Fallout 4

[fragger]

A short time ago I posted about how Knight Rhys had stopped issuing his radiant "Cleansing the Commonwealth" quests from Cambridge Police Station, while Scribe Haylen kept offering her "Quartermastery" ones. Well, after doing about half a dozen missions for Haylen, Rhys finally came good again and resumed offering his quests.

Funny thing was that for the last three quests I did for Haylen before Rhys became active again, she sent me to the same location - Nahant Oceanological Society - where the requested bit of tech was in the same red chest upstairs each time. Different bits of tech though - two Haptic Drives and a Reflex Capacitor.

Anyway, Rhys has returned to quest-giving mode and Haylen has sent me somewhere new, so the game appears to have unbugged itself.

What may be relevant to this bug occurring in the first place was that when reporting to Rhys at the end of one of his quests, instead of just hitting the down-arrow key for "Yes" when he asked me if I'd completed the mish, I accidentally hit the right-arrow key and chose the snarky reply. Maybe I got punished for being cheeky

[Dweller_Benthos]

See what sarcasm gets you? 

I know I've had a few quests in a row going to the same place. Kidnappings I think they were, so close together that the area hadn't had time to respawn enemies/loot from the last time I was there. The subsequent quest being easy as there were no enemies to battle, just walk in, find the kidnap victim and free them and walk out.

[Art Blade]

funny stuff.

[fragger]

Gets funnier... I did one quest for Rhys, and now he's stopped giving them to me again - and this time, I wasn't being a smarty-pants to him He did walk away from me during the de-brief and his dialogue subsequently cut off mid-sentence, and while looking into this prob online I read that some people said that this happened when they tried to "hurry along" Rhys' dialogue. So maybe he gets glitched whenever his spiel gets cut short, regardless of whether the player or the game itself brings that about.

Haylen is still handing out her quests though, as usual. (sigh) I guess I'll do some more of her jobs and see if Rhys comes good again... It's no biggie if he doesn't, I'm almost done with those guys' quests anyway. I was only using them to get my levels up to 100 before hitting Nuka-World and I'm almost there, at 93 and-a-half.

[Art Blade]

good job so far, fragger

[fragger]

Thanks, mate Getting there...

I've taken a break from FO4 and returned to XCOM for a while. Forgot how addictive that thing is. I've now had over a hundred games of it since I originally started playing it Like Civ V, it doesn't get old for me.

[Art Blade]

Hehe, funny how both XCOM and FO4 are games that I kind of made you play.. and then you became addicted to them. Which is nice

[fragger]

I was going to mention that, but I thought you might get sick of hearing it I've bought games for myself that I've ended up not liking, or only played once and never touched again (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Modern Warfare 2, Civ VI...) Maybe you know me better than I do

[Art Blade]

no, but well enough

[mandru]

I should add the Lone Wanderer perks to my build as I'm finding myself avoiding lugging troublesome companions all over the map wherever possible.  I skipped taking Nick Valentine while completing Far Harbor.

I may get to them eventually so that I can complete their personal quests.  But for now I'm happy to be free of them even though I'm probably wasting a lot of free Karma from the missions I've done as well as the settlements developed and the numerous aid missions.


I keep spotting bits of strangeness that I've not noticed before.

Maybe this was from a recent update but in a situation that appears to be linked to the usage of Dog Traps.  Three times now when returning via fast travel to a settlement (where I have dog traps deployed) I've encountered 2 packs of 4 feral/rabid/mangy/ready to rip your face off wild dogs preparing to storm the settlement.

I've set up all of my settlements with cement walls so that at most there are only two entrances and often only one entry point that is heavily guarded.  If there is more than one entrance to the settlement the dogs will divide their forces into a two prong attack otherwise in the case of a single entrance I've observed two distinct groups of 4 dogs.

In all three cases there was a wild dog caught and awaiting release in one of my traps and (I think this was the key) the captured feral had been held for a prolonged period in the trap because I'd become involved in some long duration mission or a series of shorter forays that were all part of a related theme delaying me from returning in a timely fashion.


It would appear that Brahmin selling Kelly is absent for me in this run through the game. 

But not to worry.  Some of my settlements have had 3 brahmins wander in and fight over a single food trough while a couple of the others haven't been so lucky and their troughs remain vacant. 


While not as strange and probably more predictable is Preston's behavior if you have unlocked many or most of the settlements before hooking up with his initial group of refugees.  The "One more thing for you to look into" missions from Preston are limited to only those settlements Preston sends you out to contact or unlock and establish but that is with the exception of Warwick and Abernathy.

Abernathy and Warwick look to be the nearest and furthest settlements from Sanctuary just to keep you jumping all over the map.  Of course much closer than Abernathy is the multitude of times I've been sent out to a settlement to investigate all while the contact is right there in Sanctuary. 

I didn't count the Red Rocket near Sanctuary into my observation on this matter as I've not populated it yet so I don't know about that location's role in the grand scheme of the game.

[fragger]

I read something once about negative consequences of some sort if you keep an animal caged for too long. Sorry, but I can't remember what those consequences were. All I remember is that they were negative

Kelly does indeed appear to pop up in some playthroughs but not others. Of the four I've done (including this one and an abortive first one) she only appeared in two of them. Must be some sort of game-initialization dice-roll happening there. Or just a good old-fashioned glitch.

I too noticed in my last 'thru that Preston offers far less settlement quests if you've already populated most settlement sites before meeting him. I've populated all settlement sites this time around without meeting Preston (except the Mechanist's Lair), so it should be interesting to see what quests he offers. Last game (and this one), I already cleared out the Castle before meeting Preston, so when he finally brought up the quest to clear it, I had some dialog option along the lines of "I already did that". Preston said "That's great news", then he and the other Minutemen simply met me at the cafe outside the Castle and we all just strolled in like tourists. Incidentally, all the egg-nests and debris inside the Castle won't go away until the Minutemen take up residence (once they do, there's a 12-hour wait until that happens). I've had a settlement in there for ages now and all that rubbish is still there.

[Art Blade]

I seem to remember something about caged beasts, like if you keep something caged, his friends will try to free him. I'm glad those cages were for dogs rather than deathclaws.

And people showing or not showing reminds me of my first playthrough when, right at the start, I ran into "Art versus Art" while it took forever to happen in a different playthrough.

[mandru]

I was in Salem where I met up with Barney Rook for the mission Gun Run to kill off the growing numbers of mirelurks by activating the five terminals to activate the auto turrets scattered around town.  Midway through the quest I spotted a human bring chased by a few of the mirelurks so I stopped locating terminals to dash over to where I'd seen him and killed the two mirelurks pursuing him.

It was Gene the dog seller.  So in the momentary lull between bugs I bought a dog off him hoping that it would allow him to wander on out of Salem and out of harms way.  However after activating the last terminal and collecting my reward from old Barney I came across Gene still in town huddled against a wall of the church taking pot shots at the auto turrets above him.  The turrets had decided he was an enemy and were returning fire whenever he strayed too for out of the cover of the wall. 

From a previous experience I'd learned those turrets in Salem are immune to my bullets so the only way I could help Gene was to get far away fast enough to cause the town to stop rendering along with the turrets so that he might appear else where in the game and live another day to peddle his dogs.

** In looking up Barney Crook's name to post this I found that those turrets will also turn hostile on any vertibirds that you call in for transport **

[fragger]

Funny story, mandru. It appears that Barney and the player (plus companion, if there is one) are the only people those turrets will tolerate

In my last playthrough, Barney never appeared. There were two dead Mirelurks outside his house and the gate was open, but no sign of him. Which sucked, because a) I wasn't able to do his quest, and b) I couldn't gain access to his basement to get the "Guns and Bullets" magazine in it, nor his custom sniper rifle, "Reba II". He never showed up for the entire game. Apparently this is a known glitch, others have reported it. He was fine this time around though.

[mandru]

My last unfinished game (because of the computer crapping out on me) also was missing Barney.  So I was relieved to see him there this time.

Not that the Reba II was nearly as good as the weapons I had equipped before swinging by Salem to see if he was back in the game.