Fallout 4

[fragger]

 

I'm losing the plot - I composed a whole post with screenies and all, then must have logged out after previewing without posting Fortunately, I have a habit of doing a "copy all" every so often when composing a long reply, and one final copy before the final post, so it was still in the clipboard (phew).

Regarding junk items used as decorations, you can actually right them again if some clumsy settler knocks them over. If you pick up a knocked-over item while in Workshop mode, it stays in whatever attitude it was in after being knocked over, i.e. it doesn't automatically turn itself right way up in your "hands". But if instead you pick it up normally (outside of Workshop mode) so that it goes into your inventory, then drop it again via the Pip Boy, you can then pick it up in Workshop mode and it will do the automatic righting thing again.

I've managed to avoid having anyone knock over my stuff because I'm playing with the time scale set to real-time and sleeping all night, so that the only time I'm active is during the day when the settlers are all at w0#k (and they're all employed). So they don't get a chance to get into the house - except for Garvey, who is currently kicking back on my sofa upstairs, the presumptuous mug.

I like this real-time business, it gives me plenty of daylight time. I don't much like traipsing around at night, even though there are certain advantages to doing so. Fast-travelling still consumes some game time, but as soon as it starts to get late I scoot home and sleep until morning.

I've got a few cats in Sanctuary now, they really make a difference to the happiness level. It's now up to 92% and climbing thanks to the puddy-tats. And the radios - I've got a bunch of them distributed around the place, all set to Diamond City Radio. I love some of the music on it, some real classics there.

[spoiler text=screenshots]

Got a cool little workshop together. I wish I could move the Workbench into here too, but you can't move or build those, for some reason.

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Cookery Corner.

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Chemistry Corner.

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I wish I could put some stuff on those multiple shelf units, but the game won't let me.

I could use wall-mounted ones, I guess.

Weapons and Armour workbenches.

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Power Armour w0#k area.

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Spare power armour frames.

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I'm thinking of trying my hand at manufacturing, that looks like a pretty interesting area of the game (thanks to the Contraptions DLC). An ammo plant would be cool, even though a shortage of ammo doesn't seem to be much of an issue for me, I've got heaps (in fact I sold all my .38 and .308 ammo, I don't have any weapons any more that use it). But it's something new to build and play around with.

Stimpaks and Purified Water aren't issues either, I've got over 200 of the former and about 150 of the latter. Combined with all the cooked stuff I've got, along with copious amounts of Radaway,  health regeneration is never a problem

You guys have probably already discovered this, but if by some chance you haven't - well, here it is
If you build a magazine rack (in Decorations/Containers) you can transfer all the magazines you've collected into it.
You can then select one and see the cover without taking it out of the rack - though you can do that too if you want.
Just make sure you leave enough space to walk around the rack, because it appears that you can't rotate it.

Each rack holds 20 magazines.

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[/spoiler]

[Dweller_Benthos]

Some nice stuff there, guys, I only had the patience and desire to do some building stuff, and usually ended it with it half done and I never got back to it, lol.

But as far as scrapping everything, there's a mod for that (of course) I can look it up if need be. You dump all junk into a special w0#k bench and tell it to scrap everything to the workshop inventory or back to your own inventory. The only drawback with scrapping everything, no matter which method you use, is that some recipes call for the item, and not the scrap. I don't recall which ones they are, but at one point I needed to build something and it required the whole item, and I had none because I had been scrapping them all along for the base components. Just something to be aware of.

I always used the wall mounted magazine racks, though the stand up wire racks were cool and brought back memories of going to the local shop when I was a kid and browsing the racks they had looking for new comics to buy. The fact you can't rotate them in game bugs me and they always seem to self-rotate to a weird position that doesn't display the books you want showing on the front.

[Art Blade]

nice stuff indeed, fragger It's fun to see how you made your ideas come true in the build section. There's so much potential in all that and it easily consumes hours and days playing

Of course there is a mod that allows you to move the w0#k bench around to where you see fit..

And yes, I used those racks as long as I hadn't have too many of those magazines. I placed one next to mama Murphy's armchair so she always had some stuff to read. Eventually I resorted to those larger wall shelves and now four of them are full and two more are starting to fill up.

[T.V.]

I've been a busy little beaver out at Starlight. I built this large but rather pointless structure out there, for - well, I have my reasons
Pity about that toxic pond right in the middle. What the dickens did they put that there for?

Don't know if You found out, but if You scrap the barrels, it wont be toxic any more.

[Art Blade]

Thanks for the info. I did that without realising what it did to that pond.

[fragger]

D'oh! Of course... Thanks T.V., I never even thought of that.

Trivia time: Consulting an online list of all named characters in FO4, I added them up. Just over 1,200 give or take a few. That's named characters - it doesn't include all the unnamed settlers, caravan guards, generic enemies and others. That's incredible, I've never come across so many characters in one game! There are also more than 111,000 recorded lines of dialogue, and so far I haven't come across any weak voice acting - it all ranges from reasonably good to excellent. This game is truly epic.

Anyway, I hope you guys don't mind me raving about stuff I discover in the game. I'm well aware that you're all way ahead of me, but this game is such a blast and so freaking immersive, and I get such a buzz out of discovering stuff, that I can't help but blather on about it Who knows, it might even be helpful for anybody deciding to try out the game to have more recent accounts of another newbie's experiences. Let's face it, this topic has become so lengthy that it could be a bit daunting for the casual reader...

[spoiler text=Anyway, down to biz ]

Time to don the overalls and get to w0#k.

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I built a little manufacturing plant in Sanctuary. Time to make stuff!

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The conveyor belt didn't need to be as long as this, but I wanted to fill up the space.

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I still want to jazz up the joint a little more. That cabling glitch/trick is proving invaluable (thanks for calling my attention to that, Art). When used with conduiting, you can really get a lot of the wiring out of sight. I only just recently discovered that those "posters" on the wall can be illuminated when connected to power, so in addition to lighting up these I lit up the two I already had in my bar as well. See the wires going to them? No? That's because you can't, they're in the wall. I love that.

(Well, actually, you can see the main power line outside the windows on the left. But no cables indoors - woo-hoo!)

I originally put in an ammo machine and made some shottie shells, but then I changed my mind and swapped the ammo builder out for an armour one.
With the terminal hooked up to the new armour builder, I selected my armour type:

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Then I made note of the materials needed.

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At this point, I didn't know whether the machine would produce just one armour component (chest, R leg, L leg, R arm or L arm) or if it would produce an entire suit. It doesn't tell you any of that, nor is there an option to select which armour body part to build. I put in the amount of material it asked for to see what would happen.

What happened was that a left leg part came sliding out on the conveyor belt (in a very cool fashion). Anything else? No? Okay... I put in another amount of materials to see what came out next. What came out next was a chest piece.

Since there is no way to specify which body part you want armour for, only the type of armour, I began to suspect that each time I put in the next lot of materials, it would make the next body piece in some kind of sequence. It didn't - on the third run, it produced another chest piece.

Hmm... Time to try a different approach. This time I put in enough material for all five pieces, thinking that maybe it would produce one of each if it had enough material to do so. I then started the run - and it produced one left leg, one left arm and three chest pieces. Wtf?

Turns out that it just randomly chooses which parts to build. Great - I'm feeding precious resources into this thing, and it's just doling out stuff at random. It was like playing a poker machine. A bit of online perusal revealed that yes, this is indeed how it works - but only the armour builder behaves this way. With all other builder types - ammo, weapons, explosives, food, and the rest - you can order exactly what you want and it will produce whatever you ask for until it has used up whatever resources you put in it (I'd been making shotgun shells earlier, before I switched to armour production, and it produced what I'd asked for). Apparently there is a mod that lets you select individual armour parts to build, but there really shouldn't be a need for one. The devs should have taken care of that already.

In the end, I cheated up enough resources to make 20 pieces. All I wanted from the start was a Heavy Combat Armor right arm - I'd already scrounged the other parts in the field - so I thought surely, out of 20 pieces, at least one of them would have to be a right arm. I finally got the right arm, but combined with several earlier lottery runs, I ended up with 10 chests, 8 right legs and 4 each of the others 3 parts. I guess I can at least equip my settlers with them.

For now, I built these five lockers to store them all in, one for each collection of body part.

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So finally, with a complete set of Heavy Combat Armor, it was off to the workshop to get it modded up.
And here I am, the proud owner of a new suit of all-polymer, ultralight Heavy Combat Armour
(and a tough, unique synth helmet I found to go with it).
Now we're cooking!

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Heh, "...ultralight Heavy Combat Armor". Now that's an oxymoron).

Because of that silly random-production business, I felt fully justified in cheating (and even then, I only gifted myself as much material as was required, and no more).
[/spoiler]
I never expected to get hooked on the game to this extent, especially in the early days. But FO4 rocks

[Art Blade]

it is absolutely enjoyable for me to read about your discoveries and the fun you're having with the game. When I say the following, it is not meant to rub it in: I think by now you'll have fully understood why I thought it would be a game to your liking and recommended it to you. Reading your posts and checking out your screenies, I'm very happy that you've become so addicted to it

I haven't yet tried my hand at building a factory. Mostly because I've been cheating from the start and therefore haven't needed anything those production lines can provide me with but who knows, I might, just to see it in action.

Cheating with god mode allows me to carry everything with me until I'm uncomfortable with the amount of stuff simply because the inventory list is growing longer and longer and makes it hard to quickly find anything in there. That's when I return to Sanctuary and unload all the stuff. I've got lockers, cupboards, cabinets, boxes, mannequins.. you name it, they're all dedicated to specific items or sets of items.

When it comes to armour, hehe, I know what you're experiencing. Some parts are out there in abundance, others are extremely scarce. I remember having had an old power armour set without a proper hat and I couldn't for the life of me find a matching one, for weeks, real time. Then I had enough of it and cheated one. Only to come across that particular item somewhere in the fields, not long after cheating it

I too like the voice acting. However, there are a few funny moments when you can tell something's odd, they were probably running out of time to sort it out: One line you're speaking like a normal person and the next, you're yelling and changed your voice as if acting on a stage (a bit like the Silver Shroud) and then, as if nothing had happened, you continue in a normal voice. Or settlers that pop up on rooftops. Or Dogmeat hurling himself off a highway or getting chopped up between closing lift doors. Makes me chuckle, I can forgive those things This isn't a game I'm taking seriously, I mean, Super Mutants and Gamma guns.. so for me, that's just something that cracks me up as opposed to games that are more serious like L.A. Noire -- if there had been anything like that, it seriously would have spoiled the whole atmosphere and immersion, but they didn't screw it up, so.. However, Bethesda is notorious when it comes to those weird little things. More annoying are missions that glitch out on us. You already know at least one, the USS Whatsitsname, when you couldn't talk to Capt'n Ahab or what his name was. Happened to me as well. Having to leave and re-enter to fix it, is at least a simple fix but there are other bugs that may or may not happen in your game. However, at least most of the bugs can be ironed-out with help of the community and that is first and foremost OWG, and only second "the web."

This topic has been growing steadily, and it has been fun reading and writing here. May I suggest that you read and smile and laugh and uh-huh and oh your way through this topic from start, during your creative pauses, that is? I'm sure it's a pretty entertaining and partially enlightening read.

Keep it coming, keep it coming

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yes, pretty cool stuff, reading about other people's adventures, and comparing to what I did, which was the same in some ways and completely different in others.

I never did much of the manufacturing stuff, only enough to get the related achievements, and not much else. I did set up a system where you have to build a certain amount of something, and using the belts and factory, I created the item, then ran it back into a recycler (which might be from a mod) that returned most of the base components and then ran those back into the factory in a loop. Got the achievement pretty fast that way, lol.

By the time the factory stuff had been released, I was already swimming in ammo so I had no need to create more, so I never used any of that. Same goes for armor, as I picked up pieces here and there that had nice bonus perks already on them, so I looked a little mis-matched but had some decent abilities from it. I can tell that playing the game from the start with all the DLC available would make for a different experience.

[Art Blade]

deffo. And indeed, picking up legendary armour is worth the patch w0#k regarding looks. 

[fragger]

Yeah, you called it, Art I can understand your surprise now when I first said that it wasn't doing much for me. That was before the true extent of the game become apparent. I can pinpoint the moment it did - when I went through the Cambridge area down to the river and saw that whole great city on the other side. And even that turned out to be just the beginning - there are so many buildings you can go into, with meticulously detailed and extensive interiors. Even after the amount of time I've spent in it so far (and I've been playing quite a lot) I still feel like I've only completed a fraction of it. It's got to be one of the most ambitious sandbox games ever - the list of things you can do just goes on and on, and the discoveries and revelations just don't stop coming.

So rub it in all you like, I don't mind Just joking, I know that's not what you're doing.

It's great to see that some game companies still cater to the single player. No measly, cut-down, throwaway SP version of the game in favour of the MMO crowd here.

And yes, there are bugs. I found Billy, the "kid in the fridge", and elected to take him back to his parents, but then when we ran into Bullet further down the road, the game got itself tangled up. I was between Bullet and Billy, and Bullet had the little marker above him indicating that I should talk to him. But when I approached him, the marker switched to Billy. So I went back to the kid, and the marker jumped back to Bullet again. Back to Bullet, and the marker went back to Billy. Each time I crossed the half-way point between the two, the marker would jump to the one who was now furthest away, so I couldn't get to talk to either of them. I had to reload from my last save which fortunately was just back up the road a little ways (I've learned to quicksave a lot), and then it came good.

I can forgive Bethesda for these flaws. It's an extremely complicated game programming-wise and these sorts of things don't happen too often, considering the stunning complexity of it all and the fact that players can build stuff, then change or get rid of what they've built, move things around, follow a zillion different paths through the story and interact with the throng of unique characters in a zillion different sequences - all with dialogue choices - and the game has to keep track of it all. There must be some hellacious coding behind it. In view of all that, I think they did a pretty bang-up job in managing to keep the incidence of glitches as low as they did.

By the way, I finally got Ironsides to talk. I did what you suggested - went below decks, then back up again, and he was back to his garrulous old self.

[spoiler text= A few more pictures and stuff]

I liberated the Castle and seeing all that lovely open space inside, I got the building bug again.

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Nice view from the top of the tower.

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The front door. I just had to do something about that ugly breach in the wall.

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Unfortunately, one of the Minutemen got killed taking the place. I stripped his body of everything he had on him, but now he won't go away. Everything else did – the dead Mirelurk Queen and all the egg nests – but this guy lying in the courtyard in his undies stubbornly refuses to decompose. I tried blowing his body through the breach with grenades and nearly got him out that way, but then a grenade landed on the wrong side and blew him back in again. Now he's in a position where I can't explosively evict him. Maybe he'll go away eventually, I don't know, but he's been there for quite a while already and he's spoiling the look of the yard.

This was cool. Back in Sanctuary, I made this weight-lifting stand just for kicks, then discovered that I could interact with it.

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When I did, I got a strength boost. I can now carry an extra 10 kilos (or pounds or whatever the units of weight are).
It appears to be a one-off bonus though – I've tried it again a few times but I don't get anymore boosts.

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The funny thing is that when she has the weights fully extended, she lets a little fart slip. You have to listen carefully, but it's there.

[/spoiler]
So in the end, you made a damned fine choice, Art. You know me well - I love this game to bits

[Art Blade]

you and me both, mate

excellent building ideas there at the fort, wow. I never did much with it except beds. By the way, try the pommel horse. Both the weight bench and that horse give you a temp boost (retry after 2 hours in-game, as far as I know, but you're on real time) and both of those items make settlers happy as it is some type of extra activities in their spare time or sometimes even in between jobs. You'll see your settlers use those items usually after w0#k and before they go to bed. They'll use them a lot

I've got a solution for your minuteman body in undies that refuses to decompose ( what a story, and the 'blew him back in again' made me roar with laughter HAHAHAHA ) But first you should try to grab the body like you did with items you placed -- bodies can be 'grabbed,' too. And then carried outside and perhaps thrown into the sea.

how to get rid of annoying non-decomposing items
- place yourself next to him so you can click on his body while the console is open
- in case you haven't yet, drop a quicksave
- click on him and make sure you see an ID that seems reasonable (you'll know if it isn't)
- type disable and hit enter (makes him invisible, that way you'll know the ID was correct, else type enable to revert whatever you just disabled)
- type markForDelete and hit enter (this will delete the entity --better than invisible-- at least as soon as you leave the area)

I hope he's one of those items that actually have got an ID. I know of very few things that don't. In which case you're screwed. In Covenant the wreckage parts of its mounted turrets (if destroyed) are examples of those few items that cannot be 'addressed' properly and will remain forever. And no, not even mods that scrap everything know them, at least I never came across any.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I'll have to check what I did at Covenant, I'm pretty sure I put new turrets up there where the old ones were, either I squeezed them in somehow or deleted what was there. But Covenant is one of the most complained about settlements as it has plenty of bugs, or more likely, there are so many ways you can finish that quest that the permutations exceed the game's ability to deal with them. I know everyone in my game is dead there, and Deezer the robot was invisible for a while, and for another while was buried in the ground.

[Art Blade]

I put up turrets on the mounts there but the remains of the original turrets won't disappear. I carried them behind the houses and hid them there, as far as that was possible. I kept the robot because I like his lemonade not made of lemons.

[mandru]

Instead of using console command "disable" on that non-decomposing body try "resurrect".  You might just add another member to the settlement.  If he's in bits then disable, enable and then resurrect should put him back together.

"Recycle Actor" is useful sometimes too.

[Art Blade]

sounds like a butcher, reverse-engineering.