is to tell Dave the ballots are in, wait for him to approach the ballot box, then sneakily pickpocket all votes except the one for Rosie or the one for Bob once he gets it open. Though Jon wanted to test something before he put one of them in charge – he knew that, in the case of a tie (one vote for Dave, one vote for a rival), Dave would just declare himself the winner. But what if the tie was between Rosie and Bob?

Dave still declares himself the winner, using what I presume to be the same voice line he uses for a tie with himself. Apparently the man will only accept defeat if it’s clear and unanimous.

X. And so – after chatting with Dave about his trip with Crowley and showing off that there is an option to get him to just turn over his key with a speech check as a gift to the “ambassador” – Wanda stole all the ballots except for Rosie’s vote for herself, because putting Bob in charge is not fun for anyone (he’s a spoiled teenager, so – yeah). Rosie was delighted, while Dave was pissed off and stormed out, declaring he was going to head to Old Olney to found the NEW Republic of Dave.

He got about five feet before he was killed by radscorpions. XD To be fair, it’s near impossible for him to survive the journey anyway, because even if he makes it to Old Onley, the place IS a deathclaw nest, so you’d have to pre-clear it out for him. Wanda didn’t feel like doing that, and so she just got his key off his dead body, pulled his unique variant hunting rifle Ol’ Painless out of his safe (better crit chance and very narrow spread, but that’s the best you can say about the gun), then headed back to Crowley to sell him his keys and complete the quest. . .

XI. And then just pickpocket them all back off him so SHE could go to Fort Constantine and get the item Crowley wanted! Leading to Jon delightedly discovering Crowley had a unique voice line if any of his keys go “missing.” XD (Hey, dude, given that the other way of getting the reward is to wait for you to retrieve it and then KILL you, you got off easy!) Wanda promptly traveled over to the fort (which she’d passed while visiting all the satellite arrays) and into the CO quarters, where she worked her way down, fighting robots with her special shocky power fist all the while. Along the way, she found a cracked-open safe with the launch codes to the ICBM on-site (along with a stealth boy and a Chinese Spec Ops book nearby, leading Jon to assume the Chinese had actually managed to infiltrate the place) –

And a terminal where she could try launching the ICBM. Fortunately the targeting computer was kaput and wouldn’t actually let her do so, but it drove home Jon’s point last week (where he was able to activate a nuclear satellite) that there’s tons of horrible superweapons just lying around in the Fallout wastelands, just waiting for the wrong person to stumble across them and try to activate them. Sheesh.

XII. However, superweapons and bombs weren’t what Wanda was after – power armor was! Yes, as it turns out, the reward at the end of this building full of nasty armor robots is one of the best power armors in the game, the T-51b, with resistances out the wazoo. Definitely a nice bit of kit to claim –

If you know how to wear it. Which Wanda doesn’t. Yeah, in all games prior to FO4, you needed training to use power armor, and it actually functioned and looked a lot more like regular armor, instead of the special exoskeletons anyone can hop into in the Commonwealth. And the only place to get proper training is by contacting the Brotherhood of Steel and getting in with them. Which means (unless she decides to do specific sidequests involving the BOS), next episode, it’s finally time for Wanda to start advancing the main plot again so she can get in with them! Poor James, he must be thinking FINALLY. XD

Workout: Back on the bike, and back to James Turners’s High School Years Rags To Riches Generational Epic for the next couple of days! Today was Part 21, the wedding episode for Kevin and Reginald! Because Sidney is toxic for constantly calling Reginald on the phone, so Reginald has to be even MORE toxic by getting married first! And adopting a cat, because Sidney also spontaneously adopted a cat. And then later a dog, because Neighborhood Stories be overenthusiastic, yo. James turned off most of the adopting stuff after that. :p

Anyway – first part of the episode was largely about Reginald going around and announcing his engagement to people (starting with Sidney after he went to see his cat, because Reginald did want to meet the cat), and picking his wedding party for the big day (a destination wedding in Sulani, complete with Reginald and Kevin staying in a special rental). He ended up asking his mother Column to be the officiant (as James couldn’t think of a better role for her); Molly Prescott to be his Sim of Honor (because it sure as hell wasn’t going to be SIDNEY); and Kevin’s little brother Wade to be the ring bearer (which – took some doing, as Reginald hadn’t even MET the kid before and thus was obliged to use the picture-taking trick to make sure he liked him enough to agree). Kevin, for his part, also went and visited his family (who now have a house in the world); dropped by Reginald’s thrift store to plan his wedding outfit (as the nuptials would be on the beach, James ended up going with a semi-casual look for both him and Reginald in the end – that made them look like buddy cops from Miami Vice or something XD); and even managed to get some mentoring in at the Oasis Springs gym again for his job! :) James even remembered to use the calendar to plan the wedding so it didn’t start immediately once Reginald got home from asking everyone to be in the wedding party!

And then it all went downhill from there, largely because the FIRST time James played through the wedding, he managed to mute his microphone and thus there was no sound. Fortunately he’d saved the morning of the wedding and thus could play it through again. . .only for Reginald to apparently flirt with SOMEONE in front of Kevin (we’re not sure who) and instill a Fear of Cheating in him. Couple that with Kevin being “High Maintenance” and hating the sun, and Kevin spent most of the ceremony very, VERY angry. He DID go through with the wedding (which itself went down pretty well, despite a few guests – including Sidney – trickling in late), but he was absolutely fuming during most of it, and his and Reginald’s romantic relationship was largely tanked by the time they’d gotten through toasts and dancing. Also James spent so much time trying to get him to calm down and like Reginald again, Kevin ended up peeing himself on the dance floor right after their first dance. Also also James made the mistake of hiring a headliner DJ for the party, so all the guests were paying attention to them instead of the first dance. It was just – kind of a mess all around, really. Fortunately James ALSO had a save he’d made AFTER the initial, GOOD wedding, so he said he’d switch to that one once this wedding was over – I guess that explains the title of the episode being “This wedding was a fever dream!” XD I’m looking forward to seeing the rest tomorrow!

And that's about it! Like I said, pretty chill day, but I got a good amount of stuff done, so I'm happy. And now it is time to go to bed and prepare for another week of work, meh. At least at the end of this one I have a three-day weekend! Night all!