Crawl out through the Fallout

 Sometimes when I need a break I take it playing games. But not really playing them, not in the sense of plowing through the main campaign with all the shooting and required cutscenes. More of the zen-like side stuff; like driving endlessly around the winding roads of Medici in Just Cause 3, or settlement building in Fallout 4.

You can almost skip settlements if you are just trying to complete the main campaign. If you just do the minimum the game points you to, all it does is give you a place to stash your loot. Like any AAA game there are a bunch of side things like crafting and collectibles and side quests, of course, all of which can buff you a bit and make the main quest easier.

There's a couple of hacks in the settlement system. If you stumble on Abernathy Farm (very close to the path the game is pointing you down) it is easy to build it up into a farming menace. It takes boring time collecting crops but it gives you lots of caps to buy ammo and upgrades.

Or there's the hack in Sanctuary. Unlike almost every other settlement, there is a big creek right there and you can fill the thing with industrial water purifiers. Can take a bit of time tracking down all the scrap to build them, but after that, you almost never need stimpacks again; you can just quaff pure mountain water.

Of course there is game balance here. To get all the screws and nuts and plastic scraps to build the things, you have to explore. When you explore, you get jumped by Raiders. Raiders carry stimpacks in their pockets. If you are playing on anything other than Insane difficulty, by the time you build your water purifiers you are swimming in health already.

But anyhow.

The real draw of settlement building is putting together the picaresque shanty-town of your dreams, broken chairs and salvaged plates and a few splashes of paint. And that's fun; working within the restricted build set and all the stuff that is already there. The garage in Sanctuary is beautiful by itself and it is hard not to include it in your new town, and that goes double for the Red Rocket service station.

But that gets a little old and you start going into mods to get access to all the crazy stuff that is already in the game and just not made available to you to build. Me, I rapidly went away from the whole depressing junkyard aesthetic and hunted down mods that let me build clean new-looking stuff. Hey, if the Institute can do it...!

And once you've proven you can actually do it the hard way, the hard way stops being interesting. That's when cheat mods or, better yet, console codes come in to allow you to side-step the whole digging through wheelie bins throughout the greater Boston area for broken coffee cups and just magic up all the ceramic you need.

And that's when the settlements start getting crazy big and ambitious.

I've already hit the next step, though. That's when you realize that all these cool places you are building are for nobody but you, and you start trying to get your settlers to do more than pull weeds and complain. My latest discovery is a couple of packs of magic sandbox markers that trigger animations that are already in the game. So they'll do more than sit on chairs or use the basic crafting stations.

That is a bit of a useless chase, though. This is not The Sims. The AI is really stupid, and there's no way to script at any kind of level. The best you can do is assign a settler to a specific job. So you can give a settler a rifle (I got so tired of raiders I gave them all the tin-toy like Alien Blaster, with a free community mod that turns it into a carbine with scope and all, and my own tiny tiny mod that doubles the damage) and assign that settler to a guard post.

So they'll stand there like they are guarding something. For eight hours without a break. Then all the AI get up at once from their assigned jobs, go wander around whatever chairs or spare crafting stations they can find to sandbox on, then head to whatever random bunk their tiny pea brain sees first. There is no way to have the soldiers mess and bivouac on their own. And no way to keep the shop-keeps from running out to attack the advancing Deathclaw to pound at it with their bare fists.

(Well...you can hack some of this, but the game AI always trumps whatever you and your mods try to do. If you lock a door, they'll teleport through when you aren't looking. Among other things. And they get stuck on everything.)

***

So that's my fix for the weekend. I hope. Back to revising the Sukeban Deka fight, trying to keep Doctor Noh's speechifying about the Imperial Rescript on Education to a minimum, and plowing through the to scene I'm calling the "Embassy Ball." (There's no embassy, and no ballroom dancing.)

I am seriously losing faith in this thing. I want to experiment with new covers to see if I can see how much is that nobody wants to read it, and how much that nobody has even noticed it. But I haven't the heart for all the work coves are going to take. I'd hire someone if there was a way that I could hire them to do it right. But that's the problem; they want to sell you their package. If it is Fiver, they want to be the artist and dictate what you buy. If it is cover art speciality shops, they want you to buy the package that works for their business model. Art is a commodity, sure. But I don't even know enough to know what genre I'm trying to hit and that means I can't just Chinese Menu my cover needs. 

I did put out an enquiry on Fiver about buying a custom stock set. I'll be really surprised if I get any useful results there.

And one of these days I'll feel too out of words to write, but still alert enough to open PhotoShop and see just how bad the repaint I am contemplating would be.