Wow, Session Ten already. A milestone has been reached. A small one, but one nevertheless. We have embarked on Norine's journey through the Commonwealth together and so far, I am quite happy with how she is progressing. This promises to be on the large end of one of my updates, but much was done, from both a combat perspective and a settlement perspective. Let us begin...
Instead of the more traditional Tenpines Bluff, Preston's conversation with me at the end of session 9 took me farther south, to Oberland Station. A nice situation to be in as it is actually the next logical hub in Norine's journey to Diamond City and its close proximity to Greygarden, a robot-inhabited settlement that has a goodly amount of scrapable material.
The route to Oberland is rather uneventful, I follow the railroad tracks heading south, killing mongrels and a radstag on the way. I am forced to turn back, however, at the radiation box car. Yes, I went for that safe and ended up with half rads, so I headed back to Starlight, deposited my acquired loot and cured my radiation.
I woke up with a disease. Damn, the one that requires frequent sleep. I ignore it for now, but it ends up biting me in the ass later, you'll see. But for a simple journey to speak to concerned settlers, it is one I can ignore for now and I press on, following the tracks. I take care of raiders at a grave site and pass a junk yard to my left before reaching Greygarden. I pick up the robot's quest as I see value in their strategic location and sell harvested Mutfruit to Supervisor Brown. Greygarden is not a settlement I want to develop, barring a "boss" residence for myself, but I see it as a sister settlement to Oberland and the settlement's scrapping will benefit Oberland down the road.
Man, is Oberland tiny. I get there and take a deep, deep breath. It will be, by far, my most challenging settlement, should I win it. Wide open to attack on all sides. It consists of just a small railway station tower and a rickety iron fence guarding two sisters and a crop of tatos. I meet with one of the sisters and sure enough, she sends me to Corvega Assembly Plant. Good, so no different location, just Corvega. Hmm, makes me wonder though where you are sent if you have done Corvega first?
I head back to Starlight and get some rest. This disease is beginning to nag a little. I require rest constantly. Sheeeets. And it messes up my day schedule. I try to keep to daylight hours whenever possible, but the requirement of frequent sleep puts me out of whack and rather than wait until dawn, I decide to head to Corvega as soon as I wake up.
Corvega is the structure that most dominates Lexington. I had seen it before as I cleared the Super Duper Mart. My strategy for the plant is very, very simple and I head to the freeway overpass just opposite it. There is a small camp up there with a bed and plenty of cover for a sniper.
How fun are headshots? Am I right? I snipe many of the raiders in the exterior of the plant, drawing their attention at times, but then quickly retreating back to cover. I can play this game with them all day.
Or so I think. It hits me a few hours in, just after I've looted some of the bodies in the main entrance. I am fatigued.
Ah shit. Seriously? I just woke up! I ignore it for a spell and continue to loot bodies and I see my AP starting to drain further. I take some Newka cola to combat it, but it keeps draining. I don't want to keep drinking the stuff and at the same time, I need AP for VATS once I'm in the plant.
I make the decision to head back to Starlight with what I have so far and take some antibiotics, hoping that the rest of the raiders I've killed will be there. In Starlight, I also build a steamer trunk that I stow in my residence. What I plan on doing is storing the loot from Corvega to use for rebuilding Oberland.
The next morning sees me cured and ready to try again. You have to be really carefuly about disease management. I'm lucky I tend to do locations pretty slow, because if I had rushed into Corvega with this? There are limited locations to sleep there and you can't sleep restfully.
I enter the plant and the first thing I do is stop everything, turn off my HUD and take a picture. HAHA, but man, does that photo look awesome. It's soo moody. Of course, for the time being, I ignore the jabbering of the raiders than think they see me but really don't. Poor paranoid fools and I turn my HUD back on to clear the lobby area, using either the sniper rifle or my shotgun. This time around, I ignore the scrap all around me and focus my attention on the bodies, because sometimes they disappear and I need everything I can get.
I proceed with this method and continue through the plant towards the first main stairwell and I'm faced with several decisions.
Do I go up or down?
Or do I not continue at all?
Well, yes, that is an arguement as well, since looting the bodies of the remaining exterior bodies and the bodies leading to the stairwell has already put me at being nearly over encumbered. Yeah, I pick up everything. I can't buy stuff like my fiance can, I have to scrap it and then use the raw materials. Caps are harder to come by without the luck perks (which I've decided not to take) and I'm saving for three things. Home Plate, good items to scrap that I buy from vendors, and the Overseer. With my charisma, those things will be expensive. I make the decision to use the stairwell as a marking point and I again, head back to Starlight. Besides, the way I see it, it's one less looting trip I need to make and I get to sleep in a nice, comfy bed. Before I go, I stop at both the amorer bench at Lexington's Red Rocket and the weapon's bench and scrap the lesser items. The sellable gear is stored in that steamer trunk in Starlight.
Attempt One: I pick up some grilled radstag and some bourbon and head back out to Corvega after eight hours of sleep. It's dark again. I decide to descend the stairwell and investigate the basement of the plant first, killing raiders and looting their bodies as I go. The feral ghouls from the tunnel don't surprise me as I had actually infiltrated Covega in my Teddy Ruxpin playthrough through the sewer pipe. I nearly die when one of the Raiders sends a molotov in my direction. And he ended up killing himself. YAY!
I then proceed up the stairs, being mindful not to go into Jared's chamber just yet.
Then I make a mistake. I start getting cocky, playing and teasing the raiders. One nearly gets me at a stairwell, surprising me, but I kill him. And then I try my hand at not sneaking and relying on my shotgun, like my fiance does, cause he's a badass.
Apparently, I'm not such a badass. I die when the three raiders stationed at their makeshift wooden hovel camp thing totally take me down. I manage to kill two before one gets me with his submachine gun.
And I wake up in Starlight again, needing to clear out the basement, again. No more badassery for me. I know what I'm good at. Also, I remind myself to make a savepoint at the mattress you can find just above and down a ways from that hovel thingy. Even though the mattress is gross and ewwww.
Attempt Two: did things in the same order, except now I have a healthy respect for my own mortality and am more cautious. This attempt goes far better and I sustain barely any damage from the raiders. Mr. Submachine gun didn't know what hit him. Go me. I make the save point at that ewwwww mattress and then proceed to Jared's portion of the plant. This is it the boss fight. I know this place well, junk cars, turrets, raiders, and Jared. Molotovs and explosions. And... a sentry bot.
You know that moment when a lightbulb goes on in your head. Yeah, I could do it the normal way, sniper rifle blazing, risk grenades and molotovs. Or...
I sneak to the terminal and hack it. I know some hacking tips regarding eliminating duds and stuff. I get in and guess who I now can control? Hehehe, see, I love it when I can do shit like this in a game. I set his personality to aggressive (law enforcement) and then set him upon the poor raiders, while I watch in the shadows. There are explosions and everything. My fiance and I both watch the carnage in awe at the power of the Sentry Bot.
It's beautiful.
"But you didn't get the XP." My fiance remarks.
"I don't care." Does it make sense to kill everything like a Commando, or try this more sly way? This was so way more delicious. The roleplay beauty of it too hard to pass up. Corvega is cleared because I was clever enough to hack. I mean, she's alone, right? A lawyer, not a fighter. I put him back in his pod and proceed to loot the bodies.
Great Loot: A combat armor left leg. Which, of course, I'll mod the shit out of. It'll replace the crap Buttressed Raider left leg I have which is crap. Everything else is sellable or scrapable.
Actually, the hardest part of Corvega, for me, was again, the sheer amount of loot and scrap to have to shift around. It takes about 3 trips to make it back to Starlight with everything, at that's me taking advantage of grilled radstag, bourbon, and scrapping the armor and weapons I'm not going to use at the workbenches in Lexington. But when I'm done, I have a steam trunk full of seperated supplies to take to Oberland.
But before I head over, I make a quick trip back to Sanctuary Hills, to inform Preston Garvey of my success. He offers me the rank of General and I... I turn him down. Hey, Norine has her own shit to do. She needs to solve the mystery of why she woke up and why her husband was killed. Why was her son taken, even though she thinks Mama Murphy is spouting bullshit when she says that Shaun's alive. I may revisit the Minutemen, but for now, most factions will be done like this. Do a favor for them, but she will abandon them in favor of her pursuing her story further when they ask for more commitment. Not sure who I will align myself with ultimately. All three factions other than the Institute are viable at this point in her gameplay. And things could well change. I'm treating this playthrough like she thinks Shaun is dead, because that bloody makes a ton of sense. I head back to Starlight, perhaps a little disappointed in myself, but still, I have given enough to the Minutemen already. They are using a settlement I worked very hard to establish. I am giving them my old home, they can defend it themselves.
Into the fog, into the unknown. A third settlement to develop. It takes a full four trips back and forth between Starlight and Oberland to deliver all the supplies I will need to get Oberland somewhat functional and I am still dealing with limited supplies of concrete and wood.
Raiders nearly end a trip for me, but thankfully a Yao guai ends them without seeing me. It is a tense, hard moment in the deep fog, because I can only hear them. The roars and their gunshots. Then only roars.
Fiance says, "go buy a shipment of concrete" and I say "no". This is not about making it easy. A shipment makes things easy, it's a crutch. This playthrough is about using what you got and that's it, scrapping and recycling. I can buy items, junk, but not shipments. I got 28 units of concrete and I need to make them count in this, when I arrive, I note, rather deceptively uneven terrain.
The small tower will be used as my quarters. The "boss" needs a bird's eye view of the settlement, which means that the settlers will need a seperate structure for them to be comfortable. The concrete goes into setting the foundation for a small warehouse structure that ends up holding about 5 beds. A good start.
In addition, I build water pumps, diversify the sisters' crops, establish power (windmill is a trademark by now), add a decontamination arc, a recruitement beacon, and bring some much-needed security to the settlement by walling it up completely with junk fences and installing four machine gun turrets in strategic locations.
Amazing how fast some settlements fill up. I'm not even there for barely a day fixing things up after adding the recruitment tower when I have my lucky five; the sisters and three others. Down the road, when I finish with Greygarden's quest, like I said, I'll use their supplies and the loot from the water treatment plant to augment Oberland a bit. I eventually see a settlement of about 8 to 12. My southern hub in my quest to reach Diamond City. A beacon of hope amidst the Rad Storms...
This will be rather brief. Achieved level 18 in Corvega and added to my perks rank 3 of Locksmith and rank 3 of rifleman. I see a trip to Vault 111 to nab the Cryolator. :D Next on the list is the second rank of Aquagirl, because why not play like a frogman? Am currently level 18 or 19, not sure, waiting on the important perks that come in the early 20s, and shoot, forgot to look up my health stats, but I'll do that for sure after my next session. Plans are to complete Greygarden's quest and clear the area around both settlements. The junk yard and see also if I can kill me a Yao guai. :D Ha! fat chance of that happening, but I can dream. I snuck past the last one. Thanks for looking and reading.
Here's to surviving. :D
Wow, Session Ten already. A milestone has been reached. A small one, but one nevertheless. We have embarked on Norine's journey through the Commonwealth together and so far, I am quite happy with how she is progressing. This promises to be on the large end of one of my updates, but much was done, from both a combat perspective and a settlement perspective. Let us begin...
Instead of the more traditional Tenpines Bluff, Preston's conversation with me at the end of session 9 took me farther south, to Oberland Station. A nice situation to be in as it is actually the next logical hub in Norine's journey to Diamond City and its close proximity to Greygarden, a robot-inhabited settlement that has a goodly amount of scrapable material.
The route to Oberland is rather uneventful, I follow the railroad tracks heading south, killing mongrels and a radstag on the way. I am forced to turn back, however, at the radiation box car. Yes, I went for that safe and ended up with half rads, so I headed back to Starlight, deposited my acquired loot and cured my radiation.
I woke up with a disease. Damn, the one that requires frequent sleep. I ignore it for now, but it ends up biting me in the ass later, you'll see. But for a simple journey to speak to concerned settlers, it is one I can ignore for now and I press on, following the tracks. I take care of raiders at a grave site and pass a junk yard to my left before reaching Greygarden. I pick up the robot's quest as I see value in their strategic location and sell harvested Mutfruit to Supervisor Brown. Greygarden is not a settlement I want to develop, barring a "boss" residence for myself, but I see it as a sister settlement to Oberland and the settlement's scrapping will benefit Oberland down the road.
Man, is Oberland tiny. I get there and take a deep, deep breath. It will be, by far, my most challenging settlement, should I win it. Wide open to attack on all sides. It consists of just a small railway station tower and a rickety iron fence guarding two sisters and a crop of tatos. I meet with one of the sisters and sure enough, she sends me to Corvega Assembly Plant. Good, so no different location, just Corvega. Hmm, makes me wonder though where you are sent if you have done Corvega first?
I head back to Starlight and get some rest. This disease is beginning to nag a little. I require rest constantly. Sheeeets. And it messes up my day schedule. I try to keep to daylight hours whenever possible, but the requirement of frequent sleep puts me out of whack and rather than wait until dawn, I decide to head to Corvega as soon as I wake up.
Corvega is the structure that most dominates Lexington. I had seen it before as I cleared the Super Duper Mart. My strategy for the plant is very, very simple and I head to the freeway overpass just opposite it. There is a small camp up there with a bed and plenty of cover for a sniper.
How fun are headshots? Am I right? I snipe many of the raiders in the exterior of the plant, drawing their attention at times, but then quickly retreating back to cover. I can play this game with them all day.
Or so I think. It hits me a few hours in, just after I've looted some of the bodies in the main entrance. I am fatigued.
Ah shit. Seriously? I just woke up! I ignore it for a spell and continue to loot bodies and I see my AP starting to drain further. I take some Newka cola to combat it, but it keeps draining. I don't want to keep drinking the stuff and at the same time, I need AP for VATS once I'm in the plant.
I make the decision to head back to Starlight with what I have so far and take some antibiotics, hoping that the rest of the raiders I've killed will be there. In Starlight, I also build a steamer trunk that I stow in my residence. What I plan on doing is storing the loot from Corvega to use for rebuilding Oberland.
The next morning sees me cured and ready to try again. You have to be really carefuly about disease management. I'm lucky I tend to do locations pretty slow, because if I had rushed into Corvega with this? There are limited locations to sleep there and you can't sleep restfully.
I enter the plant and the first thing I do is stop everything, turn off my HUD and take a picture. HAHA, but man, does that photo look awesome. It's soo moody. Of course, for the time being, I ignore the jabbering of the raiders than think they see me but really don't. Poor paranoid fools and I turn my HUD back on to clear the lobby area, using either the sniper rifle or my shotgun. This time around, I ignore the scrap all around me and focus my attention on the bodies, because sometimes they disappear and I need everything I can get.
I proceed with this method and continue through the plant towards the first main stairwell and I'm faced with several decisions.
Do I go up or down?
Or do I not continue at all?
Well, yes, that is an arguement as well, since looting the bodies of the remaining exterior bodies and the bodies leading to the stairwell has already put me at being nearly over encumbered. Yeah, I pick up everything. I can't buy stuff like my fiance can, I have to scrap it and then use the raw materials. Caps are harder to come by without the luck perks (which I've decided not to take) and I'm saving for three things. Home Plate, good items to scrap that I buy from vendors, and the Overseer. With my charisma, those things will be expensive. I make the decision to use the stairwell as a marking point and I again, head back to Starlight. Besides, the way I see it, it's one less looting trip I need to make and I get to sleep in a nice, comfy bed. Before I go, I stop at both the amorer bench at Lexington's Red Rocket and the weapon's bench and scrap the lesser items. The sellable gear is stored in that steamer trunk in Starlight.
Attempt One: I pick up some grilled radstag and some bourbon and head back out to Corvega after eight hours of sleep. It's dark again. I decide to descend the stairwell and investigate the basement of the plant first, killing raiders and looting their bodies as I go. The feral ghouls from the tunnel don't surprise me as I had actually infiltrated Covega in my Teddy Ruxpin playthrough through the sewer pipe. I nearly die when one of the Raiders sends a molotov in my direction. And he ended up killing himself. YAY!
I then proceed up the stairs, being mindful not to go into Jared's chamber just yet.
Then I make a mistake. I start getting cocky, playing and teasing the raiders. One nearly gets me at a stairwell, surprising me, but I kill him. And then I try my hand at not sneaking and relying on my shotgun, like my fiance does, cause he's a badass.
Apparently, I'm not such a badass. I die when the three raiders stationed at their makeshift wooden hovel camp thing totally take me down. I manage to kill two before one gets me with his submachine gun.
And I wake up in Starlight again, needing to clear out the basement, again. No more badassery for me. I know what I'm good at. Also, I remind myself to make a savepoint at the mattress you can find just above and down a ways from that hovel thingy. Even though the mattress is gross and ewwww.
Attempt Two: did things in the same order, except now I have a healthy respect for my own mortality and am more cautious. This attempt goes far better and I sustain barely any damage from the raiders. Mr. Submachine gun didn't know what hit him. Go me. I make the save point at that ewwwww mattress and then proceed to Jared's portion of the plant. This is it the boss fight. I know this place well, junk cars, turrets, raiders, and Jared. Molotovs and explosions. And... a sentry bot.
You know that moment when a lightbulb goes on in your head. Yeah, I could do it the normal way, sniper rifle blazing, risk grenades and molotovs. Or...
I sneak to the terminal and hack it. I know some hacking tips regarding eliminating duds and stuff. I get in and guess who I now can control? Hehehe, see, I love it when I can do shit like this in a game. I set his personality to aggressive (law enforcement) and then set him upon the poor raiders, while I watch in the shadows. There are explosions and everything. My fiance and I both watch the carnage in awe at the power of the Sentry Bot.
It's beautiful.
"But you didn't get the XP." My fiance remarks.
"I don't care." Does it make sense to kill everything like a Commando, or try this more sly way? This was so way more delicious. The roleplay beauty of it too hard to pass up. Corvega is cleared because I was clever enough to hack. I mean, she's alone, right? A lawyer, not a fighter. I put him back in his pod and proceed to loot the bodies.
Great Loot: A combat armor left leg. Which, of course, I'll mod the shit out of. It'll replace the crap Buttressed Raider left leg I have which is crap. Everything else is sellable or scrapable.
Actually, the hardest part of Corvega, for me, was again, the sheer amount of loot and scrap to have to shift around. It takes about 3 trips to make it back to Starlight with everything, at that's me taking advantage of grilled radstag, bourbon, and scrapping the armor and weapons I'm not going to use at the workbenches in Lexington. But when I'm done, I have a steam trunk full of seperated supplies to take to Oberland.
But before I head over, I make a quick trip back to Sanctuary Hills, to inform Preston Garvey of my success. He offers me the rank of General and I... I turn him down. Hey, Norine has her own shit to do. She needs to solve the mystery of why she woke up and why her husband was killed. Why was her son taken, even though she thinks Mama Murphy is spouting bullshit when she says that Shaun's alive. I may revisit the Minutemen, but for now, most factions will be done like this. Do a favor for them, but she will abandon them in favor of her pursuing her story further when they ask for more commitment. Not sure who I will align myself with ultimately. All three factions other than the Institute are viable at this point in her gameplay. And things could well change. I'm treating this playthrough like she thinks Shaun is dead, because that bloody makes a ton of sense. I head back to Starlight, perhaps a little disappointed in myself, but still, I have given enough to the Minutemen already. They are using a settlement I worked very hard to establish. I am giving them my old home, they can defend it themselves.
Into the fog, into the unknown. A third settlement to develop. It takes a full four trips back and forth between Starlight and Oberland to deliver all the supplies I will need to get Oberland somewhat functional and I am still dealing with limited supplies of concrete and wood.
Raiders nearly end a trip for me, but thankfully a Yao guai ends them without seeing me. It is a tense, hard moment in the deep fog, because I can only hear them. The roars and their gunshots. Then only roars.
Fiance says, "go buy a shipment of concrete" and I say "no". This is not about making it easy. A shipment makes things easy, it's a crutch. This playthrough is about using what you got and that's it, scrapping and recycling. I can buy items, junk, but not shipments. I got 28 units of concrete and I need to make them count in this, when I arrive, I note, rather deceptively uneven terrain.
The small tower will be used as my quarters. The "boss" needs a bird's eye view of the settlement, which means that the settlers will need a seperate structure for them to be comfortable. The concrete goes into setting the foundation for a small warehouse structure that ends up holding about 5 beds. A good start.
In addition, I build water pumps, diversify the sisters' crops, establish power (windmill is a trademark by now), add a decontamination arc, a recruitement beacon, and bring some much-needed security to the settlement by walling it up completely with junk fences and installing four machine gun turrets in strategic locations.
Amazing how fast some settlements fill up. I'm not even there for barely a day fixing things up after adding the recruitment tower when I have my lucky five; the sisters and three others. Down the road, when I finish with Greygarden's quest, like I said, I'll use their supplies and the loot from the water treatment plant to augment Oberland a bit. I eventually see a settlement of about 8 to 12. My southern hub in my quest to reach Diamond City. A beacon of hope amidst the Rad Storms...
This will be rather brief. Achieved level 18 in Corvega and added to my perks rank 3 of Locksmith and rank 3 of rifleman. I see a trip to Vault 111 to nab the Cryolator. :D Next on the list is the second rank of Aquagirl, because why not play like a frogman? Am currently level 18 or 19, not sure, waiting on the important perks that come in the early 20s, and shoot, forgot to look up my health stats, but I'll do that for sure after my next session. Plans are to complete Greygarden's quest and clear the area around both settlements. The junk yard and see also if I can kill me a Yao guai. :D Ha! fat chance of that happening, but I can dream. I snuck past the last one. Thanks for looking and reading.
Here's to surviving. :D
