Wasteland Riches

 I've got it made!

In unrelated news, I've been drinking a lot of Munich-made beer lately.

So, Fallout 4. As I've said, the main campaign is only mildly amusing. Exploring the wasteland is a lot of fun, but like Skyrim, encounters with NPCs are fairly fruitless. Mass Effect this is not. In Mass Effect you are a social creature; your play is informed by how you interact with people. In Skyrim, you have little effect on the world (in-game, you stopped the end of the world, but that still doesn't keep guards from insulting you about missing pastries.) In Fallout 4, forget the main gameplay loop; make it a cut-rate Sims instead!

So I started with the Wasteland look; scrabbling out some semblance of civilization out of the ruins.

Which, especially when I started to lean on the console codes, usually started by cobbling up a nice-looking workshop slash home base. All the crafting stations I'd need, some decorations to add that cool look, and a cot for when I needed sunlight for the next bit of work.

You can do some cool stuff with that, especially when you throw off limits and just start slamming boards around to make gigantic sprawling settlements.

I think that one is from my "Roman" run. My head-canon for that play-through is when I woke up in the vault with Nora dead and Shaun gone my mind snapped. I'd been teaching history and, well, I decided I was actually a lost Roman Centurion, thrown into an unfamiliar world, and doing what any good Roman military man would do then.

Engineer the shit out of things. And of course build up defenses. Turns out that if you use the Conquer mod to create closely-spaced settlements you can run a road from one to the other. Things break a bit doing this, though.

This is also what got me into modding because I really, really wanted the appropriate props. But importing them into the game is, well, not for the weak.

So next step is Nuclear Nora, Planet Janet. Head Canon here is a highly educated, competent, and confident person from before the bombs fell, and aside from the Institute most of the people of the wasteland have forgotten how to build things properly. So max out the science, first off. Collect laser weapons, sure. But pretty soon it is into mods because then I can build properly, none of this tarpaper and broken furniture.

And of course make a nice room for myself.

Funny thing about screen shots. The Fallout 4 universe is a 3D one. You are used to being able to look around and see things in true depth. So it really doesn't look right from single POV static screenshots. That, and in screenshots the lack of decorations is a lot more obvious. I can decorate...I'm just usually so bored of that settlement by that time I move on.

So that was fun but I was starting to get experimental. I was tired of having most of my settlers off lost in a field somewhere and I wanted to see them do more sandboxing.

First thing is to set up the proper infrastructure. A nice workshop, and a recycling point.

Some fixed defenses to keep the Raiders at bay so my settlers can relax into a life of leisure.

(That one has a fusion plant in the base. I couldn't put windows around the other turrets to protect them because in that location the build height is extremely low.)

Then secure a good source of clean water.

(This actually makes in-game sense. Sometimes settlers will get lost poking around the water pumps. Enemies also like to damage them, and even the repair robot isn't a panacea for annoying clean-up work. So put them in a protected shell with a good generator, and lock the door behind you.)

And I toyed for a while with the idea of greenhouses. Stick some crop-tending robots in a box with planters -- same idea as the water supply. But the robots get lost too frequently, and without farming to do the settlers are, it turns out, even less interesting.)

I was getting to the point of having robots do everything, but amusing as that was, I miss the settlers. So time to try to get some more interesting behavior out of them. I made a couple of spaces absolutely crammed with sandbox opportunities and those were mildly amusing. Somewhere, there's a way of making a vibrant-looking community by placing the right interaction opportunities around and balancing the number of people with the inability of the game to handle large numbers of AI objects. But so far, the results have been pretty...but sterile.

Oddly enough, though, the best-looking settler activities weren't vendor behavior or using crafting stations, they were guarding, doing push-ups, playing with knives... So that moved me into going the direction of heavily armed camps, and trying to resist the temptation of hanging turrets on everything.

Which is in a way getting back to the Wasteland Aesthetic I'd started with. Although by this point, the mod stack is extremely long, half the mods are hand-modified by me plus my own tiny attempts, and let's not forget all the console work that goes into it.

All in all, though, it is a mildly amusing way to pass the last hours before bed after I've lost the creative ability and focus to do something more worthwhile. And when all is said and done...sometimes just heading out to wander around the wasteland is all you really want.