Fallout 4

[Art Blade]

OK, good to know. I usually only plonk down heavy machine gun turrets in settlements that I had to acquire thanks to missions because those turrets don't require any generator.

fragger, I still love FO4 but I'm currently just taking a break after going through all the stuff so intensely, so currently I'm playing something different (dirt rally) but I will not give up on FO4. Just a little break because dirt rally had been sitting there since you started to play FO4 and I didn't want it to be a waste of money.

[fragger]

No worries There's nothing sadder than a game which never gets played Enjoy!

I've been breaking up my FO4 sessions with a bit of Civ and XCOM lately. I haven't lost any love of FO4 though, I'm still playing that more than anything else and will be for some time.

[Art Blade]

 

[fragger]

I learned the hard way not to scrap those distress signal beacon units, i.e. the ones you find next to the dead BoS troops during the Lost Patrol quest. In my first game, I didn't realize I could pick them up. This time I did, and I took all three of them back to Sanctuary and stuck them in a desk until I'd completed the quest. Then, deciding that they wouldn't be of any further use, I dropped them in front of the Workbench and scrapped them for parts. But now I get three distress signals emanating from the spot on the ground where I'd scrapped them

I looked online and it's a known bug, and unfortunately there is no console fix for it. There is a mod that will get rid of it, but it sounds like a cumbersome process. Otherwise, I just have to put up with it. Of course, they don't make any beeping sounds unless I turn on my radio and tune to them, but it means I now get a "distress signal found" message whenever I enter Sanctuary and get three distress signal entries cluttering up my radio list.

So never scrap distress signal beacons into a Workbench! If you pick them up then later decide you don't want them in your inventory, either store them in a locker or sell them to a trader.

[Art Blade]

 

[mandru]

I keep hearing from you guys that you are dropping materials right at the Workshop to scrap.  I have always been under the impression that as long as I was within the influence of the build area anything scrapped would be added to the bench and drop the level on the build limits.  I make a habit of setting up a well lit 2x2 square scrapping hut in an out of the way location in each settlement without doors in order to keep companions and settlers from coming in and strolling through kicking the dropped items all over hell.

Is there an advantage that I'm missing out on by have my scrapping huts further away from the workshop? 



I had a weird moment with Cait.  I'd equipped her with power armor and came across a spot where there had been a conflict that had involved a free roaming settler, a protectron, and a group of raiders of which only a couple of the raiders were still alive.  After killing the surviving raiders I looted members of the raider band.

Knowing that there is a random event of a young girl learning to become a trader who has a sentry bot as a guardian the thought occurred to me that this may be a similar situation where the protectron was protecting the settler.  Not wanting to miss out on a potential random event (or a possible future Mechanist mission survivor that could be added to a settlement) I resurrected the settler (who behaved normally when revived) and then tried to resurrect the protectron.

The protectron wouldn't resurrect so I went after a more thorough console code series where I disabled, enabled and recycleactor 'ed the protectron it revived but was instantly hostile towards everyone including the settler.  So I killed it to save the settler.  Then Cait and I went on our merry way.

That was where I noticed the weirdness had set in.  I first noticed that Cait was no longer wearing her PA so I retraced our steps looking for it.  I made a complete scan of everywhere Cait may have wandered around in the area and removed her PA unnoticed while I was fussing with the protectron but no results.  The PA was gone.

My next thought was that maybe it had somehow been stacked into her personal inventory.  So I turned to her to ask her to trade and was shocked at how her appearance had changed.

She'd gone skinny. 

Though it wasn't her typical curvaceous skinniness.  Her body was formed in the taut compactness of an assaultron's but was only two thirds of an assaultron's proper length.  She had maintained her normal height by gaining an overly long human neck with the long spindly tubular arms and legs of a protectron all while maintaining the graphic skinning for her character.  She looked like one of those long limbed plastic bendy fashion dolls.  My initial thought was "Oh *bleep*!"

She'd somehow become a bizarre mashup of a protectron, assaultron and had absorbed her PA.  It was still Cait.  She didn't make clanking noises when she walked even though the PA was not in her inventory.  I was very relieved that there had been a very recent save point that allowed me to set everything straight.

[Art Blade]

crazy story, mandru.

Regarding scrapping. I do that close to the workbench because I usually move one step over to one of the other workbenches. These are close together and I don't see any use in scrapping stuff far away from where I want to use those benches. If that makes any sense.

[fragger]

I scrap right in front of the Workbench only because after dropping stuff, I can just turn around on the spot and use my "interact" key on it to go into Workshop mode. Since I have to interact with the Workbench initially anyway to get into Workshop mode, I figure I might as well just stay on the spot.

When FT-ing into a settlement, the first thing I usually do is tell my companion, if I have one, to "stay", so they don't follow me and start kicking my dropped stuff around. I also put the FT mat close to a settlement's Workbench because that's usually my first port of call when entering. But not too close, in order to leave a "companion-buffer"

Other than that, no, there's no advantage to doing it there.

That Cait story was a - er, unique kind of occurrence Never heard of anything like that before. Console meddling can be fraught, I think, depending upon what you're asking it to do. "Use at your own risk", as they say. I guess the simpler and more straightforward the console commands are, the safer you'll be. It must be remembered that the console is not part of the game as such, nor is it intended to be a means to achieve satisfactory gaming ends. It's primarily a developer's de-bugging tool, so it must be used with judicious care - a bit like tinkering with a car's engine as opposed to simply driving the car.

[Art Blade]

you don't need to interact with the red settlement workbench to go into workshop mode. In my case I keep the MMB pressed and that pops up build mode. Maybe check your keyboard and mouse layout, it's probably a different key for you.

[mandru]

Holding "V" on the PC opens build mode.  Typically I fly into town, get to one of my scrapping huts and then engage build mod to drop/scrap all my collected loot quickly so I can get back into the  action.

If I'm going to build I find I typically do so at a separate time away from questing or exploring.

[Art Blade]

same here, I guess. When I'm in the mood for building something, then I don't want to get distracted.

[fragger]

Ah, okay. Must be due to my unorthodox keymapping, I'll check it out. Cheers

I've thought that there should have been a hotkey for it, I've probably remapped the key to something else.

[fragger]

I found it, I have to hold down "W". I used to have to do that anyway if I had been in Workshop mode but temporarily got out of it, to move a companion who was in the way, for instance, but I thought I had to stay within the Workshop mode time-limit to "W" my way back in (I mean, while the "Hold W to enter Workshop mode" message was still showing). Didn't realize I could just hold down W at any time to get in. D'oh... What threw me was that I have to hold down the key a little longer for it to register than if I do if I've already been in Workshop mode but briefly get out, and while the message is still showing.

Thanks for the tips, guys Now I won't have to run back to the Workbench whenever Workshop mode times out, or I leave the build area

[mandru]

fragger I'm glad to have alerted you to the workshop hot key but navigationally speaking because W (at least on my vanilla unmodified key mapping set up) is the move forward key (which I tend to utilize a lot in and out of build mode) pressing and holding the W key would foul me up.

It would tend to toss me out of build mode more often than not. 

On my key map set up X is the auto-march forward until another direction is pressed or the X key is hit again and it's constantly getting me in trouble as I often accidentally hit it when I'm either trying to stealthily drop a grenade in a target's lap or toss in a melee bash by going for the Alt key where those two functions are assigned.

I should probably reassign the auto-forward function to the P key which would position that action I never use completely out of the way so that I would never hit again.

[fragger]

I would have remapped the W key then because I reassigned "move forward" to the LMB (RMB shoots, MMB aims/blocks). I don't recall making W the Workshop key but I guess I must have, no doubt thinking that W could stand for Workshop.

Because my preferred K+M remapping setup clashes with the default settings, I have to use X to toggle-move my way around while in Workshop mode because the L and R mouse buttons are reserved for rotating objects in that mode (which doesn't seem to be negotiable) and thus I can't use the mouse buttons for movement while in Workshop. It's a bit of a hassle, but getting used to the default controls would be an even greater issue for me (I've used this keymap config ever since Doom - the first one ) I can live with the way things are well enough